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Episode Transcript:

00:02:17 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Christy, welcome to the show.

00:02:18 – Christy Osborne
Hey Eric. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here today.

00:02:22 – Eric Zimmer
I’m excited to talk with you about your new book, which is called Love Love Life Sober, a 40 day alcohol fast to rediscover your joy, improve your health, and renew your mind. But before we get into that, we will start in the way that we customarily do, which is with the parable. And in that parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild. And they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. 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 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.

00:03:12 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. Thank you so much for the question. I was actually thinking about this, obviously, knowing I was coming on today, and I was coaching a lady this morning who I coach women who want to break free or take a break from alcohol. And we were talking a lot about this idea of creating more space. And I think when we’re talking about alcohol or any addiction or any negative behavior or habit we want to change, we focus so much on not feeding. Right. The bad wolf, and we don’t focus so much on feeding the good wolf, but also what to feed it. Right. And so, for example, with this lady this morning when we were talking about space, it was the space to joyfully move her body and to eat healthy and to have time for herself and to begin enjoying music and all of these things. And so when we’re talking about this, in the scheme of, I think, alcohol. Right. It’s what can you feed the good wolf with to make yourself feel better and the person that you end up wanting to be. And so, yeah, that’s what I thought of today when I was preparing for today.

00:04:19 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I really love that response, because one of the things that I got out of your book that I thought was useful was when you hear 40 day alcohol fashion, it’s easy to think of like a sober January or a dry, I don’t know how many months now have a dry version of them associated with them, right.

00:04:38 – Christy Osborne
Pretty much all of them.

00:04:39 – Eric Zimmer
And while that’s a lovely idea, mostly what people do is just not drink for that month. And your book is really saying, let’s use this time that a yes, you’re ideally not going to be drinking, but let’s explore your relationship with alcohol during that time. Why are you doing it? What are you getting from it? What might the benefits of not doing it? And your book does a great job of walking through a lot of those things. And that’s why I think it’s a really useful addition to this sort of dry January movement, which, again, is valuable. But if you just don’t drink for 30 days, nothing’s different. I mean, you’re probably healthier in many ways at the end of it. But the way you think about the world may not be that different. Whereas your program gives you an opportunity to do that.

00:05:28 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, I talk about in the book that I did all of those things, right. I did the dry Januarys, the sober Octobers, and it’s exactly what you said. I ended up drinking. Nothing really changed as far as the behavior of drinking. And there was one particular dry January where February rolled around and I drank even more because I kind of had proven to myself that I didn’t have a quote unquote problem and so that I could continue on. And there was no real look at the reasons behind why I was drinking. It was just this white knuckle figure out how to not drink for 30 days and get through it as fast as possible. And that didn’t work for me. And so I obviously wanted to try something different. What I really, really wanted to do, when it got to the point where I wanted to seriously look at my drinking, is I wanted to lose the desire to drink. I didn’t want to have that desire. I wanted to have freedom from alcohol.

00:06:21 – Eric Zimmer
I’ve thought before about what did I get out of twelve step programs that helped me get sober? Because I have drifted away from them over the years for a variety of different reasons. And one of the things that I got out of them that I thought was like, this is a critical component, is a method for changing the way that we view the world and think about alcohol. And that’s what the twelve steps ideally will do. And so, again, this is a different version of that, but there’s a very clear path here to walking through that. And so I’d like to get into some of that. But first, maybe just tell us a little bit about what brought you to the point.

00:07:04 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:07:05 – Eric Zimmer
What life was like when you wanted to change your relationship with alcohol.

00:07:10 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, I grew up not drinking a lot. Like, I went to USC for college in southern California, a big greek school. I was in a sorority. But even then it was very measured. I wanted to be very much in control. And as I kind of look back, there was definitely upticks for various reasons. I went to law school. It kind of became this way of reward at the end of a hard day of studying. And then I moved to the UK right after I graduated law school. And it was the thing that everybody was doing over here to connect, to meet new people. Then I became a mom, and then it was the thing that all the moms were doing as, again, the reward aspect of it. A long, hard day with babies, and I was alone in a foreign country with no family, and every mom that I looked at was using wine as the reward for being a mom. And so it was an incremental, slow uptick in the drinking. And I never did have this massive, rock bottom moment. I’ve heard you tell your sobriety story, and I don’t think I necessarily blew up my life. I could have gotten there. Don’t get me wrong. Like, it could have gotten there, but it was the slow, incremental uptick in the drinking and using it for various reasons and giving the wine various jobs. And then my own mother passed away in 2018. And growing up, she didn’t drink, but in the last kind of ten years of her life, she discovered alcohol, and it changed her. It kind of wrecked our relationship. And so her death was very traumatic for me because I was mourning the loss of this mother who was my best friend growing up, but then who we had this great chasm of distance between us when she passed. And so what did I do to manage all those really hard emotions? I drank. And people always ask me, were you, you know, at home on the couch drinker, or were you the going out drinker? And I was both. But at the same time, it looked very similar to my friends. I didn’t know anybody that didn’t drink. I knew that everybody, you know, or at least I thought I did. Thank you, social media. Thank you, Instagram, that everyone was having the wine at the end of the day because the homework was hard with the kids or to let loose on a Friday night. And so it didn’t feel like it looked any different. And so that was one of the things, I think, that kept me stuck, right? A little bit longer. But also, this idea of maybe my drinking’s not bad enough, right? I could never, ever have pictured myself walking into an AA meeting and saying, hi, I’m Christy. I’m an alcoholic. I just couldn’t picture it because I thought, okay, that feels like it could be a lot different than the way that I’m drinking. And so I felt really alone. I felt really, really alone and lost. And I honestly didn’t feel like I had anyone to talk to. And this is in 2020, when the sober, curious movement, I think, is just then gaining traction. So, thankfully, there was then a lot to read and learn about over the course of the pandemic when I started my work. But it was very isolating and feeling very alone and feeling like, is this something I even need to address if nobody else is? And so, yeah, that’s kind of how it all started.

00:10:14 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting you bring up my addiction story, because there’s two parts to it. And normally, part one is what I reference. Two is I stayed sober about eight years, and I began to drink again. And I never went back to doing hard drugs, but I was drinking and I was smoking marijuana, and my bottom was not the bottom. Like, I was doing well on all external measures. I’d been just promoted. I had the best job I ever had. I had a nice home, I had a nice car. I mean, all these things were okay, and yet I sort of knew I was dying inside. And yet it was hard. It was harder for me because there was a voice that was like, oh, it’s not that bad the first time, there was no sort. If that voice had tried even that, I’d have been like everybody knew, like, okay, that’s ridiculous. This time around, though, however, from the outside, it didn’t look that bad. And yet inside was really where I was so sick. You know, I was lucky to be able to recognize I was as sick that time as I was the first time. It’s just that circumstances had been different.

00:11:25 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:11:25 – Eric Zimmer
When it comes to your own recovery, let’s talk a little bit about that idea of alcoholic, because I think this is one of the things the sober, curious movement has been of the most service to the world, I think, which is to get people away from having to think of identifying as alcoholic as the way to get better. So what was it that you identified in yourself that made you say, okay, I may not be alcoholic, but I need to do something about this.

00:11:55 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. And I want to always start this conversation. Conversation by saying that, like, no, absolutely nothing against AA and the people that find that label empowering, like, that is awesome. It’s just that it doesn’t work and it doesn’t feel good for everybody. Right. And so to your point, too, of everything kind of looking good, and you are just promoted. You know, the morning that I stopped drinking, I was looking through my Instagram feed, and I had a really popular blog for expat amErican women living in the UK. I had just been on Sky News to commentate for the royal wedding of Harry and Meghan, and everything was, like, really glossy and pretty and all of this to the point that you said it just didn’t feel real or authentic. Like, I didn’t feel like I was representing how I really, truly felt inside. And so it was really that of just looking in the mirror one morning after a night out and just saying, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to feel this way. There’s got to be something, some path to get me to feeling better. And I automatically knew that the first thing that had to at least go. And I never said forever. In the beginning, I didn’t know what it meant. I had no idea. I didn’t know if it was going to be 30 days, 16. I had no idea. I just knew that I needed a break. And so it was just kind of this, again, like a slow burn of this feels awful. I knew I wasn’t being the best mom I could be. I definitely valued, like, at the end of the day, the glass of wine over a bedtime story or hanging out with my kids, because that felt like the thing that was mine. And, like, let’s get those kids into bed as fast as possible so I can sit on the couch and have the wine. And it was just one of these slow things. And I just woke up and I’m like, this is not who I am. This is so inauthentic. That’s not the real me that I’m portraying. And I’ve got to do something.

00:13:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You talk a lot in the book about sort of this mommy wine culture that’s out there. Share a little bit about what that is. I think a lot of people will know. I mean, you go anywhere and you just see these clever little signs that actually don’t seem that clever about moms and drinking, but talk a little bit about that.

00:14:00 – Christy Osborne
And my mommy wine culture is the pervasive messaging. Right. That we as mothers, need wine in order to parent because they’re really hard work. And when I really drilled down on the fact that that was the message that not only I was sending my kids, but to the other people that were following me, for example, on social media, that was not the woman that I wanted to be. Right. And all you have to do is literally stroll through target and you see mommy wine culture everywhere on the tumblers and the baby onesies, and it’s all about, you know, the baby wines whilst. And so I wine w I n e. If you look at Etsy, I think there’s, at the time of writing the book, there were 70,000 products on Etsy promoting kind of this wine culture and mommy wine culture. Yeah. And I was also the one, by the way, that gifted these tumblers and, like, thought these were really cute and had the cocktail napkins and all. I had all of it, but it was just really drilling down to, like, is this true? Also, is alcohol helping me be a better mom? Is that true for me? And it wasn’t. And so it was challenging this idea. And during the pandemic, actually, Tropicana, the orange juice company, came out with this ad, and it was a bunch of actresses. I’ll leave their names out of it. But hiding in bathrooms or the garage in order to make a mimosa, and they showed them, like, hiding from their families and their kids. And it was like, yeah, the tagline of the campaign was take a me moment, like, as a mimosa. But for me, I remember thinking, and I was very early into my surprise at that point, and I was just thinking, this is not the message that we need to be sending to mothers during a global pandemic, that you should hide from your kids and drink in your closet to survive.

00:15:42 – Eric Zimmer
Hiding your drinking is generally a bad sign just right across the board. Like, that’s a pretty good indicator that call yourself what you want, but you may need to examine. But I do think that is really true, that I think the message that’s being sent there is two. First is that kids are so hard that you need a real way to cope with that. And there’s some truth in the fact that parenting is difficult, right?

00:16:07 – Christy Osborne
Oh, 100%.

00:16:08 – Eric Zimmer
The second message is that the way to cope with any difficulty is through alcohol. And we tolerate it in that sense. But there’s lots of other places where if we said it that explicitly, you might. People might be like, well, hang on a second. Like, if I was like, I have such bad depression, and the thing that I do is I turn to a white claw hard seltzer. Right? Most people would look at that and be like, dude, that’s a bad idea. But to say it, taking care of my kids is a little bit different.

00:16:40 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. And the other side of that, too, is, what if you switched up the drug? Right? Like, what if you said, I just need that line of cocaine or that, or that little bit of heroin in order to get me through these kids, because they’re really hard work. And then that, of course, opens up the whole thing of, well, why are they different? And why is alcohol so socially acceptable? And why is it pushed on mothers as the thing that we need in order to parent?

00:17:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. The whole, I’m going to celebrate. I want to be careful not to be judgmental here. To each their own. Right? But I have found this whole I’m celebrating my near dependence on alcohol to be a strange thing. Maybe it’s that when I started, I was underage, and the last thing I wanted the world to know was that I drank all the time. Now, this was a long time ago, maybe the culture was very different. I don’t know. But to me, it was never something that I was going to, like outwardly proclaim to the world, yeah, yeah.

00:17:39 – Christy Osborne
Oh, my gosh.

00:17:40 – Eric Zimmer
That this is my thing. But that is very much the culture. You see it certainly in the wine mom culture. I see it a lot in the retired woman culture also. I see a lot of it there. It’s probably lots of other places. You talk a little bit about how pervasive alcohol is in our culture, and it really is everywhere.

00:18:00 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, it is. And to your point of this becoming, this almost point of being loud and proud about, I recently saw there was an Instagram post, and it was a gal using a tumbler to go to her son’s soccer game, filling it with vodka, but then putting a teabag like label hanging outside the yeti or whatever. So that. And the line was, yeah, where my soccer mom’s at? And it literally has, of course, millions of likes. And all these people being like, yeah, that’s what I do. And I was just like, when did that happen? Because I don’t remember going to my brother’s soccer games and mom’s having yeti tumblers of white claw or whatever it is on the sidelines.

00:18:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it is very interesting. And the flip side of it is shame perpetrates this. Right? So it’s a strange thing that’s sort of happening, which is, on one hand, we’re celebrating being this way, and yet on the other hand, the people who are really struggling with it, they may be superficially buying that message, but inside they feel shame about how much they’re drinking. So it’s this weird contradiction.

00:19:07 – Christy Osborne
It is this weird contradiction. And it also means that, you know, women have to kind of want any of anyone, really. But I say women, because I coach women, have to almost live up to this thing of keeping alcohol cute and making it look fun, but if you get hooked on it, oh, my gosh, no. Then you are other, and there is something wrong with you, and then you have, you know, all the things that come with that, the stigma and all of that. And so that’s where, obviously, the shame kicks in. And the shame part is so important to talk about, because when we’re stuck in shame, we are in our survival part of our brain, and we are not in our prefrontal cortex. We can’t make good decisions. And so we want to get out of that place as fast as possible. And from personal experience, I know that the easy way out is wine when you’re stuck in it because.

00:19:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:19:54 – Christy Osborne
It shifts the emotion real fast.

00:19:55 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It is such a pernicious situation once you’re in its grips. Right. Because you have alcohol, which is actively damaging your prefrontal cortex and your executive function, your ability to make good decisions. So you’ve got that happening, and then, like you said, you’ve got the shame happening, which is further shifting away from your prefrontal cortex and the ability to make decisions. And you have a great emotional strain. And the way you cope with that emotional strain is you drink, and it’s easy to see how this, just once you’re in it, it tends to be no direction but down.

00:20:32 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:20:32 – Eric Zimmer
And again, that’s not for everybody. Right. Plenty of people moderate just fine. And so this is not, at least from my perspective, not an alcohol is a bad thing. It’s just that I think there’s a lot more people struggling with it than we might know.

00:20:48 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. And we’re in a day and age now, right, where we also do know so much more about it. And there is so much research on Gen Z and the upcoming generations not drinking as much as we did, because they know the health ramifications of it, and they’ve probably seen parents struggle with it. There’s the whole idea that they also have smartphones. Right. So the reason that we’re using alcohol, maybe to connect or to have fun, they just have to open up TikTok. And so we’re seeing, I think, this shift from the younger generations using it as much. But I think a lot of that has to do with. With everything that we’re learning about how it does. It is hard. It is hard. And moderation. Plenty of people can do it, but it can be tricky. Once you’ve given alcohol jobs, once you’ve leaned in, it’s hard.

00:21:54 – Eric Zimmer
I want to come back to that giving alcohol jobs thing in 1 second, but I want to ask a question, because you’re closer to the research on all this than I am. Are we seeing in Gen Z, a drop in using substances overall, or are we seeing a drop in alcohol with marijuana maybe making up more of that gap? I’m just. I’m just curious.

00:22:13 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, definitely less alcohol. And there is research to suggest, because marijuana is legal in a lot of states now and more prevalent, that that’s had an uptick. I don’t know the exact data on that, but I know that a lot of kids are drinking a lot less. They’re drinking a lot less in college, which is a good thing.

00:22:32 – Eric Zimmer
100%. 100%. Okay, let’s come back to this line you just used, giving alcohol jobs. What does that mean when we are giving alcohol jobs?

00:22:41 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. So when I looked back at the reasons why I was drinking, it was for connection, it was for coping, for example, for the loss of my mom. I also really believed that wine was helping me sleep because, listen, if I had two glasses of cabernet, I fell asleep, I passed out. I didn’t actually fall asleep. So I was giving alcohol all these jobs. And when I looked at my wine and when I started talking through this with clients, that was one of the questions that really resonated with them. I would say, well, why are you drinking? But when I said to them, what is the job that you are giving to that glass of wine? It was all of a sudden just a lot more clear of the reason, kind of behind the why and all of that. And another way to ask that is, what is the unmet need? What do you actually need when you’re pouring that glass of wine? Is it rest? Is it connection? Is it fun? Is it coping? Is it because there’s a really hard emotion that you don’t want to feel because you weren’t taught to feel it? And so I just think it’s a really good way of getting behind the reasons. And then you get to ask the amazing follow up question, right, of is that true? Is alcohol doing that job? And I know that this is a really blanket statement and can feel really untrue to anybody that’s stuck in the drinking cycle, but alcohol actually does all the opposite things of what we’re drinking for. Right. Disconnects us, makes us more tired, zaps our energy, spikes our cortisol, all the things.

00:24:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I always talk about addiction and substances because there’s this strange nuance to them. Right. The first is that when we first started using it, it may have done those jobs semi well. Right. That’s thing one. Right. And this gets to the learning model of why we become dependent on substances, is that we learn over time. But the other thing is that if it didn’t work at all, this would be so much easier. Like if you took a drink and you didn’t feel temporarily a little bit better, it would be easy to see through this. But the fact is, it continues to do something that, at least initially, and my experience is that initially gets smaller and smaller and the benefit gets smaller and smaller as the costs go up and up and up. But it’s the fact that it does do something that makes it hard, because, again, it would be easy to see through if it did nothing. But I think you’re right. If we look honestly at anybody who’s got some degree of dependence on alcohol, or any substance for that matter, because I think they’re all essentially the same in this regard, the thing that we wanted it to do, the perfectly good reason that we may have started it, it doesn’t fix that anymore. And like you said, it makes most everything worse over time.

00:25:22 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, and that is so true. And this is the reason that people get stuck on it. Right? And when I did the research around dopamine and dynorphin and all of the ways that our body actually chemically reacts to alcohol, this is when this massive light bulb went off for me and I was like, oh my gosh, everybody needs to know this. And that is that, that feel good feeling. The dopamine that you get, the reaction from the glass of whatever you’re having is actually between 20 and 30 minutes, and then your body is desperate to get back to homeostasis basis. So it pumps you with this downer called dynorphin. And you cannot replicate that feel good feeling with the second glass. Sometimes really feels like you can, but scientifically, looking at the way our brain works, you can’t. And so that was, I was like, okay, so yes, it did the thing for 20 minutes, but then it wrecked three days after that.

00:26:12 – Eric Zimmer
Precisely. And you keep chasing it. That’s the thing, right? Because again, if you had one drink and afterwards you were like, oh, okay, well, that was a good feeling. It’s gone, I’m not going to get it from the second drink. And you just said, okay, enough. Right? Well, you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast because you’d be a normal human being, probably. But those of us that relate to this go, oh, yeah, but one more will do it, one more will do it. I’ll get there, I’ll get there, I’ll get there. Right? You just keep going. And the cost keeps escalating.

00:26:42 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. And so when I kind of learned that, I was like, well, it became a no brainer. And when you factor in cortisol and adrenaline and the fact that that can stay raised for seven to ten days, then after you’ve even had a small amount to drink, then it’s like, is the 20 minutes really worth it if you’re making yourself more stressed a week later?

00:27:01 – Eric Zimmer
No, I mean, that’s the question I have to ask myself. Not that often, because it doesn’t come up very often, but every once in a while I have to do that calculus in my head.

00:27:09 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:27:09 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, yeah. One drink is the best antidepressant I’ve ever had. Like you said, it’s 20 minutes and then wreckage.

00:27:17 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, yeah.

00:27:18 – Eric Zimmer
Okay, so we’ve established the problem clearly enough here. I think let’s turn ourselves to some of the things that we can do that help us to change our relationship with drinking. So we’ve sort of talked about the core one, which is to understand what jobs we were giving it. Where do we go from there?

00:27:39 – Christy Osborne
This is the thing with all of the asking of the question is there’s so much that you can read and learn, but what I think really ends up making the change is when you do it and you feel it, when you have that experiential knowledge of, okay, I know that alcohol is going to hijack my rem sleep. You know, I can read all about how that works in the brain, but when I actually sleep, not drinking, I can compare the two. And I think if you’re a regular drinker and you haven’t ever taken a significant break before, we have a lot of data, right, of what it’s like to be a drinker, but we’re making a lot of assumptions about what it’s like being a non drinker without having tried it. So first ask the questions and then do an experiment. Try these things. What are you assuming if you’ve labeled the jobs, are those jobs really true? And the thing about finding freedom from alcohol is it obviously takes work and it doesn’t feel really good the very first time. And I’ve heard you talk about this on another podcast where, you know, 30 days might not do it.

00:28:42 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Right. Where sometimes it gets worse before it gets better can be the experience for some people. Some people start feeling better right away, but some people feel worse, you know?

00:28:51 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, yeah. And then it becomes okay. So I’m using that glass of wine for connection. So that’s my need. How do I really get that? And there’s a lot of women that I’ve coached that don’t know how to get that thing that they need to. Fun, for example, is a really big one. It’s like, the only way I know how to have fun is by drinking. I don’t remember what I even like to do. I coach a lot of women with that. You know, I had a gal recently who went back to a pottery class or a dance class because that’s what they enjoyed in high school, pre drinking. And so it’s really about getting to know the things that then can fill those unmet needs that you’re using for wine. And if you keep doing that in a way where you’re giving yourself a ton of grace and a ton of self compassion. And by that, I also mean if you’re on a break from alcohol and you’re looking at your relationship and you have a drink, you don’t necessarily have to go back to day one. If counting days doesn’t work for you, let’s figure out what you learned from that growth point. And so that also is super, super important because, like, we touched on shame briefly, that’s not going to help us at all. But if we can come to a place of grace, compassion, curiosity of just would my life be better without this? Would I feel better? How do I want to feel? How is alcohol playing into that? Asking the questions and doing the experiment and getting to the truth of all of it is just. That’s what helped me so much.

00:30:14 – Eric Zimmer
The phrase you just use there, growth point, is one that I really like. What you mean by growth point is, let’s say I’m trying to do a 40 day alcohol fast, and on day seven, I end up having a few drinks. Right. Instead of looking at it as a failure, we look at that as a growth point. It’s a chance to learn something, right? And I think that is really important because I think most people, if they’re trying to change their relationship with a substance, are going to have lots of, quote unquote, what look like failures, right? Like, even everything you do up to the last time, when you get, like, I think about it, like there was a day, you know, 15 years ago was the last time I had any substance. But there were lots of things that I tried before that that didn’t, quote unquote work, that actually were part of getting me to whatever magic puzzle pieces clicked together. 15 years ago, it was those times that I tried and it didn’t work, that were part of the solution. They were part of the answer. And I think that that’s so important. And I think you do a great job of really highlighting that. Because if we take failure to either mean we’re bad people, so we feel bad about ourselves, and the way we cope with that is to drink, or we take failure to mean weakness. Can’t do it. I’ve known so many people who just go, I can’t. You might have been able to, but I won’t be able to. I can’t. And the lens to get through that is, at least that, I think, is you just haven’t figured it out yet. We haven’t figured it out yet. What’s your combination? What’s your puzzle pieces that come together that are going to lead to you having more freedom? I just love the way you talk about that. And I love that idea of growth point.

00:31:59 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. I mean, I always use the example, a couple examples. One is if you fell at like the 20 miles marker of a marathon, I’m not a runner, but would you go back to the starting line? No. You would get up and you would finish the race, right? Or for the moms out there, your little toddlers learning how to walk, they keep falling down. Do you say, you’re horrible at this, stop trying? No. You say, get up and try again. And for some reason, with the drinking thing, we feel like we have to make it perfect. And if it’s not, then, as you said, we’re somehow failures, that we’re not going to be able to do it. And then for a lot of people, this idea of you are then this alcoholic, you’re never going to be able to have any fun. You’re going to have to go to meetings for the rest of your life. That kind of narrative can be really scary. So exactly what you said. It’s about figuring out what works for you. And that’s what I love so much about your story. And also, so this podcast is, you get to pick and choose, right? Because push comes to shove, it’s about choice. And it’s also, this is, like, beautiful work that we get to do. We don’t have to do this. We get to do it. And sobriety is a gift and a blessing. It’s not something that I had to do. It’s something I got to do. And, like, I’m so grateful that I got to do it.

