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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  02:10

Hi, Laurie, welcome to the show.

Dr. Laurie Santos  02:11

Thanks so much for having me

Eric Zimmer  02:12

on. I’m so excited to have you on you are the creator of a really great podcast called The happiness lab, as well as work you do on happiness at Yale and all sorts of things. And we’ll get into all that in a minute. But let’s start like we always do with a parable and 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 for a second looks up to their grandparents as 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.

Dr. Laurie Santos  02:56

Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard the parable before, you know, when you feed, you know, for me, it really shows that happiness and focusing on our mental health takes work, and it takes choices, right. And it reminds us not just that happiness takes work, but that there’s these interesting opportunity costs, right? That if you’re putting your time and your energy, especially your emotional energy into certain kinds of things, you could be doing that at an opportunity cost of the kinds of processes you want to win out, right. And so the wolf metaphor has always been really powerful to me, it’s not enough that you focus on the things that matter, you also have to make sure that you’re not also focused on on the things that don’t matter.

Eric Zimmer  03:32

Yeah. And there’s a lot in your work that I think we’ll get to, as we go through that really hits on that parable, so much of your work, I think oriented around an idea of what we think will make us happy is actually not usually the things that will make us happy. If we think something is going to make us happy. That’s where we’re going to direct all our energy. And to your point, if all your energy is going there, you don’t have enough left to put over on the things that do create happiness. If we had infinite energy, this wouldn’t be a problem, right? But it is. And so, yeah, that opportunity cost is really important. I want to start by going in a slightly different direction, because I did not know this about you until I started doing deeper research, but you are the director of the Yale’s canine cognition Lab, which that is so cool. That is so cool. I’m a huge dog lover.

Dr. Laurie Santos  04:24

Yeah, the work is relevant in a couple of different ways. Feeding wolves. Yeah, we haven’t worked with wolves directly. But we have worked with Australian dingoes. This was my kind of, you know, day job before I got interested in the science of happiness. I was really interested in this question of what makes humans unique, what makes humans special. And studying canids is really an important way to answer that question, in part because dogs and domesticated dogs in particular grew up alongside humans, right, you know, so its path from becoming a wolf to becoming a canid that could be around people is one that really shaped these animals to pay attention to us in a particular way and maybe even shaped their cognitive abilities so canids are real A fantastic comparison point for all the cool and interesting things that humans do if you’re interested in questions of uniqueness, but But I sadly, don’t get to spend as much of my time doing the canine work these days. So no,

Eric Zimmer  05:11

it’s just as I was looking at some of your publications after like the second one that had dogs or, you know, canines in the title, and there’s something I’m not understanding about her work here. And so then as I dug a little deeper, I was like, okay, so to that end, you know, if we wanted to translate that work, into the happiness work, is there anything about the work that you do, or about dog cognition, or animal cognition that would point us in the direction of happiness or any lessons we can sort of, even if we’re sort of stretching the analogy a little bit, anything from there that you find interesting?

Dr. Laurie Santos  05:44

Yeah, I mean, I think there, you know, a couple of things. One is, animals are incredibly good at prioritizing some of the stuff that makes them happy, right? I mean, take, you know, for example, presents, right, you know, mindfulness just being in the present moment. You know, I think dogs are a wonderful example of this. I mean, I think one of the benefits we get from hanging out with dogs. And in fact, their scientific work to suggest this is that you become more mindful when you’re around your dog, you’re taking your dog for a walk, and he’s, you know, sniffing the ground and looking at the flowers and paying attention to the sounds sort of causes you to do the same thing, it gets you back into your normal sensory experience. And so I think animals can be a great guide for helping us do that. I also think that dogs are a really wonderful way to get social connection. Especially if you’re having a hard time getting some social connection with humans, you can form that meaningful bond with an animal in a way that gives us so many of the exact same psychological benefits. So the work I was doing with dogs wasn’t necessarily on happiness, but they’ve definitely give me a glimmer into some strategies that

Eric Zimmer  06:44

work. Yeah, I mean, dogs are one of my great sources of happiness in life, for sure. It’s funny, anytime, if you were to look at my camera roll, or your to look at my gratitude lists, they’re always there near the very, very top. Alright, so let’s talk a little bit about an idea that you use a lot, which I think is really important. And we talked about it on this program we talked about in the spiritual habits program, you say, a good rule of thumb for all this stuff is little and often.

Dr. Laurie Santos  07:14

And I think what I mean by that is, you know, we can really find ways to protect our mental health and boost our well being through the little things that we do, if we kind of keep up the habit of doing them often, you know. So I think when we think about the things that are really bringing us down, it’s not usually the one off thing that we happen to do with our time, it’s the things that we’re doing persistently, over and over again, that, again, can kind of create this opportunity cost on our happiness. But if you can put in positive habits, even if they’re tiny, even if they’re baby steps, and you can get yourself to do them more and more, those are the things that are really going to impact your well being oftentimes more than you expect. You think, Oh, it’s this little thing, you know, do a five minute meditation, or it’s this tiny thing to like, make sure you’re texting a friend and checking in, you know, these things matter more than we think.

Eric Zimmer  08:03

Yeah, there’s a Tanzanian proverb that I use in the spiritual habits course, which is little by little a little becomes a lot. And I just love that idea. And I love how you just pointed to this works for both the good and the bad, right? You know, if social media doesn’t make you feel good, I’m not castigating it across the board. But if you’re one of those people, in which social media turns into a comparison exercise, and leaves you feeling bad about yourself, you know, little by little, that becomes a lot versus just like you’re saying, text to friends, little by little, you’re nurturing and growing connection. And so I just think that’s such an important idea. And we tend to discount it, because we think we have to make really big changes. And sometimes a big change can be great and can be helpful, and depending on what it is, but for most of us, it’s the little changes, you know, how do we work a little more of this indoor day,

Dr. Laurie Santos  08:55

and I think, you know, focusing on the little can allow us to do something that also can improve our well being right, which is to make sure we’re harnessing self compassion. You know, I think sometimes when we want to make this huge change, like, Yeah, I’m gonna be perfectly happy, and I’m never gonna mess up again. We’re often trying to make that big change with a certain sort of attitude. And it’s an attitude of perfectionism. Like, if I screw up, you know, the world is over. And so I think focusing on the little changes means you’re giving yourself something, you can bite off something that’s actually doable. You’re not setting yourself up for failure, you’re kind of doing it in a compassionate way. And so I think that’s another way that focusing on the little can help us we’re doing it with this mindset of compassion and durability, as opposed to I must be this perfect robot that gets everything right the first time.

Eric Zimmer  09:38

Absolutely. And I think there’s so much to be said for positive momentum, right? So when we start doing little things, and we’re successful, we feel better about ourselves. We feel more confident, we feel like we have more self efficacy, versus when we try and do big things and we fail you do that long enough that eats away Get your sense of your ability to change. And I did a lot of behavior coaching for a while. And that was such a big thing was people would say, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t finish things and say, Well, you haven’t finished things in the past. But I don’t know that that’s a personality trait, right. But we’ve got to adjust the way we go after these things.

Dr. Laurie Santos  10:17

That’s exactly right. And I think, forget that the stories we tell ourselves matter a lot, right? You know, I’m a person who doesn’t finish things. You know, that’s a story that you can update, right? That’s a story that has some content that may or may not be true that you could challenge, you know, riddled with these cognitive cognitive fallacies. And so I think focusing on the small can also help us make sure that those stories are accurate, right, we’re not trying to come up with a magnum opus story that’s going to make sense of everything we’ve done. We’re just talking about, you know, did I get up and like, do my five minute gratitude meditation this morning, right? You know, these tiny things allow us to achieve it. But they allow us to come up with better stories that we can tell ourselves that are stories that are positive ones about growth, and so on.

Eric Zimmer  10:58

Yeah. Dr. Rick Hansen said something once he said, our stories about ourselves are at least six months out of date. And I think actually that numbers way underestimated, I think, I think our stories about ourselves can be years out of date, you know, and so I like that idea of just adjusting a little bit. You mentioned gratitude there. And I thought maybe we could turn towards gratitude for a second, because it’s one of the skills that you talk about in your happiness course, as being a really helpful happiness tool. There’s lots of studies about how good gratitude is for us in so many different ways. You know, it’s pro social, it tends to make us often be able to regulate ourselves better sometimes get more done. I mean, there’s, there’s a ton of reasons why gratitude is so valuable. So my question to you would be twofold. The first would be, what do you think are some of the most useful strategies for making gratitude part of our life? And then the second question is a little bit more complex. But you talk about hedonic adaptation, which is we get used to things right, you know, I get a new car, and then I get used to having the car, it’s no longer special anymore. Well, I’m curious whether we can have a Donek adaptation in our gratitude work, because this is what I feel like happens to me as I do it. And it’s really valuable until I’ve done it for a while. And now I’m back to the same sort of things. And now all of a sudden, it’s kind of used to the gratitude work. So question one would be what are some practices you like? And then question two, what would be some ways of keeping it fresh?

Dr. Laurie Santos  12:29

Yeah. Well, in terms of practices that I think work, main part of it is you got to find what works for you, right? There are practices that might be fantastic for me that you might find cheesy, or you might find onerous, you know, as someone who’s an expert on behavior changes, you know, the practice is going to work is the one that we can get ourselves to do. Right, right. Some that I really like, are just the simple act of writing down a few things that you’re grateful for, you know, I have a little app that I use to do this, I don’t think you need an app it can if you’re a pen and paper person use pen and paper, but just commit to you know, three to five things you’re grateful for every day. And the key which maybe is gonna get to your head on adaptation question a little bit is that ideally, those should be different. Your doesn’t really work if every day you’re like, dog, spouse, coffee, dogs, bows, coffee dogs, like you got to first have to mix it up a bit. Yeah. And you second have to make sure you’re feeling it can’t be wrote. I mean, the whole point of gratitude is that it’s an emotion and you have to kind of turn it on. But another practice I really love, which for me felt a little bit easier, because it meant I was noticing things I was grateful for throughout the day, was a practice that I learned from the author Ross gay, who has this book called The Book of Delights. And his practice is just he tries to notice things that he finds delightful out there in a world. So it’s not like you know, capital G gratitude of this blessing that came to your life. It’s just like, you notice fun things out there. Like, you know, this morning as I was walking to get coffee, there was a guy who was like parking near me and he was like, blasting old school like Ozzy Osbourne out the window of his car, and he had this big dog that was hanging out. And so I looked over and for a second, I thought the dog was like jamming along to Ozzy Osbourne. Right? And that was like, delight, you know, Ross galas, put his finger in there and just said, that is a delight, right? And the reason I like the delight practice is first, it’s easier than gratitude, right? You don’t have to kind of remember this list and write it down. But the second is that it’s doing what you want to be doing in the gratitude practice, which is sort of training your attention to the blessings to the things that are good in life you’re fighting this bias that we know is one that is built in which is a negativity bias. Our brains are set to notice the big Tigers out there in the world the anxiety provoking scary sad things. It takes some work to train our brains to shift focus and notice the delightful thing so if a gratitude practice seems onerous, or like it’s going to be to work, commit to noticing the delights and I like finding a delight buddy where you can like text the buddy like saw a dog hanging out. Carpooling Ozzy Osbourne delight, you know, all caps is that’s a great Good idea to get to your heat on an adaptation question. You know, I think this is a tough one, because there are studies that suggest that we don’t heed authentically adapt to certain kinds of emotions as easily. And gratitude is one of these that you’re, if you’re focused on the right stuff, you can continue that feeling long after you expect you to see the same hedonic adaptation curve for gratitude. But you have to keep feeling it to get there. And I think the problem with a lot of gratitude practices is we turn them into something that we do rote, it’s like brushing our teeth, again, you know, it’s like, you know, spouse, dog coffee, like every single day, right, and you just stop feeling it. And so one way to do that is you make a rule with yourself that it has to be something new, you know, it can be my spouse’s feet, or his smile, or you know, my dog’s tail or like my dog, the way she drinks the water, you have to commit to finding something novel every single time. And that means you’re still in the noticing, right, you’re still like allowing the gratitude to do what it needs to do, which is you got to feel it, you got to think like that is amazing that this universe of all the people, this dog could be with all the dogs that could have this dog, you have to take a moment to feel that. But if you get there, if you allow yourself to feel it, there is evidence suggesting that you won’t adapt to it as much it still kind of can have its effect, maybe even more so than other emotions, which is, you know, one of the many, many cool things about gratitude. If you’re doing it right. You don’t heat authentically adapt as much.

Eric Zimmer  16:24

You said a bunch of things there. I’d like to just kind of hit on real quick. I think first is I love that idea of delight, the word I often use is appreciation. Like what do I appreciate today? Like, to your point, it’s smaller than something I’m grateful for. It’s just a little flash of a moment that there was something, something that was there. And then the other question I have is about feeling it because this is an interesting one, right? I’ve talked on the show a lot about my struggles with depression, depression, when it comes on me, what it is primarily is lack of feeling, right? Something that you might normally feel just doesn’t do it, right, the song that normally is like, Oh, I love that song is just like, it’s fine. And so if gratitude is something we need to feel, and yet feelings are difficult to come by. And yet we know that gratitude is something that may help with depression. Any thoughts on working around that?

Dr. Laurie Santos  17:20

Yeah, I think your experience is, of course, really common. I mean, one of the classic symptoms of depression, as you know, Anhedonia is literally like, you’re not having hedonic, you know, moments, these hedonic experiences. And so, yeah, I mean, I think one way to do that is, again, to take this idea of baby steps and a little self compassion, right? You know, if you’re going through a terrible episode, yeah, the song that moved you before isn’t going to do so in the same way, you know, the main thing on your gratitude list, you’re not going to feel it. And you know, that’s a pain that sucks, right? But it’s something that you need to accept is not going to last forever, right? I think this sort of statements that you talk to yourself with can be really powerful in those moments. But that’s one of the reasons I think a practice of something like a delight practice can be so powerful is that if you commit to the tiniest thing, like you can start noticing again, and that can kind of break through. And I do think that these things sort of snowball, I mean, this is one of the things we know and depression, right is that you’re not getting as much of a hedonic burst every time you do something fun. So then you stop doing things that are fun, and now you really don’t have any hedonic bursts. And then you’re, you know, it’s like, so if you can kind of get this snowballing to go very slowly in the other direction, it can be quite powerful and, and in ROSS Gay’s book, you know, he talks about how this practice of delight has gotten him through, you know, some really tough times, you know, the book is really honest about issues of racial violence and things like that. And he says, even in the midst of the worst times, you can just notice that one cool thing, it can kind of give you a little, you know, a peek of hope that can help you in a really important way. Yeah, I

Eric Zimmer  18:55

think there’s a couple things you’re pointing to there. One is specificity, right? If I can be more specific and what I’m grateful for you just named it like the way my dog drinks water, my dog’s tail, right. It’s the specificity. And then I think the second piece in what you’re saying also is that I do think by looking for little moments of, even if the word delight is too strong, the little moments of something that’s positive shows that even something that feels as all encompassing as depression has its moments in which its waxing and waning. It is not this constant thing. It’s not always there in the same level with the same intensity. It seems like it but these noticing of little delights, as you sort of said, short of you allows you to see through these little holes, you know, like, oh, yeah, okay, there’s something out there. It’s not all clouds. It’s not all gray.

Dr. Laurie Santos  19:47

And I think another key is to give yourself permission that those things we’re supposed to have on our gratitude journal, like our spouse and our dog, but you know if you can find the goofy things, it’s one of the reasons I love Ross’s book is you know, In his big list is like the banned el DeBarge. Like purple things. Why is purple color? It’s such a weird color. I think if you can allow yourself a little bit of the goofiness that can kind of snap you out of it a little bit too. It doesn’t have to be, you know, the most meaningful thing in your life. It could just be like, Yeah, it’s pretty good. That’s a good thing. It’s like slightly above baseline, and just get your brain to notice that stuff.

Eric Zimmer  20:21

Yeah, another person who does that? Well, as a guy, Neil, past reacher, it’s called the Book of Awesome. And then he’s got other books of awesome, but it’s basically that thing. He’s been a guest a couple times. And it’s just fun. He approaches it in a fun, small way. But again, the thing that I noticed about his stuff is it’s so specific. And I think that’s an important thing. Let’s change directions, because I have to ask you about episode of the happiness Lab, which is your podcast. And it’s about something you’ve worked on with Dallas Taylor to create the handbook for Sonic happiness. Basically, the idea is sound has an enormous impact on happiness and well being. I am a extraordinarily sound sensitive person. So I’m wondering if you can give us a few tips from the handbook for Sonic happiness.

Dr. Laurie Santos  21:10

Yeah, it’s funny that you’re such a sound sensitive person. I feel like in general, that, you know, might not be a good thing for for a podcast, or that’s a fantastic to hear all that tiny thing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one of the great things about talking with Dallas was realizing that we’re not often intervening on sound to promote our happiness and our mental health. What do I mean by that? You’re we’re constantly intervening on our other senses to feel better. You know, if I’m having a bad day, I want to take a warm bubble bath, or maybe put on a candle, like I want to watch something on TV, I want to buy flowers, right? We’re hacking, vision and touch and like taste right? You know, when I’m having a bad day, I want some ice cream, right? We do that quite naturally. And many of us have like straightforward go twos of things in those domains that feel good. But we don’t often do that as much with sound maybe a little bit with music, right? You know, if I’m having a sad day, maybe I want to enhance the sadness and listen to a sad song or listen to something peppy to get me out of it. But that’s pretty limited in the scope of all the sounds, we could be engaging with you what Dallas really recommends is making sure that you are as much as you can, limiting some of the bad sounds so tired of noticing them, you know, he talks about even ambient sounds in the room like you know, the hum of a refrigerator. That’s really annoying, or, you know, like just other sounds around you. Sometimes I noticed this too, like I’m feeling just graded. And I’m like, what’s going on? It’s like as some stupid hum like happening in the building next door that’s like really bugging me, right? So kind of finding ways to limit the bad sounds, but really trying to find ways to mindfully notice some of the good sounds, you know, and trying to get beyond music for something that feels nice. You know, for me, it’s often very natural. Sounds kind of sound amazing, right? Like, take a little hike, or go somewhere natural, even if it’s like a park in your neighborhood and just be quiet. Yeah, notice, and, you know, you and I are having this conversation. You know, I’m in New England when it’s right around the beginning of autumn, and the leaves are kind of rustling and sometimes you can hear the acorns fall and things like that, you know, those are true delights for me, you know, those are delights in the sound domain, but, but I’m often not giving myself permission to engage with them. In the same way, I would totally give myself permission to engage with the taste of an ice cream cone, or the warmth of a warm bath, right, give yourself permission to engage in positive sounds.

Eric Zimmer  23:28

I think the benefit of being a sound sensitive person and a person focused on positivity to some degree is I’ve really learned to seek those out. I had been a on again off again meditator for a long time. And then someone said something to me that I had never heard of before. I don’t think it’s uncommon now. But this is 10 years ago, they said go outside, sit outside and just meditate on what you hear. Just follow what you hear. And when your mind it gets lost in thought, just ask again, what can I hear. And all of a sudden, I was like, This is what I’ve been trying to get for 20 years from meditation, you know, it just really worked. And then that actually allowed me to settle enough that the other types of meditation became a lot more profound for me. So it really unlocked something for me. So I love to go outside and listen to sounds. But the downside of a sound sensitive person is sort of like you mentioned, if there’s a rattle or a hum or a something, I mean, I am so aware of it. And what I don’t know and I can’t decide and I’d be curious to see you know, kind of what your thoughts are and from what you’ve learned about it is I sometimes worry that I’m making myself more neurotic around it just it’s a rattle, let it go, Eric, but I don’t very well, you know, the other one is and I think there’s an actual name for this, but I don’t know what the name is, but it’s where the sound of other people eating drives you nuts. And I don’t know whether you guys discussed that part at all.

Dr. Laurie Santos  25:00

Couple of things there. One is, I think, probably a lot of us are getting rattled by the rattle psychologically, but we’re not mindful or aware enough to realize it. I know I’m just like, I’m in a bad mood, I’m gonna strike out some meat to my husband. And I’m like, Oh, wait, it was the refrigerator hot. Like it was like, there’s a causal arrow from this nasty sound. So part of being, you know, sound sensitive, you might even say sound mindful, right? Maybe sound sensitives you’re really affected by about sound mindful, as you’re noticing which things are out there, it can just give you some awareness. Right, you might be able to do something to shut the rattle off. And even if you can’t, you now at least have some awareness. Okay, this is going on? Right? Yeah, you know, I know, you’ve talked a lot on the show about addiction and things like that, you know, it’s the same as craving, right? You know, being mindful of the craving, and now it’s there, it’s really present. But yeah, now you’re aware of it, you can choose to do what you want to do with it, maybe you’re going to allow it, maybe you’re going to non judgmentally really pay attention to it. You know, and this was one of the things, you know, that I’ve seen in sounds that are annoying is sometimes if you can get to recognizing them just as sounds, you just in the same way that you can recognize a craving as it’s just a feeling and get really curious about it like that rattle, you know, what’s the frequency of the bump, bump, ah, it makes my chest vibrate and things like that, like now you’re just digging into it and investigating it. Yeah, in a way that kind of causes it to lose its power, right? Like, you notice, it’s not just this valence. That’s like sucky, negative Stopstopstop. Like, you can sort of see it for what it is. And that can disarm it sometimes, too.

Eric Zimmer  26:25

I like that idea. Actually, I had not thought of investigating it more closely. If it’s rhythmic, I can capture the rhythm of it, and then it sort of disappears. It’s the intermittent ones. But to your point, I’d either try and tell myself, don’t be annoyed by it or make it go away. I do one of those two, but I have not that much now that you’re saying it. Turn towards it in a curious way. Learn more about it, how often is it? What are its frequencies? What you know, I think that’s helpful. All right. What about being driven crazy by the sound of other people eating? Can you fix this problem?

Dr. Laurie Santos  26:59

I think you can. Yeah, maybe same technique, like get out of the room or eating? Yeah. I mean, it’s the same with all effective things, right? You know, if you can really investigate your own preferences, sometimes you start laughing at yourself, right, you’re like, I’m really, really annoyed by this guy. Chewing chips, you know, like, if you can kind of get to a meta awareness of what’s really upsetting you, then again, through this process of kind of allowing it and investigating it, you can sometimes get some purchase on it to be like, Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Again, it doesn’t make it perfect. And it does take a lot of work, right. But you can kind of get to the other side on things.

Eric Zimmer  28:01

Hi, everyone, I want to personally invite you to a workshop that we are offering at the end of October at the Omega Institute, which is in the Hudson Valley in New York. And it is really beautiful this time of year, it’s going to be a great chance to meet some wonderful people recharge and relax while learning foundational spiritual habits that will allow you to establish simple daily practices that will help you feel more at ease and more fulfilled in your life. You can find details at one you feed dotnet slash omega, I’m really looking forward to meeting many of you there. Another episode that you had recently, he was about, in essence, on one level working too much, or you know how much is too much to work. But the insight that came out of it that I thought was really interesting was that we all want more time we have this desire, I used to say I want to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want, right, which is, in my case, an unqualified disaster, when that occurs. But the point of the episode is that there is a sweet spot for how much discretionary time is helpful. And that even moving small amounts of discretionary time can be very helpful back to this little and often. So can you tell us a little bit more about that one?

Dr. Laurie Santos  29:12

Yeah, yeah. So this was work that was looking at kind of how much discretionary time do we need? It was an episode with the psychologist Cassie Holmes, who’s fantastic. She’s got a great new book out on some of these topics. And I think we assumed that like infinite time is good, right? Like all the free time possible. But what she finds is that you definitely need some free time time that you would describe as free. That’s not scheduled. But it’s really not infinite. It’s actually just a couple hours a day, you know, maybe even the range of like two to three hours a day. And I think two things there. One is like when you realize it doesn’t have to be infinite. You’re like, Okay, this seems much more doable, right? Like I think I can move things around to objectively get that much free time or it’s a little easier than if I was going for infinite free time, for example. But the other thing that she she talks a lot about is that we really need to prioritize that free time. Right and I think look really carefully at what’s digging into it, you know, sometimes what’s digging into it is work and paying the bills. And you know, yeah, that’s the thing. But sometimes what’s digging into it is stuff that’s just like, filling our time that we don’t need. You know, I know you love parables on the show, you know, she talks about the perhaps apocryphal tale of some professor who was trying to teach his kids you know, about the power of this. And he says, like, you have these ping pong balls, how many ping pong balls? Can I fit in this class? People say some number of ping pong balls, and he puts them in. And he’s like, so is the glass full? And people are like, Yeah, you know, and then he brings out these little like, marbles. And he’s like, Well, you know, actually, can I put some marbles in? And they’re like, oh, yeah, you can use a fit some marbles. And he says, well, now is the glass full, and people are like, yeah, and then he pulls out the sand. And he’s like, uh, huh, I pour the sand in. The reason this is relevant is he says, you know, your time is this glass. And if you start filling it with the sand first, you won’t be able to fit the ping pong balls, which are the things you really want to be doing with your life, the things that really fulfill you and build you up. And so I think, you know, with that metaphor, I think we can ask the question, like, what’s the sand in our lives that fill things up? You know, and what’s the ping pong balls. And sometimes when you do that analysis, you realize, you know, the sand was, you know, every free 10 minutes I had, I was looking at something stupid on the internet. And the sand was ruminating over and over again, when I could have like, you know, popped out and you know, done a quick workout or something like that, right? It really allows us to analyze and be more intentional about how we’re spending our time, and recognize that it’s a limited resource that we often don’t think of as one perhaps our most important limited resource, you know, money, if you blow it, you might be able to get more money someday, but time when you blow, it has gone forever, you know, in your life, it’s not coming back, when we’re

Eric Zimmer  31:42

talking about discretionary time, are we talking about time that we get to choose what we want to do in and we may fill it up? Is it still discretionary time? For example, if I’m like, alright, well, I want to exercise for an hour, and I want to meditate for 20 minutes, and I’d like to do this, would we still consider that sort of discretionary time? Because I don’t have to do those things? Or would we still say even beyond that sort of thing? I need some amount of time, that’s just do whatever I feel like,

Dr. Laurie Santos  32:12

Yeah, honestly, I think it kind of depends a little bit on how you frame it, you know, use the example of like, the time to exercise. There’s different ways to frame that, right. You know, you could frame it, like I’m done work, and I get to do the things that are for me, what’s the thing for me, I’m going to exercise when you have this new, amazing yoga session, right? Or you could frame the exercises like I have to do it. If I don’t do my half hour exercise, I’m failing at my happiness mission, I’m going to like die of a heart attack. Like there’s a sort of half junus assuredness to certain kinds of things we do. Yeah. And you know, a lot of shadiness obviously comes from work and paying the bills and things. But sometimes we build up that sharpness in our brain for things that aren’t a half, two, right, that are supposed to be a one, two, but now have somehow turned into a weird should have to, you know, and the joke I use with my students is that you don’t want to be shooting all over yourself, you know, but I think we often should all over ourselves in ways that make even the most leisurely things, even the things we would normally be doing, you know, as a gift to do ourselves as this thing we should savor, you know, this delicious ice cream cone of time that we’ve spent, and it just feels like crappy, like, we’re just trying to, like push ourselves through it, you know, it’s feels like the most onerous work task. So I think it’s not exactly defined by a particular thing. It’s often defined by our attitude towards that thing. And this is one of the time hacks I think can be quite powerful, right, is that you don’t necessarily have to change how you’re objectively spending your time to, you know, in some ways subjectively, think about your time, use differently, if you can kind of change your attitude towards how you’re spending your time. That might be enough.