00:33:10 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a really lovely reframing. And you do that a lot in the book, sort of the reframing from deprivation to what am I giving myself? Right? I’m giving myself good health. I’m giving myself better sleep. I’m giving myself more clarity instead of I’m taking this thing away from me. I always share this story because I think it’s such a great one around these growth points, and it’s from a client of mine. She figured this out. I did not figure it out, but she was having trouble getting to complete abstinence. And so she started this thing where every day she was sober, she put a marble in a jar. And it was amazing because what. What we got to see was this jar just filling up and filling up and filling up, right. And so instead of looking at the one day, let’s say it was one or two days a month, that it didn’t work. What we saw was this accumulation of sober days. We were focusing on the good there, not the bad. And I think that can be a really important thing to be able to do, is to recognize, like, okay, I’m not perfect, but, wow, I have 22 sober days last month. That’s better than the month before where I had zero. And that’s the way some people get there. A progress like that, other people are able to sort of just stop. But lots of people. It’s more a process than that.

00:34:29 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. And progress can look so many different ways. Like, I was chatting with a client recently, and we were talking about she had had a few days drinking that week, but what she did was she stopped before those drinks, and she actually took out her journal, right? And she wrote down why. And she. And she journaled through cravings that she then would overcome and all of this. And so I said to her, she came to the call, and she’s like, I wasn’t perfect. And I drank four days this week, or whatever it was. And I was like, wait, can we talk about that journal situation that you just read to me? Because that progress of getting behind of the why and figuring out why you’re doing this and delaying the craving and all of that, that is such incredible progress. And to your point, with the marble in the jar, I love that so much. Sometimes what I do with clients is I have them print out a calendar, and then we highlight the days, and then we take the percentage at the end. I’ve created a fun little celebration tracker to go along with the book. Kind of similar, where let’s figure out, let’s celebrate the wins as opposed to focusing on being perfect. So. I love that so much.

00:35:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s so important. Let’s talk about thoughts. You talk about taking every thought captive. What do you mean by that?

00:35:38 – Christy Osborne
So even if when we’re talking about the whys, right, that’s a thought. Like, I am drinking to relax, or I am drinking because I want to connect. And so the battlefield of all of this is going on in our minds, and we are not used to listening to our thoughts. We’re very used to thoughts kind of calling the shots and going along with what they say. And it’s so funny because we’re having this conversation relatively close to when the cute Pixar movie, now it’s just fallen out of my head. Inside out, too, has just come out. And I went with the kids. And it was just a really fun way of kind of showing what’s going on in your brain. But looking at your thoughts, and your thoughts don’t necessarily have to be true. We have been conditioned for a number and number of years to believe various things about alcohol, but also various things about lots of things in our life. And so it’s taking those thoughts captive and asking whether they’re true or not. I work a lot with women who come with a list of, like, shoulds, right? I should be doing this. I have to do this. I should be doing this. I need to host this party. I have to run all these committees. And it’s like, well, let’s take that thought out and let’s put some light on it and ask ourselves, is this really true or are you putting that on yourself? And if you’re putting this expectation on yourself, how is that serving you? And so it’s just getting really, really clear about what we’re thinking and which is something that we’re not trained to do and something that takes practice and asking ourselves if that thought is true and if it’s serving us or not. And if it’s not serving us, why are we thinking it? Why are we holding onto it? Why are we letting ourselves mind spiral on something?

00:37:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love that. What you just said about that. Is it serving me? One of my favorites is with thoughts to look and say, is this useful? Is this actually useful in getting me to where I want to go? Because truth, it could go either way. You could be like, well, maybe, I don’t know, like, is it useful? And I think so often we’re making up the stories about things, we’re giving things their meaning and interpretation. And if we can, like you said, take our thoughts out and really examine them and say, okay, you know, is this true? And also, is it useful, right? Or is it serving me? To use your phrase, we’re not trained to do it and it’s really hard to do. And the mind is really slippery. You have a lot of journaling in this book, and I assume that’s why. Because things in our head are slippery.

00:37:58 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. And pulling it out, putting it on paper so that you can actually see it and examine it is a really important, I think, exercise, for sure.

00:38:05 – Eric Zimmer
Talk to me about one thing at a time. What do you mean by that?

00:38:09 – Christy Osborne
So I think the idea of one day at a time could potentially have this twelve step stigma attached to it. Right. Where you’re white knuckling, you’re going to have to be in this forever, this is going to feel hard and heavy, and you’re going to be in this deprived place for the rest of your life. Life. It can be really, really overwhelming to people. However, in the beginning of a alcohol free journey, an alcohol freedom journey, it can be really, really helpful, because these hard things that we’re talking about, examining our thoughts, managing cravings, all of that are actually temporary. And a good night’s sleep fixes a lot of things. And so in the very beginning, one day at a time, while you’re also doing this work of discovering, like, the reasons behind your dream drinking and grace and compassion, I think, can be really, really helpful. But then what happens is, or at least happened for me, is the one day at a time, then just became. I don’t think about alcohol anymore. I’ve lost the desire to drink. I don’t struggle with this. And so I think one day at a time can be really helpful in the beginning, but it can also feel heavy depending on how you’re looking at it.

00:39:14 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. And I think that’s the big promise, which is that there is a way in which it seems impossible, right. But there will come a day where you don’t want a drink. And again, that seemed impossible to me in the beginning.

00:39:28 – Christy Osborne
Me too.

00:39:29 – Eric Zimmer
Literally. I mean, I would hear that and I would think that there’s no way, like, all I want is a drink, right? And I want it so bad. And yet the problem, like, for most of us, if we’re able to stay sober for a period of time, it goes away. It just disappears, which is bizarre. It’s bizarre to me, the level of non reaction to alcohol that I have right before this interview. I’m in a studio here, and they entertain here. And so I went. I had a sandwich, and I went to the refrigerator and I opened it up and I put the sandwich in. And since they do have events here, it is just stocked with beer and hard seltzer and all kinds of stuff. It might as well have been a fridge full of, like, cow piss. I mean, it just didn’t have any. Like, it didn’t gross me out. I guess if it was a fridge full of cow piss, I would have a stronger reaction than I did. I didn’t think about it. I wasn’t like, oh, that’s alcohol. That’s. Careful. I better not have it. I just, like, didn’t even really think about it.

00:40:31 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, I love that so much. When you were saying that, I was thinking last summer even, I took my daughter to Taylor Swift in LA and I was, like, very aware of, like, the mom’s drinking and thinking to my myself, oh, my gosh, they’re not going to even get to, like, the third era because they’re going to be feeling awful. And then I just took her this last weekend because she came to London then a year later and it was everywhere. And I got in the car and I was like, oh, I didn’t even really notice it this time.

00:40:56 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:40:56 – Christy Osborne
You know?

00:40:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I always find it a little bit, for me, of a warning sign if I start noticing it, right? Like, if I suddenly am, like, noticing, like, people’s like, oh, there’s a glass of wine over there and there’s someone else has got tequila. And, like, if starts pulling my attention, even subtly, I usually just ask myself, like, okay, what’s going on inside? Because that is almost non existent for me most of the time, which I think we’re both sharing this in a message of hope for people. Because if I had to live the way I felt early on with this feeling, like I was torn in two, like, half of me being like, you can’t do it, and the other half of me being like, you have to do it, like, if I had to live the rest of my life that way, it would be awful. It’s an awful feeling.

00:42:03 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. Yeah.

00:42:04 – Eric Zimmer
But it goes away, which is the good news. Or none of us would actually probably manage to stay sober if you felt that way all the time.

00:42:12 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. That’s cognitive dissonance at its finest. Right. I was just gonna say it’s just that I really want it, but I don’t want it and all of that. And that’s why if you get under the subconscious conditioning, under all these reasons, under these assumptions, under the jobs, whatever you want to call it, and kind of call that stuff out, but then also, also feel it and feel the difference, that’s when you get to start, I think, feeling this hope, and I love that so much because that’s all I want, is this to be a conversation of hope and freedom and all of that and for people not to feel alone. If you feel like you’re drinking, looks like everybody else around you, but you know in your soul that it’s not feeling good.

00:42:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. And that’s the ultimate measure, right. It’s not about how often you drink or what time of day you drink or whether you’ve had a DUI or. Those are not the thing, right. The thing is, how do you feel about it? And most people know how they feel about it, right. If you ask yourself that, you know, there’s something in you that goes, ugh. Ugh, right. Doesn’t feel right. That doesn’t mean you get sober. I mean, I didn’t feel right for a long time. I ignored it as best I could. But, you know, it wasn’t that far into my substance use career where I noticed, like, something feels wrong.

00:43:32 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. I talk about in the book about values and how drinking just moved me really far away from those values that I held really dear, like, you know, dependability and honesty and learning and all of these things that had been something that was really important to me. And just the little ways that alcohol kind of chipped away at that, not being so dependable because maybe I would cancel because I had a hangover or. Or just totally, like, not learning. Not reading books because who has time to read when you’re just downing wine every night? And so that moving slowly and slowly away from the person that you feel like you want to be or what you hold as values was something that when I kind of looked back, I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, it wasn’t a massive DUI. It wasn’t all these things. It was this. And that is enough to look at it in a graceful, filled.

00:44:25 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that people often do is they get a little bit of time sober and they start to feel better, and then they survey their life, and they see all sorts of other stuff that feels like it suddenly needs to be fixed. What do you caution people to do in that situation?

00:44:43 – Christy Osborne
Well, I think, first of all, if you feel like alcohol is something that you want to look at, start with that and don’t do all these other things. I have a lot of women that come to me, and they’re like, okay, I want to ditch alcohol, and I want to train for a marathon, and I want to cut gluten. And it’s like, well, let’s focus on one thing at a time, right? Because there’s so much science about habit change that says if you put too many new things in that they all end up failing. But I actually love that when alcohol then finally is out of the picture, that you do get to look at these other things, and they’re things that I don’t think, at least for me, I didn’t see it coming. Right. Things like learning to sit with heart emotions, things like learning how to express and keep boundaries because I supporting the unmet need of being alone or rest or whatever it is. And so, again, it’s kind of this work that we get to do, and I think it slowly presents itself when alcohol is out of the picture because alcohol tends to muddy all of this other stuff. I guess my advice is not to do it all at once. If you feel like alcohol is the thing that’s keeping you stuck, to focus on that and then see what comes up from it. And one of my favorite things about coaching is push comes to shove. It actually never is about alcohol. It’s about so much more about what’s underneath it.

00:45:57 – Eric Zimmer
Right?

00:45:58 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:45:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I think it’s this subtle balance because I agree with you, like, trying to take on too much. I talk about this all the time. Small steps or little by little, a little becomes a lot. These ideas. And there are also things, though, that we can do that we could add to our life that make perhaps staying off the alcohol easier. You talk about joyful movement as an example.

00:46:22 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, joyful movement 100% because of also what it does to our brain chemistry. And I think maybe some of your women listeners can relate to this. I had to actually, like, ditch the word exercise and lean into more, calling it joyful exercise because it was about the feeling good and not necessarily about how I wanted to be smaller or skinnier or change my body. That was something that came up in my journey after I did shock eating protein, because protein balances blood sugar, and if you have a more stable blood sugar, cravings aren’t going to be as intense, especially, you know, as you go throughout the day. And so there’s lots of these little things that I talk about in the book, bookending your day, starting with something in the morning, whether it’s a book or a podcast or meditation or journaling, but then also ending your day with something. So you have something at either end of the day. And this is all experimentation to see what kind of works for you. One of the things that really helped me, that also really helps clients, is, for example, if a walk is really serving you and it’s making you feel really good, and you know that at 09:00 after you drop the kids at school or whatever, that is something that’s going to set you up for success during the day is to actually get out your calendar, whether it’s a paper one or your iPhone or whatever, and put that in as a non negotiable and really have that time scheduled. And I also did that, and I have to actually come back to it sometimes right when I’m, like, busy with clients or kids and everything, it’s like, oh, I feel like I’m running on empty at the end of the day, and I look back and I didn’t get my walk, and I didn’t do my journaling, and I didn’t do my things. And so to put that in as non negotiable, especially in the beginning, was super, super helpful.

00:47:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It is interesting the way as we get busy, we tend to jettison the things that allow us to perform well enough to remain busy, I guess, would be the way to say it, you know? Or as life gets more stressful, we often, the first things that we throw out are the things that help us cope with stress.

00:48:14 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, overuse the phrase, but you really cannot pour from an empty cup. You just can’t. You cannot give to others in the same way if you’re not taking care of yourself.

00:48:23 – Eric Zimmer
We’ve sort of covered this a little bit, but I want to hit on it a little bit more directly, which is redefining self care. You say one of the most pervasive messages we face in our society, especially as women, is that drinking is a form of self care.

00:48:38 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, yeah. And again, it gets back to that. What is true, right, is if it’s supposed to make you feel better, if it’s supposed to serve you, it’s supposed to give you something like rest or coping or connection. Does alcohol really, really do that? And we’re also up against a society of social media where it’s wine as self care, but also going to get an expensive massage as self care, or anything related to the spa is self care, or shopping as self care. And it’s really looking at the truth of all that, right? Because self care might just actually be going to bed an hour early or making your budget or these things that actually set you up for success, that make you feel better and allow you to stick to your goals. But we’re up against the conditioning, just like with alcohol, where self care is like, let’s do more things, buy more things. And it doesn’t have to be that. And so, yeah, I talk about that in the book of redefine it. Like, what actually do you need? Need for me, honestly, sometimes it’s going to bed an hour before the kids and just saying, you know, they’re old enough to do this now put yourself to bed. And it’s not this, like, really flashy, exciting thing that makes a glamorous Instagram post, but it is true self care for me. Or saying no, right? Saying no to the parties, saying no to the committee, saying no to the extra responsibility at work, like that is also self care. It’s just kind of like flipping that on its head. One of the things I talk about in the book is, for example, one day waking up the run might be good self care, but also sleeping in might be self care. And a good way to measure that is what do you feel like when you get home from the run? Are you so glad you did it, or are you more exhausted? What do you feel like when you get home from that dinner party that you feel might feel, like, obligatory? Did you feel good that you went, or did it feel like a drain? And so figuring it out kind of that way. And again, it’s just going against all the pervasive social media and messaging of society and getting under the hood of, like, what’s wrong? What’s just not.

00:50:35 – Eric Zimmer
Did you, and do you encourage clients to change their relationship with social media if the messages that they are getting are consistently pointing at the wrong thing for them?

00:50:48 – Christy Osborne
It’s obviously very, very individual. One thing I do say is that if someone is enjoying it and doesn’t feel like they need to address it, is at least go in and unfollow the accounts that are promoting, for example, mommy wine culture. And the second you do that right now, the algorithm’s so smarteendez that’ll stop feeding that stuff to you. But if it feels like that ends up taking place, for example, of alcohol, like, if you feel like that’s the thing that you’re using, then to numb out, then look at how it actually is making you feel. If you’re scrolling Instagram for an hour, does it make you feel better? Does it make you feel more connected? Does it bring you joy? Or does it do the opposite of that thing you can apply? Kind of all the same questions.

00:51:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Yeah, I think that’s such a useful way to frame the up this idea is, did it end up making me feel better? Right, because self indulgence is not the same thing as self care. They could be the same activity sometimes, but sometimes not. And I think what you’re saying is, go a little bit deeper and ask yourself, like, did that actually move the needle on me? Feeling better with me? I guess I don’t do really any social media anymore, but when I did, I was able to notice this thing that about the first 15 minutes of it felt enjoyable. I was stimulated and I was like, oh, look, I see this thing. And that’s interesting. And that’s interesting. Like, it felt good. But then somewhere around the 15 to 20 minutes mark, if I paid close attention to myself, something shifted. Something shifted where it just suddenly it just didn’t feel good anymore.

00:52:21 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. So, similar to alcohol, it’s real easy.

00:52:23 – Eric Zimmer
To go right by that because you’re distracted. That’s part of why they work. The way they do, is they distract you. But there is usually a subtle feeling there.

00:52:32 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. I was just gonna say, it’s so similar to alcohol. Right, because it’s the same dopamine response.

00:52:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:52:39 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:52:40 – Eric Zimmer
Interestingly, I had not heard of dynorphin before. Let’s close with a little bit more about dynorphin, because I’ve been doing this for a decade and reading thousands of so many of these books that I can’t believe I haven’t heard of dynorphin before for. Tell me more.

00:52:54 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, so, I mean, we know about dopamine, right? It’s the feel good chemical. It’s also the learning molecule in the brain. So we learn it feels good, we cement these neural pathways in our head. But when we drink or do any substances, we get this artificial level of dopamine. And since our brains are desperate to bring us back to homeostasis, it releases a counter chemical called xynorphine, which basically brings you down. Right. It’s a set of. It’s a downer. And what ends up happening when you’re a regular drinker is your body gets so used to the incoming massive spikes of artificial dopamine that it releases more and more dynorphin. And so you cannot get or feel joy or happiness without the massive amounts of dopamine, aka alcohol, because you’re flooded with this opposing chemical. And how that looks in real life for me, was realizing that I would be sitting at my daughter’s ballet recital or my son’s baseball game, and I was like, this is not fun because there’s no alcohol, and that is because of this other thing. And it also ties into. Right, how we were talking about 20 minutes, the dopamine hits you for 20 minutes, and then this other chemical, the evil brother, whatever, comes in and does the opposite. And so it’s just a really interesting way to understand all of the neuroscience of what actually is happening and get to the truth of, is it actually doing the job that we’re drinking it for?

00:54:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. That’s one of the other things that makes addiction. I’m going to use the word. We don’t know. We could use alcohol use disorder, but I’m just going to broadly say addiction. So pernicious is that thing that you’re describing there, which is our neurochemicals are all messed up. And so we may not be producing enough of the chemicals that make us feel good, or we may be over producing the chemicals that tamp down that response. And you take the alcohol away or the substance, and you have the inability to enjoy pleasure. So then somebody says, well, go to a pottery class instead of drinking wine. And you go to the pottery class and you’re like, who cares? Like, that was stupid, right? Like, okay, that did not make me feeling better. I was uncomfortable. I didn’t know anybody. And it’s, again, why I think that having support early on in any sort of sobriety journey is so, so important. Because just to hear somebody else say, that’s a normal.

00:55:12 – Christy Osborne
Just hang in there.

00:55:13 – Eric Zimmer
Like, of course you can’t feel good, but I felt the same way. And you know what? It gets better. Like, whether it’s a coach like you, whether it’s an online group, whether it’s a twelve step program, people often ask me, like, what’s the one thing that someone has to do to get sober? I’m like, well, I would never boil it down to one thing because I think it’s complicated. But if you at gunpoint forced me, I would probably say help from other people who’ve been through it. That would probably be. If I had to make one recommendation, I’d say that one is sort of the non negotiable on the table, I think.

00:55:46 – Christy Osborne
Yes, 100%. Community. Community all the way. It’s because you don’t feel alone. Then the shame also evaporates. Because when you speak something that feels shameful in a group, that helps with the shame piece of it. And when you can hear other people saying yes. When I went to that party and turned down the glass of wine, it was so weird. And I felt like a fish out of water for 15 minutes. But then 20 minutes and I was fine and I was able to be okay, then, you know, it’s possible for you, too. And so, yes, a hundred percent, I totally agree with you. And that can come in different forms, right. Whether it is a twelve step meeting or even just connecting with the sober podcast host that you like listening to or whatever.

00:56:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that’s the thing. There are a lot of ways to get it. Like, when I got sober in 1994, there was one place to hear any of this, and it was in a twelve step room. That was it. It just didn’t exist in any meaningful way outside of that. I mean, the Internet didn’t exist. It’s so different today. I mean, we have so many resources and different ways of plugging in. And that’s the other one I always say. We used to say in AA, like, keep coming back, right? Which meant, you know, keep trying. And I think that’s the other message that I think is so important is you don’t have to keep coming back to AA. That’s not it. But keep trying, keep experimenting. Because there is a way out.

00:57:08 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. And with all the grace and compassion in yourself, knowing that alcohol is a highly addictive drug. And this is hard, but there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s a lot wrong with alcohol. And you’ll get there. You’ll get there. What you said, right? The puzzle pieces that work. And it will happen.

00:57:24 – Eric Zimmer
Well, that is a beautiful place for us to end the conversation. On that note of hope, you and I are going to talk a little bit longer, longer in the post show conversation, because I want to just talk a little bit about some of the different theories about addiction or dependency out there. There’s a disease model, there’s a learning model. There’s a self medication model. I just kind of want to talk through some of the different facets of those. We’re going to do that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you’d like to get access to that as well as ad free episodes and help support us, because we can use your help for sure, go to oneyoufeed.com dot Christy, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

00:58:06 – Christy Osborne
Thank you so much.

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Mirabai Starr
Not only do we not need the institutionalized, organized religious paths to get us to some kind of spiritual intimacy, but religion can be an obstacle to a spiritual experience. But I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

00:00:22 – 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 you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good. Wolf, thanks for joining us. Back on the show today is Mirabai Starr star, an award winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker, and a leading teacher of interspiritual dialogue. In 2020, Mirabai was honored on Watkins list of the 100 most spiritually influential living people. Drawing from 20 years of teaching philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico, Taos, Mirabai now travels the world, sharing her wisdom on contemplative living, writing as a spiritual practice, and the transformational power of grief and loss. She has authored over a dozen books, including the one discussed here, ordinary mysticism, your life as sacred ground. I also want to let all of our listeners know that we now finally have a great YouTube page, so you can watch your favorite interviews on there. You can find it on YouTube at the one you feed pod hi, Mirabai.

00:02:14 – Eric Zimmer
Welcome to the show.

00:02:16 – Mirabai Starr
Thank you so much. I can’t believe we’re here together in person.

00:02:19 – Eric Zimmer
I know. I think this is your third or fourth time on the show, and we are doing it in person at your place near Taosh. And it’s beautiful here. The mountains in the distance. It’s lovely.

00:02:31 – Mirabai Starr
It’s such a joy to work in this space.

00:02:34 – Eric Zimmer
So we’re gonna be discussing your latest book, which is called Ordinary your life as sacred ground. But before we do, we will start with the parable, like we always do. 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 and 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.

00:03:20 – Mirabai Starr
For so many years, I have been on a spiritual path, and I mixed it up with perfection and purification, like there was some kind of end result of all the spiritual practices that I had been doing and all the spiritual traditions I had been immersed in. And that end result was something like enlightenment, or in the christian language, it would be salvation. You know, each spiritual tradition has some version of an end goal. And so no matter what I did, it fell short. And so my ideas of somehow arriving at a place where I was awake and free and fully compassionate were never enough. Like, I never got there. And so I kept feeling like all I was doing was feeding the bad wolf, that I couldn’t access the good enough Wolfenhe and making sure that she would prevail. And I think I’ve just let that go. Not only I think, I know I have, and that’s incredibly liberating. So that the bad wolf and the good wolf have merged into this glorious, messy, beautiful, vibrant being. And that’s the one I feed the good enough wolf.

00:04:47 – Eric Zimmer
I like that. I like that idea. Throughout your book, this idea is really on display. This sense that in the midst of our ordinary lives, with all their challenges, and in the midst of our own emotional and behavioral things that we might call emotional or behavioral failings, that even in the midst of all that, there is some sacredness available. And like you, I think I for years had sort of a end goal, which was being enlightened so that I never felt any more pain. And as a former heroin addict, I clearly like that’s what I was aiming at, right? Like, I drove my life into the ground. I burnt it down to chase that feeling. And I think that I was able to pivot to some degree and go, oh, maybe I can get something like that out of spirituality. And that’s a much better way to pursue it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, a much better way to pursue it. But like you say, always sort of not quite getting there or having these experiences that were, you know, life changing in some ways, but then life goes back to being life, right? Right. It’s like a drug. You go up, but you gotta come back down. And so I, like you, have gotten a lot better at accepting who I am and my life, the way that it is. But that’s always an ongoing challenge, I think.