Eric Zimmer  33:42

Yeah, I think that is such a powerful intervention is to get to this, I’m choosing to do X, you know,

Dr. Laurie Santos  33:50

even do get to, you know, get to do this is amazing. Yeah, well, even

Eric Zimmer  33:54

something like doing work as a parent can very much feel like I have to, you know, I had this realization, I’ve shared this on the show a number of times when my son was, I don’t know how old he was nine or whatever. And I was complaining about having to take him to soccer practice again. And I just went like, No, I don’t like there’s no law that says, I have to take my son to soccer practice, like, I simply don’t have to do that. Matter of fact, I could choose not to come home. And his mother would have to take care of No, I’d have to pay child support. But I could make that choice. And just reframing it that way then caused me to go okay, so I am taking him to soccer practice, why am I doing it? And now I’m sort of linking this thing to something I value, you know, and the same thing, as you’re saying with exercise. Like, I can turn it into a half to do it, but I don’t actually have to do it. I’m totally in charge of choosing. I’m choosing to do it. Why? Okay, because I know it makes me feel better. I know, you know, blah, blah, blah. So I think reframing things as choices in our lives, a gets us out of that feeling of obligation, or we have to do that. feel it’s a trapped feeling for me, right? And then also does get me back in touch with my values, what matters to me, then I can make a choice? Well, maybe that doesn’t matter to me that much. Why am I doing that?

Dr. Laurie Santos  35:11

Yeah, no, I think that’s really profound right in two ways. One is kind of, as you mentioned, getting back to your values, right, so now you can appreciate this thing, right, you can have some gratitude for it’s like allowing you to harness the things you care about. Yeah, I think it also gets you back to a sense of agency, which just psychologically is powerful. We don’t like to be forced, you know, and helpless and doing things. But I think that choice can remind you that like, it’s a choice. And you know, to go back to the metaphor, you mentioned, like, you can ask yourself, Is this the sand? Or is this the like, you know, big ping pong balls, right, you can really say, you know, like, really assess whether or not this is the kind of thing you want to be doing. Because sometimes, some of the things we think are have tools in life have moved away from our values, right? They’re, they’re not serving us in the way that they served us before. It’s right here, you mentioned, our theories of ourselves are several years old. In some cases, I think, our kind of meta theories of what our values are, might be wrong, when we really introspect, you can be like, I don’t have to do this. And in fact, I don’t want to do this even in terms of my value, so it can allow us to engage in behavior changes that really are gonna serve us a little bit better.

Eric Zimmer  36:14

Yeah, you know, a lot of the stuff in your happiness Course talks about, no, there’s some very basic things in there that I often am like, I wish I had recommendations that were more interesting than exercise, good sleep, and meditate, like feels a little bit like eat your vegetables, right?

Dr. Laurie Santos  36:31

People pay you and they’re like, Wait, really, this is the rocket science of happiness research right now? Yeah. Yeah, one thing I like to tell my students is like, yeah, totally common wisdom, but definitely not common practice. Right? Yeah, that’s good. One of the reasons I think it’s powerful to understand the scientific benefits of these things, is I think it sometimes can help us pop over a little bit to behavior change, right? When you really reflect on the actual benefits of something like getting a half hour of cardio in, or the actual benefits of getting some sleep for your mental health. You know, you see, like, in my case, my students, like they see these graphs of like, do you want to be here on your mental health? Or here? You know, this big graph? It’s like, oh, like, yeah, you know, that can sometimes give you the motivation, that kind of kick in the pants to get back in gear with some of these things. But yeah, I mean, there’s stuff our societies have been saying, our cultures have been saying, our grandmothers have been saying, you know, for hundreds, if not 1000s, of years, but somehow in the modern world, we’ve got away from actually practicing these things.

Eric Zimmer  37:28

Yep. So we’re talking about this, don’t shoot on yourself, or reflecting on choice, right, which is very valuable, there are still going to be times, you know, with me, I’m like, Okay, I know, unequivocally, the single best thing I can do for my mental health is exercise. Like it is the number one intervention for me, I know that I’ve internalized that. And yet, there are days where I’m like, I just don’t want to do this. So there’s a certain amount of like, yes, I want to have agency and I don’t want to do this. And there’s a certain amount of time where there is a need to sort of push and say, Eric, this is good for you and do something that in the moment, I may not be wanting to do. So how do you balance those two sort of, you know, not getting locked into obligation, not making something that’s good for us a chore? Knowing that sometimes we have to just go through the motion.

Dr. Laurie Santos  38:18

I mean, if you only have days, when you experienced this, you’re doing well, because I think one of the big insights I think that the research shows us is that a lot of this isn’t what the actual activities themselves are. But it’s how we talk to ourselves about them. Right? So the shooting brain is really this kind of drill sergeant kind of idea of motivation, where you’re just think if I just scream at myself and berate myself for being such, you know, idiot, that I won’t want to go to the gym, then that’ll motivate me to go to the gym. Right. And that feels like a should it feels like ah, it can turn the best thing that you love the most into this thing that feels like an external obligation. But then you also don’t want to, you know, have the pendulum shift too far in the other direction, where you go into like indulgent mode, where you’re like, Oh, do whatever, just like be this crazy hedonist and hurt yourself, right? Because that can lead down a bad path too. And so what you’re trying to do is to find a happy medium, always hard, of course. But one of the voices to channel I think that helps with that happy medium is a voice of self compassion and self compassion in the way that researchers like. Kristin Neff at UT Austin, talk about it, where you’re trying to talk to yourself as a close friend would talk to you. Right? You know, so let’s say you know, you haven’t been to the gym in a while you’re feeling like crap. your close friend shows up. What are they going to say to you? They’re not going to be like, Eric, you need to get your act together and get to the gym. What a loser like they’re not going to scream at you. They’re gonna be like, No, you have tomorrow morning. 8am you gotta go to the gym like I’m gonna beat you up or something. Right? But they’re also not going to be like No non-problem That you’re never going to the gym, like eat more ice cream, like sit on your butt like, yeah, they’re gonna be like, Eric, what’s going on? What’s going on? Why aren’t you going to the gym right? They might be curious. They’re going to be kind, they’re going to try to get to the bottom of it, they’re not going to let you indulge just, you know, self compassion is not self indulgence. But they’re going to, you know, try to figure out what’s going on. And I think that’s sort of the attitude we need to take to ourselves when we’re feeling that resistance. One move is to actually get curious about the resistance and say, what’s, you know, going on? And I’ve done this, I mean, I definitely have had this specifically with exercise a lot. As I said, it’s not days for me, sometimes it’s months. But I find that when I get curious about it, it can help like, what’s happening? Why does this feel like an obligation? What have I done, and sometimes you analyze and you realize, like, you know, it’s the particular thing I’m compelling myself to do. There are other things that feel like a showed in my life. And if I can’t harness that time that I was exercising for something else, like there’s another thing that I’m missing that I want to get into. But all of that it’s unnecessarily which solution I come up with, it’s just the fact that being curious about the resistance, can allow you to Stop butting heads against either kind of, you know, plowing through it like a drill sergeant, which doesn’t work or ignoring it, and letting it continue when the resistance is really not serving you. So, again, it’s this kind of how you talk to yourself. Yeah. And allowing yourself to kind of get curious and pay attention and investigate what’s going on with you.

Eric Zimmer  41:14

Yeah, I think that’s really good. I think another phenomenon I’ve noticed in myself is particularly with exercise, it’s like, I look at exercise, and I’m like, okay, my plan is I’m going to do a 60 minute bike ride that day. And, and I know how much energy a 60 minute bike ride takes, it takes 10 units of energy, and I look inside, and I’m like, I have got one, this is not going to happen. Right? So you know, the other just sort of simple thing to do is to break it down and go like, Okay, can I get on my bike shoes, that takes one unit of energy, I got one unit of energy, good, I ease myself one step at a time into the thing can be another, just sort of a simple hack, for lack of a better word to kind of get over that hump. Because I don’t know what it is about exercise I’ve asked maybe you have a theory on this. I’ve never gotten a good answer for it, or not a complete answer, which is, I have exercised, let’s say, I don’t know, 5000 times in my life. I don’t know what the number is. It’s a big number now, right? I’m not a young man. Every single time I’ve done it when I’m done. I’m like that. I’m so glad I did that.

Dr. Laurie Santos  42:20

That was a choice to do that. Yeah. Never once

Eric Zimmer  42:23

not once have I been like, Ah, man, I wish I didn’t do that. Right? You would think that it would just be easy to do it right? It just seems like my brain would learn. That’s good. Do it. And yet, it’s still sometimes a big effort. I don’t know if it just comes down to conservation of energy as a species. I don’t know you have any thoughts on that? Because it’s strange to me,

Dr. Laurie Santos  42:43

you’re good. If it’s just exercise for you mean, for me, it’s like, sit down to journal, do your meditation like call your mom like there’s so yeah. So one hint that we get from the neuroscience is that you’d like to think that, you know, the brain was organized in the following way, it was good at detecting what I really liked, you know, what drove pleasure, it would notice that really well. And then it would have mechanisms that motivate you that say, Hey, whenever you feel that, you know, that little burst of pleasure do that more often. Turns out, the brain doesn’t have that many pleasure centers, they’re like really tiny and hard to find, even with neuroscience researchers, early on, we’re looking for them, like we don’t have any pleasure centers, meaning we don’t often notice what feels good, right? We notice things that really hack into those systems. So you know, drugs of addiction, like those hack into the system. Great, we noticed that those feel good. And those are very hooked up to the motivation systems. Yeah, you know, sweet things, right? You know, these visceral states we get but you know, the nice warm feeling I get from doing a nice gesture to somebody you know, the warmth I get from social connection, the exercise endorphin high, don’t notice it as much. However, the brain has lots and lots of neural real estate devoted to what you might call wanting. So if the pleasure systems or like the liking the brain has lots of wanting stuff. And so you get these systems that like give you lots of craving to do stuff that, you know, just happened to be a hack in this liking system. Again, whether it’s drugs of addiction, or things like social media, or, you know, all these like little dopamine hacks, our brain is really ready to go after those. But it has no mechanism to learn about, you know, the big highs, the, you know, kind of like deeper pleasures in life. And that sucks is such a stupid way to work for rats, great for them, but like not for us, you know? So how do you kind of combine these systems for wanting and liking better, you know, all the forms of like and get them to talk to your wanting better? Sadly, there’s not an obvious way. But there are hints that one way you can do it is to kind of ramp up your intentional noticing of the rewards you get. So my colleague, Hedy Cobra, who’s a neuroscientist at Yale, she she’s really interested in mindfulness approaches to addiction and things like that, you know, claim that you can use the same sort of approaches to notice the good things just as you can, let’s say a craving for a cigarette or something. Notice like actually what I’m craving is kind of gross, you know, like really paid Tension how this makes you feel, which is like not that good. You can do the reverse for something like exercise. And so this is something she practices all the time. She’s like the annoying friend that always wants to do like the hard yoga or the run or the like, you know, she never has the thing that we were just describing. But it’s in part because she’s forced herself at the end of it in that moment you talk about really like, This feels great to sit there and meditate on it, like, Oh, my chest feels lighter, I feel really good, right? Like, she’s kind of giving her brain some time to be like, Wait, like the reward areas that are kind of slow, unless it’s like a straight up dopamine hit, they can kind of notice this stuff. And you know, does that perfectly lock up your wanting and liking systems? No, but I think it can kind of help this sort of mindfulness practice of noticing they’re rewarding parts, just in the same way, you might notice that the negative things that are not serving you, when you sort of notice those consequences, and really attend to how they feel, they can kind of get into that circuit a bit more too.

Eric Zimmer  46:47

That’s a really interesting perspective, the like in wanting systems and a lot of the things that these pleasures were describing that come from wholesome activity, there are subtler thing. And so savoring them is really important. It’s just so interesting, having been somebody who had drugs of addiction, right, as a heroin addict, it amazes me looking back on the amount of pleasure I was getting at the end was so small, compared to the price I was paying. You know, and I’ve heard people describe some theories of addiction people have is that there’s a learning disorder associated with it in that your brain is just not updating, its prior so to speak, right? It, it just it’s stuck on the heroin, good signal, even though heroin is clearly not any longer good. My brain is like, a doesn’t get it, you know. And so, I think that these things are really tricky that liking and wanting, it gets really interesting that the brain has a lot of real estate devoted to wanting

Dr. Laurie Santos  47:44

Mm hmm. Yeah. And and that the wanting sticks really strongly to certain things. Right. You know, again, drugs of abuse, a lot of times are hacking your dopamine system. Yeah, as does the intermittent reward of your Instagram feed, you know, as does the like, really central pleasures like sugar and you know, lounging around and things that wanting system has nothing to stick on to for these bigger pleasures, and it doesn’t update. Well. You know, as you mentioned, I think one of the sad things that you know, if you’re really addicted to a particular drug is that you’re habituated to it, you’re definitely not getting not only at the consequences super high, but you’re also probably not getting the same pleasure that you’re getting in the beginning because your brain is kind of used to it, but yet still the wanting systems like Wanwan, that’s if I could go back in evolutionary time and like, tweak one thing about the rain, yeah, it would probably be to put more pleasure zones for the bigger, more meaningful pleasures, and it would be to hook the wanting systems up a little bit better to those. But sadly, I did not get consulted on how brands should be designed. So Oh, well.

Eric Zimmer  48:43

So do you think though, that this is just pure conjecture that if we as a species, managed to not exterminate ourselves in the next several 1000 years, that will change? Because to your point for rats, it’s a very simple system, right? They don’t have meaningful pleasures in the same way that we do. Right? Do you think that we might have evolved to be a little wiser about these things and to shake off some of this evolutionary baggage one being like that, maybe we would realize like, sugar and fat are not always good. Do you think that humans will evolve and again, this is just conjecture, but I’m curious what you think.

Dr. Laurie Santos  49:21

Yeah, no, totally. Scientifically speaking, I think these selection pressures have to be pressured to change things around in the brain, you know, if sugar and fat were killing us, you know, then we might over time develop adaptations not to like it. And that’s kind of true, but but not so quickly. You know, like real evolutionary time, like, evolution always moves towards the directions of adaptation, but sometimes it really slowly right, you know, so die in our lifetime and not in a long time for the human species. That said, I think, you know, this is where cognitive hacks can come in. Right? You know, if we can get good at noticing mindfully paying attention just earn rewards. You know, that really seems to be a hack on the system, it takes a tremendous amount of work. I mean, this is like, you know, we’re talking like Buddhist meditation levels of, you know, commitment to this stuff. But there’s a sense in which you’re kind of hacking these things. And this is one of the things I love about, you know, recent neuroscience work that looks at people who engage in these ancient spiritual practices is that they are literally hacking their brain, you know, if you look at a long term meditator, they just have less neural real estate devoted to mind wandering, you know, if you look at a monk who’s done, you know, many, many hours of compassionate meditation, their brains just go more quickly to engaging with compassion to other people. If you look at drug addicts, who’ve used mindfulness practices to overcome craving, when you look at, you know, their brain, when they’re in a craving state, it looks different than you know, a recovering addict who might not have used these mindfulness practices. And so there are hints that we can start hacking these systems through work and so on. That’s not as easy as like, you know, meteorite hits. Only people with certain wanting like existence, stick around be way easier, you know, though, maybe more tragic. But yeah, yeah. But the good news is that with effort and intention, there are some hacks that can help this stuff. Yeah, I think

Eric Zimmer  51:11

we can change this wiring extensively my own life, just being a testament to that I’ve shared the story several times recently on the show, so sorry, listeners, if it’s getting boring, but I think it’s an important one, which is, my mom broke her hip, and I was picking up all her prescriptions, I was carrying oxycontin back and forth from my mom’s house, the amazing thing is, not only did I not want it, I didn’t even think about it, it was a month or two into it that I was like, that’s incredible. But I would have robbed somebody at gunpoint for that once upon a time. You know, I mean, I think that just speaks to change is really possible if we just keep doing these things. Now, I’ve got a lot of years away from heroin. So it doesn’t happen overnight. But it is possible.

Dr. Laurie Santos  51:53

Yeah. And I think that’s important to remember, you know, it gets back to something we were talking about before that little and often, right, that often is the key, I think in your highest right, like you have to fight that craving, or allow it or investigate it a lot to get to the point that you’re at, but it does get easier over time. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  52:10

for sure. We’ve been talking a fair amount about behavior change here. And there’s lots of techniques and tools for behavior change. But one of them is that the support of other people, or a term I’ve seen you use as cultural or religious structures, you talk about how it seems kind of very clear that like your CrossFit gym, or your church, or these things can help make behavior change occur. And you then go on to say, Well, what’s driving it? Is it the beliefs of the organization have the thing? Or is it simply the commitment to it? And I just would love to hear you kind of talk through that again, because I think it’s really interesting.

Dr. Laurie Santos  52:50

Yeah, I mean, so you know, this better than anyone who you’re listening to your podcasts, if they’ve been listening for a while know this better than anyone, behavior change is a hard, hard, hard, hard, right. So any hacks that we can figure out to help us can be huge. And I think one of the hacks that we forget about, we love this sort of Protestant work ethic idea that, like, I’ll just power through it, you know, me, me, me, this individual changing my behavior against the world. But one thing we find is that behavior change often seems a lot easier. When you have environments and structures around you, that are kind of consistent with that change, you know, what do I mean? Like, if you want to exercise that’s much easier if all your friends exercise, right? Like, that’s much easier if you have like, you know, this like padded out home gym, that’s amazing, right? Like, that’s much easier, if you just happen to live in a place where you know, there’s no cars, you got to walk all the time, you’re just going to get that in more naturally, so that environments can really help us. And sometimes those environments are physical structures, you know, like lots of walking pads, and, you know, an elliptical machine in your apartment. But sometimes those structures are really like cognitive structures, their belief systems, right? You know, they’re about the people around me value this, right, the people around me are committed to this. And I think both of those kinds of things can really work their magic, those are both kinds of structures that seem to really help us. But it’s often not the kind of beliefs and values we think, you know, so one of the big findings I talked about in my classes that overall religious individuals tend to be happier people who have a belief in afterlife, belief in God and so on. And so you could say like, Well, maybe it’s their, their personal beliefs, right? Like they’ve, you know, have this belief in afterlife that gives them meaning and so on. Turns out not so much. It turns out if you factor certain things out a belief in you know, a god or something like that doesn’t actually matter what, what seems to matter a lot more is the practices you engage in religious individuals go to services, so they engage in social connections. religious individuals often are part of organizations that engage in charity, so they do nice things for each other. They pray and so they get a chance to be mindful and take some time where they’re present. They often engage in practices related to things like gratitude and other pro social emotions. You know, they’re just like physically around other people all the time because they’re engaging with these other folks. So we think structures have to be about our own personal beliefs and like what we believe and what we value. But sometimes the environments around us can be shaping our behavior in ways that are so much easier. And a recent episode of my podcast where I interview, the inventor of the so called Blue Zones, Dan Buettner, he’s an author who studies places around the world that tend to have these positive practices either for like physical health, like places that induce longevity, where people live healthily for a really long time, or places that induce happiness. And he’s fond of saying that like any attempt to individually change your behavior, without your environment supporting you, is doomed to failure. Like, you know, you could do all these different hacks and download apps and get coaches and whatever. But like, if you just moved to a place that was happier, or move to a place where you exercise more, that would impact your behavior so much more, you know, he’s being a little harsh, we know that with work, you can change your behavior. But it’s definitely true that if you can find some environmental support, that helps enormously,

Eric Zimmer  55:58

it makes such a huge difference. I mean, I got sober and 12 Step communities and you know, I’ve had friends of mine who are former heroin addicts say it was harder to quit smoking than stopped doing heroin. And there’s a variety of reasons for that. But one of them, I think, is simply when we went to get off heroin, we were embedded in a community that was focused on that. And when we stopped smoking, primarily, most people just simply go, Alright, I’m going to stop smoking, and they do it entirely on their own. You know, I think it makes such a difference. And I think this idea between beliefs and practices, I’ve often heard people describe Judaism as a religion that’s less about belief and more about practices, you know, I often try and tweeze apart what in 12 Step programs worked, what was it that was actually working there. And, you know, it’s interesting to think about, but I do think that the community aspect of it, that piece of it is really, really important, in 12 Step programs to talk about unity service and recovery. And I think it’s really interesting, the Unity or the people, the service is doing something that cares about other people. And then the recovery was some method of personal internal transformation, I think that can just be applied to us generally, as humans, you know, those three things are really helpful orienting points.

Dr. Laurie Santos  57:18

Totally. And I also think this idea of, you know, giving up control, you know, which, which can be complicated, I think it has certain religious overtones, and so on. But, you know, ultimately, it’s really accepting your common humanity, you know, which is something that people who do work on self compassion, talk about, right? It’s like, I’m not going to be perfect, I’m just going to be human, I am going to be tempted, right, you know, like, I have to kind of come to terms with the fact that I’m not the one you know, who’s in control all the time. And that humility can often ground us in a whole host of attitudes and ways of talking to ourselves that allow us to be a little bit more self compassionate, right? Like, you know, I’m not going to be perfect, maybe let’s not put myself in this situation, it’s gonna be really hard. Like, I’m not Superman, right? Like, I need to ask for help. Right? Yeah, you all of these are practices where you’re kind of compassionately dealing with yourself. But those are practices that also make behavior change much easier.

Eric Zimmer  58:10

Yeah, I’d like to turn now towards loneliness. There’s a lot of it out there. And it’s not such an easy thing to solve. I was talking with someone who is lonely about this. And this is a person who’s had lots of loss in their life. So everything that they sort of relied on is just kind of gone. And they’re sharing how, you know, it’s one thing when you’ve got a spouse to go out and find some additional community by joining a club, but that when you have none of those foundations, it’s very, very difficult. So I’m wondering what might you say to someone who’s in that position, who’s, you know, really isolated and becoming an isolated feels like a tremendous amount of work and is very discouraged by it?

Dr. Laurie Santos  58:56

Yeah, I think first that can recognize that you are not alone. Like a lot of people relate Right? Like loneliness is skyrocketing, even if you don’t have people talking to you about it. I mean, you know, even the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy has been focusing on loneliness, in part because he thinks is a public health crisis, a public health crisis because of how dangerous it is, but also a public health crisis because of how common it is, right? And so I think that’s step number one is like, you know, you’re not a loser, there’s not something wrong with you like, this is something a lot of people are going through. But that also comes with, you know, something that’s related, which is that if you reach out in a baby step way, you’ll often be surprised about how many people will follow up. I think one of our fears of loneliness is or one of our worries when we’re feeling lonely about doing something about it. It was we’re kind of simulating how much work it’s going to take and how much success we’re gonna get. Right? Or suddenly, it’s gonna be such a pain to like, Call somebody or go to this club or whatever. And we’re simulating, you know, if I do reach out, people aren’t gonna like me, right? And scientists have looked at this and there’s evidence that Both of those intuitions are wrong, right? Our predictions about how much of a pain in the butt and how stressful how, you know, annoying how maybe awkward it’s going to be, to reach out, they’re all wrong, like our brain is telling us Oh, don’t do that it’s gonna be a pain not gonna be as much of a pain as you think. Right. And our brain is also telling us stuff about how successful it’s going to be. And we there’s so much evidence that we miss predict how many people are going to like us, we miss predict how much people will appreciate our attempt at reaching out, especially if we haven’t reached out in a long time. And I think recognizing that those biases, our biases that our intuitions are wrong, can be really helpful when you’re making the decision to try to overcome your loneliness, because you’re like us feels like it’s gonna be a lot of work. You can be like, nope, sciences is not let me just try it. Right, let me just try it and take a baby step towards it. And then often, if you’re paying attention, you’ll get some positive reinforcement back, right, you think, oh, it’s gonna be so onerous to go to this club, especially if I don’t have a spouse or you know, nobody to talk to you, then when you try it, it actually works. The key though, I think, you know, especially with the sciences, that you kind of have to try it the right way. And the right way, is really making sure that you’re doing that first step to reach out, you know, including when you go to a place, you know, so, you know, I’ve seen friends who say, you know, I’m, you know, lonely, like maybe I shall, I’ll go to CrossFit, or you know, I’ll go to a book club, or I’ll go to this thing. But then they get to the book club, and they like, you know, are on their phone, checking their email, or they’re like playing with the cat, you know, to book club, right? Like, they’re not actually talking to people. And what does that do? You know, it’s reinforces this cycle where people think, Well, you’re not interested in them, so they’re not going to try to talk to you. So I think we need to recognize that it’s not just putting ourselves in this situation, but it’s having our own openness. Often, solutions to loneliness involve not like someone reaching out to us, but us reaching out to other people as trying to solve other people’s loneliness, us feeling like, you know, we’re the ones we’re going to talk to somebody so they feel better. That’s what kind of opens things up.

Eric Zimmer  1:01:52

That’s a really interesting perspective. And actually, I think my own experience would bear that out in certain cases, one on one, I’m pretty fine with people put me in a room full of people that I don’t know. And I hate it. You know, if I could have three glasses of whiskey, I would like it a whole lot more. But I but I don’t. And so what I found, though, in some of those situations is exactly what you just said is the strategy for me sometimes is look around and see who looks lonely, and go approach that person as a starting point. But it’s funny when you said that, like you know, you go to the event and you’re on your phone, or you’re playing with the other people’s cat, you know, I am totally that way put me in a new social situation, what I’ve learned about myself is, I may not even be able that first couple times to overcome it. Like it just may be too strong. But if I keep going, I can find something. And I’ve seen some research talking about, you know, it takes a while to build a connection or a friendship. And the thing that I’ve done so many times in my life is show up someplace once and be like, No, not my people, because nothing happened. Right? Yeah. And I just know for myself that the first time I show up my defenses, they’re just, they’re unconscious, and they’re high enough that I’m either going to think I don’t like these people, or they don’t like me, one of those two things is going to be going on in my brain. And I just kind of have to ignore it and go, well try again, you know, try a few times, if this seems like it’s a place that might offer the kind of community I want, I may have to venture into the space multiple times. And then sooner or later, I find like, all of a sudden, my walls start dropping. And so that’s a way of doing it. Even if you can’t quite overcome, you know what you’re saying like the first time I’m there, all I can do is play with a cat because I feel so shy. I like

Dr. Laurie Santos  1:03:38

your suggestion there. You can also look at it from the other people’s perspective, right? Like, why didn’t they connect with me it might not be because you know, you’re a loser and uncollectable. It was made when you were playing with the cat, the whole you know, so it’s like, yeah, I think if you if you if you frame it more like, I’m going to help the loneliest person at the party. That’s super helpful. I mean, I’ve seen this on one on one, you know, if you know if you’re feeling anxious, socially anxious, and a party is not the right scene, fine. Look through your phone or your email list and say, I’m gonna, you know, text or email the person in this list that I think might be the loneliness. And I’m just gonna check in. And you’d be surprised how much good work that does.

Eric Zimmer  1:04:12

This is my final question. To what extent does virtual connection can it be a replacement? For in person connection? Is it 50%? As good 75% as good? Am I asking the wrong question is a good question.