00:06:19 – Mirabai Starr
And it’s humbling. It’s humbling. Like this is it. What you see is what you get, you know, the person who wakes up in a bad mood or who eats too much or, you know, whatever it may be that we judge ourselves about. It’s easy to say it’s all sacred, but it is sometimes. Like, really, this is it. But it’s when you’re nothing. Trying to use spiritual practice as a bypass, such a great term spiritual bypass, or as a drug or as a way to check out of reality, which I think you and I, having been on a spiritual path for a long time, were probably conditioned to do. To use spirituality to get away from life, whether it’s beliefs or practices or rituals or texts, you know, and to actually show up for the full catastrophe, as orbit the Greek called it, is so much more ample and generous a way to live. And it includes everything. And everything belongs. As my friend Richard Rohr says, everything belongs.

00:07:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about change and when not to change, I guess, or when to give up trying to change, because I think there are changes that we can make in our lives and often need to make that are really positive.

00:07:43 – Mirabai Starr
Right.

00:07:44 – Eric Zimmer
And I think the more that the way I behave aligns with who I want to be inside, the more peace I have. And so there are positive changes that are worth aiming at, and we fall short of those, but doesn’t mean that they’re not worth aiming at. And there’s plenty of times where it seems to me that that needs to be set down.

00:08:03 – Mirabai Starr
Mm hmm.

00:08:04 – Eric Zimmer
And so I think a lot about when to use each thing.

00:08:08 – Mirabai Starr
I love that. Eric. I’m not saying anything goes. This is not a sloppy, you know, just whatever. It’s all sacred. And just do whatever you want and behave however you wish and do whatever you want to your body and not worry about the consequences or treat your loved ones like shit and not worry about how that affects your relationship. No, it’s not in anything, ghost. In fact, this path of reclaiming everything, everything is sacred, requires a certain rigor and discernment so that you can really show up for reality with an open heart and a clear mind and a brave way of being. It’s sort of like my interspiritual work, which you’ve spoken with me about in the past. We’ve had conversations about walking an interspiritual path and how some people see that as being somehow superficial, like just taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Whatever makes you happy. And it’s like a self gratification or something, rather than engaging deeply with one tradition and reaping the harvest of that discipline that comes with committing to a single spiritual tradition. And I’ve called that into question because I grew up in my spiritual life anyway, with that, that messaging that you should pick one path and go deep rather than explore multiple spaces. But my lived experience, Eric, was always that in encountering and cultivating intimacy with multiple spiritual spaces and traditions, I experienced great depth of transformation, of spiritual presence, that it was anything but superficial and lightweight, and a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It was deep encounters across a broad spiritual landscape. It’s the same thing with this ordinary mysticism business. It’s not like, oh, it’s okay, whatever you do is holy and you have a path. Both paths, the ordinary mystical path and the interspiritual path and the path of the feminine mystic, which you and I have also just spoken about, require that you show up as awake and committed to loving kindness as you can possibly be. And it gives you much more freedom without someone telling you the way you’re supposed to do it.

00:10:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. There’s a line in the book where you’re talking about intention. You say, to be a mystic in our times is not about renunciation, it is about intention. And then you go on to say, set your intention to uncover the jewels buried in the heart of what already is. That’s a great line. Choose to see the face of God and the face of the bus driver and the moody teenager impealing a tangerine or feeding the cat. Decide. Mean it. Open your heart and then do everything you can to keep it open. And I think that’s speaking to this commitment, right? Like, decide. Mean it. Like you’re bringing your whole self and your whole effort to this. And then you also say, but setting our intentions blesses the outcome without investing them with shame or blame if they don’t work out. That’s the flip side of it.

00:11:32 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah, that’s right. You know, I always appreciated Pema children. Always. Always. Who happen to have been just a little sidebar. My social studies teacher when I was twelve.

00:11:43 – Eric Zimmer
You have got to be kidding me.

00:11:44 – Mirabai Starr
You didn’t know that story, huh? Yeah. Before she became Pema, she was still Deirdre. And in fact, it was in my probably 6th grade year that she went off to Boulder to be with Choim Trunpa Rumpesche and become Pemachan.

00:11:59 – Eric Zimmer
That’s wild.

00:11:59 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah, so years later, yeah, Natalie Goldberg was my english teacher. Palma Chodron was our social studies teacher. Ramdas and Trampa and all of the characters came through Taos in those days to our alternative school. So I come by this path I’m.

00:12:15 – Eric Zimmer
On, honestly, I was gonna say, yeah, you may not have had much choice.

00:12:20 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah, it really feels that way. But Pema, years later, when I started reading her as Pema Chodron, she spoke about this revolutionary concept that all of our gifts, all of our beauty, all of our wisdom is completely and inextricably entwined with our shadows, with our neuroses, with our insecurities. And I was like, really? That is such a relief. That was my intuitive experience that those two things could not be separated and they were not mutually exclusive. And I think that message from Pema 2030 years ago, I don’t remember when it was start where you are. That was the book just really paved the way or unpaved the way, because it rewilded the way of my heart so that I could accept that truth.

00:13:11 – Eric Zimmer
You used the word shadow there, and it made me think of later in the book, you talk about your shadow, and you brought up one of your sort of shadow sides, which is that you keep trying to simplify your life, and to use your phrase, you remain frenetically overextended. And I relate with that to some degree. And I think about it a lot. I’m like, well, my ability to, like, want to do things and to engage deeply and be somebody, that’s like, I see something, I’m going to go over there. I’m going to go get like. That’s one of my very best traits. And its shadow is exactly as you’re saying that it gets me to a place where either, like you say, I’m overextended, although I’ve gotten a little bit better at that. It’s more my mental state is always out in front of me, and so I have to work hard to reel it back in. And so I wouldn’t want to get rid of that part of me that would be destroying part of, I think, who I really am. But I also don’t want to let it run the entire show.

00:14:17 – Mirabai Starr
Exactly. That’s. That’s a beautiful example. Yeah. And the things that we do, probably you, you do this. I know I do. Are beautiful, wonderful things. You know, today is a perfect case in point. Before I saw you, I did eleven things and crammed them all in and managed to have a couple of bites of a taco, you know, to keep the machine of my body going. And I kept stopping in between taking a breath and going, wow. Here you go, Mirabai. This is what you do. But they’re all beautiful. I mean, starting with a yoga class, like, get into the car and drive to yoga. Check. You know, and then take care of the two year old for an hour while her mom has a massage, check. They’re all wonderful, but it’s easy to get lost. But when you remind me of what I said myself in my little book, it’s like I can take a breath again and say, yes, it’s all intertwined and it’s all sacred.

00:15:14 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And there is a way I have found to be going, going and to be present.

00:15:21 – Mirabai Starr
Yes.

00:15:22 – Eric Zimmer
It takes a little more effort, I think, because, you know, there isn’t the spaces, but I know I can have those two experiences, right? One of which is like, I’m doing all my things and I feel present and I feel content and I feel connected, and I can also be doing the exact same things and feel completely frenetic.

00:15:43 – Mirabai Starr
Right. That’s such a great insight. You know, what I think is the key to the distinction between the frenetic and the present is humor. There’s always part of me that’s not always, but often is right behind the little stress monkey going, look at you, cutie, you’re doing it again. And isn’t this hilarious? And same thing with my judging mind, the mind that judges other people as being unconscious or somehow otherwise falling short of my standards, being a human being. And as soon as I hear that little critical voice in my head, right behind it is the chuckle, like, look who thinks she knows what they don’t know.

00:16:33 – Eric Zimmer
That’s really good to cultivate inside. I have an external version of that in my best friend Chris, who’s the editor and founder with me of this show. And he just probably in the same way that we all have qualities that we sometimes will take too far, his humor. Not that he takes it too far, but, like, as a defense at points, right? But it’s almost impossible to get him to be consistently serious about anything, which is one of his best traits. Perfect for me, because when I do get so focused, that sense of humor tends to sort of constrict and shrink and does not really allowed to with him around, you know? So it’s a real gift to also have people that can do that for us.

00:17:15 – Mirabai Starr
Yes, definitely. I have one of those, too. Ah, that’s beautiful.

00:17:21 – Eric Zimmer
Speaking about our failings or our not living up to the people we want to be, you have something in the book. I never can say her name. Right, but you’re talking about the french nun, Therese.

00:17:33 – Mirabai Starr
Therese of Lisieux.

00:17:34 – Eric Zimmer
Thank you. My mouth doesn’t make those sounds. You talk about how she hated herself for hating the way the sister beside her in the refectory chewed her food. And I am an extraordinarily sound, sensitive person. And so somebody chewing loudly around me, or, like, chomping on their ice, it brings up this, like, just strong irritation that no matter what I have tried to do, I can’t turn off.

00:18:02 – Mirabai Starr
Wow. Yeah. Dysphonia or something. I know about this.

00:18:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I cannot turn it off. So it’s good to know that a saint had the same problem.

00:18:11 – Mirabai Starr
Oh, okay. So what a wonderful next step of our conversation, Eric, because I think one of the things I’m trying to do with ordinary mysticism and with my work in general, because I’ve been so deeply immersed in the teachings of the mystics across the spiritual traditions over the years, is let people know that your Life is not counter or in opposition to the lives of these saints and mystics that we know about. It’s not like we should not put them on a pedestal, because what that means is then we feel like we could never hope to emulate their beautiful, wonderful spiritual qualities. All of them, I assure you, had their. Their neuroses, their mistakes, their indulgences, their misbehaviors. You know, they all also felt like they fell short all the time. There’s a part of this Book in the back that is called you’re not in trouble, which is a phrase that my brother in law says sometimes to all of us to remind us and to himself, that those 10,000 things a day that you think you screwed up are just fine. You’re just fine. You’re not in trouble. And so I think all the saints and mystics that we revere probably had those conversations with themselves as well. And so when we can see their humanity, the humanity of the people like Therese or Teresa of Avila, who could be moody and demanding, or Francis of Assisi, who would get angry and climb up on the roof of the church that was being built in his name and tear the tiles off and throw them to the ground, because he was looking for a community of voluntary simplicity. And the people who were trying to follow in his footsteps were getting it all wrong, and he’d get pissed off. And sexism and racism in the people that we revere, we get to look at those qualities and say, ah, they are just like me, and we’re all doing the best we can to live lives of loving kindness and service and maybe not selflessness, but less selfishness, less self centeredness.

00:20:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. So how do you think about that when it comes to more modern teachers and the sex scandals that we see. Right. Which are, you know, rife throughout, I mean, really everywhere. And so it’s easier to say somebody in, you know, back in the 15 hundreds or 14 hundreds who acted a certain way that that’s so far away, we can sort of separate the person from the message easier than today or ten years ago. How do you think about that?

00:21:03 – Mirabai Starr
I think about it a lot because having, you know, grown up since early teens in. In the spiritual arena, multiple spiritual spaces, buddhist, Hindu, Sufi, and others, I’ve seen a lot of bad behavior in the teachers that I have loved and followed, and I’ve tried to give them a pass. And the philosophy of the guru doesn’t do anything that’s not for the benefit of the disciple. Gets them a lot of leeway, but I’m not buying it anymore. I no longer even believe in a fully enlightened being, and that’s like sacrilege in my spiritual community because I have a guru named Kurali Baba. He’s been my lifelong teacher and beloved kind of spiritual anchor. He will remain so probably till the day I die. He’s in me. There’s nothing I can do to extricate myself from my love and devotion to him. And yet I no longer believe that the guru won’t do anything that isn’t of benefit to the disciple. I’ve seen them all make mistakes that have done harm to the people who have followed them. Sexual impropriety, homophobia, and everything in between. And we know better now. Well, even in the sixties, even the difference between the 1960s and seventies, when I was starting on my spiritual path, and now there’s just no excuse. There’s a power differential between the teachers and the students, for one thing.

00:22:47 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:22:47 – Mirabai Starr
And for the teacher to use that power differential to his own benefit and gratification is wrong.

00:22:55 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And I think it’s pretty clear that one of the things that makes something a cult is when you can’t question the people at the top. The minute that they’re infallible, you’ve got a pretty good idea it’s time to go. Right. It’s wise to just say, okay, I need to go somewhere else and seek my guidance and wisdom, because that’s dangerous.

00:23:18 – Mirabai Starr
Well, exactly, Eric. And so that’s a mark of what makes a teacher an authentic teacher in my mind is when she carries wisdom transmission, shakti, energy, whatever you may call it that’s real and is willing to apologize and admit when she’s off the mark. That goes such a long way. Someone who is humbly able to say, you know what? That was not okay, and I’m sorry.

00:23:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. You and I both know Henry Schuchman, and I interviewed him just a few days ago. And I’m not saying Henry’s a guru. Right. But he’s somebody that a lot of people look up to, and he’s a very wise teacher. He’s one of the most gifted teachers. I think that morning, as we were preparing, he was down on the floor setting up lights with the other people there. And that’s the kind of leader that I’m looking for and the kind of leader I want to be.

00:24:14 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah.

00:24:15 – Eric Zimmer
Is the person that’s not setting themselves so far away from everybody else that’s right in it with everyone. And it was just another thing that I looked at that made me love Henry, you know, because it was just. He was right there. He’s the teacher, and yet he’s willing to sit down and help you screw in the light bulb.

00:24:33 – Mirabai Starr
Exactly. I love that.

00:24:35 – Eric Zimmer
I do think it’s interesting, though, to think about. I think there’s a further distinction. I think your first distinction is true, that nobody should be given a pass that, like, bad behavior should be called out and it should be stopped. But then you get to the next level, which is, what about their message or their teacher?

00:24:52 – Mirabai Starr
Okay.

00:24:52 – Eric Zimmer
Right. I think we’re all wrestling with this. Even outside of spiritual circles, in this day and age. It’s the musician as a person and then what they created. And can you. And should you separate those things?

00:25:06 – Mirabai Starr
Exactly. And sometimes, I think in our hyper aware era, we ourselves might cancel ourselves because of white guilt or fear of what, you know, doing something that is inappropriate or cultural appropriation or all the things that I, for instance, wrestle with and talk ourselves out of our prophetic calling. Again, it’s this idea of perfection that we may hold in our minds. And so how do we step up as teachers, as prophets, as contemporary mystics, which so many of you who are listening qualify as being, without being so hard on ourselves when we miss the standards we hold ourselves to or hold others to? So I think that’s a beautiful example, Eric, is that there is such power that certain people carry to transform our consciousness and open our hearts. Those very same people are human beings, and they’re going to sometimes do things and say things that cause harm? Do we cancel them completely? Do we call out the behavior and affirm the beauty that they carry? That’s what I would vote for. But again, that takes rigor, it takes discernment, and it takes the discipline of keeping your heart open so that you don’t just write them off, but you forgive and allow and are willing to listen and engage in hard conversation.

00:26:46 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it really is challenging. I mean, I spent, I mean, a number of years of my life as a, you know, out and out criminal. You know, I’ve got a grocery list of crimes, and that’s not me anymore, but it was. And so where in here do we hold people’s ability to change and also not be naive? That some people don’t change, aren’t capable of changing, don’t want to change even what they say? I don’t think there’s any answers, but I think it’s a question I think about a lot.

00:27:19 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah, I love that you’re asking these questions, and you’re asking them publicly, because I think we all need to be listening in to the nuances of this question.

00:27:28 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s come back to your book. And there’s just so many beautiful lines. But I thought I’d have you read the first few paragraphs of a section in the book that I think covers a lot of what we’ve been talking about. I’ll let you find it. The section is called the myth of the perfect family. It’s in the first chapter, intention.

00:27:47 – Mirabai Starr
It’s hard to give up our fantasies of a life where beauty is built in and we don’t have to work at finding it. It’s easy to recognize the presence of the sacred in the saintly hospice chaplain who turns your mother’s deathbed into a temple in an epic sunset over the South Pacific. Or in the birth of a baby to a couple who had given up hope of ever conceiving, let alone carrying a child to term. But what about your boring job, your addicted partner, your home town that feels more like a strip mall than a community? What about your dining room table at dinner time? One of the things it means to be an ordinary mystic is to bow at the feet of your everyday existence, with its disappointments and dramas, its peaceful mornings and luminous nights, and to honor yourself just as you are. Remember Steven Stills of Crosby, stills and Nash? He told us that if you cant be with the one you love, you should love the one youre with. I say, if you cant be the one you wish you could be, love the one you are. And if you don’t have the life you imagined you would have or should have by now, how about loving the life you are living? A mystic finds the magic in the midst of the nitty gritty, the crusty spaghetti sauce pot in the sink and the crocus poking out of a spring snowfall, the unsigned divorce papers on the kitchen table, and the results of your latest blood work on your computer screen.

00:29:30 – Eric Zimmer
I love that. I think that’s really beautiful. It made me think of something, this idea of having to look for beauty instead of it just being always built in. I think it’s a great way of really thinking about, for me, the effort that it takes. I wish it didn’t. Like you’re saying, I wish that, like, my grateful awe eyes were always open and I just wandered around and, you know, beauty at everything. But I don’t. I have to consciously, moment by moment, remind myself to try and look for it.

00:30:06 – Mirabai Starr
And there are practices that help, you know, I mean, in many ways, I’m deconstructing religion in this book, saying not only do we not need the institutionalized, organized religious paths to get us to some kind of spiritual intimacy, but religion can be an obstacle to a spiritual experience. But I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I love many of the practices and sacred texts and prayers and even ideas and concepts that are at the heart of the different religious traditions. And one of the kind of universal practices that I think helps build these wonder muscles and open these beauty eyes is contemplative practice of any kind. Whether it’s seated meditation on a cushion on a daily basis for 20 minutes, or whatever it may be, or walking in the woods in a mindful way, or reading poetry, where you really show up for the feast of words. There are many different ways to cultivate a contemplative life. It helps so much to awaken the heart of the mystic so that you will perceive beauty when you look.

00:31:46 – Eric Zimmer
There are sort of two arms, as I think of it.

00:31:49 – Chris Forbes
Right?

00:31:49 – Eric Zimmer
There’s the actual contemplative practices that you’re describing, which are a practice and discipline. And then there’s the how does what we see or realize there trickle out into all the other moments of life? That’s sort of that second part of it is like, where I’m really interested in kind of what I’m writing about in the upcoming book and taught in the habits that matter program is not how to do the formal practice, more formal practices, but how to drip it into all the rest of your life.

00:32:23 – Mirabai Starr
Beautiful. You said it earlier, when we were speaking, before we got on air, that your deep and long time, rigorous commitment to a sitting practice is changing, and that now it’s kind of just infiltrating every aspect of your life. And I think that’s the fruit of this kind of contemplative practice that you’ve cultivated for so many years and that I have as well. And many people I know and love are kind of walking away from the cushion and seeing how that contemplative habit shows up when it’s needed most, you know, in line at the store, in traffic, and an argument with a beloved. You know, it’s just like weightlifting. I think you and I are both exercisers.

00:33:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:33:11 – Mirabai Starr
I find that when I do my exercise practice, every aspect of my life is strengthened and I feel better and I have more. More energy to do what I love. It’s not like I’m so virtuous because I lift weights or I hike every day or I do yoga and all the things that I do, I spend a lot of time doing physical practices, and my body really thanks me for it. The harvest is everywhere in my life.

00:33:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I agree. I agree. It’s important. And I do think that both elements of that formal practice, whether it be meditation or exercise, being things that you sort of do, make it more likely that you’ll be strong in the rest of your life, or you’ll be wise in the rest of your life or awake in the rest of your life.

00:33:59 – Mirabai Starr
And we need to be willing, like you are, to allow that to morph and change. For instance, I live, and we’re looking out the window right now together, which is cool, right on the edge of national forest. So my two dogs, Lola and Ruby, demand to take a long walk every day because that’s all they’ve ever known. So we get out into those mountains every day. And for many, many years, I have not only had a practice of silence when I was walking, but I’ve written about it. So I’ve, like, come out publicly and said, take a walk, but don’t have your earpods in your ears. And don’t catch up on phone calls and texts. Be present in the.

00:34:41 – Eric Zimmer
Unless you’re listening to the. When you feed. Just kidding.

00:34:43 – Mirabai Starr
Unless you’re listening to the one you feed. And then you can catch up on all the past episodes. So recently, I started listening to the audible version of braiding sweetgrass. Well, I just finished it yesterday, so it took a long time because it’s a long book, and it’s one of the most powerful transformative books I’ve ever read. I loved it so much, and I make a living out of reading transformational books. I loved it so much, and it got to the point where I was not going to get through it because it’s so long and I have so many things to do unless I bent my rule of walking in nature and not listening to anything. So I started listening to it on my walks, and it was extraordinary. It was so liberating to break that rule. There was one point where she was talking about moss and lichen. Robin Wal Kimmerer reveals nature as God, as divine, as sacred, so beautifully, but so she can get totally into something like lichen and moss, and it’s utterly captivating and transformational and heart opening. And while I was walking, she was describing a certain kind of lichen, and I was seeing it in the rocks on the path where I was walking. It was such an epiphany. It was a spiritual experience. It was a mystical experience, and it wouldn’t have happened. That epiphany, that mystical experience, that ordinary mystical moment would not have happened had I stayed rigid about my spiritual practice of silence while walking.

00:36:14 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It makes me think of in the book, you say there’s a tension, a paradox for you when you think about where we gain real wisdom. Is it lived experience or is it the distilled transmission from books or scriptures? My answer is both, and I think you’re describing this in a slightly different way, which is that your conditioning is to have that experience, you need to be quiet while you’re walking. It’s the lived experience side. But what you found was that in the right way, the scripture.

00:36:51 – Chris Forbes
Right.

00:36:51 – Eric Zimmer
We’ll call our book of scripture. Right. The scripture was the thing that enlivened that moment in combination with lived experience. And so they’re sort of separate, but then ultimately they become, ideally, they’re not separate.

00:37:05 – Mirabai Starr
Exactly. And in fact, what I found was, and this has just been in the last week, that I discovered this by listening to her book, that I do both. So I listen for a while, and then I turn it off and I walk in silence for a while. So I’m doing both. And that works beautifully. It’s a tapestry.

00:37:24 – Eric Zimmer
I do, too. That’s my general. Like, if I’m out for a long hike or bike ride, I’m like, okay, half of this, I can listen to music, or I can listen to a book that I’m into, I can talk to a friend, and half of it, I’m just going to turn all that off and just be out here. And I can do both, like you said. And that seems to allow me to get the best of both worlds.

00:37:47 – Mirabai Starr
And this is the liberation that I’m hoping we can all give ourselves permission to experience with an ordinary, mystical life, to release, to jettison, to give up and walk away from all the rules and regulations that legislate, that control our spiritual experience and allow ourselves to kind of undomesticate the path to the sacred, to draw on the spiritual traditions, the age old methods and practices and poetry that feed our souls, and to also be willing to not know and allow it to be revealed in your regular, everyday life.

00:38:32 – Eric Zimmer
I think the other thing that you do in this book and I think is really important is to. I’m going to use my own words here, bring down the bar of what constitutes a mystical experience, because I struggle with this. People use the word joy all the time. Joy is not a word that I feel like is exactly in my emotional register. I just don’t think it. I mean, I’m not saying it’s never there, but that’s not my lived experience of my emotional register. And so when I think that that’s the bar I’m aiming at all my experience is not good enough, and I’m not good enough, instead of going, here’s me and the way I see and relate to the world. And in the midst of that, there are moments of beauty and maybe joy or contentment might be more my emotional register. Right. I’m a little bit more equilibrium. I think, in reading your book, you’re a little more like up here and then down here, like, you’ve got a wider emotional register, which is not better. It’s different. And so, for me, there’s been a process of recognizing that it doesn’t have to be one of these earth shattering moments of complete liberation or a blinding flash of enlightenment for it to be something that is still really beautiful and beneficial.

00:40:02 – Mirabai Starr
Are you listening, y’all? This is so good, Eric. This is the essence, and I forget myself all the time of what I’m trying to say. Your life is not only good enough, whoever you are, whoever’s listening, it is the most beautiful thing it can be. In jewish mystical teachings, every one of us is imprinted the day that we’re born with what is ours to do and be in this world. To mend, actually to mend the torn fabric of the world of reality, Tikkun Olam, to repair the world. And often our lives are an adventure of discovering what that is. But it’s so important as you’re saying, to not discount what and who you are, because I promise that your version of Tikkun Olam, what it is, any of you, any of us are here to do and be in this world, is hidden in plain sight, nestled at the heart of who you already are. Someone with an emotional register of equilibrium or an Enneagram four like me, that experiences the heights of drama, some might say, but ecstatic states and deep pain and grief. And, you know, I find the presence of the sacred in both. It’s probably harder for me to actually be present when things aren’t intense.

00:41:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it is sort of accepting us. I love the way you describe this in the book. You say, for me, almost everything that happens is a big deal. I’ve always been this way. I can take the most prosaic encounter and convert it into a melodrama where my husband Jeff will gloss over a torn rotator cuff as if it were a hangnail. I just love that because you’re just like, in that sentence, you’re letting yourself be the way you are, and you’re letting him be the way he is, and you’re not making one of those better than the other.

00:42:12 – Mirabai Starr
That’s so true. I mean, and it’s easy. It’s easy to let go of the judging mind when we set our intention, when we realize that everything belongs, that everything is sacred. I mean, it’s not always easy, Eric, but it’s often much easier than we make it out to be. To just allow things to be what they are and to allow our beloveds to be who they are. I’ve been married for 26 years. This is my second marriage. It’s his second marriage. And I knew right from the beginning that we were really different. We had really different temperaments. And that the way he is is adorable. His quirks and behavioral challenges are endearing to me. They were endearing at the beginning, and they’re endearing still, I think, because I know, I knew that he accepted me unconditionally and that there was something wonderful ahead if I could also accept him, and therefore myself, unconditionally. Not that we don’t have our moments, we do. But there is this kind of. What would you call it? We adore each other for all of those quirky little things that make us who we are.

00:43:29 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I think you were using at the beginning of that, that it’s easy to let go of those things when we think that everything belongs. And I would say that it actually, that that makes it possible. It may still be very difficult within that. But if you can’t take that first step, if you can’t at least go, this has a place. This belongs. This is okay. I may still resist it 90% of the time, and I can work on that. But if I can’t do that first step, it’s not even possible to let things, myself and others, be the way they are.

00:44:05 – Mirabai Starr
Mm hmm. Yeah. And it probably does start with our sense of ourselves as adorable. Like, can you cultivate that for 1 minute? You are adorable, Mirabai Starr. You’re adorable. And see if that tenderness doesn’t start shifting things so that everything becomes adorable.

00:44:26 – Eric Zimmer
You were speaking just now about your husband, and in the book, you’re talking about this idea that the general prevailing wisdom, let me see if I can say this right, is that in the beginning of a relationship, we are infatuated. And so we see people as really great, and then over time, we see who they really are. And you and I think Leonard Cohen and I don’t remember who else you quote, flip that on its head and say, actually, no. Your initial impressions when you saw someone as beautiful and wonderful and special and unique, that’s what’s real. And what has happened is time has dulled that.

00:45:12 – Chris Forbes
Yes.

00:45:13 – Eric Zimmer
And that is a complete reinvention of the way we think about each other.

00:45:19 – Mirabai Starr
Oh, I’m so glad you picked up on that. Cause that’s one of the great enlivening insights of my life. And I’ve carried that into the realm of grief, too. That when people die in our life, you know, in our world, in our close world, we often glorify them. Like, suddenly the person who acted like an asshole, suddenly the person who misbehaved is wonderful, and their character defects become just interesting aspects of who they are and were. And not only that, but we start to see them as maybe an ancestor who carries wisdom and guidance for us. And there might be people who say, you know what, honey? That’s magical. Thinking that person was a jerk in real life. That doesn’t make them suddenly an enlightened being now that they’re dead. And, I mean, I’ve kind of received that messaging. Maybe some of you have, too. And I think there’s something true in that sense that the loved one who’s gone, even if they were difficult and problematic in your life when they were alive, become something holy, something generous, something gener, someone generative, they become a life giving source for you, a source of wisdom, of courage, of energy, of guidance. An ancestor that isn’t just an idea, but an entity a reality. I don’t know. Whatever your beliefs are about life after death. In one of my books, Caravan of no despair, my memoir of. It’s called a memoir.

00:47:03 – Eric Zimmer
This is your first book? I read in our first interview about.

00:47:05 – Mirabai Starr
That book, yes, a memoir of loss and transformation. I have a chapter called believing everything, where I systematically kind of like Descartes when he came up with, I think, therefore I am. I systematically go through all the possibilities, all the things that the different world religions say, atheism says about what happens to after you die. And I conclude that they’re all true. So whatever you believe about what happens after death, I have experienced, and many of you have too, the true presence of loved ones who have died, as real, as available, as helpful, as beautiful. And that’s kind of like that insight about when you fall in love, you’re seeing the real person, and over time, that gets dulled. As you said, I think when someone dies who they really are, their essence is liberated and accessible.

00:47:59 – Eric Zimmer
For me, that belief system is a double edged sword, and I’ll tell you that the good side of it makes complete sense to me, which is believing, particularly with your current partner, that the person you saw them first as is who they really are. I have this situation, though, when a relationship ends, I suddenly see that person as the end all and be all of everything that ever could be good in the world because I can’t have it.

00:48:29 – Mirabai Starr
Yeah.

00:48:30 – Eric Zimmer
And so for me, I actually think this insight of yours is really good, because what I can do, instead of saying, is it true? Is to ask. My favorite question is, is it useful in the case of somebody who, say, someone has left me and is moving on, probably not useful to deify them. Probably useful to think about the parts of them that I didn’t like as a way of moving through, but with the people I’m with or the people who have passed on in the way you’re describing, gone. It’s probably really useful to see them as beautiful, wonderful people, knowing that the truth is, of course, they’re all both, but it’s more useful to see them that way. I often, more than I think about is it true? Because so many things are true at the same time, is which of these ways of thinking is more useful to me being the person I want to be? I mean, and I never thought of this idea. It’s new to me that you’ve just said here, this idea of the way I saw them in the beginning is how they really are. How useful is that in me with my current relationship right to think back to how luminous she seemed to me then and go, yeah, that’s real. That was really her. Like, that’s a beautiful and useful thought. Yes.

00:49:58 – Mirabai Starr
And that’s the way of ordinary mysticism, is how do we see the divine, the sacred, the luminous and numinous in the people in our lives, including the people for whom it is difficult to see. In whom it is difficult to see.

00:50:16 – Eric Zimmer
I’ve got a couple that I think, you know, that’s a deep practice.

00:50:22 – Mirabai Starr
It is, and I’m not always good at it, believe me. True confessions.

00:50:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I think I’d like to talk about letting go. You say, sometimes when I’m wrestling with a problem or a decision, I remember I don’t have to figure out I can give it over. My default is to the great mother. I murmur words like, here, mama, you take it. And then I get on with my day and wait to see what happens. I think a lot about letting go, and I thought we could just talk about it in general.

00:51:12 – Mirabai Starr
There’s such a fine line between letting go and checking out. There are certain things that the holiest, most sacred, most awake thing you can do is to not turn away, but to stay present with difficult feelings. For instance, like jealousy or grief, just missing someone you love. And those of us who’ve been on a spiritual path of any kind know all the tricks. To be okay with difficult feelings, to meditate our way out of it, or to just let go and be grateful. There are lots of good tools and techniques, but sometimes the magic is in not letting go in showing up. So, say we’re talking about addiction. To be with the difficult, almost unbearable feeling of craving. Sometimes that’s the way through, right? Is to not run away from it, not indulge in the substance. To make the feeling go away. But staying with the hunger and exploring it with curiosity and tenderness. And then the letting go. When. At the times when we’re able to let go, or when it’s useful to use your language, Eric, to let go becomes a true freedom. A true path to freedom.

00:52:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think that is another one of those things that’s really hard to sort out, when I should allow a feeling to be. Because that’s either instructive or it’s a way of being present. It’s a way of not running from my emotions. And when it’s time to try, as we’re saying, to let go, it’s a very subtle thing to sort of figure out. I think. I think about it with anger often, right. Anger is certainly a useful generative powerful emotion. And it can also get stuck in the on position, which is what we would call in. We used to refer to in twelve step programs as resentment. And they used to say all the time, resentment is the biggest thing that causes people to go back to drinking. Now, I don’t think that’s true for everybody. Like, I’m an absolutely, like, fear based person. That’s much more likely to me than being mad at somebody is to think terrible things about myself or whatever. So it’s not everybody, but I think it’s interesting to think about when a feeling gets stuck. And we do need to work on saying, hey, let’s turn the channel. Let’s make a conscious effort to think something different. Let’s let go whatever form that takes. I often feel like, I don’t know, even today, how to sometimes decide which is which.

00:54:17 – Mirabai Starr
Well, there’s a lot of conditioning that’s going to get in the way, you know, and a lot of it is, if you’ll forgive the term, patriarchal conditioning, you know, a paradigm that conditions us to believe that the more spiritual thing to do is to transcend the feelings. And I remember when my, when my daughter died, not long after, within a year or so, my teenage daughter was killed in an accident, car accident. I was in Mexico and someone brought me to a shaman, a mayan shaman in the Yucatan. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Yucatan. I feel very at home there. Fluent in Spanish. I’m very connected to the land and culture. So this wasn’t like a totally shocking foreign thing, but basically the, the dude said to me, you need to let your daughter go. Yeah, it was within the first year. It was definitely within the first year. I was like, oh my God, I have to let her go. I mean, I might as well, someone might have said, climb Everest by tomorrow at noon. There was no way that that was going to happen. And I felt like there was something wrong with me, that I was flawed because it was such an impossible thought. Not long after, I was back home here in Taos and a visiting Zen teacher came, who happened to be a woman. We had Duksan and we were sitting together in an interview and she was just asking me what was up. And of course, that’s what came up is my daughter died a year ago or less, whatever it was. And, you know, when you have a great trauma, many of you know, you experience traumatic brain damage in a way. And so you forget about time is very fluid for me. In those first year, couple years after Jenny’s death, but anyway, it was early on, and I was talking about my difficulty in letting go, and she was like, are you kidding me? You’re a woman. You’re a mother. We’re not supposed to let go of our children. And when a child dies, it is a fundamental rupture of that truth, that that attachment is appropriate. When the Buddha talked about attachment, either he didn’t know about a mother’s attachment to her child, or that’s not what he was talking about. That’s not the kind of attachment that we were being encouraged to use contemplative practice to see beyond. That’s an attachment that is appropriate. And that was so helpful to me.

00:56:48 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a story in the buddhist tradition that I sometimes have taught in the habits that matter program. What is your take on that story?

00:56:57 – Mirabai Starr
So just a nutshell version, y’all, of that mustard seed story, or the Kisa Gautami story is this is a young woman whose child has died, and she is absolutely distraught. This is a perfect example, Eric, that you brought this up. She’s beside herself with anguish, and she is carrying the corpse of her childhood around her village and wailing and saying, can anybody bring my child back to life? And, of course, makes everyone very uncomfortable. She’s kind of nuts. She’s crazy with grief. And finally, someone says, we can’t do it. I can’t do it. But there is this guy who’s teaching in the forest not far away, and people say amazing things about him. Why don’t you take your child to him and see if he can do it? Because if anybody could, he could. Of course, it’s Siddhartha, Gautama, the Buddha. And so she’s very excited by this possibility. And she hauls the corpse of her child into deer park or wherever the forest is, where the Buddha is giving his discourses. She charges in, like Mary Magdalene, where Jesus is feasting with the tax collectors. She just comes right on in, and she lays her child at his feet, interrupts his discourse, and says, master, I hear that you can bring my child back to life. Can you please? And the Buddha looks at her with unconditional compassion and says, okay, I’ll tell you what. Go back to your village, knock on every door and collect a mustard seed from every household that has not experienced the death of a loved one. Bring back this collection of seeds. I will concoct a magic potion that will bring your child back to life. So thrilled, she hauls her baby’s body back to the village, knocks on every door, and of course, not a single household has been free of the experience of the death of a loved one. And she goes back to him, and she says, you tricked me. And in that moment, in his absolute. Ugh, just makes me cry. His absolute, unconditional, loving response to her that no words needed to be exchanged. She woke up. What did she wake up to? She didn’t let it go. She didn’t rise above and transcend her grief. What she experienced in her body was the felt sense of, oh, everybody experiences loss, grief, sorrow. Someone we love is gonna die, and we’re going to wish they hadn’t. I belong to this web of interbeing, as thich nhat Hanh called it, and we all do. That was the liberation, as we belonged to each other.

00:59:42 – Eric Zimmer
I love that story for that reason. And when you were talking about the Buddha and attachment, I was bringing it up, because to me, that story isn’t a Buddha saying, get over it. It might seem like in a superfluous reading of it, that that’s what happens to. She realizes everybody else has death, and she goes, okay, well, I do, too. And now I’m not grieving. That’s not what it is about. It’s about I’m just not alone in my grieving. And what’s happening to me is not a mistake. Yeah. A problem that I have done something or goes against the order of the universe. And I’ve experienced similar things, like losing a dog. I’ve told this story on the podcast many times, but I lost one dog, and I was like, all right, that’s terrible. Deeply grieving. And then not long after, we lost another dog who got cancer, who was young, and there was a part of me that went, that’s not right. That’s not fair. Two dogs in that amount of time. He was too young. He was. But I had enough wisdom to just go, that’s what happens. Living things get sick. They die. And it didn’t lessen my grief at all, but I didn’t have a bone to pick with the world over it or the universe. It actually allowed me to inhabit my grief.

01:00:54 – Mirabai Starr
Beautiful.

01:00:55 – Eric Zimmer
And I think that’s that story, right? She’s actually able to inhabit her grief, which means she will heal in whatever. When we could have a long conversation about what healing from grief even means. But there is a healing, and she’s able to begin that path by realizing that what’s happening to her is not unique, and she’s connected to everyone else.

01:01:17 – Mirabai Starr
And there’s something deliciously holy about that realization.

01:01:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. It’s the realization I think that is at the heart of when twelve step programs work. That makes them work. That is one of the key things, fellowship. You walk in and all these shameful, awful things that you’ve thought and felt and everything, and you hear people all around you saying the same thing and laughing about it, and you go, oh, my God, I’m not alone. And up till that point, at least my experience and hearing enough other people talk to it, you think you’re uniquely insane. You think you’re uniquely crazy. Why do I keep doing this? So, yeah, it’s that recognition. As you said, we belong to each other.

01:01:59 – Mirabai Starr
Beautiful.

01:02:00 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I hate to end interviews where I’m the one who’s saying the last thing really well, but I feel like we kind of hit just a beautiful stopping point.

01:02:09 – Mirabai Starr
And for me, this whole thing was a conversation. It wasn’t just me talking about my little book. I loved that. It was conversational.

01:02:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. And I hope we featured your wonderful little book. Enough listeners, Mirabai and I are going to continue to talk in the post show conversation. And we’re going to talk specifically about something that is more interesting than you think it is, which is the process of translating old texts, beautiful texts, into English that Mirabai is really, really good at. If you’d like access to our post show conversations, ad free episodes, and to be part of our community, which we’d love to have you in, go to oneyoufeed.net join thank you, Mirabai.

01:02:50 – Mirabai Starr
Thank you, Eric. What a joyous.

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Kristin Neff
What do we think is going to work for a kid or a friend? If you say you’re a stupid loser, I hate you. How helpful is that really going to be? And yet somehow we think that’s going to be good for us. It knows the exact same effect.

00:00:17 – 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 you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts dont strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we dont have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But its 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 wolfen, thanks for joining us. Back on the show is one of our favorites, Kristin Neff. She is currently an associate professor in human development at the University of Texas at Austin. While doing her postdoctoral work, she decided to conduct research on self compassion, a central construct in buddhist psychology and one that had not been examined empirically. In addition to her pioneering research in self compassion, she has developed an eight week program to teach self compassion skills. The program is called mindful self compassion. Today, Eric and Kristin discuss her new book, Mindful Self Compassion for Burnout, tools to help you heal and recharge when you’re wrung out by stress.

00:01:53 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Kristin, welcome to the show.

00:01:55 – Kristin Neff
Hi Eric. Glad to be here again.

00:01:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, I believe this is the third time, although I’m not entirely sure, but I believe that is correct. But your work on self compassion is so important that it’s something I’m happy to keep featuring. We’re going to be discussing a new book that you have though, which is called mindful self compassion for burnout tools to help you heal and recharge when you’re wrung out by stress. But before we get into that, let’s start like we always do, with the parable. 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 and 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.

00:02:56 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So I suppose, actually my response to that may have altered somewhat. I mean, because the obvious response is to feed the wolf of kindness and to try to promote kindness, to practice kindness, to practice peace. But I think it’s also important to feed the so called bad wolf and to kind of reframe the bad wolf, not as a bad wolf, but as a part of us that, for whatever reason, hasn’t gotten the love it needs or doesn’t feel safe, which is why often growls so loudly or, you know, barks or. What do wolves do? Howls. That’s it. They howl so loudly. So I think you primarily focus on cultivating the good habits, but you don’t want to judge or shun or, like, isolate those parts of yourself that you think are bad or unworthy, because then they just kind of go deeper in the recesses of your psyche. So I think all of our internal parts, we want to feed them understanding and safety and care with the idea that we want to behave or operate from those parts of ourselves that are in line with our values.

00:04:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I guess castigating or casting off any part of ourselves is not really to be acting in self compassion.

00:04:09 – Kristin Neff
Yeah, I mean, so Dick Schwartz, I don’t know if you’ve had him on, the founder of internal family systems, you know, talks about no bad parts. I do think it’s a really important perspective. It’s not really a bad wolf. It’s a wolf. It’s a scared wolf. And the reason it’s acting bad or mean or hateful is because part of it is scared. And so I think to the extent that we can offer that sense of safety to all parts of ourselves, sense of acceptance, and of course, accepting ourselves is not the same as accepting our behavior. So we don’t want to act like the bad wolf. We don’t want to make the other people’s problem. We don’t want to, again, act in a way that’s contrary to our values. But the impulses, the thoughts and feelings that come up, you know, we don’t choose to have them. That wolf is often formed when we’re very young as a way just to try to make us feel safe. Sometimes a child may think, okay, the only action I know how to take is to tantrum. So in some ways, that bad wolf might represent this young part of us that didn’t know any other way to respond. So it’s a good parable, but it’s also important that we don’t shun or ostracize any parts of ourselves.

00:05:16 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s talk about this latest book, which is applying the research that you’ve been doing for a long time and writing on for a long time around self compassion, applying it to burnout.

00:05:28 – Kristin Neff
Why?

00:05:28 – Eric Zimmer
Is that the direction that you chose to take this book?

00:05:34 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So, well, it’s really just come up for me a lot in the last five years or so. It actually started when a woman, actually from a children’s hospital here in Austin, had taken our full mindful self compassion program and loved it and said, by the way, this was pre pandemic. And she said, you know, the doctors and nurses and carers at my children’s hospital, the parents, they are so exhausted, they’re overwhelmed. It’s such a stressful job. Can you figure out any way to teach them that will fit with their overwhelmed schedules? You know, that doesn’t require meditating. That’s kind of easy on the spot practices they can do to help support themselves, given all the stress they’re in. And so we did. We created something called the self compassion for healthcare communities program. We did research on it, and one of the main findings of the research was, first of all, not only did it increase self compassion, not only did it increase a sense of well being, it increased a sense of compassion for others. Compassion, satisfaction. In other words, these people could start getting satisfaction about caring for the children. When you’re so stressed and you get burnout, we’ll come back to this. You stop caring as much because you feel so overloaded and so overwhelmed, you kind of have to shut down as a natural reaction to all the stress. And we found that it did actually reduce the three core symptoms of burnout. And then the pandemic hit. Right. And so before, it was like, oh, these poor doctors and nurses at the hospital, they’re so burned out. And then it was like, okay, my source of income has totally changed. I usually made most of my income from, like, doing in person workshops. Okay, that’s off the table. How am I going to make a living? My son, you know, in special needs classes, can’t go to school anymore. And so I have to do it from home. And so I became one of those people, along with pretty much everyone else on the planet, that started feeling the intense stress that was exacerbated by the pandemic. And I’ll be honest, I definitely teetered on the edge of burnout just some moments I felt like I didn’t even want to get out of bed. It’s like, how am I going to put 1ft in front of the other? But I have my self compassion practice. So I really applied it to myself during those times. I was just there for myself. I supported myself, I allowed myself to feel my feelings. I had a way to hold the stress and kindness and warmth and support so that it wasn’t so overwhelming. And so I didn’t go into full on clinical burnout. And so toward the end of the pandemic, I thought, you know, we’ve created all these great tools and self compassion practices in the mindful self compassion program. Why don’t we write a book applying that specifically to people who are burned out? Because, again, for a while, we mainly talked about our healthcare workers, of course, who are especially burned out because of the pandemic. But it’s way beyond that. I mean, stress, chronic stress, it just seems like it’s getting more and more intense all of the time. You know, the workplace even just like stressed out by the uncertainty of whether it’s politics or global stability, there’s just so much chronic stress. I thought that this book would be helpful, and I have to say I think it is. I think we managed to write something that’s easy to read. It’s not like an academic tome. No, it’s short. It’s easy. It’s kind of entertaining, the way we tell the stories of. But it’s really practical. I mean, every single chapter has a tool that you can use. You don’t have to, like, make extra time in your day to practice it every day. You can do it on the spot, in the moment. And these practices, again, I know they work not only for my research, but really from my own life.

00:09:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you’ve been pretty open in the past. You and I have discussed the challenges of parenting your son. And it sounds like he went from having autism to OCD on top of it. And you say he started having real mental health issues. So in addition to the income, you’ve got this going on with your child. Were specifically. Were a couple of the things that you did. I assume they’re the tools that are in this book, but that you found particularly helpful for you out of the full suite of tools that are there.

00:09:44 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So probably the tool I use most often because it’s the easiest and it’s immediate, is touched, you know, because it just goes straight to your physiology. Your nervous system active, you know, probably activates the vagus nerve, parasympathetic nervous system. Just putting your hands on your heart or touching yourself in some way. It does a few things. One we have research shows, and, for instance, it lowers cortisol levels because, as infants were designed to interpret touch as a signal of, oh, it’s okay, it’s safe. Someone’s here for me. So that’s part of it, you know, changing your physiology. But it also, like, literally gives you that sense of, I got myself. I’m here for myself. It’s like, you know, you feel your own touch, and it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s right. Normally, we’re lost in our thoughts and we’re lost in the problem, but putting our hands in our body brings us back to ourself in the present moment. And so that would probably be the most common way I did it. But often just saying words of, you know, mindfulness. I know this is hard for you, a common humanity. You know, you aren’t alone in the pandemic. That was very clear. You certainly aren’t alone. All human beings are going through this right now. And then words of kindness, you know, what do you need? Actually asking myself, what do I need? Even though I couldn’t necessarily give it to myself, like, I need for this. I need to not have to wear a mask, or I need for things to be different. Okay, well, you can’t give yourself everything you need, but just simply asking the question reminds you that, hey, my needs are important, too, especially because in that situation, I was so focused on getting my son’s needs met and just doing everything I needed to do, just saying, hey, Kristin, what do you need right now? And even if it was simply like, oh, I need a glass of water, I’ve forgotten to have a glass of water all day. So a little act like that makes a difference in just reminding ourselves that we’re worthy of care. So that’s probably the main thing I do. And then the thing about self compassion, if you look what the word is, and the latin passion is to suffer, come is with a. So it’s really, how do you show up for suffering? Right. It’s very specific. What do you do when suffering is present? And normally we try to fight it, or we try to solve the problem immediately, we try to fix it, or sometimes we just avoid it, pretend it’s not there. Now, if we had a friend to be a good friend to someone else who’s suffering, usually we’re like, oh, I’m here for you. Tell me about it. We listen, we kind of make the space we allow our friend to be upset. We don’t try to shut them down. Sometimes we do try to solve their problem, but often they’ll say, hey, can you just listen to me first? I just need to express myself. So that’s really what we do with ourselves, is showing up for ourselves, allowing ourselves to feel what we’re feeling. And yes, we do try to fix our problems, but not immediately. First, we just kind of allow ourselves to feel the pain. This is hard. We kind of give ourselves emotional support. We make sure we don’t judge and blame ourselves for what we’re feeling. That’s what I like to call tender self compassion. And then fierce self compassion is more about taking the actions that might help us. And we do need both. And so I can tell you, it really saved my butt. I’m not going to lie. It really made a huge difference.