Dr. Laurie Santos  1:04:26

And the answer is sort of it depends on how you do it. Right. You know, you and I are talking virtually over the our favorite podcast app, and it feels pretty good. Like Robin, it’s nice connection. I see you. Yeah. And that’s in part because it’s in real time, right? We’re talking using the same things as primates that we were built over evolution to do, right, we’re talking in real time with one another. I think that virtual connection works less well. If you’re not doing it in real time. Like, you know, a text thread where you’re texting a friend it does kind of doesn’t jive with the way our psychologies used to. But the cool thing is we have lots of tools now that allow us to do that from like FaceTime and zoom where you can see each other, or just like the old school phone, right? We have these smartphones that are our cameras and our alarm clocks and all these things. And we forget, like, you could just use it as a phone. And we know the phone, you know, it’s pretty good for social connection. It was like really all we had for a very long time. So

Eric Zimmer  1:05:14

yeah, yeah. And I think the thing that sometimes people will do, and I know I’ve been guilty of this as like, well, in person connections, what’s really important, so I won’t do zoom, right, thinking that somehow inferior but it’s still way, way, way better than nothing.

Dr. Laurie Santos  1:05:30

And I think this for me was, you know, a gift of the pandemic. You know, I could talk about the whose silver linings and blessings and really awful situations was that you I think it got a lot of us to, you know, do these zoom hangouts with the friends or Zoom movie or game nights and zoom yoga classes, I was doing zoom yoga with friends. And it made me realize like, Wait, this is pretty good. You know, there are people that live far away that I won’t see in person for a while but connecting with them over zoom was great. And some of those, you know, zoom, things I was doing, I’m still doing with those friends or by call my college roommates are scattered all across the country. And we still do these like, once a month, kind of, you know, spa night hangouts over zoom, because we realize like, it’s better to see them that way than not at all. So I think, you know, listen to those lessons, they can be powerful.

Eric Zimmer  1:06:14

Well, Laurie, thank you so much for coming on. It has been such an enjoyable conversation, and I’m so grateful that you had time to join us today.

Dr. Laurie Santos  1:06:22

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Pete Etchells
The rate at which technology develops and changes is really fast, right? Way faster than science can keep up with understanding its effects. And yeah, that’s part of the reason why we’re in the situation that we’re in in terms of trying to understand the psychological effects of different sorts of technologies.

00:00:24 – Chris Forbes
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 your 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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Pete Etchells, a psychologist and science writer. He is a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, where he studies the behavior effects of playing video games. Pete’s writing can be found in BBC Science Focused Magazine and the psychology blog Headquarters. Today, Eric and Pete discuss his book the Real Science of Screen Time and How to Spend It Better.

00:01:47 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Pete, welcome to the show.

00:01:49 – Pete Etchells
Hi. Thank you for having me.

00:01:50 – Eric Zimmer
I’m really excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book Unlocked the Real Science of Screen Time and How to Spend It Better, which is a really good topic because there’s not a lot of nuance in the screen time discussions. And I am a big fan of nuance. I don’t think anything is ever as simple as it’s presented to us. So I really enjoyed your book for that reason. And we’ll get to that in a second. But before we do, 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. 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. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent replies, 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.

00:02:51 – Pete Etchells
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few days and for me it’s about understanding that the sum products of the two wolves, right? You know, we all possess traits of both of them and that’s okay. You know, it’s okay to be angry sometimes, but the critical thing is that you have choice. So you have choice over which traits, which behaviors, which habits you want to nurture. And this feels very relevant to me in terms of the debates that we’re having at the minute around the influences of things like digital, digital tech, Things like social media or smartphones, video games, the Internet at large, are seen as things that very much feed our bad wolf and that they only feed the bad wolf. And kind of because of that, we don’t have choice in the matter. So if you go on social media, you’re going to have a bad time because that’s what it’s designed for. And for me, that removes the sense of agency from the equation. There are so many good things that we get from our online lives, often without realizing it. But if we feel that all it’s doing is feeding the bad wolf, we’re left with a sense that we don’t have any control over that. And maybe the only solution that we’ve got left is to ditch the tech and it becomes a reinforcing thing. We become more negative, more toxic in our interactions. So for me, the parable is about actively thinking about what the good and the bad things are in our relationship with digital tech and knowing that you have the power to feed the hopefully good ones that you want and starve the ones that you don’t.

00:04:33 – Eric Zimmer
I love that idea and I love what you said in the beginning. We’re sort of the sum of different things and I think if we want to look at the impact anything is having in our lives, we have to look at the sum of it. And most everything in life is some degree of trade off. There’s some good and there’s some bad. You have a choice. There are great things about having a child and there are things that are challenging about having a child and your experience is sort of the sum of those. Before we get too much further into that though, you had some great reviews for your book. And my favorite one was from your 4 year old daughter who said it’s not for children, it’s for adults because it’s boring. I loved that you actually put that out there. That’s very good. It’s very good.

00:05:16 – Pete Etchells
I think she meant it In a super positive way as well. Right.

00:05:21 – Eric Zimmer
The other thing that I wanted to hit on before we go too deep into the book is something you talk about fairly early on in the book, which is that you unearth a journal of yours that you kept online, something called LiveJournal. Yeah, it was sort of a blog you kept back in the day, your teenage self. And you were looking back on it, and I was really struck by that part of the book because your teenage self sounds a lot like my teenage self. Like very troubled, deeply troubled.

00:05:50 – Pete Etchells
Yeah.

00:05:50 – Eric Zimmer
And I’m curious how you relate to that now.

00:05:53 – Pete Etchells
Well, that’s a great question. That was a really serendipitous thing that happened. Right. You know, I don’t think I could have engineered it in a better way. Somebody asked me once, you know, did this actually happen? And I was like, yeah, it did. And, you know, if I’d have made it up, it would be a really boring thing to make up that I got this random email. But, you know, it was during the pandemic, I got this email completely out of the blue that reminded me that I had this thing, this life journal. And I think I’d completely forgotten about it up until that point. And there’s a bit in the book where I have this like horrible realization that it’s still there. Not only is it still there, it’s not locked away anymore. It’s, you know, literally anybody can see it. And, you know, I had this really horrifying feeling at the time that, oh, somebody’s going to come along and take it and just put all of my deep seated worries and fears on me. And nobody cares about what I was writing when I was 17, 18, but it was a huge nostalgia trip for me to go through that. You know, I downloaded all of the posts that I put up and deleted it. So it’s not there anymore online, but spent a long time afterwards just going through it. And, you know, like you say, I went through them and the sense that I got reading through them was, wow, this kid was miserable. This was not a happy person in not a happy place. And I think part of that is teenage angst. You know, I think it’s very easy to put down in writing things that maybe sound overly dramatic sometimes. And I certainly know that I was a person like that when I was younger. I know that it came from a place of difficulty, though. So something that I don’t talk about so much in Unlocked, it comes up a little bit, but is very much more a feature of my first book, which is about video games, which was actually not about video games in a way it was about grief, was that my dad died when I was 14 and I spent a long time not dealing with that because it was too big a thing to deal with as a kid. And I think over time that then starts to come out in different ways. Right. And this is what I saw in the LiveJournal posts, that what was happening here was somebody who was trying to process something really horrible that had happened and not really letting it in and not allowing that grief process to happen. And when you do that, when you start to build walls and build dams, it leaks out in sometimes not very helpful ways. So, yeah, it was really heartbreaking in a way. It’s one of those points where you feel like you wish you had a time travel machine and you could go back and just say to that kid, you’ll be all right, things will work out. You will never get over these things because that’s not what happens with grief. We often think about when difficult things happen to us or we experience death, that we will get over it at some point and then we’ll go back to whatever life was like before. And it’s not. And that’s not how grief works. Right. You grow around it. It’s always a part of you, but it stays with you and hopefully gets sort of smaller over time. Or rather it stays the same and you get bigger. To be able to go back and say that would be a nice thing, but, you know, such is life.

00:09:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And I think you even say this in the book. I’m not even sure that my 15 year old self would even believe me if I did. But I agree with you. I look back at my younger self and I’m like, I could just go back and be like, just relax a little bit. Things are going to be very different than you, than you imagine. I just look back at some of the ways I thought at 15 and 18 and 21, just this sense of finality about things. I mean, I was so young and I was just like, I’ll never find love again. I mean, that kind of thing. Right. You’re like, okay, it seems so real then. So let’s pivot now and talk about screen time. I’m going to summarize the gist of your book and argument very quickly here and then we’re going to unpack it and you’re going to clarify it. The gist of it to me is that there are a lot of voices out there declaring that screens are really bad for us. You know, we’ve lost a whole generation to screens. The kids are not all right. It’s claiming all of our lives. Our attention is breaking down on and on and on. You can find them constantly. But that if you look at the science, the science is not nearly so clear or settled as all of that. Is that a reasonable position to, again, sum up a lot very quickly?

00:10:20 – Pete Etchells
Yeah, I think so. This is something that I’ve always tried to do in my writing, is to try and start from an objective viewpoint. I tried really hard not to go into this going, I don’t think any of this is sensible. So I’m going to show that it’s all wrong. What happened when I started writing Unlocked was that I really wanted to get to a position where maybe there’s some things, some topics or some chapters where we go into the science and actually it supports what everybody’s worrying about. And what we can do is look at where things are really scary and justified and maybe where some of our worries could be better directed. Frustratingly, there was a consistent thing that any sort of area of research where you look at digital technology effects, you find a very similar story, which is that the public facing discussions around this particular thing, whether it’s social media and mental health, or screens and sleep or whatever it is at face value, are very scary, very definitive or very confident things being said about them that they are clearly detrimental. And you go into the research and that’s not what you find. You find some research to support that line of thinking, you also find research that doesn’t support it. And when you try and look at the entire picture, it becomes very difficult to get a sense of what we actually know, where the general direction of travel is pointing.

00:11:40 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that psychology can be good at doing, when done right, is that I think it shows us places that are common sense or our intuition may not be right. That’s one of the things that modern psychology research seems to do. And we all have an intuition or a feeling that screens are bad or are detrimental. Where do you think that’s coming from?

00:12:05 – Pete Etchells
That’s a good question. I think a lot of this comes from a lack of understanding how to use these technologies in the best sort of ways. So the rate at which technology develops and changes is really fast, right? Way faster than science can keep up with understanding its effects. And, yeah, that’s part of the reason why we’re in the situation that we’re in in terms of trying to understand the psychological effects of different sorts of technologies. I think it also Means in a day to day perspective, just in our normal everyday lives, these things appear and they don’t come with a training manual, they don’t come with a list of things like this is what you would use this technology for to better your life. These are the things to watch out for. If you use them in these sorts of ways, you’re going to have problems. There’s nothing like that. We wing it, right? So if you look at smartphones in particular. So smartphones have been around for a while, but really exploded in popularity around about 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone. I remember getting an iPhone when they first came out. I was an early tech adopter at the time and I thought it was great. It really reminded me of, of like old school sci fi shows from like the mid-90s. There was one called Earth Final Conflict that I always really used to love, where people literally had like a thing that looked like a smartphone, right? It was a device that had a screen and you can make video calls with people and it’s like, this is the future. So there’s that really like cool, it’s happened now and then it was coupled with okay, so what do I do next? And you know, for our generation, for people who got those early smartphones, there was a built in gating mechanism, right. So when the first iPhone came out, it was a glorified phone, right. You know, you could make phone calls on it, you could go on the Internet with it, but it wasn’t a great experience. You could do emails, things like that. Social media wasn’t really a thing there. There was no app store when it first came out. Those things came out over time. So it takes a few years for the app store to kick in and then a few years after that for things like Instagram to appear. So that gave us this sort of natural gating where we could try and figure things out as we go along. And some people did that really well, some people didn’t so much where things are different now. And I think this is part of the reason why it feels so much more pressing that there are issues is that everything’s there now. They’ve got everything all at once. And particularly for kids and teenagers who are getting their first devices, there’s no staggering of these things. They’re getting everything all at the same time with no manual, no way of thinking about how do we navigate this sort of technology. And that’s where it becomes a little bit random in a way. You know, whether you’re going to have a good go of it or not. So because we’re in that trajectory of using them, you know, and it’s still the case for our generations now, but for every generation that what we’re doing is we’re figuring out how to do it as we go along. Right. And that lends itself very easily to having bad experiences. I think one of the great problems with the way that we talk about technology and the relationships that we have with technology is that all the things that we get that are good from them tend to be entertainment or convenience factors. And because of that we don’t notice them. Right. So you use your phone when you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll just bring up a map and then you’ll find where you’re going and you don’t get lost, you don’t have a bad time, so you forget about it. You don’t have your wallet on you or your card, so you can’t pay for a coffee or something or drink when you really need one, but you can pay with your phone and you don’t have a bad experience, so you don’t think about it. So we tend not to notice them. But when we do have bad experiences, they are more salient because they don’t align with fundamentally what we want to use the technologies for. All of us have got experiences of not using digital tech in a way that aligns with what we want to do in a way that feels like it’s messing with our well being. Right. You know, and I’m the same. You know, I say a lot. You know, there’ve been a few times recently that I got to like 10 o’clock at night and I’m really tired and I want to go to bed. And an hour later I’m still there scrolling through Instagram and it feels not good. It feels really unhealthy. Right. And there’s regret there. Like, man, that’s an hour that I could have had asleep and I know I’m going to be tired in the morning and it’s happened again. And we all have experiences of that. Right. And it’s very easy then to feel that we don’t have control over that experience, that this is something that’s happening to us and that because everybody has these, that it’s a feature of the system.

00:16:37 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I felt a couple different things as I was reading your book. I had a couple ping ponging reactions. One reaction was, this all makes complete sense. The science doesn’t seem to be settled and people are taking tidbits of that science and amplifying it and blowing it up for clickbait and headlines, which people, you know, happens to science of all kinds, all the time. So I had that reaction where I felt like, okay, this is good nuance. The other reaction that I found myself having a couple times was this is what big tobacco and climate change did, too. They just kept saying, the science isn’t good enough. The science isn’t good enough. The science isn’t good enough. And so nobody did anything for a long time. And there really were and are legitimate problems underlying it. And so that was kind of the two things that were going on inside of me when I say that. What does that bring up for you?

00:17:30 – Pete Etchells
I think it’s a really understandable analogy to make, and I think a lot of people make it. So one thing I’ll say is that to use the old phrase, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. What we’re not saying here is, well, there’s no conclusive evidence to show that social media is bad for mental health. Therefore there’s nothing to worry about. That’s absolutely not what people are saying. And I think it’s often made out that that’s what’s happening. So I think if you talk to scientists on all sides of these debates, I think everybody’s trying to do the right thing, and everybody cares about the same end goal, which is everybody wants better, healthier relationships for everybody with their tech. I think where we differ is the means and the methods and the journey and the messaging towards that. I think where analogies with things like Big Tobacco maybe break down is that we actually knew very early on in those debates and in that research that chemically these things were really bad for us. And if you look at the intentional use of things like tobacco, if you use it as intended as in the quote, correct way that it was meant to be used, it has a ridiculously high chance of killing you. That’s almost what it’s designed to do. What we’re talking about with digital technologies is not something that has a chemical interaction with our bodies. And fundamentally, what it is about is connecting each other. And this, arguably, I fully admit that this is maybe a naive way of thinking about it with something like social media. I know there are other things going on here, but fundamentally, what those sorts of technologies are aiming to do is to bring people together. They’re technologies of entertainment, of pleasure, convenience, of connection, and they’re designed to facilitate that. So the analogy for me with I understand where it comes from, and it could well be the case that we get some conclusive research in a few years time that shows that actually, unequivocally, social media is bad for us. I don’t think that’s the case because we’re talking about fundamentally different things and different mechanisms, different ways in which we interact with them. But I really understand and empathize where those analogies come from, and they’re driven by deep seated worries about the way that we interact with these technologies. And I think it’s important that we don’t disregard them or just, you know, laugh people off and say, no, that’s a ridiculous analogy because, you know, you’re not, you’re not smoking phones or anything like that. The reason that these analogies come up and the reason that these conversations can be so vitriolic sometimes is because people are really worried and people really care about what the impacts are. For me, there’s been maybe a bit of a failure both in terms of science communication, but in the way that we do science, in that there are clearly lessons that we could learn. Even if you look at digital technology research, you look at the cycle of panics around digital tech effects. Before social media and smartphones, it was gaming addiction, and before that it was violent video games and aggression. And you can track these technology panics back. You never know whether you’re in a moral panic until you get out of it, right? So we can’t say that this is just another moral panic because we’re in it at the minute. But for me, though, what we’ve not done is figure out how to get out of them quicker and future proof ourselves a little bit more so that the next time a new technology comes along or a new thing that we’re worried about, we’ve got the means to research it quickly and understand its effects quickly so that we can figure out what to do with it and move on so we don’t keep getting stuck in these conversations.

00:21:20 – Eric Zimmer
Right. One of the big things that your book points out about the debate around screen time is that screen time is not a thing. I mean, it’s not one thing, right? You give a great example in the book of if we were to try and log an hour of, you know, either you or I or anybody’s screen time, right? It might be, well, I was on email for five minutes. I was writing my book for 25 minutes. I was on Twitter for 10 minutes. I’m all over the place. And then you make the point even further that even within Twitter, there are times that that might be an edifying experience. I’m connecting with a colleague and we’re having a good discussion versus I am whatever thing you get into that you know is not helpful to you. And so that we tend to say screen time or social media or these big blobs of things are bad for us. So the first problem is that we’re not making any differentiation there. And then you make the further point that when we talk about mental health effects, we are also not doing a very good job of tweezing that apart. What do we mean by bad for our mental health? And all that stuff is so squishy that it gets very hard to run this sort of. And have the same sort of randomized control trial that you would to see whether a medicine reduces blood pressure.

00:22:48 – Pete Etchells
Yeah, it’s a huge problem, not just for the research, but for the way that we talk about this more generally as well. So I’ve really struggled with this in terms of talking to journalists since the book has come out, because what will happen is you’ll have a conversation where you go, or they’ll ask a question around, what does the research say on the effects of social media on mental health? And we’ll start talking about some studies or some findings, and we’ll talk about the mess in the area and things like that. And then they’ll say, yeah, but what about the effects on suicidal ideation? But yeah, what about the effects of these sorts of forms of social media? And the conversation feels like it’s all the same stuff. It’s screen time and mental health, but it bounces around in lots of different places. And part of the reason for that is, like you say, we don’t have a good handle on this in the research literature. Part of the reason why you can point to a lot of studies that show negative effects if that fits with your worldview, or you can point to a lot of studies that show positive or non effects if that fits with your particular worldview, is because they’re all out there. Yes, because they’re all measuring slightly different things. One of the things I tried to do with Unlocked is say, okay, well, what if we take everything altogether? What do we see? And that’s where you get the mess. Right. You go, well, we don’t have clear findings in one direction or another. The counter to that, I think in some ways is the book is about different aspects of screen time. And I think I was a hostage to fortune in some ways in that almost immediately, as soon as the book came out, the conversation shifted. I don’t think anybody really cares about screen time anymore. They care about social media and smartphones. So the first counter I get quite a lot is, well, yeah, nobody that is like nobody cares about screen time. So that feels like a bit of a straw man argument. I think the same can be said of social media as a term. I’ve not seen a sufficiently good definition of social media, you know, that you might use for research purposes or also for regulatory purposes. Yet that doesn’t inadvertently scoop up things that you maybe don’t want to regulate. Right. So, you know, very often the definitions will also include things like text messaging or WhatsApp messaging, even things like forums or Google Classroom and things like that share many of the characteristics of social media. And this is not me saying, oh well, you know, very nerdy. You need to define your variables because I’m a scientist and I care about those sorts of boring details. It’s we need to figure out what it is precisely that we’re worried about because then we’ll have a better chance of doing something about it, something effective.

00:25:45 – Eric Zimmer
One of the parts of the book that I found really interesting was the discussions on attention. You reference a person who’s been a frequent guest of the show and a little bit of a friend, Johann Hari, and his book, I think it’s called Stolen Attention. I don’t remember the exact title, but the idea is that our attention is being hijacked and stolen from us. Now Johan has a particular view of the world. He’s written a number of books on addiction, on depression, and I have both those things in my past, so I find him interesting. And he has a view on the world that tends to take things and make them societal forces. The problem is bigger than the individual. It’s all the stuff around the individual. And so he’s got this idea that these things are competing for our attention. And yet you say that the science on attention is just as confused as the screen time.

00:26:36 – Pete Etchells
Yeah, again, it’s one of those areas where we probably use the term attention in a general sense as a sort of catch all term when we mean other things. Maybe we mean other things at different times, but I think more often than not we mean our ability to hold concentration or not be distracted. And I think that’s where a lot of people feel as though things have gone wrong recently. That and yeah, this is how I lead out that chapter that you’ve got a piece of work to do and you sit down and try and do it and you immediately get distracted by other things. So there’s sort of two realities there as to what’s going on. And I have this conversation with my university students quite a lot. I’ll have students come in and say, allocated today to writing an essay. And I sat down at my computer in the morning and I really wanted to do this. And then like five minutes in and I’m on my phone or I’m playing a game and the next thing I know it’s lunchtime. And then I’m in panic mode because that’s three hours that I’ve lost already. I’m already behind and I know that I need to do it now, but I’m struggling to concentrate because I’m so worried. And then I go and play video games to try and calm myself down for a bit. And then the day’s gone. And I’ve noticed done anything. I do this as well. I think everybody has experience of this, right? It’s very easy to get distracted because we’ve got lots of stuff around us that makes us distractible. The fact that many of us have this sort of experience is not sufficient evidence to say that therefore there is a collective collapse in our attention. This has happened almost by design. That’s a very substantial claim to make. So I talk about this in the chapter and think about, well, if that was the case, we would probably see that signal in the research literature. You wouldn’t even need to do a specific study on this. You just need to look at the past 15, 20 years of research on attentional cueing or the post narcuing paradigm or something like that, and look at. Do you see declines in the averages in those studies over time? You don’t see that nobody’s noticed it anyway. I think there are claims that. I think one of the claims that take Johan to task on in the book is that it seems like we’ve all suffered this collective 20% reduction in brain power. And again, that’s a very substantial claim to make. And I think if that was true, that that would be disastrous for human civilization. Right? And I think it would be so overtly obvious, more so than any claims around, everybody feeling a little bit distracted. I don’t think we’d be having this conversation. I don’t think there would have been a debate around it. There’s another one of your guests, I think, who I spoke to for the book, who I think has a different take on this is Nir Eyal. And I spoke to him for my book and we had this conversation around. When you sit down at the start of the day and you just feel completely distracted and he says that first thing you do is ask people, well, show me how you planned your day. Again, I’ve done this with my students. Do you use a diary or do you use a calendar to plan when you’re going to do things? And seven times out of ten they’ll say no. Sometimes they’ll say yes, but even in the times they say yes, there’s not really any structure to that. More often than not, they don’t really use a diary or a calendar. And that’s not to be disparaging. I didn’t use anything like that when I was a student. But Nir makes this argument, and he sort of said this to me when I was talking to him for the book, that how can you be distracted by something when you didn’t plan your day? And I think, again, it goes back to this idea that we use technology in a haphazard way without really thinking about how it aligns with our goals. And for some people, they manage that fine. But for a lot of people, that’s when we use it in an inappropriate or an unhelpful way. So, you know, I can think of days where I was writing Unlocked, where I knew that I needed to hit my word count for the day. I work really well under those sorts of circumstances. If I know that I’ve got a clear, well defined goal by the end of the day, that means that I know by the end of the day I know whether I’ve had a good day or not. So I can manage accordingly. If I’ve not had a good day, I know I need to pick it up the day after. If I had a good day, I know I can relax more and pat myself on the back. And then equally, there are other days where I didn’t really give myself a goal. I was just, I need to write. And those were the days that I got really distracted. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is, yeah, we don’t have a clear idea of what we actually mean when we talk about attention. And I am also painfully aware that that is entirely useless for everybody in these conversations. For somebody like me, as I just come along and say, well, we don’t actually know what we’re talking about here. It’s like, yeah, great, well done, you. That doesn’t help us with anything. But what I try and point to is a newer line of research, emerging research over the past three, four, five years, that tries to recharacterize attention in a way that I thought was really helpful for thinking about how we cope with digital technologies. So attention is not this simplistic thing that, you know, when a notification on your phone pings, it will automatically in always grab it. And then as soon as you’re on your phone, that’s it, you’re stuck for the next hour. That’s not really the right way of characterizing attention. A better way of thinking about it is. So in the literature they’re called priority maps, but you can think of them like heat maps. So if you imagine your visual environment in front of you, your audio visual environment, and overlaid on that is like a heat map. And wherever there’s a peak in that heat map, there’s something that is worth your attention. And where it’s flat, there’s nothing. So for me, at the minute, you know, I’ve got a microphone in front of me, a screen in front of that, my phone is off to one side, my bag’s down here. Most of this map is flat apart from my screen because that’s where my attention is focused and I want to talk to you. What affects that map? So it is bottom up processes. So if you know, visually something happens, if somebody came through the door, that would cause a spike in that area of the map. For me, if my phone pinged off, that would cause a spike. But top down processes have an impact as well. So top down processes are things like what are your goals, what are your motivations? Right now I am really motivated to not sound like I’m talking complete gobbledygook on this. And I’m finding it an interesting conversation. And this is fun for me. I know that if my phone were to go off a, that would be really distracting, you know, I’d lose my train of thought, I’d lose what I was talking about. It would also be quite rude to you as well. And I don’t want to do that. So I mean, I’ve got my phone on mute, so it’s irrelevant. But if it did go off, that little spike on the priority map would be a little bit. But it wouldn’t be sufficient to grab my attention. If you think about a different scenario where I’m sort of in the same environment, but maybe instead of having this conversation with you, I’m trying to write an email or I’m trying to write a document and I’ve not really thought about it and I’m struggling and I’m worrying about who’s going to pick up the kids and what we’re going to have for dinner and things like that, I’m not really in the task because I’m trying to avoid it, because I’ve not really prepped for it. And then my phone pings off, it will be a much higher spike on that map and I’ll go, ooh, something to distract me for a bit. So thinking about it in those sorts of terms I think is more helpful. Because when we talk about attention or collapse, that’s such a scary thing that has happened to us. How could we possibly do anything about that? Whereas thinking about it in terms of these things in front of me, these screens are tools. They are there to help me do the things that I want to do. I just need to figure out what they are and make them work for me. You can curate that experience a little bit more and have more control over what is worth your attention.

00:34:34 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I found those priority maps to be a fascinating way to think about attention. I think about attention a lot. I’m a longtime meditator. So there’s a certain way in which attention is used there. Attention is in many ways one of our most fundamental assets. And I find the priority map to make more sense to me, and it depends on both bottom up and top down processes. Makes complete sense to me. I also think that what you said your students described to you, I can say was happening to me in 1989.  I thought I was going to be an author. I would sit down to write and 15 minutes later I’d be like, well, I am now reading. You know, my distractions might have been different. They might have been, I’m reading a novel instead of being on Instagram, but I didn’t know how to stay on task. I didn’t know how to do any of those things. I do think that there is also something to be said for we have a whole lot more coming at us and I’m a believer that we have more control over that than we often think that we do. Yeah, it’s all the classic stuff. Turn off notifications and, you know, I use tools like, I don’t remember what this tool is called. It’s something I’ve been using. I want to call it Screen Time, but that’s the Apple app. But basically all it does. When I try and open something that I don’t want to open all the time, it just pops up a little thing and says, more or less, take a breath. Do you really want to do this?

00:36:05 – Pete Etchells
Yeah.