00:12:52 – Eric Zimmer
So we’ll come back to fierce self compassion in a few moments. Normally, when we think of burnout, we think about having to change the circumstances of what’s happening around us, whether that be to take better care of ourselves, to say no to things. There’s a variety of different things. And like I said, that’s going to fall under sort of fierce self compassion that we’ll get to here shortly. But in what way does self compassion, the tender side of it, help with burnout? How does that actually help with the specific thing of burnout?

00:13:26 – Kristin Neff
So you may think of burnout as the inability to cope with the stressors we’re experiencing. It overloads the system. And so when we’re overloaded, when we feel we don’t have the resources to cope with all the stress we’re experiencing, first of all, we get exhausted, kind of start to shut down. We also start to care a little bit less because, ironically, when you care about a person in your family, you’re caring about your work. The more you care, the more sensitive you are to the fact that you can’t accomplish what you want to accomplish. So we kind of shut down naturally, and then we usually start to blame ourselves. We feel like there’s something wrong with us because I should be able to cope. And that leads to feelings of incompetence like, oh, I’m just worthless. And also because, especially in western society, we judge our self worth so related to our productivity that we aren’t productive anymore, because, again, we’re just overwhelmed and beyond our capacity to cope, then we also feel badly about ourselves. So self compassion helps in so many ways. One of the things it does when we allow ourselves just to say, I feel so overwhelmed. This is so hard. I feel scared. I don’t know what to do. And we kind of bring space and warmth to those feelings. What that does is instead of those feelings, like, overwhelming us, like, I don’t know what to do. And this is too much. It’s like you aren’t just the difficult thoughts and emotions. You’re also like this warm, compassionate awareness that’s observing the fact that you’ve got all these difficult thoughts and emotions. You become bigger. It’s almost like you expand your sense of self. There’s more room for these difficult thoughts and emotions to be there, which means they’re less likely to overwhelm us by making ourselves bigger. Instead of just being locked into the difficult thoughts and emotions, we’re like the compassion that can hold these difficult emotions. When we’re bigger, we’re less likely to get overwhelmed. So that’s one way it works especially for coping. It also means that it keeps our hearts open. Right. When we keep our hearts open to ourselves, we don’t have to shut down to cope. When we care for ourselves, that also means we can still care about our work. We don’t have to shut down just to survive. And really importantly, we’re understanding to ourselves. We say, hey, you know, anyone in this circumstance would be overwhelmed. You’re doing the best you can. It’s okay to be imperfect, you know, sometimes you can’t get it all right, and, you know, just do the most you can right now and just take it step by step. I know I definitely did that in the pandemic, was like, I’m just going to do the best I can today, and I’m not going to ask any more from myself. And good enough is good enough, you know? So really, it’s the perfect antidote to burnout because it reduces feelings of exhaustion. They call it depersonalization, which is like the fancy psychological term for not caring as much, kind of shutting down, going numb, and then feelings of incompetence.

00:16:13 – Eric Zimmer
So you’ve been on a couple times before, and I’ll encourage listeners to go to those episodes for more in depth on what we’re about to cover. But I do feel like it’s always worth spending a couple minutes here and maybe you can just do the couple minute tour. But in general, most of our objection when we hear this idea of being compassionate to ourselves is that it’s going to somehow make us weaker or more indulgent or less motivated or selfish. And you’ve done a tremendous amount of research that shows that isn’t true, but give us the highlights of it.

00:16:48 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So I can take them one by one so it doesn’t make you weaker. The research overwhelmingly shows it makes you stronger. Because when you show up for yourself and things are tough, that is, when you’re suffering in some way, you know, you’re stressed or you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re going to be stronger if you support yourself than if you kneecap yourself by calling yourself names or shaming yourself. I mean, that’s kind of in some ways, a no brainer. I know we think that to be tough is to be mean, but to be tough is to be supportive. Now, that doesn’t mean like papering over if there’s a problem. That’s not kind. It means giving it to yourself, straight and honest, but with kindness and support. A lot of research supporting that, the idea that it’s selfish, the burnout work is such a good counter to that. I mean, actually, if you’re going to give to others, and your giving is just one way, you only give compassion to others and you ignore your own needs, or you just ignore yourself, or you don’t think you’re worthy of getting your needs met, your cup will run dry, guaranteed, eventually, you know. So compassion needs to flow inward as well as outward in order to keep resourcing yourself so you don’t burn out. But probably the biggest one is this idea that it’s going to make me lazy or indulgent or unmotivated. The research shows it’s the exact opposite. So often what happens is when we start judging ourselves for not achieving or thinking that we should do this, we should be another way. If we fail or we make a mistake, often what happens is it creates anxiety, like, oh, I’m a failure, maybe I shouldn’t try so hard because I’m going to fail. Or what happens is we make a mistake, we’re just consumed with feelings of inadequacy and we can’t learn from the situation. You know, is it truism we learn from our failures? And so what the research shows very clearly is when you have self compassion, you can acknowledge when you’ve made a mistake, you can make the hard decisions, ones that maybe don’t feel as good but are better for you in the long run. You can learn, you can grow and you work harder and try harder, and you have less fear of failure and less anxiety. So it improves motivation. It makes us take more responsibility and choose the difficult path over the easiest path. But we will ask ourselves, is this really what’s good for me. Or is it maybe just what society tells me sometimes? Maybe you are going to change what you’re doing if it’s not truly you and it’s just what your parents told you you should do. And when we’re authentic in that way, self compassion allows us to be authentic, we’re more motivated. There’s lots of research that shows that.

00:19:16 – Eric Zimmer
When you say a lot of research, you mean a lot of research. A lot of research in the social psychology space. We hear about replication crisis and these underpowered studies. And this is a lot of research, you and the people who’ve come after you have done.

00:19:29 – Kristin Neff
Yeah, I mean, I can’t even keep up the literature if you just do a Google scholar search of things with self compassion in the title. You know, I think there’s like 8000 right now. I mean, dozens of studies come out every day. So definitely this is not based on one clever study. We have a lot of research confirming this and done various ways with self report scales, through training, through experimental manipulations. Pretty solid stuff. And you think about it, of course. Like make it so obvious. Of course, if you support yourself, you’re going to do better than if you slam yourself. I mean, what do we think is going to work for a kid or a friend? If you say you’re a stupid loser, I hate you. How helpful is that really going to be? And yet somehow we think that’s going to be good for us. You know, it’s the exact same effect.

00:20:14 – Eric Zimmer
Right. And I think the point that you made in the midst of all this that is so important is there is absolutely a way to hold ourselves accountable to certain standards, to be honest with ourselves when we haven’t lived up to who we want to be or in the situations we want to be. And there’s a way to do that that’s kind and not, you know, awful. And I’m working on a book, and I was writing a chapter. I was thinking about this idea a little bit. And it was interesting because I realized where I learned my particularly harsh internal voice, which has gotten so much better over the last 15 years, but was my father. And I remembered, I flashed back to playing golf and the things he would say to himself when he missed a shot, and the same things to me. And it did not make me a better golfer. It made me terrified is what it made me. Right. It made me not want to play. It made me afraid. I mean, all those things. And so it’s very clear how so I see what his intention was. He was a old school, military type person. That was how he talked to himself. But at least in my case, it absolutely was a thing that sort of backfired. Anything that I was subjected to that much criticism from him and thus then myself, I just simply didn’t do any more if I could avoid it.

00:21:33 – Kristin Neff
It used to be the parenting philosophy, spare the rod, spoil the child. And I think that’s, in general switched. Not for everyone, but we do have to have compassion for where that comes from, from whether it’s in our parents or ourselves. Because when we feel threatened just as a species, you know, we go into fight, flight, or freeze mode. The criticism is the fight mode. There’s a part of us that thinks if I just am mean enough or strong enough or intense enough, I’ll be able to control the situation, so I’ll be able to force myself to get it right or be able to force my son to have that good golf strength. It’s a distorted view. It’s an immature view. It’s kind of, you know, but it’s also very natural.

00:22:14 – Eric Zimmer
100%.

00:22:15 – Kristin Neff
The sympathetic nervous system only knows, ah, you know, that’s kind of what it’s in form of. And so that’s what it does. And it comes up and, you know, we don’t have to judge ourselves or other people for having it. It really comes from a place of fear. And so I think, really, safety is absolutely the core of a self compassion. It’s not even so much being nice to yourself. So if you look at the three components of self compassion, which are mindfulness, a sense of common humanity, and kindness and support, they really established safety. Mindfulness gives us safety when we know we are more than just these difficult thoughts and feelings. That gives us a sense of more perspective and safety. We know we aren’t alone. For human beings, feeling alone and isolated is like the scariest feeling we could possibly have. So remember, hey, we’re human. We aren’t alone. It happens. My son, for instance, he just left his suitcase on the train and left his medication in it. And the way he talked himself through it is, I know this happens to a lot of people. You could just see when he said that to himself, you know, he started feeling safer and calmer and then the kindness and support again, remembering, like, yeah, okay, maybe we did mess up or make a mistake. Yeah, we don’t want to keep on leaving our suitcases on trains. It’s not fun, but it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You know, kind of being understanding, warm, and that caring attitude is going to be more likely to help people learn from it. So, again, with my son, this actually really happened just like three days ago. I said, well, this is how we learn. This is a really good learning opportunity. One thing, maybe for now, we can keep our medication in our backpack that you carry in your body. And, like, actually, he said, well, I heard about these air tags. So I bought him some air tags to put in his suitcase. I mean, it’s kind of a mundane example, but if I had been like, oh, you stupid idiot, and he was like, I’m such a stupid idiot, he might still be just in that place. And now it’s like, okay, next time I’ll put my medicine in my backpack, and I’ll get some air tags, and I’ll maybe do, like, a little checklist. This is how we learn and grow from our mistakes and failures, but so much easier when we feel safe than as opposed to when we feel threatened.

00:24:40 – Eric Zimmer
So a lot of people, and I think I was this way when I was first really exposed to a lot of this research, will say, I hear what you’re saying about the research, and, you know, I’ve been really hard on myself, and that’s gotten me where I am. How do you respond to that? What are your thoughts about that?

00:24:59 – Kristin Neff
Well, it is true. I mean, it does kind of work, just like harsh corporal punishment for children kind of works, kind of, you might say, tried and true method for thousands of years. So it does kind of work, but it doesn’t work as well as support, feeling supported from a sense of safety. We actually take in more information when we feel safe. We’re less anxious, which allows us to take in more information. We’re less self focused, which allows us to take in more information so that we learn. So, yeah, so, you know, and it does kind of work. And it’d be silly to deny it because there are many a person who got their law degree by beating themselves up. But would they have gotten done better, maybe been less stressed, maybe had lower cortisol levels that they had taken this more supportive method? The research shows that quite clearly it’s more effective.

00:25:47 – Eric Zimmer
The other thing I’ve seen, and this is just in people I’ve coached and people I’ve known and talked to, is that it also seems like although it does work in certain people, it stops working.

00:26:01 – Kristin Neff
Yes, it does.

00:26:02 – Eric Zimmer
And I see this in people, usually in their forties, where it’s like it worked for a while, but now everything is just either having really trouble being motivated, having real problems with anxiety and depression, other things so, yes, it did work, but there was a cost. There’s a guy, I don’t know if you know, Doctor Aziz Gazapura, but he wrote a book called on my own side, which mines similar territory, which is a great phrase, you know, be on your own side. And I think he makes an analogy in it to like burning dirty fuel in an engine. Yes, it will burn, but eventually the engine is going to get gunked up. And that’s kind of what I’ve seen also is. Yes, it. I think that’s the case with me. Yes, it did work for a time. Well, maybe not. I was a homeless heroin addict at 24. Maybe it never worked for me.

00:26:52 – Kristin Neff
Yeah, it can go wrong.

00:26:54 – Eric Zimmer
I may need to rethink that one.

00:26:56 – Kristin Neff
And if you’re burnt out, harsh self criticism absolutely contributes to burnout and makes you more anxious. You’re more in that fight, flight or freeze mode, elevates your stress levels, makes you more self focused. And when you’re burnt out, you aren’t working. That’s the whole point. You’re exhausted. If you can’t get out of bed, then you aren’t producing like you used to. So in the long run, it’s definitely counterproductive. Even in the short run, it’s counterproductive.

00:27:20 – Eric Zimmer
So you say in the book that fighting burnout makes it worse and you’re talking about resistance in general being futile.

00:27:29 – Kristin Neff
Yes.

00:27:30 – Eric Zimmer
Say more about that.

00:27:31 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So this is a basic psychological principle. And again, there’s a lot of research that we know that supports this. So when a particular thought has arisen or we have a certain feeling or, you know, we’re in a situation, like, I feel exhausted and we have to accept that this is reality right now, if we say this shouldn’t be in this reality, something’s wrong with me for having this reality, or we ignore this reality. In other words, unless we accept the reality that this is how it is right now, we don’t have the sense of balance and equanimity. We need to make changes in the future. It’s kind of like racism. You know, if you fight racism, but you do it by saying, well, there’s no racism, how are you going to change it? So you kind of have to accept the present moment in order to make changes in the future. And so that’s really how it works psychologically. We don’t like to feel difficult, painful emotions. We don’t like to feel stress, we don’t like to feel anxiety. We don’t like to feel exhaustion, so we fight it. We try to make it go away, and we stress ourselves out because it’s not going away. And then it just exacerbates it. We go into this downward spiral. So if we can accept the fact that this moment, it sucks. You don’t want to say that it doesn’t suck. It does suck. It sucks to be burnt out. No other way to put it. It’s not fun. It’s not good for you, for anyone else. It’s not enjoyable. It is a problem. We don’t want to pretend that it’s nothing, you know? But then when you kind of opened that, like, oh, wow, this sucks, and you kind of give it some more space. So, again, you aren’t just the feelings of being burnt out, but you’re also this compassionate presence that says, oh, that’s really hard, you know, and, like, what can I do to help? We feel this naturally when we have compassion for someone else, we aren’t identified with their problems, and that’s what gives us the space to be bigger and just to focus on getting this kind of fount of kindness and warmth and support. So when we do that for ourselves, it’s like we enter, you might say, this bigger perspective, our bigger self, and this allows us not to be so overwhelmed. But if we resist it, if we pretend it’s not there, we fight against it. It’s almost like. It’s like if you make a really tight fist, and you fight the tight fist by making your fist tighter, it just makes it worse. But if you just open your hand, you know, you can kind of feel you open to the pain or whatever’s here, that it is still there, but you aren’t making it worse. And you also have a lot more degrees of freedom, so to speak, to figure out, well, what might I do to help myself in this situation?

00:30:01 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about approaching emotions with a strong back and a soft front. Yeah, explain that.

00:30:07 – Kristin Neff
Not to steal that line. It’s a famous line of Joan Halifax, who’s a wonderful buddhist teacher, actually. So, again, some people think that compassion is just about being soft. Like being soft and squishy. Oh, that’s. I’m so sorry. That’s so hard. You know, we might say that that’s so hard, but there’s also a certain, like, thing about having your own back. When you have your own back, it’s like there’s a strength there. There’s a stability there. Like, I’m here for you. I will do whatever I need to do to make sure you’re safe, you know, protect you if you need to or provide for your needs, drawing boundaries. For instance. You know, if other people are trying to harm you, part of having this strong back is standing up for yourself, speaking up. So the soft front is kind of, you might say, the tender self compassion of accepting the pain, accepting our difficult emotions, accepting ourselves unconditionally. And the strong back is like standing up for what’s right. Which might mean, hey, maybe some of her behaviors are not working out so well. Maybe we need to think about doing something differently because it’s not in align with my values, things like that. The strong back may say, you need to get up off the couch. You know, that’s really the interplay of the fierce and the tender, the strength and the acceptance. It’s like yin and yang. You know, if you have just one or the other, it’s not going to work. We really need both to be there simultaneously. If you’re just hard toward others or yourself, you aren’t very helpful. But if you’re just soft and squishy, you aren’t helpful either.

00:31:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that makes me think. A little bit of some research from Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan wrote a book called Chatter. But later in the book, he talks about something. I don’t remember exactly what he calls it, but he was talking about venting to other people and whether it’s helpful or not. And the research that they did seem to show that truly healing conversations have two elements. One element is the one that we traditionally think of, which is just listen to the person and don’t try and solve their problem. Validate what they’re feeling. Be clear that you support them, that you’re on their side. Don’t try and fix it like, do that. But that the most healing conversations also then can go on and sometimes can show the person who’s suffering some perspective that maybe they’re nothing seeing. And I think we end up very often in what we want from others and what we give others. In one of those two camps, we’re either all like, hey, I know what you’re feeling. It’s so hard. It’s so hard. Or we end up trying to solve people’s problems. And it just makes me think of what you’re saying here about this sort of strong back, soft front, or fierce and tender self compassion, that there are elements of both that are ultimately most helpful.

00:32:57 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. They really do fit together. So I’m thinking, like, with my friends, I’ve had friends tell me I sometimes give advice. I know I’m not supposed to, but if you were to ask me, would you like some advice? And then I tell them, then they know. It’s like it’s not invalidating.

00:33:14 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:33:14 – Kristin Neff
The problem with giving advice and people just want to be heard is it somehow invalidates their emotions. But if you ask, once they’re clear it’s coming from a place of support and not of trying to control or nothing judgment, then it’s so much more effective. You can kind of say it’s the same thing with ourselves. When we try to fix things immediately, there’s a way in which we’re somehow thinking that means that we’re bad or we’re wrong, you know, or that something, that the situation is unacceptable. When we make that very clear, I’m unconditionally worthy. Whether or not I’ve just screwed up, I’m here for myself, regardless of how difficult this moment is. Plus. But if there’s anything I can do to help change my behavior or do something differently, I’m open to it. Carl Rogers, you’ve probably heard this. The curious paradox is the more I accept myself, the more I can change.

00:34:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:34:04 – Kristin Neff
So the soft front actually helps us have a strong back. The art and contradiction, they work together. They enhance one another.

00:34:27 – Eric Zimmer
In the chapter about dealing with the difficult emotions of burnout, you talk about the five stages of acceptance. Can you walk us through what those five are?

00:34:40 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So there are five stages of working with difficult emotions. They aren’t as linear as I’m going to make them out to be, but I’m going to talk about them in order. The first, most natural response to a difficult emotion is resistance. We don’t like it. We don’t want it here. We want to push it away. It’s as if someone comes to your door and you don’t like who’s come there and say, go away. I don’t want you to want to talk to you. But then when we open up a little bit more to the experience of the emotion, we can actually explore what’s there. It’s like peeking through the peephole, you know, like, who’s there? Since, you know, maybe we don’t like it, but at least we’re a little curious. We aren’t full in full on resistant mode. Even though who’s there, don’t like that person, it might still be some negative reaction to it, and then there’s some tolerating. So, okay, we’ve identified what’s here. We might use mindfulness to do that. And it’s like, well, okay, this experience is here. I don’t like it, but I guess I can deal with it. It’d be like letting the person you don’t like into your foyer. You can come into the foy, but don’t come into the house yet. Right. Stay there, but it’s okay. But not so sure about it. And then once we start to feel a little safer, and this is self compassion, really facilitates this, we can be let go of resistance a little bit more. All these stages are, in some ways, letting go of resistance versus total resistance. Then we explore. We let go and have to at least figure out what’s here. And then we kind of tolerate, and then we can actually allow ourselves to feel what we feel. So we give up most of our resistance. We kind of, okay, this is what I’m feeling. I’m not going to fight it. I’m going to be with it as it is. It’s kind of letting the person into the house. Yeah, go ahead, wander around the house. That’s okay. You know, you can even use the bathroom if you want. No. You know, you’ve kind of really given up your resistance.

00:36:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:36:28 – Kristin Neff
And then the final stage is what’s called befriending. And this is where we realize that there’s usually some learning gift of learning in the difficult emotions. So almost every difficult emotion can be used as an opportunity to let us know where are our wounds that might need healing? Where are our triggers, perhaps that might let us know there’s some stuff we need to work on. Where might we be resisting, and where could we let go a little bit more? What lesson might I learn from this that would help me do something differently in the future? And that kind of comes at the very end. But the reason it’s important to know it goes in stages is some people think the moment they have a difficult emotion or difficult experience, they’re supposed to go straight to the, okay, what’s the silver lining? What can I learn from this? Or it’s like Rumi, just let the emotions sweep through your house. You don’t necessarily want to do that. It’s okay. Just let them into the foyer for a while if that’s all you can handle.

00:37:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Not only is that not what we sometimes want to do or should do, we just can’t.

00:37:31 – Kristin Neff
Right.

00:37:31 – Eric Zimmer
And that’s what I love about this. There’s a sumunk kid quote that I use fairly often where she talks about letting go. And she says that letting go is a spiraling and winding process. And I love that idea. And that’s why I love these stages, because my experience is we don’t tend to go from really not wanting something to be there to allowing her befriending instantly. It’s a process, and this can show stages along the way.

00:37:58 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. And the other thing it does is the part of us that’s feeling the difficult emotion. And maybe this is a young, wounded part of, if we immediately just say, okay, give up, don’t resist anymore, and befriend, or, you know, just allow yourself to feel it, you know, that part of us may feel invalidated.

00:38:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:38:17 – Kristin Neff
And so there’s something about saying, take your time, go slowly, lets that part of us know that, okay, it’s accepted. It can feel safe, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to, like, change on a dime. And that can also help the letting go process unfold a little more smoothly if there’s not the pressure to have to, like, let go all at once.

00:38:35 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about something called the paradox of self compassion, which is we give ourselves self compassion not to feel better, but because we feel bad.

00:38:44 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So it’s related to what we’ve been talking about in terms of resistance. So often when we give ourselves compassion and support and kindness, we do tend to feel better. You know, we’ve stopped judging ourselves or shaming ourselves, and it feels good to feel supported in this way. What can happen when practicing self compassion is we start to use self compassion as a hidden form of resistance. Like, let’s say I’m feeling worried about something coming up in the future and in the past, I gave myself some compassion. It’s okay to be worried. I’m here for you. And I started worrying a little less. What can happen after a while is then we start to give ourselves compassion to get rid of the worry instead of supporting ourselves because we’re worried. And whenever we start using something as a form of resistance, hidden or not, it doesn’t work. Right. That’s the resistance is futile idea. What we resist persists and grow stronger. And this is, again, an established psychological principle. And by the way, not always. Sometimes we can compartmentalize temporarily, but eventually we have to open to it. Otherwise it’s going to come back to haunt us. So if we just ask ourselves, why am I giving myself compassion? Is it to get rid of my pain? Or is it simply to show up for myself to be on my side as I’m experiencing pain? And it’s the second we’re after. And then, ironically, yes, of course, we’re going to do what we can to get rid of our pain. We’re going to try to make steps to be healthy. And, well, we’re going to ask ourselves what we need first. We have to accept ourselves in our situation with an open heart before we can take those next steps of trying to make healthy change.

00:40:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, this always strikes me as a form of mental and emotional judo that goes on because it’s the idea of, like, people say, well, just, if you just allow your feelings, then that’s the thing to do. And so we’ll allow our feelings, and the reason is to get them to go away. At least that’s the reason I’m doing it, right? I’m like, okay, I’m gonna allow you. So you get out of here. And it’s sort of this idea where, like, of course, there’s a part of it that does want that, and that’s what we’re aiming at. And yet, to your point, if that’s the whole purpose, then it may not work as well. It’s kind of like the whole debate around meditation practice that’s been around forever. Like, well, if you’re not practicing to get somewhere, then why are you doing it? And yet, if you’re doing it to get somewhere, it suddenly becomes a whole lot less effective. And so, like I said, it’s this sort of subtle judo I feel like we have to do inside ourselves.

00:41:22 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. Sometimes the way I work with that is I say things to myself, especially those, because, remember, it’s parts of us that are having these difficult emotions, right? Often these are young parts of ourselves, wounded parts of ourselves, scared parts of ourselves. What happens is we resist feeling them and want to shove those emotions away immediately. Those young parts of us often feel invalidated or shut down or not accepted. So sometimes I say to myself, I will not abandon you. Really? Interesting, the reaction inside your system when you say to yourself, I will not abandon you. It’s like, okay, you can feel what you feel. I won’t abandon you. And then once there’s that sense of safety, okay, I’m not going to be abandoned, then those parts start to feel safe, and then they start to let go a little more readily. But the bottom line is, I’ve actually told myself, even if you never, ever change, I still love you. And then, like, whoa, that’s a big one. Really?

00:42:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:42:24 – Kristin Neff
Are you sure it’s not contingent on maybe it’s making progress? Nope. When you give yourself that sort of unconditional bottom line, acceptance, you know, inevitably you can’t. You can’t do it as a form of manipulation, but inevitably, that sense of safety and love helps us release and let go of those things that aren’t serving us anymore.

00:42:44 – Eric Zimmer
So maybe what we can do with our remaining time here is to try and talk about a couple of the tools that are in this book. If somebody has listened to all of this, believes now that self compassion is a way they would like to try and approach themselves and their lives, where do they start?

00:43:02 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So it’s actually pretty easy to start. There’s a couple things you could do almost immediately, even without reading the book. One is, the good news about self compassion is most of us have a template for what compassion and support looks like. Right? Maybe we have a good friend that we were compassionate with, or we have an animal, or, you know, someone in our life we care about. We know what that looks like, what would be supportive, what is helpful. Or maybe we’ve had someone like that in our life, a teacher or a grandparent who’s been compassionate and supportive, or even if you haven’t, even if you haven’t been lucky enough to have that in your life. There’s, like, movie figures like Obi Wan Kenobi or some of these. You know, we have these, like, images from literature and film about what a really caring compassion person looks like so we don’t have to invent the wheel. So what you can do, let’s say you’re burnt out and you want to be more supportive to yourself. You can either ask, well, what would I say to someone I really cared about who was burnt out? I wanted to be there for them? Or what would maybe a really good friend say to me? Or what would this, like, fictional character that I, you know, if. Maybe if I’m really trying to say to me right now and then. So we have the template. We don’t have to invent the template. We just need to kind of adopt it. And by the way, I’m not gonna lie, it does can feel a little awkward at first. It feels like, oh, I’m being phony. I’m not really feeling it. And that’s okay. You know, you don’t have to feel it right away. Intention is driving the train here. It kind of leads the locomotive. You set your intention to be kinder and more supportive towards yourself. You try to, you know, put yourself in that position, do the perspective taking, and then eventually the feelings come later. It’s really all about cultivating goodwill for yourself. Not good feelings. Good feelings. We can’t really control whether or not we feel it, but we can cultivate our intention to be more supportive and kinder to ourselves.

00:45:00 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about something called backdraft. When we start practicing self compassion. What is that?

00:45:07 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So maybe you do speak to yourself like you would speak to your good friend, and you say, I’m here for you. I care about you. You know, what do you need? And instead of feeling compassion or feeling safe, you feel agitated, you feel scared or maybe even angry. It’s actually very, very common. Or you feel even worse than you did before. So usually that’s backdraft. It’s a firefighting term. In firefighting, it means, you know, when you open the doors of a house on fire, the fresh air rushes in, ignites the flames, and the flames rush out. That’s why firefighters don’t just open the doors of a house on fire. Well, actually, something similar can happen with us if our whole lives, the way we’ve dealt with our pain and our frustration or our fears, by shutting down, numbing ourselves out, closing our hearts, we open the doors of our hearts, and, like, the fresh air, the care and concern rushes in. And often the old pain just rushes out. It’s like, sees the light of day and comes out in a whoosh. And so we feel it as the anger, the fear. We actually, you know, we feel worse. Or sometimes it’s just a matter of, like, contrast. You’re kind to yourself, and you immediately remember how, like, well, my parents weren’t kind to me or this person wasn’t kind to me. It’s actually all part of the healing process. It’s a natural phenomena. There’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing it right. But it does mean you need to go a little more slowly. It means maybe, just maybe, you’re flinging open the doors of your heart a little too quickly. You need to, like, have those picks that the firefighters use to poke holes. In other words, you know, maybe just give yourself a little bit of compassion for a few minutes and then stop. Or give yourself compassion. Maybe not mental compassion. Maybe putting your hands on your heart and saying, I will never abandon you is way too much. You know, it can be good. But, yeah, that’s. That’s pretty intense stuff, right? Maybe something like, well, maybe I’ll just have a cup of tea. Especially if you’re british. You can have a cup of tea or, you know, take a walk or. Or do something else to just, again, validate so your needs are important, that you’re worthy of care and consideration. But this may be a little intense and maybe a little more behavioral or just kind of feeling your feet on the floor, something like that. Grounding yourself, stabilizing yourself. Backdraft usually does get better over time. It is more intense with people with the trauma history. Just something to be aware of. It can absolutely be work with, but it may, you may need to go a little slower. We have a saying, walk slowly, go farther. So it’s not like a sprint to have your heart wide open, you know, just little bits at a time as you feel more comfortable, as you get more used to it. And you can also have compassion for your backdraft, because it’s like, wow, that’s tough, you know?

00:47:51 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:47:51 – Kristin Neff
Hurts to give myself kindness. Like, if you had a friend who said that to you, be like, oh, oh, sorry, you know?

00:47:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think both those things. This idea of extending goodwill, not necessarily good feelings and backdraft are useful, because I do know a lot of people, this is challenging, right? They don’t believe it at first, or it feels really false, or it doesn’t feel natural. And that idea of recognizing that, like, I love the way you said it, that it’s the intention that’s driving the locomotive. It’s the intention to continue to show up for myself in the best way that I can.

00:48:26 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. What self compassion is, in many ways, it’s a perspective shift. Normally, we are in the perspective of the sense of self that needs compassion, that’s flobbed, isn’t perfect, or that’s struggling or scared or has some pain in some way. What you’re doing when you give yourself compassion is you’re switching into the perspective of the person giving compassion. Most of us, again, are used to this part of ourselves. We’re used to giving it to others. But this is also a really important part of our self. There’s always been there. And this part is less limited. It struggles less. It’s more competent, it’s wiser. It’s calmer. It’s more peaceful. It’s more loving. So you might say what we’re doing is we’re loosening our sense of identity with the normal, everyday sense of self, and we’re just adopting consciously this identity that comes up naturally when we’re there for a dog or a cat or our children. But we have to do it a little more intentionally to inhabit that part of ourselves toward ourselves. But again, it’s not rocket science. It’s a part of us. Most of us have known, you know, for a long time. We just have to remember to make that little switch. It’s a big switch. I’m not gonna lie. It’s a big switch.

00:49:41 – Eric Zimmer
I noticed that you talk about, like, talking to ourselves as we might talk to a good friend or a small child or an animal we cared about. I never hear you say talk to yourself like you would. Youre a mother. It’s a joke.

00:49:56 – Kristin Neff
It’s a joke for some people. Yeah. Also, I don’t also say your spouse or your partner either, because sometimes when people are too close, and that’s actually the reason why we say good friend, because usually you aren’t identified with your friend’s pain. If your friend loses their job, you aren’t scared by it.

00:50:13 – Eric Zimmer
Right?

00:50:14 – Kristin Neff
Right. And so you can just be your most compassionate self. But if your child loses their job or your partner, you know, we’re too close. Then our sense of self gets triggered and the fear can come in. And then when we’re afraid, we often use these strategies that we form when we are young, which are like fight or scream or hide or shame, which aren’t as effective.

00:50:37 – Eric Zimmer
Well, Kristin, thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you again. Thank you for coming back on and sharing your work with us.

00:50:45 – Kristin Neff
It’s been my pleasure. Thank you for the good work you do.

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Amishi Jha
Experiencing conflict is not a problem, but to realize that the conflict does not mean to translate into the elaborated notion that I’m a complete failure and is never going to work out. That’s the mind doing something else.

00:00:19 – 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 you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Doctor Amishi Jha, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the director of contemplative neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co founded in 2010. Doctor Jha’s work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and the Pentagon, and she’s been covered in the New York Times, NPR time, Forbes, and more. On this episode, Eric and Doctor Jha discuss her new book, Peak Mind find your focus, own your attention, invest twelve.

00:01:49 – Eric Zimmer
Minutes a day hi Amishi, welcome to the show.

00:01:52 – Amishi Jha
So great to be here.

00:01:53 – Eric Zimmer
I’m really excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your new book, Peak Mind, find your focus, own your attention, invest twelve minutes a day. So we’ll get into that in a minute, but we’ll start like we always do, with a parable. 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 and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents and says, well, which one wins? I 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.

00:02:36 – Amishi Jha
Oh, it’s such a great parable. And I love that it’s really so central to what you talk about on this podcast because it so much relates to what I think about and the work that I do in my lab, because it, frankly, is about attention, and what you feed in my mind reflects what you pay attention to, what you value. So to me, it’s entirely describing the power of attention and the vulnerability of mind when we do not attend to things that serve us best.

00:03:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, I agree totally. And attention is a big subject in the work that I do. I’ve got a program called Spiritual Habits, and attention is one of the core principles there because you quote William Jhames in your book. There’s another statement that I don’t think you quoted in the book, although it’s possible I missed it, which is my experience, is what I agree to attend to. Fundamental attention really does describe. I wouldn’t say it’s the only thing, but it is a big factor in the type of life we experience.

00:03:37 – Amishi Jha
Absolutely. I mean, it’s funny, William Jhames. I was the father of the field that I’m a member of, psychology, but sometimes I think he’s like an alien from the future because he had so much right about his wisdom and insight into things and couldn’t agree more with your kind of take on that whole thing, which is the centrality of our consciousness. Experience is tied to the conduit for what becomes prominent in our minds, which is attention itself.

00:04:05 – Eric Zimmer
So where I’d like to start is with the title of the book, peak mind. You say a peak mind is a mind that doesn’t privilege thinking and doing over being. It masters both modes of attention. So say a little bit more about that, because a lot of the book is sort of talking about people who are in, for lack of a better word, mission critical type situations, you know, people who are trying to perform better in given circumstances. So there’s a fair amount of the book that’s devoted in that direction. But this statement really is speaking to something more broadly than how I perform.

00:04:39 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, absolutely. And part of the reason I wanted to make sure I made that distinction between thinking and doing is exactly because of the populations that make gravitate toward this book and toward the kind of projects that we do in the research we conduct, which are, as you call, a mission critical kind of folks, but also sometimes they’re referred to as tactical professionals. There is a task at hand, and we need to accomplish it, and there is a more successful and less successful way to accomplish it. And action is what it’s all about. And frankly, in my entire field, in the field of attention research, from the sort of traditional point of view, that is essentially what we see attention’s role as serving action and if we can’t pay attention, the chances of acting appropriately are going to not be there. But what I’m trying to highlight, which is part of the broader mission of a lot of contemplative practices and wisdom traditions, is that there is another way we can use our attention, use our mind. And there are aspects of even what sort of traditional attentional models within modern cognitive neuroscience described that can be amplified but aren’t currently amplified. So the being mode, from my point of view, is taking an observational stance, being receptive to what’s occurring, so that in between the action, there is reflection. And without that reflection, the chances to ensure that the action is appropriate are lessened. Because sometimes you can know sort of a ballistic orientation, like, this is what we’re doing, or the training that you have may guide you to say, this is what you do. But is it the right thing to do? How are you going to know unless you actually look at the circumstances? And, you know, a lot of times these tactical professionals or mission oriented folks talk about situational awareness as you got to know what’s going on around you. But what I’m highlighting with that statement of being mode, not just doing mode, is that part of the situation is what is occurring in your own mind, the set point you have, the expectations and stories and assumptions that you have. And the being mode allows you to take stock of what is present without taking any action in that moment, just allowing that to exist and percolating in it. And I think it’s highly undervalued, especially for a lot of the kinds of professionals that we end up working with. So it’s a new or novel aspect of what they might consider doing, which is being.

00:07:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:07:00 – Amishi Jha
And I put that in quotes because people can’t see me. So, you know, in some sense, the being new type of doing, if you want to approach it in that way.

00:07:08 – Eric Zimmer
You also say a peak mind. And this, to quote William Jhames, again, which I had not seen this quote before, and I love a peak mind balances the flights and the perchings. He says, like a bird’s life, the stream of consciousness seems to be made up of an alternation of flights and perchings. Say a little bit more about that. That’s very poetic language, I think, to speak to some concepts that you’ve certainly backed up with neuroscience.

00:07:31 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. And I think it touches on what you were asking me about a moment ago. Right. The flights in some sense is the doing and the purging is the being, and that this can be broken down in sort of the micro level. So even if we’re in the middle of executing a complex task, to not forget that the flights are going to be much more successful if the purgings are actually taking place. And it’s that dance, it’s sort of the important aspects of what wisdom is, is both reflection and action.

00:08:05 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. That quote made me think of. We interviewed a gentleman. I don’t know, and I’m going to get your opinion on this in a second. We interviewed a gentleman a while back by the name of Ian McGilchrist. He wrote a book called the master and his emissary. And it’s talking about right brain and left brain, and I’d like to get your opinion on that in a second. But one of the things he said was, and when he was talking about how the right brain and the left brain work, is that the right brain is more the perching. It’s watching everything that’s happening. It’s seeing the context. It’s, you know, and the left brain is more the flight, or he talked about like a bird pecking food out of a series of stones. I’m curious, in the work that you’ve done, has right brain, left brain shown up at all? I just kind of curious your thought on that theory. I don’t want to spend a lot of time there, but I can’t help but ask.

00:08:56 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know that book, and I don’t know Ian at all. I don’t know how literally he was being or what research he was looking to. But frankly, from sort of a modern neuroscience perspective, the notion of right brain, left brain allowing for complex function to happen in a hemisphErically specified manner, has been debunked. All complex functions, whether it’s a broad observational stance or an action oriented focusing, will involve coordination between the entirety of the brain, in particular both hemispheres. But I appreciate the concept of these are distinct from each other. And I would not describe them as based on hemispheres. I describe them based on mental modes. And when we think about a mode in the mind, it’s essentially a configuration of whatever brain networks are involved in a particular process being more prominent versus a different set of brain networks. So definitely it’s the case that, and, you know, I describe it in some sense as two aspects of attention. And, you know, this notion of a flashlight, meaning focusing, narrowing, selecting versus a floodlight, broad, receptive, not biasing some information over other information. And those are two different modes. And typically, you cannot be in both modes simultaneously. And we know this. Right. If you’re sitting there and reading a deeply entrenched in a good novel or a good book, any kind of a good book could be peak mind. So if you’re entrenched in reading a good book, somebody walks in the room and says something to you, you’re like, huh, what? You’ve no idea what was said, not because you lost the capacity to comprehend language, but because you’re full focus was so narrowed that the input coming in in your broad, receptive stance was not quite up to snuff to be able to break down the sounds into language. From the brain science point of view, we know that a lot of these aspects of attention are mutually inhibitory. When one network is active, the other one will be suppressed. So I again would say that do not get too literal with regard to the hemisphere that it’s involved in, but the modal aspects, the mind being in different modes, is certainly very, very important.

00:10:59 – Eric Zimmer
You mentioned the two different modes in your book. You actually have three modes. You’re a little bit like the Buddha in that you’re a list maker. There’s lots of lists of three in this book. I’m sure someone has pointed that out before, but I actually like it as a way of organizing. It helps, but. So you talked about two of the sort of, quote unquote, subsystems that work together.

00:11:21 – Amishi Jha
Right.

00:11:22 – Eric Zimmer
The flashlight, which is. We’re narrowed in, we’re focused. You talked about the floodlight, which is a more broad and open. And then the third mode that you talk about is the juggler. Say a little bit more about what the juggler is.

00:11:34 – Amishi Jha
Sure, sure. All three of these are really, as you said, subsystems of attention. And in the broadest sense, we can say this mental capacity of paying attention is really just about prioritizing some information over other information. It’s thankfully an evolutionary inheritance we get to enjoy, even though it has its own consequences. But it is the result of, we think, at least kind of going back in time, a big problem that the brain had, which is that everything could not be processed. The brain just lacked the computational power to do that. So if you didn’t prioritize some stuff over other stuff, there was no way you were going to be able to make sense of the world around you or even what’s occurring within your mind. So just to keep that in mind as the anchor, prioritize some information over other information. Now, the flashlight, you’d say, is prioritizing some content over other content. So wherever you direct that flashlight is going to be the privileged content. But it’s directed towards something, some object. And that object can be something in the external environment or an object in the mind, like a thought or a memory. When we go to the floodlight, we’re talking about prioritizing not so much based on the content, because you’re not supposed to really advantage one thing over another. It’s about being this broad, receptive stance, but it is privileging something, and that is the moment. Now. So, formally, this floodlight system is called the alerting system, and you’re not being alert to something in the past or the future, but right in this moment, so privileging the present moment. And then, as you mentioned, the third system, formally called executive functioning, but I describe it as a juggler for shorthand, is really regarding prioritizing based on our goals. So these are internally held goals, intentions, plans, whatever it is you want to call it, that is guiding the way we’re going to interact with our own mind and our environment. You know, just like a juggler, you’ve got to do this with sort of a multiplicity in mind. You usually don’t have one goal. So in this moment, my goal is to have a fruitful conversation with you, but my goal is also to publish the papers that I’m publishing and to be a responsible citizen and to enjoy my life and my family. Those goals don’t go away, but obviously, I’m not actively doing all of those simultaneously. So I’m kind of keeping all the balls in the air and ensuring that every action that I undertake aligns with my goals. And when the juggler is not functioning so well, balls drop. We forget the goal. We don’t inhibit irrelevant information. And this could be a micro goal. Right? So I want to have a conversation with you. That’s my goal. But my phone buzzes, and then I go and start reading my text messages in the middle of this conversation. Why did I do that? Well, I failed to hold the goal and then control my behavior aligned with it. So I think that maybe helps frame it more broadly, that all of it falls underneath attention, because it all has to do with prioritizing some information or other information. It’s just the nature of what that.

00:14:24 – Eric Zimmer
Information is differs is the executive function, or the juggler, as we would call it, the part that is choosing where to point the flashlight.

00:14:34 – Amishi Jha
Yes.

00:14:34 – Eric Zimmer
I think attention is very interesting because it’s similar to the breath. It’s something that happens automatically and is also controllable, correct?

00:14:42 – Amishi Jha
Yeah.

00:14:42 – Eric Zimmer
You know, so if someone lit a firecracker off behind my head, right? Now, like, my attention is going there. There’s nothing I’m going to do about that. But beyond that, is it the juggler that’s sort of trying to say, let me align my attention with, to use a different word for what you were talking about, my intentions, the things that matter to me. Is that kind of falling into the juggler’s role, correct.

00:15:06 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. Executive control is the thing that guides goals. Now, the goal could be, pay attention to what’s happening right now. Don’t privilege any content over other content. So you’re driving down the road and you see big flashing yellow light, like maybe by a construction site, and the juggler would say, probably best to check out what’s going on right now. And it essentially calls upon that particular floodlight orientation or mental mode to be in. Or it could be get narrow and focused right now. So you can actually understand this conversation or read this sentence or whatever it is, get focused and directed. But there’s always the kind of push and pull of what the juggler intends to do and then other stuff that may derail what’s going on. And, you know, in some sense, the flashlight is a great example of that, where you already said it, you can direct it willfully, but it can get yanked. And what it gets yanked by is also very interesting because in some sense, it’s like the baked into us juggler. Right? It’s like, why would it be that a firecracker would pull your attention? Because your survival may depend on it, right. So essentially, these, you know, are things that are salient, that are novel, that are fear inducing or threatening, that are self related, are all sort of privileged into the way that our brain functions. We don’t have to try to make it that way. It just is sort of, by default, built in.

00:16:31 – Eric Zimmer
Right. You say the three main factors that determine, you know, how this attention gets deployed is familiarity, something that’s new. I’m going to give more attention to salience. Right. How important it is to me. And then finally, our own goal, our own attention. And so attention is sort of being, as you said, pulled by those things. And one of the things that you say early on that I really liked Washington, that there’s nothing wrong with our attention. We talk a lot about having attention problems these days, you know, crisis of attention. But you say our attention is working just fine. Just say a little bit more about that.

00:17:04 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. That’s the kind of ironic part of this moment. People feel a sense of struggle, an overwhelm or crisis, and they want to blame their brain instead of the circumstances in some sense. So let’s just talk about social media or technology kind of more broadly. The fact that there are algorithms that can be built around our willingness to continue engaging with particular pieces of software or websites, etcetera, tells us that our attention is working completely in a regular, typical, predictable fashion. And you already mentioned the three biggies that might get us familiarity and salience, for sure, and goals also. But when you can finally tune the. The familiar because you’re being exposed to it over and over again, or you can finally tune the salience because it’s so self related, or you can ensure that the goals are kind of kept in front of your mind. You know, like, at some point, you looked at, I talk about in the book, like, I was looking for this frying pan, like a, you know, pot or pan. And then I kept seeing pans all over the place because it was being forced onto me. Like, you look for pan. You must be interested in this.

00:18:15 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:18:16 – Amishi Jha
So all of a sudden now, the goal that I had once is now kept at the front of my mind. It’s like, oh, yeah, I did want to get that pan. It’s like reminding your goals. So attention is doing what it does, but the circumstances are now aligning to tune up and really maximize engagement for the benefit of usually selling us a product, mining our attention to be exposed to potentially buying a product.

00:18:38 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:18:38 – Amishi Jha
So it’s totally driven by this whole structure. I just wanted to caution people that, first of all, don’t take it in. Like, it’s not like there’s something wrong with you. If you see your name and you want to click on it, that is, that’s the reason that your name and face are, or on every social media app, is because that’s the first step into hooking you in. And frankly, the other piece is that you can’t really fight against it because you’re gonna lose, because you’re not just dealing with your own kind of orientation toward social media content, but you’re dealing with very, very smart algorithms that are tuning up to you and a team of engineers that are programming it. So if we’re gonna take on this challenge, it cannot just be like, oh, my mind will not click on that bright yellow, shiny thing that’s saying, click here. Unlikely.

00:19:47 – Eric Zimmer
You say you can’t win that fight. Instead, cultivate the capacity and skill to position your mind so you don’t have to fight. Say a little bit more about that. I think that’s a really important point, is that if our goal is to bring our attention back to our own control and the things that matter to us. It does feel like it’s a fight. And like you, I tend to believe it’s a fight where we’re set up to sort of lose.

00:20:11 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. The way not to fight is to, at the kind of most fundamental level, pay attention to our attention to know where our mind is. Then there’s more sense of agency, just like anything else. Like I could have the most elaborate plans, but if I don’t know what the plans are are, and I’m not checking in with where I am relative to those plans, I’ll never be able to execute them. But what we lack, typically, is that checking in component or what we’d call monitoring. Right? We’re not monitoring ourselves and we’re not another kind of technical term, meta aware. We’re not aware of the contents and processes in our mind at play in any given moment. And we can cultivate the ability to be better at that. And that’s where mindfulness meditation can really be helpful, because it is a way in which we are better able to know our mind, not just in general, like I tend to be this way or that, but in this moment, what is occurring within me and around me so more fully, situationally aware.

00:21:08 – Eric Zimmer
I want to push on that a little bit and explore it a little further because I think it’s really important. I love the way you said in the book, we lack internal cues about where our attention is moment to moment in the spiritual habits program. What I say is, you know, if we’re trying to live a life, and basically I would say it would be living a life more based on principles that matter to us. Right. Living more by that goal orientation and the goal just be to be kinder. Right. So I think forgetting is the biggest problem. Your book advocates training, you know, twelve minutes in the morning with a couple different approaches and we can talk about what some of those are. I’m curious though, do you have suggestions on how else maybe during the day to get a little bit more of this? Because I do agree that a focused training period like you’re describing does help. And I know myself and a lot of people who do have morning mindfulness practice that we can still get pretty lost all day long and lose track of any of those internal cues. So do you have some ideas about how to weave those into more of the moments we have?