00:36:06 – Eric Zimmer
And very often that’s enough, right? No, actually I don’t want to do that. Right. So I think we can use technology. I think your other point is an important one. And I talk a lot about achieving your goals or changing your behavior. And there are structural elements of that. Planning your day and turning off your notifications. Right. And then there are emotional elements of that. What’s happening inside me, whether it’s in 1989 and I think I should be writing a novel and I instead pick up a novel to read it versus today if I were to hop over and start playing solitaire. There’s a common thread underneath there. So problems with productivity didn’t just start. We’ve been writing about this stuff for a long, long time. And at the same time I do think to me it seems self evident that there are smart people who are trying to think about how to get me to spend more time on their app, their streaming service, their whatever. They know the emotional manipulation tricks. And so there’s an element of individual agency for sure. And there’s an element of, you know, somebody trying to get me to do something. In the same way that I could say with fast food, there’s an element of individual agency whether I eat a Big Mac or not. And we know that those foods are designed in such a way to capture my attention. So I think it ends up being, you know, kind of back to where we started. Right. There is a lot of nuance here.

00:37:33 – Pete Etchells
Absolutely. And I think nobody is saying again on all sides of the debate. Often there’s a perception that people like me who are saying that actually the research doesn’t support some of these more fear mongering claims that are made out there, therefore there’s nothing to worry about. That’s absolutely not what people are saying. And I think a lot of people with similar views to me say the same thing as me, which is you can hold two things true at the same time. One is that the research is not great in this area and it doesn’t support some of these wilder claims that are made at the same time. Tech companies absolutely need to be held more to account and to design these platforms better so that they’re more supportive for our wellbeing. They play safety and well being at the core of their design. Not just as something that we maybe want to think and talk about every now and again, but they’re absolutely fundamental to it. Those two things can be true at the same time. And I think, yeah, you’re right that thinking about this in terms of there are pressures on social media platforms, let’s keep with them. For example. So there’s this sort of naive view of what social media is, which is this way of connecting or facilitating human connection, which is wonderful and utopian and not really the full story. Right. There is also the business element of it, which is that you need to make money out of these platforms and there are various ways in which you can do that. More often than not, it requires holding people’s attention, keeping them on those sites. That’s where the tension comes. Or one of the tensions, one of many tensions that. That maybe is not with our best wellbeing interests at heart. But again, for me, I think a big aspect of this is, yes, yeah, we do need to push more for better safety by design principles and wellbeing by design. But that’s going to take time. And there are still things that we can do very immediately that support our wellbeing, that we can do for ourselves. I’ll give you an example. And this has happened really recently to me. I was on a debate, an online debate recently, and I know that there was somebody who was sending some not nice messages on one particular social media platform I’d come across inadvertently. I think one of my friends had sent me. I was like, hey, have you seen what this person’s saying about. I’d already blocked them a long time ago, but I was still able to see them. And that was not a nice feeling for me. I felt very low about it, very nervous. I’m constantly anxious in this debate that, what if I’ve just got this wrong? And that’s why I try and keep to the evidence as much as possible. But I wasn’t in a particularly happy place with all of that happening. And I remember going, I wonder what they’re saying about me on other platforms. And I went onto LinkedIn, actually, I went onto LinkedIn and it turns out I’d already blocked them on there. So this is somebody who I’d had prior experience with and I was like, I’m going to unblock them. And I know that this is a stupid idea, this is not going to be good for me because what’s going to happen is I’m going to unblock them. The best case scenario is that they’ve not said anything about me. I’m expecting that they said something and that’s going to make me not feel good. Why am I doing this to myself? And I didn’t know how to unblock anybody in LinkedIn, so I had to kind of figure it out. And it turns out it was really what I feel is a really healthy system of unblocking on LinkedIn, in that if you block somebody, you’ve got to go into A certain part of the settings, find them and when you click unblock, you get a little pop up that says, are you sure you want to do this? If you do this, you can’t block them again for another 48 hours. So I didn’t unblock them because I thought, hang on a sec, this has just given me enough chance to pause and go, I’m not going to get a good outcome for myself from this. I was expecting I could just like unblock them, have a quick look and then quickly block them again. I clearly can’t do that and that leaves more risk open. So I’m not going to do it. And I think my mental health is all the better for it. I took more time to think about it afterwards and go, actually, I don’t care what this person things, I don’t know them, I’ve never met them. They’re just not nice at interacting with me online and it’s probably best that we don’t talk to each other. And that’s fact of life that some people don’t get on, that’s okay and let’s just both go on with our lives. And I think that was the best outcome. That was thinking carefully about the tools that we’ve got at our disposal to curate our existence on these sorts of platforms and what we want to get out of it. But in that particular scenario, there was a bit of a buffer mechanism in place that almost kind of like protected me from myself a little bit. And I think that’s a really good example of where little tips and tricks and tools can help us. And obviously there are lots of other examples on other social media platforms where things maybe aren’t so great. And I think it’s that sort of thing where there’s an educational element to this which is around thinking about what do we want out of our tech use, whether that’s a particular social media platform or our laptops or whatever it is that we’re talking about, video games. And then there’s the other side of it, which is what can the tech companies do very quickly to give us more helpful tools to help us create that experience? And what are things that are a little bit harder to implement that need to be done over the long term and how do we push for that? And the sad fact of this conversation, I think, is that at some point regulation needs to come into the conversation because I think if you ask industries to self regulate, they’re not good at that.

00:43:05 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:43:05 – Pete Etchells
For obvious reasons. Right. So for me then the question becomes around where do we direct regulatory efforts so that they’re most effective for, you know, helping us with these things. And that’s maybe where we’ve got some of the conversation wrong at the minute.

00:43:38 – Eric Zimmer
The part of the book that I probably struggled with the most was the sections on addiction. Given that I have addiction history, alcoholism, heroin addiction in my past, and I’ve been around addiction for a long, long time. And you sort of start that chapter off by saying pretty clearly you are not addicted to your cell phone. I sort of understand your argument because I read the book, but help listeners understand why you feel confident making that claim.

00:44:08 – Pete Etchells
That was actually a sentence in the book that I agonized over a lot. It’s a very strong claim to make, and I fully appreciate that it’s one that doesn’t sit very well with many people’s experiences of their phone use. So I try and unpack that in the rest of the chapter. And I think for me, one of the big things here is around the language that we use in terms of characterizing our relationships with our digital tech. And also perhaps the influence, therefore, that that’s had on the direction of research in the area that we use the word addiction a lot in day to day spe when I don’t think we should. I think we overuse it and we use it inappropriately. We use it in a way that I think can be unhelpful to what we’re trying to do sometimes. So my take on a lot of this is that when you say I’m addicted to my phone or I’m addicted to social media, that what people very often mean is that they feel like they’re using it a lot. They feel like maybe they’re using it too much, and they feel like they’re not happy with the amount that they’re using it. That’s entirely understandable. My problem with couching this in terms of an addiction framework is that it leaves you with very few solutions that particularly when we’re talking about this in terms of it’s not just that you’re addicted to your phone, but that. That you are addicted by design, that this is something that has happened to you without you realizing. Like, if you’d have known that this was an addictive product, then you would have done something different. You might not have used it at all. You weren’t given the full facts. And therefore, this is the space that we’ve got ourselves into. It’s totally understandable when you frame it in those terms that what you then reach for in terms of how to deal with this is to remove it, to either get governments to regulate it or it needs to be kind of removed. So you see all these sort of digital detox programs and things like that. They’re very much grounded in the language of substance use. They’re very different things that we’re talking about. So one thing to say there is that if you look at the research on digital abstinence or digital detox, so where you get these studies where people are asked to either not use their phone completely for a certain amount of time, or to not use a particular social media app or things like that, you get very mixed findings, very weak effects, and certainly nothing in the sense of long term effects. Now, I know that there are some scientists out there who disagree with me on this. And there’s actually a big debate going on at the minute around that. And again, it goes back to that. What are we talking about? How are we defining this? I’ve seen some people point to a bunch of studies that show that digital abstinence works and therefore this is what we should be implementing for kids. There are studies on people, adults stopping using Facebook. That is not what we’re talking about. Kids don’t use Facebook. It’s a completely useless line of research for the thing that you’re worried about. The other thing to say about this is that if you look at the trajectory of research on digital behavioral addictions, there’s this similar trajectory that happens over time, which is people start talking about this thing in the way that we mentioned earlier, that people use addiction in a common day to day sense. And scientists come along and go, everybody’s talking about Internet addiction or something like that. We should study this. And that’s correct, we absolutely should. But it always comes from the starting point that this thing exists and is very quickly and easily definable. And I think that’s where we get things wrong quite a lot. Again, nobody’s saying that people don’t have problematic use issues with their phone or with social media, but how we characterize it helps us define it better. It helps us understand the populations who are really struggling with it. And that leads to more useful treatments in those situations. And then for the vast majority of people who are not addicted to these sorts of devices or these sorts of platforms or whatever, if you use other frames of thinking about this, then you open up a whole new tool set of ways that you can deal with it and again, get better outcomes for yourself. Maximize the benefits, minimize the harms.

00:48:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I can see why nobody in the research and the findings in this area are all over the place. Because we’ve been trying to define alcoholism or drug addiction for a long time and we still really can’t. Generally we’ve moved away from. If you answer yes to 6 out of 12 questions now you’re an alcoholic. We talk more about alcohol use disorder. That falls along a spectrum. Right. And so I think a similar way of thinking about phone use could be helpful. I also think that the other thing that’s challenging is, and I’ve had this discussion on the show with countless people of differing stripes, is it helpful to call yourself an addict? Is that empowering? Is that disempowering? Lots of people have different experiences with that. Some people find that yes, that’s really a helpful way to think about it. I find that good. I’ve gotten and recovery that way. And other people go, it just made me feel like I couldn’t do anything. Why would I say that I’m powerless over something that doesn’t empower me. And so I think the same thing is kind of going on here. And there’s a point made in the book that sometimes we may be framing something as addiction that’s something else, like it’s a self esteem issue or it’s a coping mechanism, which I think all addictions are to some degree. Right. All addictions in my experience are generally there’s an underlying something that you’re trying to accomplish with the thing. So I think it’s possible, probably in the way that I understand addiction to be. Again, I’m hesitant like you, to use the word addicted because I think gambling is our best example that mirrors it, meaning that it’s a behavior, it’s not a substance. And so I don’t think it has to be a substance. I do think behavioral addictions exist. But I also agree with you that probably most people, in the same way that if we look at the number of people who use alcohol or who use an opiate or who use cocaine, it’s a percentage of them that go on to have real problems with it. And I would imagine that it’s a similar thing. It’s really hard. You use the language of habits. And I’ve done a lot of coaching with people over the years on changing behavior. And boy, that line between a habit and an addiction, like what even is it? How do you even really know? It’s very muddy. But I do think that broadly speaking, claiming addiction across the board for all of our interactions is probably not helpful.

00:51:22 – Pete Etchells
Yeah, I think probably another close analogy here is gaming addiction which is the only digital addiction that is form categorized as a clinical disorder anywhere. So the World Health Organization classified this as a disorder in 2018 in ICD 11, the International Classification of Diseases. And there was a big debate at the time between, broadly speaking, two camps of researchers and clinicians about whether this was the right thing to do or not. So I totally take the point that you made and the point that the people on the other side of the debate made in 2018, which is that it’s too simplistic to say, well you need to know whether this is a coping strategy for something else or whether it’s just better accountable by depression or something like that. Because very often with addictions they are comorbid with other disorders. That’s very often the case.

00:52:17 – Eric Zimmer
Chicken and egg, right?

00:52:18 – Pete Etchells
Yeah. Yeah. I think the problem from the side that I was on, which was that not that there aren’t some people out there that that struggle with gaming to the point that it becomes actively harmful, but that we don’t know enough about it yet, is this a unique disorder? Is it better characterized as another form of disorder, maybe like an impulse control disorder or something like that? And we need to answer those questions if what you want to do is help the people that actually need help. So if you look on the World Health Organization’s website for gaming disorder, which is what they call gaming addiction, there is a link there to a 2020 systematic review of papers in the area. And that review covers about 160 papers. And across those 160 papers, there are 35 different ways in which gaming disorder is assessed. Not 1. 35.

00:53:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:53:11 – Pete Etchells
And across those 35 studies, you get a prevalence rate of anywhere between 0.2% of the gaming population, up to about 58%. Now what that says to me is that you don’t know what this thing specifically is. If either nobody has it or pretty much everybody has it, that’s not a helpful thing for people. Yeah, let’s just for the sake of argument, let’s just say that the true rate is 3%. If you go around thinking that the prevalence rate is 60%, you are diagnosing a lot of people with a clinical disorder that they don’t have have. If you think the true rate is 0.2%, you are missing a lot of people that need help. And this is where I struggle with that debate again. Me saying I don’t think addiction is the right way to talk about this is not me saying there aren’t people that really, really struggle in a near pathological sense or in a heart, you know, they are experiencing harm through their tech use. That is not what I’m saying at all. It’s that we don’t have the right ways of talking about it to help to identify who they are, to figure out what the unique features are of that particular disorder and to help them. And I think just rushing along and saying problematic smartphone use is actually smartphone addiction and this is how you test it doesn’t actually help people in the long run.

00:54:31 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Yeah, we could talk about this for four hours because I find it a fascinating subject. Both gaming use, any disorder, and people have been debating what exactly these things mean for a long, long time. I do think that there’s a generally common sense approach. We used to say in 12 step programs, which is if your drinking is causing problems, then you’ll probably have a drinking problem. Exactly where you categorize it. What you call it is probably not as important as the fact that like, okay, something needs to be done here. Right? Something needs to be tried. And to that end, I don’t want to put this in the post show conversation which is going to make this longer than normal, but I don’t want to talk about a problem for a long time without it all. Addressing your thoughts on how we work with this, you sort of end with, if we want to think differently about the relationship with our screens, we need to take a couple different steps. So what are some of your broad takeaways for what is a useful way to think about this thing that we don’t quite know what to call. We don’t know how bad it is. And yet as you’ve said, clearly we know there are some problems that emerge out of it for some people. So how do we think about or talk about this in a way that is helpful?

00:55:51 – Pete Etchells
I think being reflective on your tech use is a really helpful thing to do here. And I appreciate that very often that’s not an easy thing to do. So there’s no quick fix. This is not like a. Here’s one weird psychological trick that you can use to magically fix everything about your screen time life. If there are things that you are not happy about with your tech use or your screen time, things like that, actually give yourself a pat on the back for identifying that to begin with because more often than not we don’t notice when we’re getting into these sorts of bad habits and developing bad relationships with them. So when you start noticing it, that’s the first step, right? That means that you can do something about it if you’re thinking about this in the context of I have the power to do something over this. This is not something that’s happened to me. These things are designed to enable habits and enable bad habits sometimes, but I still have control over this. I can fix this. Then what happens next is experimenting. So figuring out what works for you. This is where I always like to take an evidence based approach with this sort of writing, all these sorts of things that I do. And this is where it breaks down in the book because there’s not much good evidence anywhere to say this is a really effective solution for fixing things. So it becomes very individualistic. So for example, in the book I talk about sleep at one point and iPhones have this feature called night shift, which is it turns the screen yellow and the idea is that less blue light coming out of your screen doesn’t disrupt your sleep as much. There are studies which actually show that this doesn’t work. It doesn’t have an effect. So it’s a bit of a placebo effect. But I also say in the book that I still have night shift mode on my phone. Not because I think it has some sort of biological effect, but it’s a really overt marker when if I’m playing a game or on Instagram or whatever at night, I’ve set it to 20 minutes earlier than I want to go to bed. So I’ve got a nice clear marker that now is the time to start shifting to doing something else. It doesn’t always work. But the important thing is that when it doesn’t work for me, when I still find myself scrolling or whatever, every time I found that happening recently, it’s because I’m avoiding something, like something difficult. Maybe I’ve had a bad day or something difficult has happened at work, or even sometimes it’s just been things like I’ve not been able to sit down until like quarter to 10 at night. And actually, you know what? I want some time to myself. So giving ourselves a break, I think is a good thing to do here, that we all struggle with building these sorts of healthy relationships and that’s okay. It’s never too late to start changing things. And it just starts with those little steps, being more aware of what you’re doing, thinking about what you want out of your tech use and catering things to align with that goal. I was in hospital about six months ago and I downloaded a game I don’t think I would have ever downloaded otherwise. It was like a city building game, awful game. Like you could spend thousands of pounds on that game, it was terrible, but I was just like, I just want to play something mindless like this for a bit. And I started playing it lots and I left notifications on. And it was one of those annoying games where other people can come and attack your city whenever. And I found it being really unhelpful. I would be at the dinner table and I’d get a buzz on my phone saying, somebody’s attacking your city. And I’m like, oh, I need to do something about that. I don’t want that situation to happen. So I turned the notifications off. What happened was that more people started invading my city and killing me lots. And then I realized I don’t care. Because that game was something that served a purpose for me when I was in hospital. And actually it’s not now, so I’m going to delete it. All of the time and energy and effort I’d invested to get in a certain level, it all disappeared. And you know what? Doesn’t matter, because what I’m getting is a nicer experience now. I value protected time at the dinner table with my kids. And this was something that I’d allowed to happen. I didn’t beat myself up about it, but I thought next time I’m in a space where I’m going to download a game that does something like that, I’m going to think about the knock on effects later on and you get rid of notifications, be more ruthless. Basically about when I stop playing them and things like that. And just little shifts in thinking like that can help. They’re not going to fix everything, but they will help a bit.

01:00:12 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a great place for us to wrap up. Pete. Thank you so much. Like I said, I really did enjoy the book. I appreciate nuance. There was a lot of good nuance and I didn’t feel like you were dragging the science one way or the other to suit an opinion. And I think that is always a useful service. So thank you.

01:00:30 – Pete Etchells
Thank you.

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  02:23

Hi, Emily, welcome to the show.

Emily Balcetis  02:24

Hi, great to be here,

Eric Zimmer  02:26

we are going to talk about your book that’s called clearer, closer, better how successful people see the world. But before we do that, let’s start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there is a grandmother who’s talking with her grandson. And she says In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. And there’s a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second, he looks up at his grandmother, he says grandmother, which one wins, and the grandmother 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.

Emily Balcetis  03:10

I think you know, that parable conveys the real power that we as people have to shape what our experience on an every day, every year, every life scale or timeframe that where we invest our energy is a lot driven by us. And then we can see the fruits of those labors. But as a psychologist, I also recognize that, you know, besides having choice about what we feed about, where we spend our time, what we focus on, that our brain also has a default, and that is to prioritize or give more weight to the negative experiences that those loomed larger in our mind, even if we don’t feel like we’re a ruminator or have depressive ideologies, our brain sort of does, our brain goes there. And we hold on to those feelings. So as we’re thinking about what we feed, we need to also be cognizant of the fact that it might take more effort or investment to feed the good and to cultivate and to nurture that wolf in our personality. And it might take more work. And it doesn’t mean that it’s unsuccessful, or that there’s something wrong with us. That’s just the way our brains work.

Eric Zimmer  04:19

I love that framing of it. And it’s sort of the idea of knowing the inclination of our brain and not everybody’s is the same, but as you say, most people are gonna have a negative inclination, but this applies to anything. Knowing the inclination, the direction we tend to go does give us some sense of what way we need to correct for sort of more habitually,

Emily Balcetis  04:43

exactly. I mean, if you are interested in talking about evolutionary pressures, you know, it’s important for us to find food, find opportunity, find love, find safety, and those are pressing concerns. But some might argue that it’s even more pressing that we keep ourselves safe. If we miss seeing the tiger that’s coming at us back in caveman cave lady days, you know, death was probably imminent, we might argue like, evolutionarily speaking that our attention to our focus on and our concern for things that might cause us harm or mistakes that we’ve made in the past so that we can avoid making them in the future to keep ourselves safe. That might be the basis for what we’re calling this negativity dominance. Yeah, that doesn’t mean that we are depressed or that we have clinical symptoms that might just sort of be a holdover from what requires more attention. But also, that doesn’t mean that that’s a limitation or that that’s just how it needs to be. It’s just something we need to be aware of, so that we can focus our efforts on cultivating and feeding the positive in light of what might have been these pressures that we’ve experienced in the past.

Eric Zimmer  05:46

Yeah, I love the way you say that is one of the things I like about the parable. Beyond its obvious implications of choice is it says everybody has this in them, which I think normalizes sort of what you’re saying the fact like, yeah, of course, you’ve got some of these, quote, unquote, negative tendencies, right? Yeah, they’re, they’re welcome to the human race. Right, exactly. So let’s move in and talk about your book, which really talks about the way we see the world has a lot to do with how successfully we navigate it. And in the book, you frame this entire discussion up in a way that I as a musician love, which is about you learning to play the drums. So maybe first, just share a little bit about why you wanted to learn to play the drum share a little bit about that. And then I think it’ll help us as we put each of your four strategies into context, we can put them in context around that, at least as a starting point,

Emily Balcetis  06:43

sir, you know, I think a lot of people can resonate with this, that maybe some point in their life, they thought, you know, what I want to be a rock star like that looks like a really great life. And I went through that phase as well, I went through that phase, when I was in my late teen years, I was playing in a band is a cover band, was loads of fun, we had the opportunity to play with a group that was coming through that actually was quite successful. And we played this show for 15,000 people at this outdoor, you know, rock venue. And it was amazing, it was really exciting. But that at 18 years old, was the peak of my rock star career. And it was all downhill after that, which is probably good. You know, I don’t think my stomach could have tolerated the drugs. And like, certainly, my body wouldn’t have put up with all of the late night. So it’s probably healthier that I peaked at 18. But I loved it, I have always been involved in music. That’s a part of our family. That’s part you know, my growing up. And in fact, that’s what I went to study in college was to study music performance. So that has always been a love of mine. My career is as a basic experimental motivation scientist, I do behavioral research, trying to understand the reasons that people do what they do and think what they think and how can we help take advantage of opportunities to help them have and shape the kind of life that they want. So when I found myself at a point in life, where life was really changing for me, I had the opportunity to write this book, the very same month that my first son was born. I just felt like, here’s all these incredible opportunities to try on something new. But I’m losing myself in this becoming a new mother, you know, really took away what I thought had been cool about me in the past, people were coming to visit and saying, oh, let’s meet this new baby, what’s going on? And all I had to talk about with like, yeah, diapers and formula and what happened to me, I used to be interesting. I wanted to be a rock star, where did that go? So I was conscientiously at that point in my life trying to choose carve out more time for myself. And to bring back what I felt like was a really important part of of who I was, I needed that artistic side to come through, I needed some more time for myself. So I decided to become a drummer. I had played saxophone, flute piano, so drums, the still an instrument, but definitely a different skill set than I had tackled before. And so it was a challenge that I was excited to take on plus, being able to play drums is cool. Well, at least I think so.

Eric Zimmer  09:13

And the world needs more drummers. It does not need more guitar players like me, there’s plenty of us there are not enough drummers.

Emily Balcetis  09:21

Well, you know, even if I had gotten there, they wouldn’t. The world wouldn’t have benefited from my drumming skills. Again, this is like a personal conquests that I wanted. Yeah, you know. So that’s what I took on, you know, my son is a month old. We live in a one bedroom apartment in New York City that’s smaller than most people’s garages. And that’s when I felt like you know what, we need to bring drums into this situation. That’s what’s gonna help our life right now. So, you know, maybe an ill placed goal, but one that I took on, and the bug, as we’re going to talk about is all about strategies that people can use to manage the obstacles that they face when they’re trying to meet their goals. So I became well aware of what those challenges are when you’re taking on a new goal, something that’s personally important, but on top of an already busy full life of with multiple responsibilities to manage. So the story really is about me trying to apply these tactics that behavioral science that I am conducting and that others are doing, would say would work should work. Try this. And I tested it out myself as I was trying to take on this, this personal goal of becoming a one hit wonder learning one song on drums well enough that I could play it publicly and not embarrass myself.

Eric Zimmer  10:34

Yeah, you and I were talking before we started about how sort of different our pursuit of an instrument is like, you were like, I’m gonna play this one song, and you got it exactly right. And I’m more of a, you know, good enough kind of guy. You know, the reason that is, is when I started, all I wanted to do was write songs. And in order to write a song, all I needed to do is learn enough of what was happening in this other song that I could then take it and incorporate so it built this habit. And more recently, I’ve been trying to sort of do a little bit more of what you do, which is sort of pushed through to try and you know, can I get it really right? Anyways, let’s now turn towards your four strategies that you really outline in the book. Maybe we’ll start by just listing what the four of them are, and then we’ll walk through them each in more depth. Does that work?

Emily Balcetis  11:24

Yeah, sure. Number one, materializing taking something that’s abstract, maybe just in your mind and making it visual, concrete and right in front of you. The second one is narrowed frame, so narrowing our focus of attention, trying to keep out the distractions, avoiding what’s in our peripheral vision. And in contrast to that, then there’s the wide bracket, when do we need to assume a more expansive focus of attention? They seem like they might be in opposition to one another. But again, they’re just like two tools in a toolbox. Yes, they might work in different ways, but you need a different tool for each aspect of the job, and

Eric Zimmer  12:04

framing.

Emily Balcetis  12:07

And number four, thank you. Sorry, I’m still stuck on like drumming, I’m pulling up my drumming style, framing, taking advantage of the fact that we can direct our eyes in one way or another. And what we point our eyes at, frames up a different element of our environment. And that is a really powerful tool as well, because what we see predicts what we do.

Eric Zimmer  12:29

One of the things I loved about the book, I love these four tools. I also love how you sort of emphasize, you know, we’ve got studies that show these tools work, and these tools are situational, they’re going to depend on your situation, they’re going to depend on who you are. Sometimes you might need one of them, sometimes you might need another. But you’re sort of doing away with that over simplicity of like, here’s three simple hacks to crush your life. Right? Like, that’s not what you’ve got here.

Emily Balcetis  12:57

Exactly. I mean, the metaphor of that toolbox is one that I do keep coming back to, you know, if you only had a toolbox full of hammers, that mean, that might be great if all you needed to do is pounding nails. But that’s not what life is really like, right? The different challenges that we are up against, and the opportunities that we have are different. And so we need different tools. Coupled with that we are people we are evolving as a species, but as a person ourselves, right, we’re growing, we’re changing and what worked a year ago might not work today, it might not work during a different phase of life. And so we need that flexibility that a full toolkit can offer us the opportunity to change out, you know, one instrument for another when the job and the needs change.

Eric Zimmer  13:38

Totally agree. So let’s talk now about the materializing a goal. You say understand how to materialize a goal, our steps or our efforts improves the way we track our progress, which is a nice sentence that sort of summarizes everything you cover in that chapter. It’s kind of in one sentence. That’s pretty good. But let’s talk about what are some of the things we want to do is we think about materializing a goal. This is particularly great this time of year, because a lot of people are going to start thinking about okay, 2022 is coming, how might I want to be different and they’re going to start to materialize a goal. So what are some things we need to know in that? And how did you do that with your drumming? Well, you know, this sort

Emily Balcetis  14:19

of comes back to the conversation that we opened with about the parable and how our brain is, is an amazing organ that we have at our disposal, but it also causes us problems. Our brain is faulty, it is powerful. It’s more powerful than computers certainly are now, but maybe ever will be. But yet there’s these inherent biases in the way that our brain and our memories work. That can do us a real disservice when we’re trying to monitor our progress, for example. So if we were just to leave it to our own memory and look back on, let’s say it’s March and we set a new year’s resolution in January we’re trying to think, how far have I come? Am I making progress like is the amount of effort that I’ve put in commensurate with output that I’m Getting the change that I’m seeing. And so many people give up a month in a month and a half in and throw away their efforts that they have invested into a New Year’s resolution or, I mean, January 1, or anytime that that’s important. And oftentimes, that’s because it just feels like I’ve tried so hard, and I’m getting nowhere. To which I ask, really, have you really got nowhere? I know, from my own personal experience, when I try to reflect on my drumming, or many other goals that I’ve taken on, I really can’t trust my brain to give me the right answer to how much progress have I made? And is it worth the effort that I’ve invested?