00:22:14 – Amishi Jha
Absolutely. First of all, I’d say that just to be clear about the prescription, it comes out of over a decade and a half of research, and the goal of that research is not how to maximize your spiritual fulfillment or life, but what is the minimum effective dose to protect attention in high stress circumstances? That’s a very different goal than other things. And that also that twelve minutes is not, in my view, the culmination or the be all, end all. It’s the starter.

00:22:42 – Eric Zimmer
Minimum effective dose.

00:22:43 – Amishi Jha
It’s the minimum effective dose. Thank you. Yes. And so I just wanted to mention that because people could say twelve minutes, what am I going to accomplish in twelve minutes a day? But it actually, we found, is beneficial. The other thing is that I don’t say when to do it. So do it whenever you’re going to do it still holds. The reason we do the formal minutes of day of mindfulness practice is so that the mental mode of mindfulness, which I describe as paying attention to our present moment experience without conceptually elaborating or emotionally reacting. We want to bring about more of that mode throughout the day because that is going to be the mode that allows us to connect with what’s happening in the moment and monitor the contents of our mind, as well as obviously taking stock of what’s happening around us, practicing so that we can just say we got it off our to do list. We’re practicing to elicit the more prevalence of that mode. But you’re right, there are ways in which we can advantage cueing ourselves to do that. So some of the things that we do, I’ll just give you an example from some of the research studies that we do, because we tell people what I just described to you, that we’re doing this so that we’re more mindful throughout the day. Not just that we’re olympic level breath followers. I mean, who cares, right? But how do you do that? So, for example, one of the practices that we give is these are all part of sort of the canon of what’s currently offered in the world of mindfulness training. And thankfully, that world is growing and more available to people. But something called the stop practice is a good one. And I recommend that people do this, and they use the cue of being stopped, meaning you’re stopped at a elevator, you’re stopped at a stop sign, you’re stopped at a crosswalk, you’re waiting in line. Anytime you stop and you notice the body is stationary, typically what happens in that moment? Pull out your phone, start doing stuff? No, use that as a moment to do this practice. And the practice is a mini mindfulness practice. So stop is an acronym for stop. You’re already stopped. Take a breath. And that’s just aware of one conscious breath, like you’re just. You’re not manipulating the breath or trying to take it more deeply. Just like we’ve been breathing this whole time but taking stock of it. Yeah, observe. So after that breath, you’re still kind of in that kind of mode of observing what’s occurring right now and then proceed. And, you know, I’ll tell you that one of the papers that we’re working on right now is a project we did in basic combat training with close to 2000 soldiers where they did this stop practice. They did a formal mindfulness practice, like we assign that I describe in the book. But then we asked them to do the stop practice, and we found benefited all kinds of things. Their sense of team cohesion, their ability to check out if the body was experiencing pain, to determine if they needed to take action. You know, like, for example, people talk about just fracturing their feet and legs and bones because they’re so negligent of taking stock of the body. But if you’re stopped in all these times and you’re just checking out what’s going on, and we actually guide them. Week one is the breath. Then it may be the environment, then it’s aspects of the body, then it’s people in your team. So it kind of follows different components of what the target of what you take stock of in that observe moment is, can really make a difference and cues people into that mindful mode repeatedly and multiple times a day. So that’s one thing that you could try.

00:25:56 – Eric Zimmer
I think that’s great. You know, I’m often thinking about triggers, like, what you use the word q q or trigger, like, how can we remember? And that’s a good one. I mean, I’ve talked about and heard about sort of like, if you’re stopped at a traffic light, but I love the idea of, like, stopped in any circumstance. That’s a great one.

00:26:12 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. And, you know, now I’m telling people more, like, if you feel the urge to pull out your phone, that’s a moment to practice. Stop.

00:26:19 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:26:19 – Amishi Jha
Because that’s giving you a sense of, like, something’s going on that makes you feel capable of doing that and maybe think, is that what I want to be doing now or my default thing?

00:26:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. There are so many places I could take this, but we’re a little bit time limited. So I’m gonna. I’m gonna pivot to this place because it’s something I definitely want to talk with you about. And I think it’s important to reiterate sort of what? You said that the research you’re focused on is about improving attention. But you talk about attention, you say there are three major forces that degrade our attention. Stress, poor mood and threat. But it also sounds like early on you say that if we’re feeling cognitive fog, might be depleted attention. If we’re feeling anxious or worried, it could be hiJhacked attention. If we can’t focus, it might be fragmented attention. So not only are some of those things causes of degraded attention, but it sounds like degraded attention is also the cause of some of those things. Right. It seems like it’s a bi directional relationship. Would that be absolutely accurate?

00:27:19 – Amishi Jha
Absolutely.

00:27:19 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. So given that, whether most people who are not tactical professionals are going to say, you know what, I want better quality of life, right. I want to be a little bit happier. I want to spend less time ruminating and regretting. I want to be more present to the people I love, et cetera, et cetera. So given that this is a boy, this is a long setup for a question, isn’t it? But I’m going somewhere here.

00:27:40 – Amishi Jha
I trust you.

00:27:41 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about some strategies that people use for some of these things, like think positive, focus on the good, do something relaxing, suppress upsetting thoughts. We’ve got these series of strategies that I’m going to just put them under a bucket. I’ve heard you used this bucket before and tell me if you agree. Reframing. They are sort of reframing our experience. And then you used a term, maybe it was in the book and I missed it, but I heard it on another podcast. You said, well, there’s reframing and then there’s deframing. And I loved that idea. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about those two. And then I want to talk a little bit about when might it be appropriate to do one versus the other, depending on what we’re trying to accomplish.

00:28:23 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, well, reframing, I think you’ve laid out very, very clearly already that essentially it’s a replacing of one kind of mental content with other mental content, and that can happen through even paying attention differently. So we’re still using our attention, but now I’m going to highlight different aspects of my experience to put different content at the center of my mind. It’s still using attention in that focused way, that narrowed way, that action oriented way. In some sense, deframing is saying, get back into that perching or being mode. It’s like we’re taking a look at the structure that we’re within, you know, a framework is an interesting thing. Reframing is almost like you’re ignoring the framework and you’re just filling it with new stuff. Like, you know, it’s a, it’s an apartment building and you’re just going to bring in new furniture. The apartment building still stands with the way it is, or even, let’s say, a particular room still has a sofa and a chair and a table, but they’re different. They’re a different kind of sofa, you know, a more fluffy one or genuine leather, whatever it is that you want, that you think is an improvement over the prior set of things. But the framework is the same. What I’m saying with deframing is first step is essentially be aware that you are within a framework, you are within a story, you’re within a set of contingencies and conditions and you’re acting within that. So if we can just even look around and say, oh wow, look at that. I have take by default that there should be a couch and a chair and a table in this. Do I have to? Like, that’s the first step of deframing and you can build back the same sort of components if you’d like, but at least you’re doing it with a will and with knowledge that I’m going to put everything back in a way that I’d like, or maybe I’m going to tear the whole thing down and build it up differently. So I just think most of us don’t understand that this is within our capacity to do it. Seems too hard. But when you understand with mindfulness practice, for example, that every time even we do something as simple as a breath awareness practice, or what I call the finder flashlight practice, noticing that the mind has wandered away from the goal is a little tiny moment of, oh, I wasn’t in that framework anymore. And, you know, moving towards something like an open monitoring practice, we’re really just kind of disregarding all of that, all the stories and concepts and just trying to kind of be in the raw moment to moment flow of our conscious experience, it’s also way to practice deframing. So I think that once we understand why we’re intending to do it, and I think that there’s a very important reason to intend to do it, is that sometimes frameworks are wrong, stories are wrong. More fundamentally, to get at what you’re saying regarding, you know, spiritual practice. In a spiritual life, replacing the couch is not going to make you happier. It’s going to mean you have a different couch. You know, that’s sort of the deeper issue is that maybe you want to take a look at the assumptions you’re holding of what it means to be able to achieve the happiness you’re seeking.

00:31:20 – Eric Zimmer
So deframing in this sense, would we say it’s similar to the acceptance and commitment therapy term of diffusing. And it’s a way of sort of stepping back out of thought. Right. And trying to observe that all these thoughts are happening. Is that the essence of it?

00:31:38 – Amishi Jha
It’s at the essence. Diffusion, decentering, becoming meta aware, all of that. And it does require stepping outside of what’s occurring, at least from the conceptual terrain or getting more embodied in our sensory experience so we’re not stuck in the concepts that are driving whatever’s going on in our mind in that moment.

00:32:22 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things you say with things like thinking positive, focusing on the good, suppressing upsetting thoughts, that the problem with a lot of those is that they do require attentional resources to implement. They use up attention, and instead of strengthening it, you call them failed strategies, because while we try to use them to solve our attention problems, they degrade attention even further. Say a little bit more about that.

00:32:45 – Amishi Jha
Yeah. And this is where it comes down to the context that I’m talking about now. Positive psychology, gratitude, journaling, a lot of things that fall within the umbrella of positive psychology, powerful things to do. There is a really strong evidence base that this is a helpful thing to do. But I’m specifically talking about people under high stress circumstances, protracted periods of demand. Like, for example, if you think about a critical care nurse, over the course of this pandemic, the notion of saying, think positive, think positive thoughts, that doesn’t even make sense. It’s like I’ve gone through what I’m seeing and the level of demand that I’m facing and utilizing my attention, I can’t even take a breath to do that. And I think trying to do that is where it becomes a failed strategy. You’re pushing against, against and utilizing fuel that you don’t have to expend. You don’t have it in your gas tank, you can’t use it.

00:33:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, yes.

00:33:39 – Amishi Jha
It can really make things more problematic for people because they somehow think they’re supposed to be able to do that. And what I wanted more fundamentally for people to understand is that that is not a cost free thing to do. It’s not like the default of your mind is to have positive thoughts, and you are going in the wrong direction to have negative thoughts. It’s that when things are occurring and the mind is filled with negative thoughts. It will take attentional resources to cognitively reframe, and that will be requiring you to have those resources available.

00:34:09 – Eric Zimmer
How do we get to the point where our deframing defusion mindfulness practices don’t feel effortful in the same way? Because it feels like for me to sit down and follow the breath and keep bringing my attention back to it and then back to it is also an attentional drain. But your studies seem to indicate that’s not really the case.

00:34:31 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, the studies certainly indicate that what we’re doing is bolstering core attentional resources and working memory resources. It can feel like it’s difficult, it can feel like it’s difficult, but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually draining attention in the same way that a very intense upper body workout can feel tiring, but you are actually working towards growing your muscles. It’s sort of like that idea. And I think that there are many ways in which you can practice so that it feels less draining in some sense, easing up, not having that. That kind of conflict that a lot of people can experience in practice, and a lot of that, I think, is optional. I don’t think you need to feel like a failure because your mind wandered. But people think somehow that if my goal is to pay attention to my breath, my mind should not wander. And what I’m saying is, the goal is to pay attention to your breath. The mind will wander.

00:35:28 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:35:28 – Amishi Jha
And actually remember that the moment you realize that your mind has wandered is a win.

00:35:33 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:35:33 – Amishi Jha
And then, so instead of feeling that conflict and that effort and that drudge of like, oh God, my brain isn’t even staying stable. It’s what’s wrong with me? It’s like, ah, got it, I know where I’m off. I’ve got to get back. So even the way we orient to the practice at this more micro level can reduce that sense of dread and effort. But to kind of more broadly understand that something that feels effortful can still be building resources instead of depleting them.

00:36:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love that. I think what you said there is so important, I’m kind of curious, does everybody naturally default to that sort of natural, like, oh, my mind’s wandering, so I’m failing. It just seems inherent with everybody I’ve ever talked to who’s taken up a practice like this. Do you come across people that don’t orient that way? Or is it just sort of natural to us to be told, if your job is to do this task, you just see that you’re not doing that task, you just go, oh, I’m not good at this.

00:36:29 – Amishi Jha
Okay. I think it’s even more fundamental than that. I think that this experience, this is what’s kind of interesting. Why are conflict states and negative emotion? Why do they co occur? Right? So anytime you have a mismatch between what you would like to have happen and what happens, there can be a slight dysphoria associated with it. That’s kind of interesting. So why is that? People have looked at this in cognitive neuroscience studies, where sometimes you just look to see if you impose a negative emotion on somebody, what happens to their cognitive control. And what you find is that sometimes the next thing that occurs, they’re better at it. It’s like that negativity can actually require us to bring more of our cognitive resources to solve the problem. So I think the yoking of conflict and what we call upregulation of cognitive control go hand in hand. It’s the signal that says, do something differently. Expend more mental effort to do this, bring more resources to bear. Even experiencing conflict is not a problem. But to realize that the conflict does not mean to translate into the elaborated notion that I’m a complete failure and this is never going to work out. That’s the mind doing something else. I think that it’s really interesting when you, especially when you talk to sort of long term practitioners, that conflict is seen with a neutrality that most of us don’t. When there’s a mismatch, it’s like, that’s data, that’s not, I suck. And I think that getting to that point, and especially, you know, within all of these kind of elite settings, I think people are trying to understand that, that if I add the layer of a conceptual story on top of the experience of conflict, it will slow me down in course correcting what the conflict signal is conveying.

00:38:13 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. Yeah. And I just think it’s so important to work on not developing that aversive relationship with practice, because a lot of people, I think do, it’s that I’m failing at this, I can’t do this, I’m not any good at this. And I love that.

00:38:28 – Amishi Jha
I would even encourage people to just really break down the experience, like usually in our mindfulness practice. And, you know, and I talk about this too, it’s like you’re going to focus, you’re going to notice your mind wandering, and then you’re going to redirect back. But sometimes I will guide people to just hang out in the moment that they notice the mind has wandered away and really kind of get granular with that. What occurred first? What is the first thing that happened? Usually we’re having conflict, negative emotion. I suck. That’s a fast track. So what if it’s that whatever that visceral or, you know, feeling tone is of the mismatch? See if you can get more precise on that. Get cued into that mismatch feeling, and see if you can kind of take the elaboration that follows. And, you know, a lot of expert practitioners will talk about it. I remember talking to Mathieu Ricard, once, an adept practitioner, a buddhist monk, and he said it, and I thought it was so beautiful. He’s like, it’s not a storm. It’s like, I see slight undulations on the ripples of the pond. Whatever it is. It’s like, that would be awesome. If the slight movement of the water, the tranquility of the mind is disturbed, and you can say, ah, back on track.

00:39:38 – Eric Zimmer
Totally. Totally. Yeah. And I just wonder how much new practitioners have that ability to be that great.

00:39:45 – Amishi Jha
I think that it’s at least what we can do is say, observe it, see if you can track it. And it’s almost like what I would say to people, even when I think I do talk about this in the book, like, if you’ve ever had experienced or seen somebody experience a road rage, somebody gets cut off, and the next thing you know, somebody’s flipping somebody else the bird, or in, you know, terrible circumstances, there’s violence. What if you could actually grab ahold of the earliest moment that you. Whatever that initial inclination that I’m gonna have that feeling? And we know what that is. I mean, I always call it, as I noticed in my own practice when I was very early stages, is like, if there was a ballistic reactivity, I wasn’t gonna catch it. You know, if my kid did something and I was gonna shout, I was probably still gonna shout, but I would apologize more quickly.

00:40:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:40:31 – Amishi Jha
Like, oh, I didn’t want to have that strong of a reaction. And I’m sorry, because even though I feel what happened was not okay, you didn’t need that extra stuff that just happened. You know, I don’t know if that gets at what you’re talking about, but that feels like part of the journey of what this is.

00:40:47 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, well, you quote Lou Reed at one point in the book and said, between thought and expression lies a lifetime. I love any time the velvet underground shows up in a book, between thought and expression lies a lifetime. Reminds me of the Viktor Frankl quote, between stimulus and response, right? And I’ve said that I think sometimes the most practical thing along history of different types of meditation practices given me, I think the most practical thing is that space between stimulus and response seems a little bit bigger. There’s a little bit more moment to be like, oh, hang on. You know, listeners couldn’t see that, but I sort of started to rise up in, like, a outrage and. But, you know, don’t get all the way there, you know. And to your point, then, yes, also learning to walk it back faster. And I love the idea that you just said about noticing that moment when your mind is wandered and really noticing what happens there, because in Buddhism, they talk about the five skandhas. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the five skandhas, but it’s describing a little bit of the way that we put together the sense of a self. There’s some initial, like vedana, like the very first thing, but they make a distinction between perception, like the raw sense data, and then all the layers that start getting added on top of that. Right. Positive, negative to the stories we might tell. Advanced practitioners say you can actually start to notice those extraordinarily fine increments. For most of us, it’s just like that. That whole process happens like that. But there is a way of breaking that down. I guess my question to you would be, what have you seen looking at the way our brains process data that might shed light on that or confirm that that’s kind of what happens. And do you see people being able to interrupt that pattern? Kind of the snap I just did. Do you see people being able to interrupt it or break it down?

00:42:46 – Amishi Jha
Yeah, I mean, I think the way that we look at it in my lab, there’s so many different people that are looking at this kind of thing. We can start to see even things like mind wandering. Let’s not even talk about sort of emotionally laden stuff. Obviously, mind wandering has that propensity. But what we know is that when people mind wander, for example, if we just have them do a simple task where they’re just pressing a button every time they see a digit on this screen, we know that the response times are going to become more and more variable when they are mind wandering. In fact, that’s the clue that they’re mind wandering, because usually a few seconds later, they’ll miss something or they’ll make an error or they’ll report back. Yeah, my mind was wandering so close in time to when we see a lot of variability. You see the costs of that variability on the consequential actions that need to be performed. And so what we know with mindfulness training is that there’s a reduction in that variability, and the performance is less prone to making errors like that. And people report mind wandering less. So I think that that’s a movement or that’s an insight that says, yes, the more you’re able to monitor moment by moment what’s going on, and you train your mind to do that through something like a breath awareness practice and the whole suite of practices. Now that I go into in the book, the more chances that you’re going to be able to course more quickly. And so even the windows, that’s the kind of thing we’re looking at now. It’s like the windows of variability. Can those shrink? Or what we know from, for example, the work that one of the postdocs in my lab, Tony Zinesko, is doing is we’re looking at what we call microstates. So these are essentially sort of the units of our kind of configuration of the brain, if you will, in a moment. And typically you can break this down into like 30 milliseconds. They’re small micro, micro kind of stability of the mind, these tiny windows. And what we know, for example, is that microstates tend to be temporally contingent. So the microstate you were in in one moment is likely to produce the next microstate. And we know what the microstates, at least the signature of what it looks like when people are completely off task or their mind is not on the thing they’re trying to do, or they’re highly variable. So if you’re in a highly variable kind of state, the next moment is likely to be highly variable. The question now is, with practitioners, can you see that the return back to a state of focus is more likely? So the temporal contingencies are actually being broken. And, you know, in some sense, it sounds, I mean, I’m going to leap now a lot, but if the mind is built for this kind of temporal contingency, which I think is definitely aligned with a lot of buddhist thought on, you know, sort of the contingent nature of reality.

00:45:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:45:31 – Amishi Jha
If you can train the mind to be less contingent, contingent so that there is kind of infinite potentiality from one moment to the next in the way that you can configure the brain.

00:45:41 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:45:43 – Amishi Jha
What are the benefits of that? And maybe that’s what we mean when we say even the term enlightenment is a non contingent mind.

00:45:50 – Eric Zimmer
It’s funny, I had up at the top of my notes, one of my favorite quotes by an old Zen master dogon, who said enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And I had that there because I think that speaks to attention. Intimacy is achieved by paying close attention to things. And what Dogon is saying is if we are truly that present, like you said, and that our micro states are not as conditioned to remain on the same thing. To your point, you’re starting to get towards something that looks more like enlightenment, which I think is fascinating, which is so interesting, right?

00:46:26 – Amishi Jha
Because in some sense there’s enlightenment and there’s psychosis when things aren’t in a contingent manner. So we’ve got to figure out the qualities that make it productive and warranted and worthy. And that’s where all of the other positive qualities and having an ethical orientation toward our existence can come into play totally.

00:46:45 – Eric Zimmer
Well, Amishi, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the book. It’s a great look into the neuroscience of attention. I read a lot of books about mindfulness. This is my job and yours stood out. I just found some of the ways you really dove into what’s happening to be truly fascinating, and we touched on a fraction of them. It’s a wonderful read and thank you so much for coming on.

00:47:07 – Amishi Jha
Oh, this is so much fun. Thank you for the great conversation.

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Yowei Shaw
When people in my life are going through a hard thing, I just listen. I don’t try to say, oh, you must be feeling x, or oh, it’ll be fine, I try to listen. First.

00:00:18 – 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 you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts dont strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we dont have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But its 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 wolfen, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Yowei Shaw, an award winning podcast host, producer, and self proclaimed emotional investigative journalist. She’s the host of proxy, a show about niche emotional questions answered through conversations with strangers who have shared experience in her previous life. She spent many years making NPR’s Invisibilia podcast, first as a producer, then as a co host and editorial lead. Her work has also been featured in places like this, American Life and pop up magazine.

00:01:47 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Yoe. Welcome to the show.

00:01:49 – Yowei Shaw
Thank you for having me. What an honor.

00:01:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, well, it’s an honor for me to talk to you. You were involved in one of the great podcasts of our age, Invisibilia. So I’ve known your work for a while, as do many people who listen to NPR and follow NPR podcasts. And we’ll get into your time in Invisibilia. And then what kind of came after that? Getting laid off. But before we get into all that, let’s 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, thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents and says, 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.

00:02:49 – Yowei Shaw
I love this parable. I love thinking about it because I feel like it’s actually, what drives my work, what powers it like? I’m really drawn to that emotional noise between the good wolf and the bad wolf. You know, we all have the good wolf and bad wolf constantly chattering. There’s always that struggle about countless different issues every day. And I am really drawn to examining those battles that we feel like we can’t settle on our own, that we have trouble settling. And I like trying to make sense of it. And so this is sort of like why I am now calling myself a little bit tongue in cheek, an emotional investigative journalist, because I want to investigate those battles and then try to report on it. That’s sort of how I deal with my feelings in general. I’ve been a reporter now for 15 years, which is most of my adult life, and that’s sort of how I deal with those battles between the good wolf and the bad wolf when I can’t figure it out through therapy or by meditation or talking about it with friends. And so I found that when you report on your feelings, when you talk to experts who can help contextualize that battle, what systems and ideas and histories have led to you having this particular battle of voices, how can maybe you think about it differently in a way that’s more helpful to you, and then getting to talk to strangers who have shared experience, who can tell you how they’ve dealt with it, that battle themselves, I found that really helpful. And so, yeah, I feel like that’s sort of like what I like to do in general for myself and for other people.

00:04:41 – Eric Zimmer
I love that title. An emotional investigative journalist. That’s great. And one of the things that many psychologists in different schools of psychology will talk about is this idea of getting distance from our thoughts and emotions. Right. Being able to sort of separate from them. And that’s exactly what you’re describing and why it’s helpful for you. It’s by reporting on it and asking about it and looking at it from different angles. It’s a way of disentangling. It’s a way of creating that distance in the healthy sense of the word, not distance in the unhealthy sense of the word, but in the sense of disentangling. Or the founders of acceptance and commitment therapy would call it diffusion, not being fused with those thoughts and emotions. They call it cognitive diffusion. So I think that’s kind of what you’re describing there, and it’s a well known way of working with thoughts and emotions skillfully.

00:05:37 – Yowei Shaw
Wow. I have a lot of questions for you. I did not know about this. I’m gonna ask you for some book recs after this.