Eric Zimmer  15:38

Yep, our mood shapes that so much right, the mood that we’re in can shape our cognitive view of how we’re doing

Emily Balcetis  15:45

exactly what we’re thinking and feeling right now shapes the information that’s available in our brain. So when we’re in a good mood, we tend to have happy memories pop to mind. And when we’re in a bad mood, that’s where that sort of feeling like we’re in a rut we’re in this cycle that we can’t get out of, that’s part of where it comes from is because, you know, one negative experience begets or calls upon another negative memory that we have. And again, we give more weight to those negative experiences that we’ve had in the past. So for me when I was trying to learn to play drums, knowing that I gave myself a date that I was going to perform this concert publicly, and that I was going to write about my experience in this book. And I promised myself I would do it accurately and not misrepresent what really happened. I felt a lot of pressure. And I’m not very coordinated, I got kicked out of my basketball team because I lost my footing and ran into somebody who’s on my own team pushed out of bounds when she had the ball and we lost the game. I never got invited back to play another game after that. So when I’m thinking about, can I actually play this song publicly? It just felt like every time I practiced, I wasn’t making enough progress to be able to meet that goal. I was so nervous, I was so anxious about this personal conquest that I had set for myself, that all I was really focusing on was what I wasn’t getting, wasn’t coming together the coordination problems that I was experiencing. And so then I realized, you know what I’ve been talking about, I’ve been writing about materializing, I need to do that here. I got to stop relying on my memory to determine whether I’m making sufficient progress to hit my mark, a couple of months in the future. So I set up an app on my phone to ping me a couple times a day and ask, Did you practice drums since last time? I asked you, mostly I told it, no. But if I said yes. And it would say how did you do talk about that experience. And I jot down a few little notes. I did that for a month. And then I downloaded all the data from my phone and thought about well, what am I going to think and a month that I haven’t done very much at all. It’s been you know, really busy time of the semester, as an academic professor, my kids had a lot of stuff going on that I’ve had to manage. I don’t I don’t feel like I’ve done anything this month. But when I actually looked at the data, I had a really different and more accurate understanding of the progress that I made, actually practiced a lot more than I remembered practicing. The sessions, you know, tended to be like, fairly mundane, they weren’t monumental moments. And that’s why they didn’t stick in my mind. But when I was looking at the words that are used to describe those experiences, at the beginning of the month, it was things like I cried, I hated it. It was awful. By the end of the month, it was like a compliment. My husband who actually is a drummer, so gave me my first genuine legitimate compliment in my own feelings had resonated with that, you know, leading up to that I feel I’m getting like a little bit better. My head doesn’t feel like it’s going to explode today. But these are like, you know, small moments. They’re not life changing. I’m not like concert ready? Yeah. And that’s why they didn’t stick in my memory. Yep. Which is why it’s also important to write them down so that you can, you know, become a better personal accountant of your own effort, investment and progress. Our minds aren’t gonna be able to do that for us.

Eric Zimmer  18:44

Yeah, I love that idea. I do behavioral coaching work with people. And that is such a big one is people will just be like, I’m not getting anywhere. And I’ll be like, Well, okay, let’s actually look at the data. Let’s, you know, let’s look at your checkins. Over the last few weeks. Let’s see the progress you’ve made. Let’s look at the tone the way you’re writing things. Out of curiosity, what app did you use to do that?

Emily Balcetis  19:04

It’s called the reporter app. Okay. I got that idea from this really cool collaboration that I came upon these two women who didn’t know each other at all before, found one another at a conference for their field. They were like, data scientists, and I don’t know their whole background architects. I mean, they are a polymath and each of them that they are like experts in so many areas, they found each other as total strangers met, and decided in that moment that they met that they were going to commit to each other for 52 weeks. They were going to each week pick a goal that are pick something that they wanted to track, like, what sort of animals do I experience in New York City on a day to day basis? Or how many times do I give or receive compliments, and they would just pick these sort of random themes. And note every element every time they came upon a compliment, gave or received one every animal that they saw and their walks around the city. And then at the end of the week, they would create this amazing visual depiction. I mean, really like contemporary art, they will put it on the back of a postcard one lived in New York when lived in London, and they’d send the postcards to each other at the end of the week, with this very beautiful, like vivid depiction of quantifying whatever data they had been collecting, again, this sort of low level, daily, everyday stuff that might not stick in your mind, unless they use the reporter app, unless they were noting it within their phone, and then downloading the data to look at all of their experiences over the week. And their postcards are just beautiful. And in fact, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, acquired them all purchased their entire collection, and it’s a part of their permanent exhibits now at the museum. So they were the ones who told me about the reporter app for how to keep track of daily experiences. That’s

Eric Zimmer  20:53

awesome. Yeah, I love that story in the book, and it’s such such a great story. So we’re talking about tracking our progress in this way, largely,

Emily Balcetis  21:02

exactly. I mean, it’s one of the most effective ways for getting an accurate insight into how far you’ve come and how far you have to go. Now, the next question then is like, Well, what do we do with that information? So alright, I learned a little bit more on drums, and I thought I had done before. And as a behavioral scientist, then I know that well, we have choices. As people, we have choices, what do we do with this data that we have now? And some really cool insights from behavioral scientists work it saying, you know, should you reflect back on that progress you’ve made? Or should you look at sort of the void? Here’s where I am now. And here’s where I want to go, I have an accurate understanding of where I am. And I know what the goal is. So should we look to what’s to come? Or should we look at what we’ve accomplished? Where are we going to find more motivation? And it’s really interesting, because, again, there’s no one right answer, right? It depends on the person depends on that person’s goal that they’re, that they’re thinking about. And what the research says is that when somebody is really committed to a goal, and they’ve, you know, maybe they have invested a lot in it already, this is something that is, you know, personally central to who they are looking forward is actually more motivating, they didn’t doubt that they were going to be committed, you know, they don’t need to convince themselves that this is something that is worth investing in. They want to close that gap, separating where I am now and where it is that I want to be. But people who are new to a goal, or maybe for whom, you know, the goal is more extrinsically motivated, it’s something you have to do because a boss has said it, or you know, it’s not like core to who you are as a person, then reflecting back on past accomplishments, progress to date, can be more motivating. Because in a sense, it’s signaling, you know, how much have you put into this thing are you really going to give up now look at what you’ve already accomplished, it can give you a sense of self efficacy of feeling or data to prove you can do this. And then also, it’s signaling that you must want to do this because look at what you’ve already done before. And it’s hard for people to give up on anything that they have invested in. So you know, that’s that’s a point where we can sort of self reflect, think about, is this a goal I’m highly committed to? Or is it less central to who I am, and use that as sort of a diagnostic tool to inform whether we should use that accounting experience, that materializing experience to look forward to the future or look back on our past?

Eric Zimmer  24:00

Is there any correlation in if I’m looking back to the past for sort of affirmation that I’m doing better, which we might refer to as a positive reinforcement? And I may be stretching this, which is why I’m asking versus looking towards the gap between where I am and the future, which is a little bit of a potentially negative reinforcer, or am I stretching, making that connection between those things?

Emily Balcetis  24:27

Again, as people we have opportunities to think about it in multiple ways. So some people probably do think about looking to the future as a negative, this unknown, this, like, you know, mounting to do list that separates where I am and where I want to be. But for other people, especially those that are most committed to this thing that they’re pursuing. Yeah, it’s like having something hanging over your head. You want to see it come to a close. You know, this is sort of an interesting personality test. I like movies that are really open ended, like indie films where it’s just sort of like the end of the day, and you have no idea what happens to the people tomorrow, right? And there’s so many possibilities. I love that and my husband hates it, he needs the closure, he wants the story to get wrapped up. He wants that to be the end of the narrative and doesn’t like those open ended. Yeah. And of course, you know, we can all resonate with with both of those perspectives in different situations. But for a lot of people looking forward to the future does give you that, like, pull that impulse of like, oh, I want to close this gap. I don’t like having this just hanging open having an open thread. So you know, I think, again, there’s opportunities to think about that either as a positive, like, okay, it’s clear, where am I going towards now? Where’s the gap that I need to close? And for other people, it may not be seen that way?

Eric Zimmer  25:41

Yep. And in this section, you talk about that, it’s important to know how to materialize a goal, and also how to create a plan. Yeah. So

Emily Balcetis  25:52

you know, I think, especially when it comes to New Year’s resolutions, or major milestones in people’s life, when they’re thinking about, Okay, what do I really want for myself, these moments where we reflect and then set a new grand, big intention, those are exciting moments in our life. And oftentimes, what we do is set an aspirational goal, a stretch goal, you know, you know, this is where I want to be with my life, like we’re talking in like major, big, abstract kind of ways. And that’s great to do. But sometimes that’s where the goal setting stops, is that people say, alright, world, this is what I’m going to make happen. This is what I want for myself. A lot of people at that moment will do things like create dream boards, or vision boards for their personal life or their professional life. It’s, you know, this is like a technique of curating images or motifs and compiling them all into one visual frame. Some for some people, like, you know, literally a cork board that they’re putting these images that represent what they want for themselves in one same space. And then the advice is hang this in a place where you’ll see it every day to remind you of what it is that you’re working for, again, a very popular technique that people use when they’re setting goals. And that is wonderful. Because figuring out what you want in life can be a big step for a lot of people. Right? Right. So, so that is important. But at the same time, in the same sessions, when are brainstorming about what it is that I want for myself in the future, we need to add on some other elements to materialize that not just what we want to accomplish, but how we’re going to accomplish it. So we need to add on some other steps. We need to dream big like with those vision boards or those dream boards. But we also need to concretely plan for action, we need to think about what can we do today or this week? What behaviors can I engage in? What choices can I make that’s going to advance my progress in this area? We need to translate that abstract idea into something concrete, manageable, actionable, visible, right, so that we know which way to step first step laughters. Do I step right, we need to do that. Another thing that we need to do is that we need to foreshadow the obstacles that we might experience along the way. And in fact, we will find more motivation and persistence. If we do that. We need to think about what are the challenges I’m going to face as I try to take on this goal and I take a step in this direction. And you might brainstorm a list of three or four possibilities of these things that might stymie or throw you off course or be the reason that you throw in the towel. And we need to figure out what can we do if we experience those obstacles. Now again, it might seem like, alright, if I’m trying to like psych myself up, I’m really excited about this new thing I’m going to take on in my life, this new passion that I just discovered that I’m committing to, I’m really going to do better, I’m going to be more motivated, and I’m going to increase the odds of making it. If I think about all the ways that I’m going to fail. Really, that’s the reaction that I get a lot. And the answer is yes. And it’s the same reason that when you get on an airplane, before the plane takes off, you know, the flight attendants are telling you what’s going to happen with the oxygen masks and where can you find life jackets. And they do the same thing. If you you know, get to go out on a boat for a boat ride, right? They tell you where you can find the life jackets. Now, if you’re like, you know, you’re just about to go off on this new adventure, like on a plane or on a boat or whatever. Why do they kill your bugs by doing that. Because if that plane is going down, or if that boat is sinking, that’s not the time to try to figure out where the life jackets are, you need to already know so that you can instantly pick up on plan B or Plan C, your plan D, whatever you foreshadowed because when we’re in those moments of crisis, or when we’re facing challenges, within on resources, you don’t have as much time to try to like think as creatively as possible, and to figure out a solution when we’re in the midst of a problem. And so that is why, you know taking that abstract, high level vision for ourselves, planning concretely and foreshadowing those obstacles. When people do those steps together. They increase the odds that they’re actually gonna make it to their goal.

Eric Zimmer  30:01

Yeah. And analogy that in a slightly different domain is in recovery, right thinking about what might trigger me? And what will I do when I get triggered? You know, what is the actual exact thing? I will do? It’s something I do with with clients a lot is like, because in that moment, like you said, We’re low on resources may be time, but we’ve may very well be low on cognitive bandwidth.

Emily Balcetis  30:24

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy and a domain that really matters to a lot of people. When you’re feeling, you know, an urge when you’re feeling that temptation. Right, we can get people in and recovery can be fixated on that, right. And so that’s not like you’re, you’re so narrowly focused on just working through or avoiding succumbing to this temptation that, you know, starting a new friendship with person 10, feeling confident enough to get reached out and make a phone call and ask for help. Like, that’s not going to happen. You don’t have that badge, right. Like you’re saying, Yeah, you know, another great example of this, like, you know, the power of foreshadowing obstacles. I love this example of Michael Phelps, which I’m sure you remember from from the book, but in 2008, right, he was taking the international stage for the first time by storm and the Beijing Olympics. He you know, as an incredible swimmer, that’s what we know him for. And he was on the brink of doing something that nobody has ever done in the history of the entire Olympic games ever, which is when eight gold medals in a single Olympiad. At the time of this story, he had already won seven, when he was diving into the pool for the 200 Fly. That was like his jam, right? This is what he’s known for. It’s almost like he’s a shoo in to win this race and his eighth gold medal. All he needs to do is do four links of the pool back and forth, back and forth, and the race is over. By the time he had done three, and just had one link of the pool to return, his goggles had filled with water and who is swimming blind. If that happened to me, I would totally I mean, it would never happen. I would never find myself in the Olympics or swimming without dying in a pool. But if it was me, I would have panicked but he didn’t. Because he had foreshadowed this obstacle routinely in practice, he would rehearse having these goggles not be properly sealed and having them filled with water. Sometimes this coach would even rip them off his face and smash them on the ground just as he dove in, I guess, for a dramatic effect. And, and he would have to practice swimming without goggles. So when it happened in the 2008 Olympics, he knew exactly what he was going to do, which is start counting strokes, because he knew exactly how many strokes it would take from him, for him to get from one end of the pool to the other. He did that commonly turned his attention to counting his strokes, he won that 200 meter fly, won his eighth gold medal and then would go on to win 15 More in his career. Yeah. So I think that’s a great example of what foreshadowing obstacles can do and what particular circumstances it’s most essential.

Eric Zimmer  32:46

That’s a great story. Let’s move on to narrowing our focus of attention. Why is this valuable? And when might we want to do it, you know,

Emily Balcetis  32:55

narrowing our focus of attention, the idea that like, you know, we can imagine that there’s a spotlight shining on just one thing, at the expense of what’s in our periphery, that’s a powerful tool, especially when what we’re focusing on might seem far off. So I’ve been doing, you know, research in this area for about 15 years now. And we are really focused on exercise people’s exercise goals that they have walking more running faster in trying to increase the number of steps that they’ve taken. And when you tell people like oh, just you know, set a further goal, just just try going a little bit farther today, see what happens. And then you can up at the next day, and but the next day, that can be really overwhelming for people, because literally when they’re looking at the track that they’re going around or the street that they’re going to walk down that now they’re supposed to walk farther, that destination can look really far off, it looks farther to them. What we have found is that when they have that perceptual experience, when to them, they are seeing the world in more extreme ways. And other people do that stop sign, I can’t make it there. I can’t walk to that building that’s too far away. It affects their psychological experience, right, they stopped believing that they can do it, they think the task is too challenging, and they throw in the towel sooner. So there is a direct connection between that visual experience and their motivational and psychological readiness to excel at that particular task. So we were trying to figure out, okay, if that visual experience is sort of the, the initiator of the problem, can we trick people? Can we trick their visual experiences into seeing the world in a way that is going to energize them that is going to give them the belief that they can do this? And will that have consequences for how much they actually exercise? So we came up with, you know, these instructions that are very simple, they literally cost nothing. It’s just about changing what you do with your eyes. And like I said, we would tell people just imagine that there’s a spotlight shining on that stop sign up ahead or that building that you’re hoping that you can walk to or the other end of the park that you’ve never quite made it to yet imagine a spotlight shining just on that location and Focus your gaze there, don’t pay attention to the people on the side or the buildings over on the right or the left, just focus your attention, narrow your focus. What we found is that when they do that, it induces a visual illusion of proximity when we have them estimate the distance tell us how far away does that goal feel. They’re saying it feels closer, and they don’t realize it, they don’t realize that that narrowed, focus has created this sort of perceptual trick for them. But when we look to see them, well, what happens if we’ve induced this visual illusion by changing the way that people are looking by not paying attention to the distractions on the side, what we found is that people across many, many studies, 1000s of people that we’ve tested in lots of different contexts, they walk and run faster, they go out for walks more frequently, they take more steps in their day, and they say that it hurts less. The tasks are the same, right? We’re not actually changing anything about what they’re doing. We’re changing their psychological experience. Now, when it seems like it’s not so far away, they feel empowered. They feel like they’re ready to take on this challenge. And then the experience defies their expectations, it isn’t as bad I thought I could do it. And look, I did it. And it’s sort of creating this positive reinforcement cycle, right, we’ve changed a visual experience, we change, which changes our motivational state, which helps them perform better. And when they do better than they thought that they could they repeat that experience over time. So that’s an example I think of the power of our eyes, simple tweak early on, and all of that happens within the process of setting and reaching a goal. And you can see these big downstream consequences.

Eric Zimmer  36:39

And does that translate into something that, you know, the goal isn’t like literally visible with my eyes? Yeah, what I loved about this section of the book is the phrase, which is our mental states have a much bigger impact than our physical ones, on our ability to get through things. And that really hit me and I was like, yeah, the type of work that most of us, you know, as professionals do is not as physically demanding, right. So it is very much a mental game. You know, you say in that chapter, people who think that what they’ve done will take a lot out of them feel more tired afterwards, even if you know, that’s not the case. So how does this translate into things that are not directly visual? How’s that for a long question?

Emily Balcetis  37:25

Yeah. I mean, it’s a great question. Because you’re, I mean, there’s a lot that this technique is relevant to, but one of them that, you know, comes to mind as a parallel is time, you can’t see time. But time is always a big determinant of what goals we set. And whether we reach those goals. How we manage our time is really important. A lot of times when people set goals, some of those goals that matter most to us, or that are most important, are ones that are pretty far off in the future, you can take saving for retirement, right? What is retirement? For some people, it might be never, but you know, but for almost everybody, it’s going to be pretty far off in the future. And all kinds of experts tell us like, well, we should start saving for retirement in our 20s. We do that right? Think of how much better off will be in our retirement years because of how compound interest works. But nobody in their 20s is thinking about retirement. And when I work with my college students who are in their 20s with their first jobs and asking them, you know, have you thought about your 401 B plan? They’re like, I didn’t know that. I mean, I really don’t even know what that is either. But but they certainly don’t. And they’re not saving for it. They’re not investing in it. And when you ask why. The number one was common answers, because it seems like that’s so far off. I don’t even know like, Who’s that person who’s gonna get that money? Like, what is retired me look like? I have no idea who that is. Yeah. And so that’s what we’re talking about is that oftentimes, you know, we’ll reap the biggest benefits if we invest small today for a distant far off future. And because of that big separation of time, people have people find it challenging to connect what I’m doing today with that distant goal, that distant, you know, place that I’m trying to work towards. So a really amazing researcher at UCLA, Hal Hirschfeld, he’s, he’s done work trying to say like, Okay, can we connect that space? Can we shrink that temporal space, that psychological distance that separates me and my 20s? If we’re thinking about retirement, and me and my 60s who’s actually going to get this money in my lab, we did an analogue of his research, which is we took pictures of people’s faces of 20 year olds faces, we morphed them with, you know, Maya Angelou, Tom broke out and created like actual visual depictions of what retired you might look like. And we can track it that space, we made what seems so abstract and far off in the future relevant in the here and now. And what we saw is that people’s interest and understanding how retirement works and their commitment to investing some of their income now for retirement years increased substantially by contracting that space. So I’m not suggesting everyone needs to go out and buy I’m computer morphing software and like, look, you know, imagine everyday what they’re gonna look like when they have more wrinkles and white hair than they do now. But finding ways to connect my current self with that future self can help make it easier to make the tougher choices today, that will be essential for better outcomes later on.

Eric Zimmer  40:52

Let’s move on to number three, which will be the sort of opposite of the one we just talked about, which is instead of narrowing our focus attention is having a wider bracket. Let’s talk about why that’s helpful. And then maybe tell us when one versus the other, we might want to think about the wide bracket

Emily Balcetis  41:12

is in opposition to that narrowed focus, right? When is it important to take a step back, see the bigger picture to be aware of the paths that are on the right versus on the left? That’s what using that wide bracket is about. If we go back to that example of those data scientists who are tracking compliments and animals in the urban environments, in they used a wide bracket to help maintain their commitment to something that I think a lot of people would have thrown in the towel on. So So literally, when they talked about sending these postcards back and forth, I asked them, How did you how did you do that, that’s a lot. You’re paying attention every single moment of every single day. And you’re doing that for 52 weeks, seven days a week, like, that’s incredible commitment that you had. And, and one of them said that the reason I was able to do that was because of this wider bracket that I was taking, I was seeing today’s choices within this bigger context of what it is that I had committed to, to be a little bit more concrete as it might apply to the rest of us who aren’t just trying to track animals and complements. Sometimes we can get so narrowly focused on one course of action that can be hard to let go when we might need to the most. Some times we need to change course, this may not be the right career. For us, this might not be the right person to commit to, this might not be the right goal that we’re working to achieve. But it can be really hard to let go, especially if we’ve invested time and resources into this path that we’ve taken. And so we need to take a step back and realize that there might be more ways to accomplish what we really want. If we try a different path, and it doesn’t mean that we have failed, it doesn’t mean that we made a mistake, it means it’s time to change course. You know, I think a great example, is Vera Wang, we know her for her fashion empire that she’s created an incredible company. We know her most probably for her wedding dresses that she’s made. But that’s not where her career started. She was a figure skater, and she was on the national and international stage for figure skating. She hit a peak, though that wasn’t quite the top of where that profession could take you. But she sort of plateaued there, doggedly pursuing the next and final level of success. But she never quite made it. And at one point, she just said, That’s it. I’ve tried and I’m done. Now, some might say, well, she feel that figure skating, I didn’t know she was a figure skater. I didn’t know that was part of her history. And then she stopped trying to make it to literally the top of that industry. But for her she doesn’t see it that way. When she talks about that experience of moving from figure skating to fashion design. She said, All I did was take a step back, reflect on what is it that I really want? And am I going to get that am I going to meet that passion through figure skating? The answer is no. But what is it that I want? For her, it was the art in the beauty of line Li and he you literally cut lines into the ice as a figure skater and you cut lines into fabric. So she saw this is just a natural connection, you know, just another instantiation of what it was that she was truly interested in art and lines and the fluidity of the lions and how the lions can move together. And of course, when she moved to fashion, she’s incredibly successful. It’s not a failure. It was just taking a step back, thinking more abstractly about what is it that I really want and being able to see multiple possibilities that you can’t before if you just you’re focused on taking one step forward, one step forward, one step forward on this very same path.

Eric Zimmer  44:34

Let’s take your drumming project right. When in your drumming project. Did you know it’s time to narrow my focus? And when did you know it’s time to widen the bracket? Let’s use that as an example to sort of talk about how do I know when to do I mean, I know it won’t apply universally but

Emily Balcetis  44:50

yeah, I mean for me in setting the goal. I knew that I needed to be narrow and not so wide. And maybe for you you had the opposite of experience in guitar and you know guitar In learning guitar, right, your goal is to have an expansive repertoire. For me, it was to have a very singular one. And so, you know, I was learning the skills that are necessary in order to play this one song. But you know, I can’t say that after all this time of having learned that song in the years of practicing that now it’s been, I only have one song, I didn’t learn translatable skills, because I was so narrowly focused, but it meant that I got, I got what I wanted out of that experience. And so, you know, sometimes when we need that extra push, in the case of the exercise work that we were doing, to cross over that finish line to get the extra boost of energy, that’s when we need to take the distractions away. And when a narrowed focus can really be helpful, he can track that space, it can make us feel closer to the end game than perhaps we really are. But that can be motivating. And then we aren’t going to be pulled in so many different directions, multitasking is a thing that plagues all of us. And for almost all of us, it does a disservice for our ability to get the best out of what we’re putting in. So that’s when we might want to use that narrowed focus is when we need an extra push of energy to cross over that finish line. And when we’re feeling really scattered, or like, you know, having that experience of like, I’m just not getting anything done, and I can’t cross over that finish line. The wide bracket, though, in contrast, is when we need options, when this is not working, I’m feeling you know, like I’m on a treadmill, and I’m working so hard, and I’m not getting anywhere. And if you’ve accurately assessed your progress, and that is the right conclusion to draw. That’s when we need to sort of free ourselves from that fixation that we have on this one course of action. And we need to take a step back. And we need to think more abstractly at a higher level. Going back to that vision board, if we’ve created some version of that to reflect on okay, what is it that I really want, and give ourselves the time and the space to think about all the different ways that we could get there?

Eric Zimmer  46:57

That’s a great example. And I often see this with coaching clients is there are times we need to actually like you’re saying sort of zoom back out and go, Why did I start on this? What was important about this and then connect the narrow view, okay, I’m doing this thing, and sometimes reconnect that back to the broader thing, because I think there is a tendency, you use the phrase somewhere in the book about we get caught in the middle, and we get caught in the middle. We’re not seeing a ton of progress. We’re not beginning but we’re not ending we’re kind of in the middle. And sometimes I find you know, it’s like, well, why does this thing matter to me, which is the broader perspective.

Emily Balcetis  47:33

Exactly. And you know, what we were talking about, what are the stages for effective goal setting, thinking abstractly, planning concretely and foreshadowing obstacles? Those first two steps are that are the connection that you’re talking about thinking abstractly, but in that same goal setting session thinking concretely. Yeah, it can help when those two together, like okay, this is what I’m doing every day. This is what my day looks like, why am I doing that? Oh, that’s right. Because I have made that mental connection to the bigger purpose that this action is trying to serve.

Eric Zimmer  48:02

Yeah, I mean, it’s similar. Every time when I sit down to meditate, the first thing I do is I just sort of remind myself, like, why am I doing this, because it helps me sort of reconnect, I just am not going through the motions as much at that point, because I’ve got, I’ve got a reason that it matters to me in that moment.

Emily Balcetis  48:18

There’s this great example, this case study done of a Dutch telecom company that had set this new high level goal for its for its organization, and for all the employees, which was sustainability, they wanted to increase the amount of recycling that was happening and reduce the number of things showing up in the trash can that should have been recycled. So they brought in a special communications team, they did all kinds of messaging to tell the rather large organization, all the members of it, this is what we’re doing people the sustainability of matters start recycling, they gave everybody individual recycling cans, and they swapped out the janitorial staff for members of the research team, who every night I collected every single garbage can and recycling bin and counted the number of things that showed up in garbage that should have been recycled. And what did they find? simply stating that high level goal did not reduce the number of things showing up in the trash that should have been recycled. They suspected that they thought what the behavioral scientists that they were working with that just setting this intention wasn’t going to get the job done. So in a second way for another cohort, they did the same thing sent out this messaging had the recycling bins right there. But at the same time in that same sort of first week of messaging had each individual think about a concrete action that they could take that would align with that intention, that high level abstract goal, but people came up with wasn’t magic or rocket science. It was use a paper a couple throw it in recycling, if it have some extra papers, I’ll put them in the recycling rather than the trash. It’s exactly what they wanted people to do. But importantly, they took that time they had each individual employee think about Alright, this is the sustainability initiative and couple that mentally pair it with the concrete action. And what do they see? Well, that’s baseline, about 1200 things were showing up in the trash can that should have been recycled. But that dropped to less than 200 Within a week, and that stayed for two weeks for a month for two months time that they were tracking what’s showing up in the garbage. And that stayed at that really low level, even when they made the actual action, the act of recycling more challenging by taking away individual recycling cans, and putting them into a communal space. So people had to get up from their desks and walk to the center of the office to recycle. So even despite that obstacle, having gone through that experience of pairing, the high level vision with a concrete action produced long lasting behavioral change that occurred, even despite facing these added pressures and obstacles.

Eric Zimmer  50:45

The last one we’ll talk about is the power of framing. So framing

Emily Balcetis  50:48

the idea here is just based on the principle that what we see predicts what we do, right. So our eyes are incredibly powerful in our eyes, you know, of course, we can see them on our face, but they are directly connected to our brain. And they’re connected to parts of our brain that are responsible for producing the actions that we take from moving our hands record meeting our feet. So you know, you can literally see, neuroscientists can the connection between our eyes and our movements, our choices, that behaviors that we make, so we can take advantage of that, as people, we don’t have to be neuroscientists to appreciate and take advantage of that fact. But we can use it to we can use that our eyes as a superpower to create a visual world that’s going to instantly automatically spark the kinds of choices that we want ourselves to make. So you can think about, you know, we’ve all we’ve all lived through COVID times, and people talk about the COVID 19, the 19 pounds that they gained by working at home, and you know, principals, lots of reasons that that has happened, there’s added stress, we’re not going outside to exercise as much. But people are working through dining room table a lot, right? Yeah, where they’re working is the same space that they associate with food and comfort, right, or they take a quick break. And then before it was in the office to refill their water bottle, or go chat with a colleague, but now it’s to go visit the fridge. Yeah, so we have set up our environments, we, the world has created these environments for us, that are putting visual cues in our visual frame in our frame, that is automatically associated with a choice that, that maybe isn’t ideal, if we have found ourselves to be, you know, overeating relative to what we have done in the past. So we can acknowledge that, you know, that part of it is like, you know, out of sight, out of mind. And we can, you know, change up the way that that we craft our home environment, or the way that we stock our pantry or our fridge, there’s things that we have to keep in the house, because our kids need those snacks. And they’re really tempting for us, well, we can hide them from our kids. And we can hide them from ourselves so that it’s a little bit more challenging to see them or to reach them. And it’s not that we don’t know that they’re there, but they don’t, we don’t automatically see them and then reach for them as our first go to snack. The company, Google did this, they did this experiment with their own employees, right, they were noticing that, you know, one of the perks of Google is all this amazing food and the free snacks and the at Facebook, you know, beer taps that are in the wall, you can bring your own growler and get a more than a pint and as you walk by to, to go to the bathroom, right. And all of these perks were literally increasing, you know, while decreasing the health of their employees. So they made some changes, they made the unhealthy snacks, it puts those into opaque containers, ones that they couldn’t see, they put the unhealthy drinks like the full sugar sodas on lower shelves in the refrigerator, or clouded the glass so that as people are walking by, they’re not getting that visual cue, what’s appearing in their their frame is not something that is the unhealthy choice, right, they sort of tried to separate that link between what you see and what you do by making it a little bit harder to see these things. And what they noticed, according to those that stock to Google’s pantries was that consumption of these unhealthy snacks decreased dramatically. So Google showed it with their own employees. And we can take advantage of that too. And think about how it affects what we’re eating at home or what we’re doing. You know, maybe rather than leaving our slippers at the foot of our bed, we leave our running shoes or keep the yoga mat out so that what our feet and our touch first and what our eyes see first in the morning is the meditation matters a yoga mat to cue that action rather than, than something else.

Eric Zimmer  54:36

Yeah, I’m always astounded by those sort of studies. And you know, one way of looking at it is like, how much harder is it to open the opaque can right, but as you say, it’s a sight thing. And the clearest example of this in my life is the difference between me playing the guitar when it’s sitting there on a stand, versus in a case the difference is seconds of effort, literally seconds. of effort to open a guitar case pull it out. But I play it way more when it’s just sitting there because I see, like you said, I see it, I bought this. It’s kind of behind me, it’s one of those like balance boards that you kind of surf on. I love that thing. When it’s laid out on the ground, I’ll do it pretty much every day, because I’ll walk by it four or five times, when it’s sitting up in the corner. Again, a foot away from where it is now. I could go days without doing it. I’m just astounded by that every time. It’s just amazing. Yeah, I

Emily Balcetis  55:30

had the same experience learning drums that once I put it within my line of sight, we put it in the space that we walk by to get out the door, the number of times that I practiced increased, because it’s like, waiting for my husband waiting for my kid to get their shoes on. I can go down and play for the five or 10 minutes that’s going to take before they come out the door. Yeah, because it’s that visual automatic cue. And you know, my son was born we had this big bookshelf, sort of like a curio cabinet full of books. And every time he went to bed, we would make sure that the doors were open so that the first thing that he saw when he woke up was his shelf of books. And we noticed that, you know, as soon as he was able to walk what he would do in the morning, get up and go get a book he can’t read, of course, but it was cueing that choice, and maybe bought us another extra minute or two of sleep before he came into our room.

Eric Zimmer  56:14

Yep. Awesome. Well, Emily, thank you so much. I’m happy to have gotten through the four strategies. I loved the book. Again, it’s called Clear closer, better how successful people see the world. We’re have links to your book in our show notes with links to how people can find you online so that they can check out everything you’re doing. Thank you so much.

Emily Balcetis  56:32

Thanks for this opportunity. It was a great conversation.

Episode Transcript:

00:01:38 – Eric Zimmer
Hi, Rosemerry. Welcome back to the show.

00:01:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me back.

00:01:42 – Eric Zimmer
I’m excited to talk with you. You have a new book of poems called the Unfolding, and we will get into that in a moment. But before we do, we will start in the customary way, which is to read the parable of the Wolves. And it goes like, 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. 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.

00:02:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
All right, So I brought it up knowing this was going to happen. I brought it up last night with my husband and daughter while we were eating dinner, and they weren’t any help. I thought, oh no. So this morning in the kitchen, I was thinking about times when I wasn’t actually able to feed anything myself and how in those times, all of us have had a time when we feel like we can’t do anything. Like whether that’s because of grief or because of fear or Whatever it is, something’s taken us over.

00:03:05 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Illness.

00:03:06 – Rosemerry Trommer
Illness.

00:03:07 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:03:08 – Rosemerry Trommer
And someone else comes and helps us feed. And I think that that’s important. I think about who has come to help me in those times and how, you know, with them offering, I think almost completely the wolf that’s longing for goodness and generosity. I guess I’m just thinking about how important a community is and how when we’re not able to feed ourselves, how important it is then that we have those people around us. I guess maybe I’ve been lucky enough to have people who were feeding this wolf that was full of graciousness, generosity, goodness. Less so. People who would come in and complain and say everything was wrong. And I can imagine that if that’s the community you have, that’d be a very different circumstance. But so just thinking about how important our community is.

00:03:54 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, this idea of the type of community we have around us, because there are people who can say things that are profoundly unhelpful at times. Right. And so being blessed to have that community is really wonderful. I want to talk about grief, because you mentioned grief as one of these things that takes us over. And I assume for you that’s the one that’s most present. Because your book, you say early on, the poems in the Unfolding were all written since 2021, the year in which my son Finn chose to take his life and my father died of kidney failure.

00:04:32 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, that was a tough year. And very much, you know, I was in that state of I can’t do anything and very much felt as if I was carried through that difficult time by friends, by family, and, honestly, Eric, by love itself. Which sounds sort of strange, I suppose, to say, but I was very aware of love carrying me and doing the work that I couldn’t do.

00:04:59 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. So why is the book called the Unfolding as the title of the book?

00:05:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
Glad you asked. I had, I suppose, a vision of a flower, and it was just opening and opening. And do you know what a ranunculus is?

00:05:17 – Eric Zimmer
I looked it up after you had that phrase in your book. And I’m glad you just pronounced it because I didn’t know how to say it. I probably still can’t say it because that is more than two syllables, which is beyond me. But they’re a beautiful flower that sort of opens up very wide.

00:05:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yes. They have so many petals, and they’re actually kind of small, but they’re peony ish, I suppose. And you can just imagine that this sense of more and more petals Opening and opening and opening. And in this kind of vision, they continued to. And it was just like as if the heart itself or our lives themselves are like this. This continual unfolding and thinking, too, then of the universe. Right. And how our universe itself is continually growing, expanding. So this kind of sweet connection between the soul and what’s happening cosmologically, There is this kind of opening and opening and opening, never endingly.

00:06:06 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting. I had an experience one time when I was doing tonglen meditation. I don’t know if you’re familiar with. It’s considered a giving and taking practice where you visualize that you’re breathing in, like, someone else’s pain in the form of, like, black smoke. And I had this experience where at first it feels like, well, I’m breathing this smoke into this small container. Where that’s a bad thing to do. Right. The smoke is in here. All of a sudden, I just had this vision of the back of me being the universe, as expansive as the universe. And that smoke just dissipated into absolute nothing out there. And so I have a connection also in my spirit, to this idea of the universe in its vastness and the way it continues to expand.

00:06:55 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, I love that story. And that sense of the whole universe holding you Right. As you’re breathing in all this other toxicity.

00:07:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:07:04 – Rosemerry Trommer
Beautiful. What a vision.

00:07:06 – Eric Zimmer
The book has a lot of themes, but I would say the core theme is how grief and joy can sit near each other. You say early on I’ve been surprised by what’s emerging from a broken and ransacked heart. I love that ransacked heart. A growing fluency with love. An ever evolving intimacy with the sacred. A sense of communion with others who have also faced loss.

00:07:32 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, I mean, I think that grief is certainly. There’s no way I wouldn’t be writing about it, I guess, just because it’s been so present for me in the last three years. And the thing, I suppose, that anyone who read the book would see is that this is really a book of praise. That in almost all of the poems, that there is some opening to what’s sacred, what’s beautiful, what’s mystical, what’s love, what’s connected. And I was so grateful this book came out because Mark Burroughs, who’s my editor, called me one day and said, hey, we’d love to do your next book. And I said, fine, sure. Let’s think about it. And I started pulling things together. And he’s the one who, when I finally submitted it all, said, Rosemerry, this is a book of Praise. I was so glad, Eric, that he saw that, because that’s, I think, where I would want to focus. To know then, that even though it’s a book that’s very much steeped in grief, that there is also this. I guess the way that I like to think about it is that if grief is the basso continuo, like there’s this baseline of, you know, this hurts, or this is heartbreaking, but that the melody itself is the melody of praise, that it’s a wonderful thing to be alive, that it is an incredible gift to be alive. And these two together inextricably. I like the way that the book brings them both in.

00:08:58 – Eric Zimmer
I was going to ask about that because in almost all of the poems, as you said, at least the ones that are talking about grief, there is a turning point in there where there’s a little bit of light that comes in. And poems are a reflection of our experience, but not a direct reflection. And I’m curious, in your own experience of grief, is that always the way it happens? Or are there times where it’s just grief and grief and grief and some more grief before the light or the turning or the praise comes in?

00:09:34 – Rosemerry Trommer
Interesting. So in a linear way, I like that you use this word turn. Turn is a poetic word that we use. Right. You know, it could be. It’s hard. It’s hard. It’s hard. And then the turn and it’s beautiful. I’m taking this question really to heart, friend. I want to be really honest. For me, it is almost always very hand in hand. Eric. There have been moments where it was an unbearableness that I couldn’t see out of. They didn’t last long. I can think of, honestly, just a handful where I was so destroyed. I remember reaching out to a friend both times. And is even that reaching out is the reaching out itself knowing, you know, that there’s something there? I wasn’t not able to reach out?

00:10:20 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:10:20 – Rosemerry Trommer
For me, and maybe it is because of poetry, because poetry itself wants to always touch what is difficult and what is beautiful at the same time. Poetry itself loves paradox. And a poem wants to do that. And I think that it’s possible that a practice of sitting down every day and wondering what’s here and being open to this much larger potential, doing it with a page, I think has a way of allowing it to be possible in any given moment over time. Right. We’re talking about a 20 year habit.

00:10:51 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:10:51 – Rosemerry Trommer
It’s not something I started last week or, you know, I’m wondering about that because I don’t know that I’m unusual in this, but I do know that this is what’s true for me.

00:11:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, I think you might be unusual in that. I think that there is a human tendency to view our experience monochromatically and not notice, to use your phrase, that the underlying bass note is this. And there may be a melody that has some other things going on, but not to not be paying attention to it and to describe our experience along that monochromatic baseline. And the thing I’m always cautious of on this show is being, what would I say, overly aspirational. Meaning I don’t want people who are going through a difficult time and aren’t having the same experience to feel bad about themselves because their experience is different.

00:11:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
Right.

00:11:51 – Eric Zimmer
That’s kind of why I ask. But I do agree with you that this is the reason that long term investment in creative practice or personal growth or awareness practice or all these things I think pays real dividends. Because I went through something it’s been about a year ago. It was really difficult. A lot of grief, a lot of fear. It just really sort of shook me up and it was really hard. And there was a pervasive sense that ran right alongside it that I was okay. And I think that is from 30 years at this point of some degree of. I never know what to call it. Inner work, whatever you want to call it, that did predispose my mind to look for both to look for the difficulty, but also to look for what could be good in it without getting rid of the difficulty. And I think that’s what your poems do so well is it’s not that the light is a way of turning away from the difficult. Right. It’s not a way of making it go away, it’s a way of existing with it. There’s the great pain and then there’s the joy goes with it. I’m going to say one last thing, then I’m going to shut up because I’m talking way too much and you’re not talking enough. And the reason that I think monochromatically often is because I’ve had depression at different points over my years. And that is a complete blankness, right? There’s no up, there’s no down. But it makes me think. And I can’t remember who said this. Joan Didion, maybe. I don’t know that, you know, sadness is that everything matters too much and depression is that nothing matters. Right. And what you’re describing is an experience where everything matters, not even too much. But so Much.

00:13:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
That was so beautifully said. That’s exactly it. It’s that everything matters, right? It’s not trying to be okay and push away the sorrow. It’s saying, here is the sorrow and here is the beauty, right? Here is the loss and here is the love without trying at all to push it away, without trying to pretend it’s not there, without trying to fix it. And I feel like a huge part of this is self compassion, Eric. I feel like that’s something that is really evolving in me over the last few years, is not beating myself up for having a difficult time, for just really knowing, oh, yeah, this is what we do because we’re human. We have a hard time. It’s just not easy. It isn’t easy to be alive knowing that. How do we also see that at the same time, there’s something wonderful here. And I feel like self compassion is the peace that allows for that. Can I write a poem about that.

00:14:39 – Eric Zimmer
Please, from the book? Yeah, it’s about time for a poem. So. Nice segue.

00:14:43 – Rosemerry Trommer
So the book is in four parts, and each of those four parts are words that I made up for praise. And it was in part, I think, because, Eric, of what you’re talking about, that we tend to think monochromatically. Certainly our word praise is, you know, yay, things are great. And so I thought, okay, if this is a book of praise. But the word praise doesn’t really seem to touch it. It’s a little too monochromatic. So the four words are words I made up because they’re more nuanced, more complex expressions of praise. For instance, the poem I’m about to read comes from the second chapter, which is Sarome, which comes from sorrow plus om. And the idea of it’s the kind of praise that can only rise out of the most difficult moments. The kind of praise that only comes when we’re in it, struggling, wrestling, being wrestled by life. And in that moment, there’s this. Oh, and this too. So this poem comes out of that chapter with astonishing tenderness. When in the middle of the night you wake with the certainty you’ve done it all wrong. When you wake and see clearly all the places you’ve failed. In that moment when dreams will not return. This is the chance for your most gentle voice, the one you reserve for those you love most, to say to you quietly, oh, sweetheart, this is not yet the end of the story. Sleep will not come. But somehow, in that wide awake moment, there is peace. The kind that does not need everything to be right before it arrives. The Kind that comes from not fighting what is real. The peace that rises in the dark on its sure dark wings and flies true, with no moon, no stars.

00:16:55 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a beautiful poem. It’s one of the ones I was going to ask you to read. And there’s a few lines in it that really jumped out at me that maybe we could discuss for a second. The first is this is not yet the end of the story. Like, this poem would fit perfect in the chapter I’m working on for my book right now. Because I’m talking about this tendency we have to take an event and then end the story there. It’s a bad thing. And boom, without seeing the way things will unfold because we don’t know. And so it’s hard to. But just that recognition. Often this is not the end of the story can be so healing. Just that.

00:17:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, yeah. Thank goodness. Right? It really does go on, you know. And I think there’s another poem in the book in which I remember I put on my son’s crocs, which are still sitting outside our door. And I put them on and I kind of walk around and I’m like, life went on. And I just look, you know, here I am wearing his shoes and his body didn’t go on. Although in some ways, in many ways, I feel his spirit goes on. But I just look at all the blooming all around me at, you know, the trees and how green they are and the river and how it keeps on flowing and the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing and I’m still here too. And life went on. Life went on. It does. The story isn’t over.

00:18:40 – Eric Zimmer
That’s initially so jarring. I think when you’re like in the beginning stages of being wrecked, looking around and seeing that the world is going on almost feels like the world is cruel.

00:18:53 – Rosemerry Trommer
How could it do that?

00:18:54 – Eric Zimmer
How could it go on? Right. But over time, my experience is that moves from something that’s painful to something that feels good, which is, oh yeah, life goes on. As do I. As do I.

00:19:06 – Rosemerry Trommer
As do I. Yeah.

00:19:08 – Eric Zimmer
I want to go back to another part in that poem where you see clearly all the places you’ve failed. Because we were talking about self compassion a minute ago and you were talking about the self compassion you needed to give yourself to not feel bad that you felt bad. But I think there was another huge dose of self compassion you had to give yourself. And we talked a little bit about this last time around blame of. I have a son who took his own life and what Role Do I or did I play in that? How have you worked with that? Because that’s the sort of thing that can be crushing, Eric.

00:19:46 – Rosemerry Trommer
I don’t know why I have been so blessed on this one. Well, I guess I have some idea. For me, the blame hasn’t been a big part of it. When Finn died, we could say that it was not a surprise in that things had been very difficult for a long time. And I had been very actively putting all of my energy into doing everything I could to keep him here, I suppose, but to help him, to open him, finding him mentors, finding him, help going, you know, taking fencing classes with him and taking him on, you know, whatever. I mean, I was so, so active in about every possible arena. I think that that helped me. For me, there was no doubt in my mind that I had given this boy all the love I could give him.

00:20:33 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:20:34 – Rosemerry Trommer
If this had been some other person, I would have thought maybe, what else could I have done? But I knew the truth of it was that if there was anything I could have thought of to do, I had done that. I think that helped with the blame and regret, that part. That part for me. There’s this beautiful story that I heard not too long ago about the second arrow. You’re probably familiar with this story, but for people who aren’t, just very briefly, there’s the pain that you have that you can’t get away from. My son died. That pain is absolutely inescapable. But then there’s a second pain that comes from blame or shame, and that pain is avoidable. And I think I was so lucky that it became almost immediately clear each time I’d find one of these places where this kind of second arrow would come in, you know, like projection. That was one that maybe I had to work a little bit harder on, you know, oh, I’ll never see him, you know, get married. I’ll never meet. If he had a baby. I’ll never be a grandma to his kids. And it was so incredibly apparent that that pain, that was so much. I was like, oh, I don’t need to do that.

00:21:45 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:21:46 – Rosemerry Trommer
It was a really conscious choice when it would come up. Okay, stop, stop that.

00:21:51 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that that’s the power of that idea, is that that second layer of pain is. And I say that people who do this to themselves, we all do, right? I’m saying this self compassionately, but it’s self inflicted, meaning we are doing it to ourselves, which the good news means then we can stop doing it. And I’VE joked before that, like, everything that I teach is just about how not to make things worse.

00:22:19 – Rosemerry Trommer
Right.

00:22:20 – Eric Zimmer
Which is not a great marketing slogan. But when we think about how much of our lives is that second layer of pain. Yeah, it’s a lot of it. And if you cannot do that, your life is immeasurably better because we make everything worse. With blame, with shame, with all the things I shouldn’t be feeling this. What’s wrong with me? I’m also really happy for you that blame wasn’t such a big part of it and that you were able to have that feeling. Like, I’ve done everything that I knew to do. Right. And I think that’s, to me, a sign of some degree of emotional maturity when we can look at situations and go, okay, this was not the outcome I wanted.

00:23:05 – Rosemerry Trommer
Well, there it is.

00:23:05 – Eric Zimmer
Like, I did the best I could. And that’s gonna have to be okay.

00:23:09 – Rosemerry Trommer
I did the best I could. Which is different from, you know, like, I didn’t do everything right. I’m not saying I was the perfect mom. I’m just saying that, yes, if I could think of it to do, I did it. Like, I’m sure I screwed up all over the place, Eric, but that’s because I’m a human. But I knew. I just. There was no doubt. There was no doubt that I’d done whatever I could to love him, to help him, to nourish him. Yeah. And not just, you know, not just in those last few years. Like, I really did throw myself utterly into motherhood from the beginning.

00:23:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. There’s another line in that poem, the kind that comes from not fighting what is real. And that is a theme in the book a lot. And if I go back also to. I mean, I see it in a lot of poems, self portrait is a tuning fork, as if struck by the great hand of what is true. You talk in other places about the invitation to say yes to praise what is. And I love this idea of really turning towards befriending and welcoming what actually is.

00:24:13 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. I mean, that’s where it’s at.

00:24:16 – Eric Zimmer
How do you do that?

00:24:18 – Rosemerry Trommer
Well, I. You know, one of the other words I made up, Vera Luya, is really exactly this. Right. Veritas. Which means the truth. Alleluia. So just putting those two together, Vera Luja, is this idea of the praise that comes when we meet the world as it is, instead of the way we wish it would be. How do we do that? I mean, poetry is amazing for this, Eric. It really is, because it invites again and again and again, a curiosity. What is here? What is here? I think that when we sit down, whether it’s, you know, to sit down with a pen and paper or to sit down with painting, I’m pulling out the arts because I really do think that the arts are incredible for helping us meet difficult moments and helping us find something generative and creative out of heartache. Well, out of anything, for that matter. It doesn’t have to be heartache. You can find something wonderful, creative and generative out of. Out of a northworm or out of tree bark, you know, I mean, it doesn’t have to be heartbreak, but it can be that too. And I also think that practicing when the stakes are really low, when we have a practice of showing up and wondering, what is here? What is here? What is true? What’s true now? What’s happening outside, what’s happening inside? And by outside, I mean what’s happening in the world around me and what is happening in the world inside of me at the same time, wondering these two things. So maybe that’s part of it, right? When the world inside of me is saying, everything is heartbreak, heartbreak, heartbreak. And then I managed to make that leap and look outside and see, oh, and the world outside me, there’s a bunny hopping across the yard. And I can just fall in love with this little lump of bunny. And that’s all it takes, right, to realize, oh, it isn’t all heartache, is it?

00:25:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:26:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
Although it’s not saying that the heartache isn’t there. Of course it is. It doesn’t go away. And there’s the bunny.

00:26:08 – Eric Zimmer
I mean, it’s a real revelation that you can feel multiple things at once. Right. I mean, it really is like that we are capable of that. And I do agree with you that I think poetry can be really helpful in this regard. Now, I am not a poet. I occasionally sketch a few words down. But what I’ve tried to cultivate and what I like about poetry, the reason that reading poetry is beneficial to me is I think it teaches me how to see. It trains my ability to look a little bit more closely and to see. And it shows me that even in the most mundane moment, that moment seen through a certain lens is magical. I’ll see a poet describe the same scene out my window that I’m seeing. And I’m like, all right, whatever, you know? And then I read this poem. I’m like, yes, it is absolutely beautiful. I had no idea. I just didn’t see it. And I think that’s the gift that poets like you bring to people who are less inclined that way is. It’s a training for me to see.

00:27:15 – Rosemerry Trommer
I think it’s a training for anyone. I had written poems for years before I started a daily practice. But I remember that was the biggest part of the daily practice, was that it required paying attention in a new way. And I was very aware of that because, boy, do I know what it’s like to. I’ve always called them the busy blinders, where we’re just running from one thing to the next thing to the next thing, and we’re not paying attention. You know, I have a tree, this gorgeous ponderosa pine at the top of my driveway. And how often do I see that tree? So seldom. And this is. I laugh at myself for this. Right, right. Like, I go by that tree almost every day. I don’t always leave the house, but every day I leave the house, I go by that tree. How often do I notice it?

00:27:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:27:57 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:27:57 – Eric Zimmer
And it’s human nature to some degree. Right. Like, that’s the way the brain is designed to work. If you’ve seen something before, the brain is sort of like, okay, don’t need to pay attention, because there might be things I haven’t seen that I do need to pay attention. It’s why the brain is drawn to novelty. Right. There’s a survival element to it. So it makes sense. And I’m glad that the brain can do that. But to your point, when that’s all the brain does, we miss our whole lives.

00:28:26 – Rosemerry Trommer
Right? Right. That’s beautifully said. I don’t think we need to be poets, by the way, to do this practice. I think it helps. I mean, you don’t have to be a poet to want to pay attention. It does take maybe this, though, a longing to see what’s here. Like, I think it does take that. I want to see what’s here. Gosh, I was so aware, Eric, after Finn died, especially then, I had this constant prayer. Open me, open me, open me. I wanted to stay open and to feel it all. I wanted to feel every bit of that pain. I wanted to feel all of it. I didn’t want to run away from any of it, and I didn’t want to numb out. And I think that longing, that willingness opened me. Open me. That is what it takes. Maybe whether you’re writing. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a poem, but to have that longing to.

00:29:14 – Eric Zimmer
Be open, that’s a great way to think about it, Is the desire I’m always about. Is there something Simple I can do here. And I don’t think that this practice is simple because I think it’s an ongoing practice of deepening this. But I do think a simple question that I often use. What have I not seen before in this scene? You know, like, I’ve looked out this window. There’s no window in the room I’m in. But let’s say I was in a room with a window, my old studio, There was a window, it looked out, and I looked out that window a million times. I’m exaggerating, but I would look out and I say, what have I seen? What have I not noticed? And to me, that’s a very simple thing that I can just ask myself anywhere.

00:30:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, that’s a great question.

00:30:01 – Eric Zimmer
I think what we’re trying to do, in many ways, is outsmart that part of the brain I was just talking about, because in a neuroscience way, in a very real sense, what many neuroscientists believe is happening is. You may already know this, but the two things are happening. Our brain is predicting what it expects to see, and our senses are transmitting what is actually seen. If those things match, in a very real sense, what we see never gets to certain parts of the brain because the brain just says, I don’t need to know. I expected to see X. X is what’s coming back. Get out of here. Right. And so what we’re trying to do is just. At least what I’m trying to do is force the brain to actually see, look again, bypass that prediction mechanism, and look again.

00:30:53 – Rosemerry Trommer
That’s a fabulous practice, and I love the brain science behind it, because you’re right. I mean, how much do we not see? Because we just predict it and move right past. You know, it’s the reason we don’t hit the furniture in the house in the dark when we’re walking through. Right. We already.

00:31:07 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:31:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
We already know. I have a poem about this longing to be open. Could I read that one, please?

00:31:13 – Eric Zimmer
Your timing’s impeccable. I was just about to say, I think we need a poem.

00:31:17 – Rosemerry Trommer
Okay. So this poem is called the Prayers. And it reminds me of when I was a very young mom and my kids and I were playing in the sand, and I’d been going through a very difficult time separately. And I was distracted while my kids were playing in the stand, and I was writing with little rocks in the sand. I wrote the words, open me. And I remember telling my spiritual teacher that I had done that, and she.

00:31:47 – Eric Zimmer
Said, oh, be careful.

00:31:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
That’s a. That’s a Big prayer. Yeah, the prayers. When I asked the world to open me, I did not know the price. When I wrote that two word prayer in the sand, I did not know loss was the key devastation, the hinge, trust was the dissolution of the idea of a door. When I asked the world to open me, I could never have said yes to what came next. Perhaps I imagined the waves knew only how to carry me. I did not imagine they would also pull me under. When I asked the world to open me, I had not imagined drowning was the way to reach the shore. The waves of sorrow dragged me down with their tides of unthinkable loss. The currents emptied my pockets and stripped me of my ideas. I was rolled and eroded and washed up on the sand like driftwood softened. I sprawled there and wept, astonished to still be alive. It is not easy to continue to pray this way. Open me. And yet it is the truest prayer I know. The other truest prayer, though sometimes I long to reject its truth, is. Thank you.

00:33:28 – Eric Zimmer
That’s beautiful.

00:33:29 – Rosemerry Trommer
After he died, I remember getting help from lots of people and all kinds of modalities. Reiki and acupuncture and massage and just talking to people. And I remember, you know, when people would say, how can I help you? I would just say, keep me open, make me open, help me stay open.

00:34:11 – Eric Zimmer
I wrote a song years ago and one of the lines in the chorus was that, you know, a broken heart is an open heart.

00:34:18 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:34:19 – Eric Zimmer
And that an open heart can be a broken heart. Also, it goes both directions. And that’s kind of what you’re saying here. By being open, I’m more open to the difficult things that come as well as the good. But that seems to be to me, a bargain.

00:34:33 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Well, you’re saying I’ll take it all.

00:34:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:34:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Who would want it all? But really, don’t we desperately want it.

00:34:39 – Eric Zimmer
All most of the time?

00:34:42 – Rosemerry Trommer
Okay, I’m with you. And this is what. This is what I said in the poem too. I’d never say yes to that. I’d never say yes to that.

00:34:48 – Eric Zimmer
Of course not.

00:34:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
No, of course not.

00:34:50 – Eric Zimmer
I think what’s harder to say yes to, at least for me, sometimes the thing that’s hardest for me to say yes to. I’m not going to make equivocal statements. Is the. Is mundaneity a word, the mundane nature of day to day existence. Right. Like even that. I have to be willing to open to.

00:35:12 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yeah.

00:35:13 – Eric Zimmer
That’s what I don’t want to open to. Because I want every moment to be this open. Like wow. I’m seeing everything. But a lot of life is just sort of like, you know, just rolls along. And for me, that’s the one I’m working most on opening to and just going, that’s okay.

00:35:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:35:30 – Eric Zimmer
You don’t need to go make every moment spectacular or every moment peaceful, or every moment insight, or every moment poetry, or. Some moments can just be whatever sort of plain old moment they are. And that’s the one that’s hard for me to open to.

00:35:48 – Rosemerry Trommer
The mundanity. We’re in the business of making up words today, Eric, so we’re going to go with mundanity, I think. Yeah.

00:35:55 – Eric Zimmer
It’s funny, you referenced a book that I had never heard of until recently, but I bought because when I heard it, I was like, I must have this book. And it’s. What’s it called? The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

00:36:05 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yes. By John Koenig. I love this book so much. My master’s is in linguistics, so I’m a word lover. Right. I just love language. And I love what he’s done with his book. If anybody doesn’t have it yet. It’s such a joy because you read these descriptions he has. You see yourself in all of like, oh, there. Oh, there I am, too. And he just finds these very complex, beautiful moments of what it is to be alive. And it’s not poetry, but that book is completely poetry. I love that book.

00:36:37 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. I mean, it’s actually a very good teacher of what many psychologists think is an incredibly important skill, which is emotional granularity, the ability to be more precise and nuanced in what you feel. And that book is a great example of it. And the title is just. It’s too good. The minute I heard the title, it was, I’m ordering this book sight unseen.

00:37:01 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yeah. I hope you love it.

00:37:04 – Eric Zimmer
Speaking of the mundane and opening to it, I think you have a poem that speaks to this.

00:37:11 – Rosemerry Trommer
I do. This one is actually the last poem in the book. And it goes right to that mundane place. Eric. Today’s sermon was a single drop of melted snow that clung to the tip of a tight red bud at the end of a naked branch. It didn’t have to shout or sing to make me fall in love with the way the afternoon light gathered inside it. Such a simple pulpit, such humble gospel. This radiant preacher, this silence in which the prayer is made of listening.

00:37:49 – Eric Zimmer
It’s a beautiful poem. And what it brings up in me is the longing to see. Like that. If I’m going to be even more clear. I think the thing that I have a difficult opening up to is the emotional mundaneity.

00:38:08 – Rosemerry Trommer
Mm. Yeah.

00:38:10 – Eric Zimmer
It’s the times where I feel like. I know that that bud coming out on the tip of that branch should be beautiful or moving or something, but it’s not doing anything.

00:38:23 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Yeah.

00:38:25 – Eric Zimmer
That’s the hard part. I think I’m gonna go off and think about what you said, because what I can connect to in that moment that I do think is beautiful is that longing. That. That longing is connected to the knowledge of the beauty that’s all around me.

00:38:39 – Rosemerry Trommer
You know, Eric, I love that you bring this in, then this. Yes, I know it’s there. And there are those moments where we’re just like, I don’t see it and actually don’t want to see it. Is that part of it?

00:38:48 – Eric Zimmer
It’s. I don’t see it, or I don’t feel it, or I don’t feel it. It’s like, okay, yeah, I know it should be beautiful, but it’s just. Nothing’s happening inside me. It’s not stirring me. I’m unstirred.

00:39:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
I’m not being stirred. Right. I am unstirable. Yeah. Which is, I guess, even different from the other place I was thinking of. I don’t want to be stirred right now, which just yesterday, I was at a most beautiful, heartbreaking gathering where my beloved friend who has brain cancer is going to die. Today, she has a death with dignity. And we all gathered. And I won’t go into that, I suppose, but as I left this most sacred, incredible, holy space, I wanted to not be there for a while anymore. And I told myself, okay, sweetheart, you don’t have to right now. You’ll come back.

00:39:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:39:44 – Rosemerry Trommer
So right now, you don’t have to feel it. You just don’t have to. So I think, isn’t that interesting that there’s all these. You know, I’m stirred. I don’t want to be stirred. I would like to be stirred, but I’m not stirred. All these.

00:39:57 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right.

00:39:58 – Rosemerry Trommer
All these ways meet a moment.

00:39:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. And it does all come back, ultimately, to say yes to the world as it is, to praise what is, not what I wish it was, but what is. To me, that’s the lesson of a lifetime. Right. That’s a lesson that takes my entire life to learn. I’ve gotten much better at it. Being a Heroin addict at 24 shows my attempts to not say yes, to control everything. Right. Like, I don’t want that. I don’t want that. I’m going to adjust it. I’m going to fix it. I’m going to change it. I’m going to change it. Right. And so since then, it’s just been a work of like, okay, what is say yes to it.

00:40:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. And I really didn’t want to do that either. You know, I spent almost all my life trying really hard to not say yes to the world as it is. Yeah.

00:40:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And I’m sorry about your friend.

00:40:45 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yes. Well, it’s been quite a path. You know, we sang together for 30 years.

00:40:51 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, my goodness.

00:40:52 – Rosemerry Trommer
And then at her gathering, it wasn’t a memorial. Right. She was right there.

00:40:57 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right.

00:40:58 – Rosemerry Trommer
So it was. I’ve never been in a situation like this. You know, there were 70 of us gathered, and four of us who’ve sung with her for decades sang songs that we’d sung with her. And I could hear where her voice wasn’t, you know. Yeah. It was very, very beautiful. Very moving. She smiled the whole time, Eric. She smiled the whole time. And it was beautiful how at peace she was. She had such a peace about her that allowed for such wrestling with me to know that here it is again. Right. What is here? I was really sad. And what else was here? She was so full of peace.

00:41:42 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:41:43 – Rosemerry Trommer
So thrilling for her and her peace and also, you know, meeting my own heartbreak. Heartbreak. Yeah. At the same time. And of course, singing and crying ends up in gurgling. It was, you know, at least it was sincere. It was certainly not a performance.

00:42:02 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. No one’s gonna doubt your sincerity. That’s. That’s funny. You know, that death with dignity thing is really. So I’ve said this before on the show, like, if I was going to get heavily invested in a cause, I think that might be the one for me, because I haven’t had the fortune to go to the sort of event you’re describing, but I’ve heard of them, you know, what a beautiful thing to celebrate your life while you’re actually still there.

00:42:29 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:42:29 – Eric Zimmer
And in a place where you’re capable of appreciating it. I’ve seen the death without dignity a number of times now, and it really is, you know, undignified. There’s a great Jason Isbel song called Elephant, which is a heartbreaking song, but he talks about this idea that no one dies with dignity, but we have the chance to give people the ability to do that, and it infuriates me that we don’t in a lot of places.

00:42:56 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, yeah. Colorado Newly does. I think it’s only three years old now.

00:43:01 – Eric Zimmer
We are near the end of our Time here, but I thought we could. Have you read one last poem, which is the Grand Quilt.

00:43:09 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, I’m glad you picked this one.

00:43:11 – Eric Zimmer
I think this is a nice way to sort of take us out.

00:43:15 – Rosemerry Trommer
So this is a poem in a section that’s called Some Union. Sum is a proto Indo European root that means to sing and union. And the poems in this section really are the praise that comes when we understand how deeply connected we are with everything, including the things maybe we’d rather not be connected with. So this is the grand quilt. I don’t believe we can stitch together only scraps of beauty, squares of light. I don’t believe in a quilt that doesn’t also have patches of sorrow, blocks of ache. Such pieces are, of course, much harder to want to stitch in. But it matters that we do not exclude them. It matters right now that we don’t pretend they do not exist. It matters that we sew every piece into the grand cloth. It matters, too, how we sew these pieces in, perhaps using our finest silk thread, perhaps with an elaborate stitch our grandmother taught us. Or perhaps we must use a stitch we make up, because no one ever taught us how to do this most difficult task. To meet what at first seems unwanted, wrong, and to incorporate it into the whole and to do this for as long as we can stitch. That’s how long.

00:44:45 – Eric Zimmer
That’s beautiful. I love this idea of it matters how we sew these pieces in, not just that we include them, but how we go about doing it. And that some of doing that we may have been taught we’ve seen other people, and there are plenty of times for different people where no one modeled for us how to do this difficult, emotional stuff. We’ve never seen it.

00:45:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Right. So we get to struggle and make it up.

00:45:11 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:45:12 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, this didn’t work. Okay. Yeah. No, I think that’s a big part of it. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if we did have role models for all of this? And to some degree, I think they do exist if we look for them. I’m thinking now of Mirabai Star, who is just such a lighthouse for all of us, really, especially in this realm that we’ve been talking about, of everything matters, of showing up with what’s most difficult and what’s most wondrous, and being both grounded and ecstatic at the same time, you know? And I think that we do have to figure it out. Even if you sit at the feet of Mirabai Star every day, you’re still going to have to figure it out for yourself.

00:45:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Yeah. I got to go to Taos recently and interview Mirabai in person as part of a trip out there, and it was. It was lovely. But I’m happy that you brought up role models because I actually think that what you’ve done in your last book, in this book, is a role model for other people. And I’m going to reach here, but I don’t think it’s a huge stretch. Your work to me, what you’re doing here. And Mirabai does this also with her grief, is a little similar to me to what Viktor Frankl did for us. Right. Because I think the reason that we’re often drawn to people like Viktor Frankl, at least I am, is that he shows that these ideas about how we can live a better life apply in even the most dire of circumstances. They’re good in your day to day life and they’re good in the most extreme human circumstances. And I think what I love about your work is this showing in one of the most extreme circumstances, besides being in a concentration camp, is losing your child, how to do that with some degree of openness and grace. And so thank you for that.

00:47:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
Thank you, Eric. Thank you. I’m thinking now too of the poets who are writing, you know, in Gaza right now and doing the same work, which is a horror I can’t even imagine.

00:47:19 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:47:20 – Rosemerry Trommer
And I think it’s true that we will all come to opportunities in our lives where we are asked to wonder, like you say, what am I not seeing? What did I not see here? Or, you know, my maybe have my prayer open me, you know, even though it’s insanely painful to be opened.

00:47:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:47:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
We’ll all get those chances.

00:47:42 – Eric Zimmer
And I think it sort of takes us back also to where we began. Which is what in these moments where you can’t, you know, others can and. But to flip that, which is that we can do that for other people too.

00:47:56 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yeah. Thank goodness. Right? I mean, I feel like this is what you’re doing. All right. That’s what this podcast is about. It’s what I hope the poems do.

00:48:05 – Eric Zimmer
Well, thank you so much for coming on again. It’s always such a pleasure when I talk to you. I’m just really glad we did this.

00:48:13 – Rosemerry Trommer
Thank you, Eric. Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be with you again.

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  01:37

Hi, Catherine, welcome back.

Catherine Gray  01:40

Hi, thanks for having me back.

Eric Zimmer  01:41

I don’t know if this is three or four for having you on, but it’s been a good number, and you’re always one of my very favorite people to talk to, so I’m happy to have you back. We’re going to be discussing something new for you, which is a novel instead of a non fiction book, and it’s called versions of a girl. But before we get into that, will start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent 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. The grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, 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 and your life and in the work that you do. I love

Catherine Gray  02:37

the parable and for me, so whenever I had my daughter, I became a parent aged 42 two years ago, and something happened which really made me think about the parable a lot in that my bedtime routine became completely disrupted. And for many, many years now, every night, before I go to sleep, I write a list of gratitudes, and a lot of that is to counter the fact that I have such a negatively biased brain as most of us do, and left unattended, my brain will become, you know, a doomsayer, a nihilist. It will focus on everything that’s going wrong and everything that could go wrong. And I found it was actually a magical cure for my insomnia. This writing of all the all the positive things that were happening, um, could potentially happen. And, yeah, as I say, when I had my daughter that just fell on the classroom floor because of tiredness. And you know, it all goes out the window. And for six months, I became very, very negative and irritable towards myself. So it really does make a difference what you feed your brain. And for me, I need that nightly diet of positivity. Otherwise, my brain goes to a dark neighborhood, and yeah, I have to really call it back. So that’s what it means to me.

Eric Zimmer  03:56

Lovely. Did you experience any postpartum depression, was that part of the irritability and all that? Or how was that time for you? Because I know it can certainly be challenging.

Catherine Gray  04:07

I definitely felt the hormones. I’ve read that the hormonal surge that you received during pregnancy and also thereafter, which apparently lasts about two years, is akin to feeling premenstrual all the time. Now, when I’m premenstrual, I don’t get teary like a lot of other people do, but I do get very irritable, even sometimes murderous. I have not murdered anybody yet, so I didn’t experience sort of postpartum depression. I experienced what is a lesser known offshoot of it, which was postpartum rage, and this wasn’t directed at anybody in my life, apart from potentially myself, right? And the items in my fridge. So I found myself doing things like throwing peppers at the. Which do not do that, it creates an almighty mess, and also a tub and permits, which, again, really bad thing to throw. Yeah, yeah, that’s completely settled down now, but I’ve really struggled with it, and also the tiredness and just everything that you can’t predict is going to happen to your life happens. And, yeah, it was a tough period, but I’m through, and I’m out and I’m okay, and all I’ve murdered is some peppers,

Eric Zimmer  05:26

good. I’m glad that that’s been the extent of the damage. You know, a couple thoughts come to mind there. I mean, I do think the first couple years after having a child can be very difficult, just the sleep, all of it, and I think it’s a beautiful time, but it’s a very trying time for many people. The other thing is you were talking that I thought about was this is interesting, because in men, depression is often diagnosed by irritability. Interesting. That’s the way it manifests. So for me, my depression manifests as general deadness and irritability, very rude, just irritable with every little thing for no good reason, right? It’s the sort of stuff that you know, at least I know I’m like, there’s no reason to be irritated by this, but yet I am,

Catherine Gray  06:18

yeah, and it’s one of those emotions that you really tend to beat yourself up about because you’re like, I should be better than this. I shouldn’t I shouldn’t be irritated by this, and yes, I am. So what do I do? So it was a really hard time for me. The only time I can liken it to would be early recovery, although the emotions were different, because in early recovery, I didn’t feel like that. But yeah, it was. It was a similarly challenging time, I would say, yeah.

Eric Zimmer  06:45

So this latest book is a work of fiction. Your previous books have been memoirs about recovery. How are they described?

Catherine Gray  06:55

Well, they’re often described as a hybrid, because they’re not just memoirs. So my story does feature in them, then I go off and explore journalistically, all of the research, talk to experts, and also weave in lots of self helpy tips and tricks. So it’s like a hybrid between those two. And yeah, so I’ve done four of those now, and this is my first fiction. It’s my debut novel.

Eric Zimmer  07:22

I think we may have only talked about three of those. We must have missed one. I don’t know which one, but we’ll sort that out off air. But the fiction is, I told you that I think the book is amazing. I was captivated from the very first sentence any book that basically says, in a way, she’s looking forward to prison as a place of starting is so good. Like, I’m like, Well, okay, I have to know who is she and why is she going to prison, and what’s wrong with her life, enough that she actually is looking forward to it. It’s a great start.

Catherine Gray  07:54

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I love a bit of crime in any novel. Yes, I love somebody to die and puzzle, you know, sorting out who did it and why, and, you know, what happened. So for me it was a really key linchpin that sort of crime aspect. Although it’s not a crime novel, it’s coming for age more than crime but I guess it’s a blend of the two.

Eric Zimmer  08:18

It’s a blend. I mean, there’s definitely a whodunit in it that runs through the whole book, right? Yeah, there’s a character who is murdered, and you don’t know who through most of the book, and it seems significant. So I would say, yeah, it’s kind of a mix of two, but the heart of the book is really about, why don’t you describe the coming of age and the split between Fern and flick? You’ll do better than I will. Okay,

Catherine Gray  08:42

so the book opens on a 14 year old girl. She’s called fern. She spent equal years with each of her parents. Her parents are divorced. They’ve been separated for a long time, and her parents are very, very different. Her father is a hell raiser. He lives hand to mouth in California, in motels. He’s a borderline genius. He means well, but he’s mostly a disaster. Her mother is this ex ballerina who lives this gorgeous life in a London townhouse. Her biggest concern is what you think of her. She’s more of a helicopter parent and an unexpected visitor comes along and throws Fern, the main character, a dilemma as to whether she stays with her father in California or goes back to her mother in London. So it’s an exploration of how your dominant parent and how your dominant home life can shape your future trajectory. The story splits, and then we follow both versions of the same character over the next 21 years and see how they unfold and how they’re shaped differently, and how they shape similarly as well. So I wrote the first draft when I was pregnant and I was obsessed with nature versus nurture, and this is what came out. So I think it’s. Really an acceleration of the kind of parent that I want to be and the kind of parent that I don’t want to be. I would say if you boil the book down to one central theme, it’s the parent and child relationship. I think that would be it, because there’s lots of different examples in the book of how that dynamic unfolds. And what’s interesting is the parent in the book that arguably commits the biggest crime in inverted commas is the one who comes off probably the best because of the way that they deal with what they did. So, yeah, it’s childhood. You know, character shaping, addictions in different forms, recoveries in different forms. There’s lots of juicy topics in there that will be fun to play with, especially with the dual timeline narrative.

Eric Zimmer  10:43

And what age remind me the two of them sort of splits. How

Catherine Gray  10:46

old 1414?

Eric Zimmer  10:48

So up till 14, they’re one person. They’ve lived the same life. At the age of 14, one decides to go back to London to see her mother, who she’s not seen in a long time, and the other, at the last minute, decides not to get on the plane, and at that point they’re two separate stories. Exactly what I find fascinating about that is that it is nature versus nurture, but what you’ve got is both, right? Yeah, you’ve got someone who’s got the same genetic makeup, someone who had the same formative year experience, but yet, at the age of 14, they go different directions, and their lives unfold very, very different. And it’s just interesting to think about as a parent. I think you always think about like, how long does what I do as a parent matter? And there’s a lot of research out there that shows like it’s the first few years, those are so formative, right? Yeah, but what I love about the book is, yes, those first years are formative, but it also shows that that influence does not end at 14, even though it’s less than it was when you’re young. These two girls take very different paths from the age of 14 largely based on the environment there.

Catherine Gray  12:03

Yeah, I think everything that is coming out recently says that the first three years are the most key. And if you get those right, it’s almost like you’re fine. But I also think that launch into adulthood those years of I would define it as 14 to 21 especially with so many young adults living at home now. I mean, I Rick showed back to my home many times over my 20s and even early 30s. So it’s so important that the way that you’re sort of finished and pushed into the world, and the messages that you get in adolescence, when you’re figuring out who you are and also how you know romantic relationships come into play, and also your use of substances come into play as well. Yeah, and you know, we often do what our parents do rather than what they say we should do. So it was really fun to play with, and also because the same set of characters in each timeline are doing different things, and there’s that butterfly effect. So in the timeline where Fern stays with her father, who’s wrestling with a savage addiction to alcohol, because she spends a lot more time with him, the effect on him is different than in the timeline when she leaves right and he becomes famous in the other timeline for his music, because he’s really talented musician, and that has an impact as well. I really wanted to explore also the idea that money doesn’t necessarily solve things. Yes, in many ways, it can make being okay harder, because you have the money to numb the consequences and pay to get yourself out of trouble, almost, and if you’re surrounded by yes people as well, that can have a delayed effect on any sort of self realization and improvement that you want to make. So I wanted to play with that as well. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  14:03

it’s really fascinating the way that unfolds. And I think what you said there is really important about adolescents in that we put into action what we’ve learned about romantic relationships. Yeah, and again, by and large, that’s when substances, you know, drugs, alcohol, come online for us. And what I think is interesting about the two characters, and you mentioned this in an email to me, is, you know, thinking about their attachment styles. We’ve done episodes before about attachment styles, anxious attached versus avoidantly attached versus securely attached, right? And neither of the girls is securely attached, and that happened early, right? That’s when that forms. It forms early on. And so neither of them had a life that would have been securely attached. But it is interesting that in those adolescent years, their attachment styles, avoidant and anxious, come to the play. They each have a different one. And so I think it further shows this. Idea how? Yes, a lot of things are formative in those first few years, but they’re not definitive. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  15:06

there’s a fourth attachment style that often people don’t read about. It’s disorganized attachment, which basically means that you’re both. I love

Eric Zimmer  15:15

that phrase too. I mean, you could just call it like both or dual attachment styles, but the fact that it’s called disorganized, and I think I have that one cracks me up, like just disorder, like, who knows what’s going to happen could

Catherine Gray  15:30

go either way. Yeah, basically, I think the easiest way of thinking about it. So John Bowlby, who, I believe, came up with the theory of attachment styles and did a lot of ground breaking work on it in the 60s, he theorized that it happens in the first five years of life, and ultimately, if you have a secure, consistent, safe relationship and home life, then you are likely to grow up to be securely attached, whereas, if you do not, then you are likely to grow up to be either anxious, avoidant or both, which is disorganized, and I definitely relate that mostly I skew anxious, but that is because I’m very attracted to avoidant people, and so therefore that tweaks my anxious side, whereas when I have dated Secure people and also anxious people, I skew avoidant, but ultimately, what your subconscious is trying to do in this awful recreation of your early years is to stop you being stable and to almost keep things unstable, because that’s what you’re used to, and we repeat what we don’t repair. And so it’s almost if you do find yourself in a secure relationship, I will burn things down. I will blow them up. I will find a way to make them unstable. But the awareness of that is the key to changing it. So that’s why the two different versions of Fern, one of them skews anxious and one of them skews avoidant, because of the relationships that they’re in. And that was really fun to play with as well, and really made me think about myself. I think while I was writing the book, I did actually realize I am both, and before that, I would have told you that I was anxious because I really related to the avoidant character as well.

Eric Zimmer  17:15

Yeah, you more or less described the way I am in relationship, if I’m not bringing a lot of consciousness to it, which is, if you are attached to me, I’m going to run away. On the other hand, if you’re not attached to me, I’m going to chase you. But there’s going to be a certain amount of distance between us either way. And, yeah, right, just whichever way you move, I’m going to move the opposite way Exactly. It’s just perverse. I guess, perverse makes it sound like it’s a willful thing. It’s just baked into me. Now I’ve become very conscious of it, and I’m better able to work with it than I used to be. But that pattern, you know, haunted all my relationships until this one, yeah, if somebody

Catherine Gray  17:52

was really into me and they were like, I want this, you know, I want to get married and have kids with you, that there was nothing more likely to turn me off. I’ve had some psychologists describe it to me really brilliantly, and she said it’s like a box dance where you know, like you said, you always maintain that distance, so if somebody steps towards you, you step away. Yeah, and that just carries on and on and on and on until you finally break the pattern by being aware of those urges and impulses and trying to counter them. And I’m now engaged to a long term partner. We have a child together. We have a house, and he skews avoidant, and I’ve just sort of accepted that’s my fate. You know, I am destined to end up with avoidance. But thankfully, he is aware of being avoidant, and I’m very aware that that tweaks my anxious side so but it doesn’t mean that it’s not without challenges. It presents many challenges as dynamic, so we have to work with that constantly and be aware of it.

Eric Zimmer  18:53

Yeah. I think what’s interesting about that is, as you said, you know the pattern. I know my pattern, it doesn’t stop the feeling coming up, yeah, of wanting to pull away or wanting to grasp that still emerges within me. It’s just, as you said, I have most of the time enough awareness to go, Okay, hang on. That’s just, you know, an old pattern, and it’s similar to how we learn to work with not drinking early on, right? The desire to drink emerges, but we learn how to handle it differently, although I will say it is different in the sense that, at least for most people who are in long term recovery, the desire to drink or use just disappears, kind of vanishes, but the feelings that caused us to want to do that don’t, yeah,

Catherine Gray  19:40

that’s absolutely true. I think what happens is you just learn to deal with them in other ways. That’s maybe why it fades into complete obscurity, because you’ve actually just assembled a whole new toolbox of things that you do instead of drinking. And I’m now 11 years sober. I just turned 11 at the weekend. Yes, and I honestly never miss it, crave it, want it. It doesn’t even occur to me now, no matter what is going on in my life, like when I was talking about that postpartum rage that I experienced, my hand never itched for a drink, because that’s just not part of my coping strategy toolbox now, so I have just so many other ways that I deal with that. And yeah, it does fade, and it’s lovely.

Eric Zimmer  20:24

Yeah, yeah, I’m in Amsterdam right now, and I was a heavy marijuana smoker in my using days. I loved it. It was up there with alcohol. And I’ve been getting used to this over the last few years, as it’s become legal in parts of the US also, because with alcohol, I just became immune to it, because it was all around me all the time. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  20:47

it’s omnipresent. You literally can’t get away from it. That’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about how the legalization of marijuana could affect people who are in recovery from addiction from marijuana, yeah,

Eric Zimmer  20:57

because all of a sudden it’s showing up. Yeah, again, in a way that it hadn’t before. It also has the allure of, sometimes what a new drink will have to somebody who’s in recovery, like, oh, I never got to try that drink, right? It’s like, oh, there’s all these different types of weed I could try, and I could just go shopping for it. So even with that, though, my point in bringing that up is I walk by pot stores all the time here in Amsterdam, and it smells like weed outside of all of them. And I just have, it’s a flicker. It’s just a flicker of a like, Hmm, I used to like that, and then it just kind of dies away, you know? And it’s so minor, but it’s weird to see it occasionally brought up. I imagine it’s what would happen to me if suddenly they start selling heroin on street corners. I’d probably that that long dormant part of me would probably be like, Well, hold on, you know, like, I still won’t watch any sort of, like, needle being used in any way in a movie or on me. I, you know, close my eyes. I just, I don’t want to see it because it’s triggering. Yeah, that’s

Catherine Gray  21:57

so interesting. I’ve never thought about that. And that’s perhaps one of the reasons that with alcohol, you do have to become immune to the constant marketing and presence of it, because it is just everywhere. Even, you know, every single social event is the centerpiece of it, yeah? And so you’re sort of thrown into the fire. I’ve never thought about that, yeah, what an interesting way of thinking about it.

Eric Zimmer  22:41

We talked about nature versus nurture a little bit earlier. Let’s talk about nature versus nurture in the creation of addiction. Well, I

Catherine Gray  22:53

have done a lot of research on this for previous books, so I’m just going to quote you some of the studies that I’ve seen and things that experts have told me, but it’s quite commonly known that if one of your parents is addicted, then you are four times more likely to grow up to encounter addiction yourself. And what’s less commonly known is that the chart topping predisposition to later addiction is a traumatic childhood and when we think of trauma, we think of very extreme events, but actually childhood trauma includes things like just being routinely insulted by A caregiver, or moving house a lot, or bearing witness to a caregivers addiction, whether it’s a step parent or your actual parent. And so a lot of us would actually qualify for childhood trauma, and we don’t think we do. So there’s a test. It’s a really interesting test. It’s the A, C, E test, right? Yep, that you can look up and find out if you would fall under that umbrella. And so that seems to suggest that nurture, more than nature, is the thing that sort of activates addiction within and I think it often takes grip in adolescence, which is one of the reasons why I made phone 14, because I think that’s when it’s activated that because that’s often when we pick up alcohol or whatever other drug we later become addicted to, and that’s when it really sort of get teeth and claws into us. And there’s also very compelling evidence that shows that if you pick up young, which I did I was 12, so if you pick up before the age of 15, I think it is, you are again four times more likely to later become addicted. Because it makes sense. Our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re 25 so if we are drinking routinely to medicate anxiety or whatever other emotion. In our early teens, then we’re going to become more attached to it,

Eric Zimmer  25:03

right? We just have more time for our brain to alter in the negative ways that alcohol or drugs alter the brain. Yeah, and I know this question was of particular interest to you as you were about to have a child, and it certainly was of great interest to me, unbelievably, 2526 years ago, that my son was born because his mother and I were both heroin addicts. So it was this, like, are we birthing a destined to be an addict child? So talk to me about that for you, you know, from a personal sense, well,

Catherine Gray  25:38

that was one of the reasons that I arrived at motherhood so late, because in my 30s now I know so I thought I don’t want to have a child. So from the ages of 33 to 39 if you’d asked me, I would have said, No, that’s not for me. But when I had a lot of therapy around my own childhood, I realized that the reason I didn’t want to have a child was because I thought I was going to be a terrible parent and B that I was going to birth a child that was pre destined to become an addict, and therefore I would be subjected to that terrible ordeal of watching the person love the most go through what you’ve been through, and knowing that you can’t really do anything to help until they ask for help. So a lot of that research is what informed my decision to then become a parent. And I was very lucky that I was able to in my 40s, and now I feel much more at peace. My daughter does have a higher chance, but it’s not as simple as you’re just four times more likely to become addicted. You inherit characteristics that can predispose you to addiction, so things like anxiety, introversion, but also spontaneity and extroversion, I believe. So those characteristics you can inherit them, and therefore it depends on the home environment as to where those characteristics lead you. So that’s the way I see it now, and I’ve made all these promises to her that she’s completely unaware of because she’s doing in that I will always endeavor to make her feel safe. That was the word that my research kept coming back to, was feeling safe. That is the way that you can give your child the best possible start. And that doesn’t necessarily look like a nuclear family that stays in one town forever more with a white picket fence and a Labrador, you know, right? That doesn’t necessarily look like that, but certainly so if you look at my childhood, we moved seven times before I was 18, and I was adjacent to three very acrimonious breakups, and so that didn’t make me feel say, yeah. And so there’s lots of things that, but it doesn’t necessarily like I say mean that I will stay with my partner forever, or I will stay where I live now, it’s just that I will be much more conscious of the impact that it could have on her, that inconsistency. So no matter what I do, I will try and provide an environment that isn’t hostile, because that’s something that I experience and but I’m not going to be perfect. That’s another thing you just have to reconcile. Yeah, life is going to throw me all these curveballs, and there are going to be choices that I make that are imperfect as a parent. That’s just how it is, but as much as possible, I want to point myself in that direction.

Eric Zimmer  28:39

Yeah, it’s a beautiful intention. My son is, as I mentioned, much older, and I guess that you know, you never know. But up till now, he shows no signs of addiction that the way I describe it, he doesn’t have the desperate personality I did, right? Yeah, even my teen years before I started using, there was just a desperation about me that he’s just never seemed to have, and so I think we hopefully did okay. But his mom and I split when he was two and a half, right, like she fell in love with somebody else. I mean, I ended up being far and away the stable parent, which blows my mind that anybody would apply that to me, given the fact that, you know, when I had him, I was three years off being a heroin addict. So for now, he seems okay. That must be so satisfying to see it is. And, you know, I think the satisfying thing for me is I don’t believe by any way, shape or form, I did it perfectly. There’s some things I can look at and be like, Oh, boy. I wish they could do a do over on some of that. And I know that at every age I’ve looked at him, I’ve been able to say he is more mentally and emotionally well than I was at that age.

Catherine Gray  29:50

But you are modeling for him that a person can be very happy without any drug, yeah, of any type. So that has a. Massive impact on a child, and something that I try and do with my daughter every night, I’ve read this research that says it’s really good for them to do we have a dance party. And when I was teen, I would describe myself as very buttoned up. I was very tense and very anxious. And when I discovered alcohol, I was like, this is the answer. This is the magic solution to my constant feeling that I’m almost locked within my body and I can’t let go and I I’m really quiet, and I can’t express myself, and I can’t dance or talk to people that I fancy or whatever I wanted to do when I was a teen. And I try and model that with my daughter by throwing myself around the kitchen like a total loon to try and show her and to encourage her to have that lack of inhibition that made me feel like I needed something in order to disinhibit. Yeah, yeah, your son has had the most incredible role model in that in

Eric Zimmer  31:01

some respects, the other thing that we did is his mother and I, you know, started talking to him as early as it seemed like he could actually understand what we are talking about, about the fact that we were both addicts, and how destructive it was to our lives, and the fact that, given that he is the child of that he is more predisposed to it, and so he should approach substances with more caution than the average person would. Yeah, I don’t think it stopped him from experimenting, but I do think there was an idea in his mind of like, okay, I need to be a little more careful here.

Catherine Gray  31:36

Yeah, I think that’s so important. I do remember having a chat with my father along those lines as well, but it was too late by that point. Yeah, and I was 17, and I remember us going, I remember it so clearly as well. I was going for a walk on the beach, and he clearly clocked that I had a growing addiction to alcohol already. I was so shabby, hung over, I could barely talk. And he said to me, you know, 20 or so, or whatever he was at the time actually would have been more like 10. And so you have a greater likelihood so just to be aware of that, you need to be careful with alcohol. But by that point, I was fully in Yeah, and I thought, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You know, it will be different for me.

32:27

I will be able to outside it, unlike you. And no,

Catherine Gray  32:33

yeah, yeah. So I think it’s great that you got that message in early, and I will allow my daughter to read my books whenever she’s you know, probably very young

Eric Zimmer  32:46

as we look at the two girls, they have their own different set of problems. You alluded to this a little bit before, but the one who takes on the name flick grows up in a very wealthy London home, and I find it interesting because you talk about how self obsessed she becomes with her appearance, which she gets largely from her mother. And it was just striking how well you wrote about how uncomfortable that is.

Catherine Gray  33:17

Yeah, I think that’s something that a lot of women of my generation grow up with. But again, it’s everyone, isn’t it? You know, everyone’s surrounded with images of perfection, and that’s now being countered by a lot of different sorts of images. But I certainly I remember taking two hours to get ready for college. I mean, that’s and if I was having a bad hair day or a bad skin day, I just wouldn’t go even though I was obsessed with learning the type of college student that would hand in extra essays. And my tutor was like, What are you doing? I don’t want to mark these extra essays. We’ve got enough to do that. Something that was paramount to my self esteem was looking perfect or as perfect as I could, and so I poured a lot of that into flick, because I do think that relates to that whole love addiction, anxiously attached feeling like your outsides have to be as flawless as possible in order to be accepted as a person. Oh my gosh. I do not miss those days. I mean, I constantly carried around this little magnifying mirror and would check my face before I met anyone, just in case there was anything in their teeth or anything out of place. And now I couldn’t be more different. I just basically only put makeup on for press events or whatever. So it’s so nice when you break free of that.

Eric Zimmer  34:38

Yeah, I interviewed somebody recently. She wrote a book called boy mom, and it was about raising boys, and she takes a similar approach to how you described your books, which are, there’s a thread of memoir in it, and then there’s a lot of journalistic research, right? And one of the things that she found was that more and more boys are taking on that. Oh, I can imagine which I mean, for me, I mean, I feel like I had it from the very beginning. I said to her in the interview, you know, comic books I used to read had the Charles Atlas comics in them. Charles Atlas was a bodybuilding system, and basically it showed like this skinny kid on a beach getting beat up or pushed around, and then he goes and buys the Charles Atlas comics gets big and bulky and strong, and now all the women love him. And so, I mean, even for a boy that was marketed so young to me,

Catherine Gray  35:29

yeah, now I’m thinking about all the superhero stories, and with boys, it was often if you have muscles, then everything will be solved. Yes,

Eric Zimmer  35:36

yep, yep. It’s a thing we all wrestle with, and it is good to see more body positivity things coming out. I still think it’s a long way to go, but it’s some progress. There’s a particularly telling part in the book where you’re describing Fern slash flick, the one girl who split into two her mother, and in the story, her mom kind of gives her up at like, age four. Is that about the time it is, or age seven,

Catherine Gray  36:05

six and a half? Seven? Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  36:07

yep. So she just basically says to her dad, here, take her and the book starts to explore her experience up to that point. Yeah, definitely, the mother’s experience. And there’s a particularly telling part where, in my notes, I title it the mother Inquisition, which you write about, like, did you have a natural birth? Did you have pain relief? Are you breastfeeding? You know? Are you swaddling enough? Are you reading to her? All these ways that we like interrogate mothers to make sure they’re doing the right thing. Where did that come from? Personal Experience

Catherine Gray  36:42

entirely, because I found that when I was pregnant, and also, I would say it’s fallen off now, but I’ve curated my life so that I’m less exposed to it. I’m not in touch with any sort of NCT group or anything like that. NCT is in the UK. It’s something that you go to when you’re pregnant, and you meet lots of other parents, okay, also in the same stage of the process as you now, I actually ended up because I did feel there’s just so many messages when you’re pregnant that your body is no longer your own, and people feel entitled to a pine all over your pregnant body, and you’re told to do things and not do other things, and eat this and don’t eat that, and stop running or keep running. And you know, everyone seems to have an opinion, and that then continues into the early years, where lots of people interrogating you as to how you’re doing it and whether you’re going to use baby rice and start weaning it four months, or whether you go up to six months or, you know, and often the only right answer is the answer that you give that matches how they did

Eric Zimmer  37:54

it exactly, exactly. So

Catherine Gray  37:57

I did some things that were potentially controversial, like I co slept once my baby was big enough, and I breastfed for a lot longer than some people would. I did it until she runs. I’m still doing it and she’s over two, yeah. So I really found that in order to stay sane, you just have to detach from all of that, which is one of the reasons why I actually ended up leaving the NCT Whatsapp group that I was a part of, because I really felt myself being drawn into that. And you just have to go off instinct and make your own decisions and say, okay, yeah, thanks for the advice, and then do whatever you want to do. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  38:36

yeah. There’s so much of it. There’s so much of it. I remember we parented Jordan similarly, the way you’re describing like he slept with us and he breastfed for much longer. And people told me over and over, you’ll never get him out of your bed. He’ll never learn to sleep, right? You know? And there just came a time where all of a sudden it just seemed like it was the right natural time, and he went off to his own bed, and everything was fine, yeah. And you made the joke there, and you made it in the book, which is the only acceptable answer is the one that you did. You know, like when you’re asking somebody, because I think we’re all insecure about the choices we make as parents, and so when somebody’s doing something different, we read that as, oh, I didn’t do it right, yeah, which we then turn on its head and make it you’re doing it wrong in order so that we don’t feel wrong. Yeah, we

Catherine Gray  39:23

like people to match us, and so whenever I’m talking to parents to be or new parents, I try my absolute best to just keep my mouth shut unless they ask me directly for advice. Yeah, then I will give it, but I will very much positive in the context of this worked for us. Yeah, every parent and every child is different, so that seems to be the way around it is to remember that you are an individual who had a very individual experience, and everyone’s going to have a different way. Thank.

Eric Zimmer  40:18

That advice giving or thinking that the way you did it is the way everyone should do it also applies to recovery, right? Yeah, we see this again and again. Unfortunately, it most often comes out of people who are in 12 step traditions, insisting that everybody do it their way, although there is an equally large group of people who insist that 12 step programs are garbage. But it’s this, here’s how I did it. It’s the only way to do it, which is patently insane. Yeah, I know

Catherine Gray  40:46

that rhetoric, and I think it comes from all paths of recovery, the you know, this is how I did it. So this is the right way, and that’s why I actively rail against it in all of my writing about addiction and recovery, I just say there is no one way, and you just need to try everything and work out what fits you best. It entirely depends on you as a person and your internal beliefs. Like for instance, I discovered having left 12 step that one of the reasons it didn’t fit with me, even though I learned a lot there in the six months that I was there, I innately knew that I would need to move away from it in order to continue was because I have something called an internal locus of control, and I’ve since been told by a therapist, and that means that I don’t feel comfortable when I’m sort of making things dependent on external influences, even though I know that the higher power doesn’t necessarily have to be a theistic, you know, bearded God as you know it can be a god as you understand them. I literally don’t believe in any sort of like force of good out there, which is a bit depressing, actually. I literally believe, you know, we’re bored, we die, and that’s it, and there’s no sort of unseen force looking after me. So I found that I continually butted up against that aspect of the program, and I was having to contort myself quite a lot to sort of fit in with it. And so I just found other ways and but I would never presume to tell anyone that My way was the right way, because I really believe that every recovery path is different, even if it does follow a traditional mode. I do believe it’s always slightly different, even if it looks the same. And so, yeah, people just have to find their own way. There is no one way, right,

Eric Zimmer  42:41

right? There absolutely isn’t. And I think we’ve gotten to a place where more and more people are acknowledging that thankfully, you know, I ran into some of the same challenges in AA, although it saved my life twice, so I’m extraordinarily grateful to it where I eventually felt like the contortions I was having to do to translate everything just got to be a bit much for me. There were some other challenges I had also that had to do with how what being an alcoholic meant to me and what it seemed to mean to a lot of people in 12 step programs, and those increasingly diverged as I got better. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  43:19

I found that too things like I would no longer refer to myself as an alcoholic. Now I do if I’m in circles where that’s the term that everyone uses, but about four years sober, I let that term fall away, and I did it very quietly, because I was a bit scared to be honest, I had internalized the belief that if I did allow that turn to fall away, then I would slip into denial and start thinking I could moderate again. But for me, two things co exist. I no longer believe I’m addicted to alcohol, but I also believe that if I were to pick up again, I would very quickly become addicted to alcohol. And so I approach it in a very neuroscientific way. So I believe that the path in my brain that was addicted to alcohol does still exist, even though it’s disused and, you know, overgrown, and it’s more of a trail that’s been forgotten through some woods, whereas once it was a six lane highway, yeah, yeah, but it does still exist there. So I will never drink again. I will never believe that I couldn’t moderate because I don’t believe I can. But equally, I do not feel like I am currently addicted to alcohol. So it doesn’t feel right for me to call myself an alcoholic these days, that I’m 11 years sober.

Eric Zimmer  44:37

Yeah, I think I still refer to myself as an alcoholic and addict, but I do it because it’s just a shorthand for me of saying something similar to what you just said, Yeah, I clearly am not addicted to alcohol, because I haven’t used it. I haven’t used a mind altering chemical in 15 years, so I’m clearly not addicted. I like the neuro scientific thing, because the other. There danger. This is the thought that sometimes gets in my brain, and it is the one that says, Well, sure, you use drugs and alcohol because you didn’t know how to cope with the world, but now you know how to cope with the world. So perhaps, and that’s what got me, after eight years of sobriety, back to drinking. It was that exact line of thinking. You’ve done all this work, you’ve done all this recovery, you make good decisions in all aspects of your life. I make sure it’ll be fine. And of course, it wasn’t. And so for me, I just basically stay with a risk reward calculus, which is the reward, if it went right, would be that a time or two a week I got a slight buzz on that would be the reward at best. The risk is everything, right? The risk is my entire life, and I’m just like, well, that’s a crazy trade. Like, I wouldn’t do that for anything else. If somebody was like, Well, you know, twice a week you could come here and you could play this game and you’d be happy for an hour, but you’re betting at the same time that if that doesn’t go right, I’ll take everything you own. I’d be, like, that’s a crazy bet. Like, no, like, that’s not, that’s another terrible so that’s kind of where I am. But I love your neuro scientific idea too, that that pathway still exists. And yeah, because that was my experience after being sober eight years and picking up and using again, was it wasn’t immediate. I didn’t immediately go back. I never went back to using heroin, but over the course of a couple years, I ended up just as sick as I had been in the first place. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  46:37

and I really do believe that would happen to me, and what you were just saying about the risk reward analysis really reminds me of that recovery saying that using or drinking is temporary fun with permanent consequences. Oh, yeah, I love that, and I think about that a lot. And also it’s the addictive voice. So I also use something called addictive voice recognition back in the early years now. Now my addictive voice is non existent. I don’t hear it. But if that voice were to pipe up, the voice saying, but you’re, you know, it’s been 11 years, surely you could just maybe have one or two. I’d be like, No, I know what that voice is, and that is just my addiction, yeah, in a different form, because it will take so many different, wily, conniving, you know, there’s that thing about it being cunning and powerful it is. So I would shut that down immediately. There’s a nuance there. Even though, in the right circles, I would use the term addict and alcoholic, yeah, because I’m not against those terms. It’s just that ordinarily, I would describe myself as an ex at it that feels more accurate to where I’m at. Yep,

Eric Zimmer  47:43

there’s a line in the book where flick, which is the version that moves to the rich London home, has a friend named Sita. Is that how you would pronounce it? Yeah, that’s right. And Sita accuses her of being manipulative. And flick says, Well, what do you mean? Manipulative? And she says, you know, massaging the narrative for your own means, and I’m reading what you said. Flick didn’t understand why that would even warrant comment. Wasn’t that what everyone did, wasn’t that just being good at life.

Catherine Gray  48:14

This came directly from my own experience, because I recall I was probably one year out from sobriety, one of my friends saying that I had become very, very manipulative. And similarly to flick, I didn’t even understand what the word meant. I couldn’t wrap my head around the word because I just had assumed that everyone did, that everyone manipulated the narrative, and tried to control how other people saw them, and tried to get the best results for them. So I’m still manipulative. Now I know that I have that in me, because it was so much a part of me first 33 years of my life, and I do often have to stand back and think, Okay, what am I trying to gain here. Am I withholding parts of information in order to make people think about me a certain way? And I really have to pull myself back and just be straight down the line, and, you know, counter that manipulative urge that I want to go with all the

Eric Zimmer  49:16

time. Yeah, the problem is that if none of that is as straightforward as just drink or don’t drink, right? Because we all are, to some degree, even without knowing it, controlling the narrative that we tell ourselves. I mean, the way we present to the world, like that, is kind of baked into us, and there’s a subtle form of it that I recognized in later years, right? There was the obvious manipulation, where I’m manipulating something to get what I want, right? Yeah, but there’s another type of manipulation, which is that I’m trying to control your emotional response. That’s

Catherine Gray  49:53

it that really hits the nail on the head. I think for that reason, sometimes I will. Protects. And then I will delete it, because I know that I am trying to admit a certain response from the person that I’m texting. And then I will bring it back, and I will remove information that is, you know, designed to evoke pity or admiration or whatever it is, you know, my manipulative author he has come up with, and I just keep it as straight as possible, for want of a better word, and that’s how I fight against it. Yeah, I do think all of us have the capacity to be manipulative, and being aware of it is just half of the battle, really.

Eric Zimmer  50:38

As you were saying that, it made me laugh a little bit. I was thinking in my mind like this being thoughtful means that I have to retype texts and emails over and, oh, like, you know, I write it out, and I’m like, hang on, let me I need to think about, you know, it’s just funny. But the subtle nuance of this that I even realized was that I was manipulating people with quote, unquote good intentions, because I would think they can’t handle what I’m going to say or what I’m going to say to them, is going to make them upset, and I don’t want them to be upset. Yeah, it’s a whole nother level of withholding honesty, which in certain situations, I think actually makes a lot of sense. And in other situations, if you’re trying to be intimate and close with people, is a terrible idea.

Catherine Gray  51:27

Yeah, it really is, because that leads to resentment. Because if you’re not being honest with people how you feel, then you’re running the danger of nurturing resentment. So it’s really hard, though I know exactly what you mean, and I like to be as nice as possible. But also have people think, well, of me, yeah,

Eric Zimmer  51:47

of course. Yeah. So there’s another great line in the book where you’re talking about flick where she realizes she’s a people pleaser, like she desperately wants to please people, but she has the unfortunate habit of displeasing people. Time, yeah, personal experience, yeah, definitely,

Catherine Gray  52:05

personal experience. I promise the entire book is an autobiography. Just the lines that you’re plucking out are really, are really just things that I’ve experienced. That is one of the things that I think is so true of people who come into recovery, and just people in general, is that so many of us intend to be or are driven to people pleasing, and then we accidentally end up people displeasing, because actually, it doesn’t really work. It just ends up going very, very wrong. And so that’s something that I fight against on daily basis as well. It’s a lifelong battle there.

Eric Zimmer  52:41

What I’ve found is the longer I sort of, I never know what to call it. I don’t really like the phrase, the longer I’m on my journey, or the deeper I go into trying to be the best version of myself, maybe that’s the best way to say it. The deeper I go into that, the more subtleties I see that 10 years ago, I would never have seen, I never would have thought of that way in which I am, you know, not being the best version of myself. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  53:07

it’s so true. And I continually have a problem with my relationship with the word no, and I really have to work on that, especially with from a work point of view, because I want people to like me, and therefore I say yes to far too much, and then I burn out. So it’s something that I do battle with very regular basis.

Eric Zimmer  53:31

I wrestle with this a little bit too, and some of it is that I don’t want to say no to people. The other thing that drives it, and I don’t know if this is part of it for you, but when you’re like you, you’re an author, right? You make your living by people buying your things, right? So when people ask you to do something, it’s often the reason you do it is because you’re getting your stuff in front of other people. And so there’s certainly a I don’t want to say no to people, but then there’s also, in my case, a fear, like, I can’t turn down any opportunity. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  54:01

a fear of becoming irrelevant. Yes, yes, they’re all going away. Have to go and work in tefca on the counter. You know, every creative has that fear, because they’ve often worked so hard to get where they are right, and spent so many years. I mean, I’ve spent many years doing second jobs and scrambling to get by, and it’s only really in the last few years that things have really come together. So there is a constant alarm, but it might all disappear overnight just because you’ve said no to coming on one event.

Eric Zimmer  54:37

You didn’t go to that one place you were asked to speak where there were six people and it just it tanked your entire career late in the book. This quote from Carl Jung that goes something like, we are not what has happened to us comes up and one of the characters reacts fairly strongly to that idea. Say more. Yeah.

Catherine Gray  54:58

So the exact quote is. Something like we are not what has happened to us. We are what we choose to become. And I take some serious umbrage to the first part of that quote, that we’re not what’s happened to us, and so does the character in the book flick, because I think that’s naive, right? I really don’t think that you can erase the first 18 years of your life or whatever, and start afresh and decide who you’re going to become now that you’re an adult, and you’re supposedly sort of free of your childhood and your parental influence, because I just don’t think that ever the case. I mean, we now know. We now know so much more about it. We know that the body stores early experiences and the nervous system reacts before we do consciously, and that’s why often we have outsized reactions to things, because they remind us of the childhood wound and all that sort of thing. So I do really think that in order to move past that and start to be able to choose who you become, you really have to go deep and do the work at the risk of sounds like a cliche. Otherwise, if you don’t have the awareness of why you say, for instance, react in an outsized way, if somebody delays responding to your message and knowing why that hurts, you can’t choose your reaction. So I do see it in so many people that I think in our 20s, we often just sort of ricochet around in reaction to our childhood and often repeat our parents mistakes, or go too far the other way and go the polar opposite. And it’s only really in our 30s, 40s and beyond that, we begin to be able to choose who we’re going to become, and make more conscious decisions about the person we want to be and how we want to parent. So it was something that I really wanted to sum up in the book, and I feel satisfied that I have, yeah, I

Eric Zimmer  56:57

think so. I was walking down the street the other day and I saw a quote on a card from Jack Kerouac, and I don’t remember it exactly, but it said something like, nothing behind me and everything ahead of me about being on the road. And I was like, Well, no, not exactly. Like, no, we are a result of the countless causes and conditions that have come together to make us who we are today. Yeah, you can’t unwind that far enough, right? Even if you start to go, Well, I think I might be this way. We’re just making it up to a certain degree. Am I that way because my mom did this? Or am I that way because Johnny in third grade punched me over a juice box? Or do I think that because some musician I loved when I was 14 said, I mean, it’s just this. Can’t sort it out. Yeah, you can make some attempts to see what some of the big things were, but we never really know fully. No,

Catherine Gray  57:48

we don’t, but I think there is a middle ground to be found. So something that I do tend to do is I’ve been in and out of therapy. I’ve done therapy really three big times in my life, but I’ve always had an end in sight, and for me, I don’t want to stay in forever, because I do think that there is a happy medium to be found between it’s that bumper sticker don’t look that you’re not going that way. You do need to look at that, but then you also need to go that way. Yes. So I think both can be true, that what has come behind us, you know, we’ve already been through, doesn’t form where we go. But then also that there is a point where you’ve done enough work on it that you can really start to choose your own trajectory.

Eric Zimmer  58:36

Can we use the line near the end of the book to sum that up, or is that too much, I

Catherine Gray  58:41

think we can So towards the end of the book, this isn’t too much of a spoiler, because there’s plenty in the book that isn’t surprised with lots of twists and turns, you know, the murder mystery and another big reveal. But towards the end of the book, one of the versions of her flick rewrites that Carl young quote, and it becomes we are what had happened to us, but now I choose who I become, and if anything could sum up my motto for life, it would be that I think that’s

Eric Zimmer  59:09

a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Catherine, it’s always such a pleasure to have you on I can’t recommend the new book highly enough. I’ve loved all your writing, but this novel, I was so excited I just read it, and was one of those I didn’t want to put it down, kind of books from start to end. So bravo.

Catherine Gray  59:25

Thank you.