00:05:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:05:45 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah. I feel like now that you’re saying this is an actual technique that has been studied for how to deal with your emotions and move through them, I think that, yeah, reporting on my feelings is one way I’ve been able to do that through work for myself and for other people. Also found that creating a ritual through a kind of absurd art project has also been really working for me lately. And what do I mean by that? Okay, so recently, I got laid off and felt really bad, and I felt a lot of shame. And one of the things that happened afterwards was, like, I knew that I needed to be around my people, like, the people who loved me, and yet I wanted to get away from them. I didn’t want anyone to look at me like, I felt so, so much shame that I didn’t want anyone. Like, other people’s gaze felt like. It was like daggers, you know, it was, like, hurting me. And so after I got laid off, I was like, okay, I know I’m having this issue, and you could, like, frame it in terms of the parable. Like, the good wolf is like, you know, you need to be around your people who love you. These people love you. They’re not thinking about you differently. They want to support you. Then the bad wolf is like, no, everybody hates you. Nobody wants to be associated with you anymore. You’re such a burden. Like, get over it already. And so what I did was, I tricked out my basement to be a massage parlor. I like massage. I like dabble. I love getting massages. And I dabble in a bit of bodywork for other people as a form of care. And so I created Yowei spa, which was like, I got a massage table. The theme was pink. I got some fake plants. I got a hot towel steamer. I just tricked it out. And then I sent around a sign up sheet to my friends and was like, yo. Eh, spas open for business. And basically, I ended up massaging a friend a week for the entire summer after I got laid off. And, like, I think that was my way, like, just creating a fun, weird ritual to try to deal with the bad wolf voice in me.

00:07:59 – Eric Zimmer
I love that. And the hot towel steamer that’s going for it. Now, here’s a dream I’ve long had, and maybe you, as a fellow lover of massage and a reporter, maybe I’ve met the person who can help me bring this to life, which is that I feel like there should be massage review services. Like, you go to get a massage, and you don’t really know where to go. There’s so many different choices. And so I thought, like, would that not be the dream job? Like, to be a massage reviewer? Like, that would be brilliant.

00:08:31 – Yowei Shaw
Yes. For every local paper. Now you have the restaurant critic. You need a bodywork critic. You need alternative health, body work, whatever critic. For acupuncture, for massage, for. There’s so many different services these days. I love that. Now I’m going to try to manifest that as my new job for both of us.

00:08:53 – Eric Zimmer
You’re in New York, right?

00:08:55 – Yowei Shaw
I’m in Philadelphia.

00:08:56 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, Philadelphia. Okay. All right. I thought you were in New York. I have my cities mixed. Well, Philadelphia is a big enough city. You could probably pull that off. I’m not sure. In Columbus, Ohio, there are plenty of.

00:09:05 – Yowei Shaw
Places to review who need our services.

00:09:08 – Eric Zimmer
I think in Columbus there is. Yeah. I would read a massage reviewer for sure before I went. Anyway, that, and this is strange. My other dream career that I think about maybe someday when I retire is similar. I want to be a dog masseuse.

00:09:25 – Yowei Shaw
Wait a minute. Do you have a dog?

00:09:27 – Eric Zimmer
I do, yes.

00:09:28 – Yowei Shaw
And do you already dabble in dog massage?

00:09:30 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, yes. Yes, yes.

00:09:32 – Yowei Shaw
Wow.

00:09:32 – Eric Zimmer
I might like to massage her more than she likes to be massaged. I’m not entirely sure. Sometimes she really seems to like it.

00:09:38 – Yowei Shaw
She likes to spread out your services.

00:09:39 – Eric Zimmer
And every once in a while she’s like, get off of me. Yeah, exactly. Leave me alone. So, yes, I love that. It just seems like that would be a lovely career.

00:09:48 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah. Now, I have another thing I’m going to ask you about after this is I want to learn how to do cat massage for my two cats.

00:09:54 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. Well, I’m going to assume it’s similar. I’m not qualified for this job, but there is such a thing, and they do offer training in it anyway. Okay, that’s not what we’re here to talk about, but apparently we both could talk about massage for a long time. But what we’re going to talk about is led to you creating the yo e spah. Did I say it right?

00:10:14 – Yowei Shaw
Yowie spah? Yes.

00:10:15 – Eric Zimmer
What led to you creating that, which was you getting laid off. So you worked your way up to being a co host of a popular show called Invisibilia, which was a great show. You’d been a reporter for it. You became a co host, and then you were laid off. Talk to me about that experience, maybe how it happened and how you felt.

00:10:37 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah. Okay. So at NPR, we had an unusual layoff, which is because NPR told us, gave us a huge heads up that they were going through budget trouble and they needed to lay 10% of us off, and we’d find out who in a month. And so I had a whole month with the rest of my colleagues to sort of have panic attacks, sweat it out, have sleepless nights, do a lot of teeth grinding. And then the day came where we’d find out who got the email, you know, to let us know that you needed to have a meeting with HR. And I ended up getting the email. And, yeah, I have to say that in the beginning, I was numb. I think. I think that, like, that whole month leading up to the actual layoff kind of functioned like a form of exposure therapy. Like, I was just getting used to the idea that I might lose my job for an entire month. And so in some ways, I was not surprised. Cause I knew it could happen. But on the other hand, it still felt like a shock. Like, I still was so completely thrown. And it was very confusing to me because getting laid off in journalism these days, I mean, that’s practically a rite of passage at this point. I knew that was the deal going into this profession. NPR had literally told me and my colleagues that I might get laid off, and yet I was still so shaken to my core, I felt like my operating system was glitching. And, yeah, basically for the next several months after that, I went through this rollercoaster ride of feelings. There was a lot of shame. There was a lot of spiraling about what could I have done differently? Was it this mistake, or was it that mistake? There was a lot of paranoia about interacting with other people and potential employers. I went to, like, a journalism conference last summer for Asian American Journalists association, and I just remember just being so paranoid. Like, anytime anyone asked me, like, how are you? Like, I would be this close to just, like, bursting into tears or, like, you know, have you found another job? Yeah. Just really benign questions would throw me for a loop. And, yeah, I basically, like, I knew I had about as good of a layoff as it gets, truly. Like, we had a very good union contract at NPR, so I got severance. There was healthcare for, like, a few months after. I had savings. I’m married. I have a husband who can support me. I don’t have kids. You know what I mean? I had a lot going for me materially to help soften the landing here. And yet emotionally, I was just completely a mess. And that disconnect between my material reality and my emotional reality was really, like I said before, whenever I have an emotional problem like this, that I can’t figure out. I start to report on it. And so that’s what I did. And I ended up reporting this series trying to understand, like, why do layoffs mess us up so badly? And I just want to say, you know, this is just my experience. I have friends who got laid off from the same company and did not experience it this way. But I do think a significant portion of Americans do experience it this way, and that’s what I was interested in figuring out.

00:14:19 – Eric Zimmer
So you’ve alluded to some of the emotional difficulty that was there. You’ve alluded to shame. I assume there was fear in there, embarrassment, which sounds like shame. What were the primary sort of emotions that you were going through? Are there others that ive missed?

00:14:39 – Yowei Shaw
Fear, shame, embarrassment? Theres other ones, too. Lets take them one by one. So, yeah, so we already covered shame, which was really confusing to me. Why I would feel like the company told me it’s not my fault. That’s the definition of a layoff. It’s a no fault termination. You’re getting laid off because of something that has to do with the company, not because of you. And they generally always tell you, it’s not you. It’s not about your performance. This is just a business decision. And yet, why was I taking it so personally? Why did I feel like this was an indictment about me? Why did it feel like NPR was rejecting everything about me? Why did I feel deficient? So that was a big one. And then, yeah, fear. Thank you for mentioning that one. Yes. Even though I am relatively privileged, I was still really scared. I’m the primary breadwinner for my family. I was, like, afraid about kind of running through all the scenarios that might happen. Well, if I don’t get a job for these many months. Okay, well, then what will happen if we lose the house? And where will we move? And da da da da, how will we feed the cats? Just kind of spiraling in those material ways. And then there was also fear around getting another job. And this was also, I mean, the podcast industry is not doing great at the moment, especially the narrative podcast industry of the bottom has fallen out of it. So there is some point to that fear, some justification around maybe I won’t be able to find another job, but also, I have 15 years of experience. I am a pretty seasoned podcast person. It didn’t totally make sense how afraid I was compared to my circumstances. And then I was like, oh, have I peaked? Like, is this it? Is this, like, the pinnacle of what I’ll be able to do? In podcast journalism, and I’m trying to think, what are all the other emotions? I think also, the thing that really stuck with me was, like, why do I feel like people are looking at me differently? Is this just in my head, or are they looking at me differently? It felt like a kind of microaggression, you know, when people would say things to me like, have you found another job yet? Are you gonna be changing switching industries? Are you just, like, little things that became so much bigger when your entire body is a scuffed knee, you know? And so I really wanted to understand, just, like, why is this just me being a drama queen, or is there something to, like what I’m feeling? Are there systems and dynamics contributing to the way I feel?

00:17:47 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And so what did you find out as you began to investigate this? What did you find out about what happens to people during layoffs and why it impacts, again, not everyone, but some of the people, so strongly?

00:18:04 – Yowei Shaw
Yes. Okay. So the first thing I learned, I mean, the history on layoffs is pretty wild. It’s very interesting. Like, before the 1970s, companies pretty much avoided white collar layoffs. This is a pretty recent phenomenon. If a company were to experience layoffs, that would be an indictment of the company. The company needs to feel shame now. It’s flipped. So now we accept layoffs as just like, that’s just what business has to do these days. But it wasn’t always like that. And so that was the first kind of data point of like, oh, okay, so it wasn’t always like this. There are these structural things that are happening that are leading to this situation in the first place. And then I talked to this sociologist, Oprah Shaw, who has done a lot of really interesting work on stigma and laid off workers and unemployed workers. I went to therapy during this whole period, and honestly, talking to him was more enlightening and revelatory than any therapy session I had at this time, because he could just. Everything I was telling him about what I was feeling, he would be like, yep. There’s a reason for that. Yep. All these people that I talk to feel exactly like that. Yep. And some of the things he told me were that the stigma that I’m feeling, this kind of paranoia around. Are people looking at me differently? Are people looking at me differently? Like, that’s not just in my head. Like, people probably are looking at me differently. And that was, like, a huge relief to sort of just be like, I can call it like it is these feelings that I’m feeling, this intuition, like I’m not wrong. And yeah. There’s just a lot of stigma around not just laid off workers, but unemployment in general. When you grow up in school, your teachers are asking you, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? You don’t really. I don’t even know if the word unemployment is mentioned. I don’t think it was mentioned to me during my schooling years. We don’t have much familiarity with it.

00:20:10 – Chris Forbes
Right.

00:20:11 – Yowei Shaw
Even though it’s a fact of this economy. And he said that the stigma really comes down to this myth of meritocracy that we have in this country. Basically the idea that your actions and hard work equal your position in life, in society. And even though the myth of meritocracy exists in a lot of countries, there have been research studies that find that in the US, we believe it the most and the hardest and the deepest. What that means is if you get laid off, well, then it’s your fault. You know? Like, that’s the emotional story that I think I was telling myself, even though intellectually I know that’s not how it works. And so he helped me kind of solve this puzzle that I was feeling where I was like, I know it’s not my fault. I know I shouldn’t feel like this, and yet I feel like it’s my fault. I feel like this is about me. And he talked about interviewing a union organizer whose job it is to explain to workers how our economy works. And even a union organizer would feel like it’s her fault, even though intellectually she knows it’s not. Talking to him about that, talking to him about hiring discrimination that unemployed workers and laid off workers face that it’s twice as hard to get a job interview than someone who has the same credentials. That was also disheartening, but also helpful in that it’s like that whole system versus the individual thing of, is it me? Is it just me, or am I part of a pattern? And I feel like there’s a moment where it just clicked for me. Like, oh, I’m part of a pattern. These feelings I’m feeling. I’m not an alien. There are reasons why I feel this way, and that helped me make sense of it.

00:22:36 – Eric Zimmer
There’s so many things in there I would like to go back and touch on. But the question that just came to mind is, you’re a journalist working in a podcast industry, doing something that clearly really matters to you. Do you think it’s harder in that circumstance than when you’re laid off from a job that maybe you are less personally invested in yeah, I think.

00:23:04 – Yowei Shaw
Absolutely. Absolutely. And yet part of me also, I have my hackles up when I get asked this question, because I think there’s this whole movement right now around, like, work shouldn’t be your identity. And, like, we know better than to, like, you know, care so much about our jobs and life is about so much more than work. And I guess as somebody who’s very, very into her work and, like, it is a huge part of my identity. But I also. I’m like, how can it not matter your job? You know, I feel like in that movement, there’s a little bit of, like, you spend so many hours of your life doing this thing, you have social networks around this occupation. To not have it, part of your identity seems unrealistic. I think that’s one response I have to that question. And then, of course, absolutely, yes. If I didn’t care so much, it would hurt a lot less. Absolutely.

00:24:14 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I certainly didn’t mean it in any sense that the ideal thing would be to care less. Actually, I think, all in all, to have a job that you care about deeply and provide provides you meaning is the better situation than to have one where you simply go through the motions. Right. I mean, that’s just my personal opinion, but I do think in general. Right. The more you care about something when you lose it, the harder it is to lose it. It’s sort of one of life’s equations, that it’s just true. When I think about things that I’ve lost that really, really hurt, usually the consolation, I find is, oh, but I really, really cared, so that’s good, right? Like, I had something I loved enough to lose it. And I think to your point, though, there are aspects of what we’re talking about that probably happen at all different levels, because, yes, we are invested in our work. Most people take some degree of meaning from it, and our relationships are there. I find it so interesting, this idea of the myth of meritocracy. And as I was listening to your podcast called proxy, and I think it’s a three episode arc that’s about this process. And as I was listening to that, and you started talking about the myth of meritocracy, as somebody who probably has bought into the myth of meritocracy to some degree over my lifetime, I don’t buy into it into the same degree that I used to. I had a little bit of like. But it kind of is true. Sort of. And I think what’s interesting about it is that it’s one of those things that’s true. And not true at the same time. And what I mean is that it is true that how much effort you put in and how hard you work and all that is an element in what goes into being successful or not successful. But it’s far from the only element, as we can see. Right. We know people who are very talented, who the world just does not treat fair for a thousand different reasons. So it’s one of those things that, like, on the one hand, I’m like, well, but you can’t totally throw it out. And yet, on the other hand, it’s nothing true. I mean, I suffered a layoff. I told you about it a little bit. It was a long time ago, but, I mean, I was working as hard as you could possibly work at the time. Right. It was just that early online company got bought by another company and the layoff occurred. And so I can see in all different cases that the myth of meritocracy is just that. The other thing I thought was interesting is we’re talking about the stigma. And I found this idea that people who are unemployed have a far harder time getting job than someone employed. Right. There’s an old saying which is the best time to look for a job is while you have a job. Right. And it’s just based on that very. At least in my mind, I always heard that phrase to mean exactly that. Right. That for whatever reason, you look like a better candidate when you have a job versus when you don’t have one. But it was amazing to hear I, as you did this investigative reporting, how open recruiters really were about this fact, about just pretty much straight out saying, like, yes, we get a lot of applicants. It’s hard to sort them out. So one way that we do so is if you have a job, we rank you higher than if you don’t.

00:27:35 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah, it was wild to hear what recruiters would say. And basically it’s discrimination when you think about it, when it’s like a characteristic about you that you cannot help, you know, that you cannot change, necessarily. It’s a form of bias and discrimination that is just openly accepted in our employment system. And, yeah, that’s wild that we’re just like, yep, that’s just the way it is.

00:28:03 – Eric Zimmer
Well, it’s based on that same sort of half true thing about the myth of meritocracy, right. Because you’re assuming that if somebody doesn’t have work, it’s because something they have done. And while in certain cases. Right, like, some people who would come to you to look for work and they don’t have a job is because they’re not very good. You know what I mean? Like, there are those people, but it’s certainly not everybody with layoffs. And I think these part true things, it’s easier to throw something out that’s completely always false.

00:28:33 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah. And, you know, these recruiters also talked about how, you know, even the ones who didn’t really buy into that way of thinking, they’re like, they don’t see a resume and see, oh, you’ve been laid off. That means you are a worse performer. There were recruiters who talked to the sociologists who were like, maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not true. It’s getting at what you’re saying. This half truth, this partly true assumption for these recruiters because they just have a huge pile of resumes to get through. And also they don’t want to get in trouble with the manager that they’re hiring for. Like, what if it is true and they end up letting somebody in that isn’t going to do a good job? And so they just are conservative and sort of err on the side of, well, let’s talk to the people who already have a job. Let’s just err on the side of, you know, we just want to be safe.

00:29:27 – Eric Zimmer
It reminds me of another saying. I was in the software business for a long time before I became a podcaster. And so there was an old saying that, like, nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM. And what they mean Washington. It’s the safe choice, right? It’s just the safe choice. Like, it may not be the best choice, it may not be the right choice, but it’s the choice that everybody would at the end of the day go, well, that sort of makes sense. So I can’t penalize, you know what I mean? It’s that same sort of thing. Now as somebody who, you know, sort of made my way through the startup business without a college degree and all that. Like, I sort of was like, well, you know, I didn’t like that phrase, you know, you want to hire somebody like me, the punk rock weirdo that showed up at your door today is your best choice. So all these things are true. So the other thing that I thought was really interesting is that one of the things that I think is obvious and you heard is that if you show up for an interview, so you’ve been laid off and now you’re back out and you’re looking for a job, if you have a sense of a desperation or be of negativity about what happened or negativity or feelings of doubt about your own ability. That’s not good for getting a job. You don’t want to show up with that. So it would seem that ignoring what we’ve just been talking about, not knowing that to be true, might be better. Because if I know that you’re going to discriminate against me, then I’m going to be more doubtful. I’m going to be more afraid. But it seems like that the research that this gentleman that you were mentioning did shows that that’s actually not true, that there is a way of both recognizing the stigma, recognizing the difficulty, allowing the negative emotions to be there, and then also not projecting them as you go into trying to find other work. How does that happen?

00:31:21 – Yowei Shaw
This is something that I was experiencing myself as I was reporting the story on layoffs. I was reading all these depressing statistics about how layoffs are linked with higher risk of divorce, higher risk of decreased earnings, you know, higher risk of hospitalization, just like all these bad things that layoffs are linked to. And I was starting to get in my head, like, oh, no. Like, am I going to end up as one of these statistics? Like, I got to get another job. Like, uh. And I asked ofracharon, the sociologist, this question of, like, it seems like it would be counterintuitive, like, it would not be helpful. It seems like it would not be helpful to learn about all these depressing statistics.

00:32:01 – Eric Zimmer
Right?

00:32:01 – Yowei Shaw
And what he said was, he said that, yes, it hurts, but also it helps you see that it’s not your fault if you do have trouble. It’s that depersonalization thing that we were talking about earlier. So, Oprah, Shaw, the sociologist, he did this study where he got all these volunteer career coaches and all these people in Boston who were out of work looking for a job, long term unemployed. He had the coaches try a different approach called sociologically informed support, which to me, I love that term. It’s so nerdy, it’s so funny to me, it’s hard to say, sociologically informed support. So basically, what happened was, at the beginning of the day, Ophir would go up in front of everyone and be like, I’m sorry to tell you, folks, but here’s what it is. And would just go through all the odds that are stacked against them. And then he would say, I know this hurts. I know this sucks to hear this, but I want you to know this so that you don’t blame yourself for having a hard time getting another job. There’s a reason, a concrete reason why you are having a hard time, because if you blame yourself, if you internalize all those failed job interviews, all those rejections, all that silence from employers, then it’ll make it harder for you to get a job, because you will be even more negative. You will be even more insecure. You know, you’ll just leak more negativity, which will then make it harder to get a job, which will make you feel even worse about yourself. And then you just start to, like, get into this vicious cycle of negativity, you know, like, it’s harder for you to get a job that makes you feel worse about yourself. That makes it then harder to get a job when you go show up for an interview, and then you just end up in this really toxic hard loop. And so what the sociologist recommends is important to know what you’re dealing with. What are the odds that are stacked against you? How hard is it for you to get another job and then get up and sort of shake it off, and then you need to get to work looking for that job. You need to go ask colleagues for a recommendation. That’s the best way to sort of overcome that bias against unemployed workers or laid off workers is a recommendation from somebody inside the company. And you basically need to prepare yourself for a marathon, not a sprint. And you need to protect your mental health. You need to prioritize it. You need to understand that there are all these negative feedback loops that could be coming from maybe a spouse who’s maybe blaming you for not finding work or for getting laid off, maybe your friends who maybe don’t understand or have distanced themselves, who knows? There are a number of negative feedback loops that you could be dealing with. And so you sort of need to, like, map out all the negative feedback loops that you might be dealing with, and then find your safe people, find the people that you can vent about your negative feelings, and they won’t judge you. They won’t say, oh, well, that’s your bad attitude. That’s why you’re not getting another job, right? You know, people you can be safe with and then just keep trucking along until you get that chance, because the longer you are unemployed, the harder it is to get a job. And the best way to deal with all those negative consequences that come with unemployment and laid off is getting another job. It’s just like this mental jiu jitsu you have to do with yourself that I find very interesting and really goes against what the dominant approach is with career coaches and career centers, which is very, like, pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You can do it. You just need the right attitude. You just need the right resume. You just need the right outfit. You know what I mean?

00:36:22 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:36:22 – Yowei Shaw
And all that matters. All that stuff matters. This is not to say that you shouldn’t learn how to interview better or you shouldn’t polish your resume. All that stuff matters. But also, it is harder for you to get a job.

00:36:36 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s a little bit like recognizing the effects of what trauma can do in your life. Because on one hand, it’s frightening to hear things. Like, for example, there’s something called the adverse Childhood Effects survey. If you get a high score on that, meaning you had a bunch of adverse things happen to you as a child, the list of consequences of things that can happen to you is long, right? I mean, it goes from addiction to heart disease to depression. I mean, it’s just not a happy story. So on one hand, it would be kind of good to not know that. And yet, of course, you’re having impacts from it that are actually happening. Like you said, it’s this jiu jitsu, a little bit of like, okay, I know that that’s all true. I know that that has all having an impact on me. And at the same time, I’m determined not to let that be the whole story. And I think that’s. We’re talking about something similar here. Yes. As a person who’s lost your job, their stigma against you getting rehiredde, it’s harder to get it right. There are these negative things that can occur. You’re dealing with negative feedback loops of people who don’t understand, people who think the fact you don’t have a job as your fault, you’ve got all that happening. To pretend it’s not happening makes you feel insane, right? To pretend it’s not is to sort of feel crazy. Same thing. If somebody has a bunch of adverse childhood effects, to pretend that that stuff’s not having an effect makes you feel crazy because you’re like, well, something isn’t right. You can’t let it be the whole story either. Otherwise it becomes self fulfilling prophecies at the same time. And I think people who are dealing with difficulties, systematic difficulties of any sorts, run up against this, which is, yes, the system is not fair, and yet you still have to find a way within that not to let that be the thing that defines you. And I don’t know exactly how people do that. I mean, I think we all wrestle with it, but it’s one of those sort of true, half truth things we talked about before where if you end up only accepting one side of that, your reality is not whole, I guess. Does that make sense?

00:38:44 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah, it really makes sense. It makes me think about. So one of the things that the sociologist found was most helpful in doing this mental jujitsu of trying to, like, hold the bad statistics in one place and also stay hopeful and, like, prepare yourself for the marathon ahead so that you don’t end up becoming a. A statistic. One of the things he found that was most helpful for participants was the solidarity, how important it was to talk about it with people who understand and won’t judge you, who won’t blame you for having a bad attitude. It’s the support group model. He said that in these career centers, usually when somebody raises their hand and says, I’m having a hard time, they’re told, shh, don’t talk about it. You don’t have the right attitude. You know, that’s not encouraged in these places most of the time. And so where does all that negativity go? You know, you internalize it or, you know, comes out in weird places. And so that’s one lesson that I think is, like, kind of common sense, but also really important to remember for all kinds of problems that you face is, like, the importance of. Of being able to share and vent in a safe space.

00:40:27 – Eric Zimmer
I interviewed a woman recently. She wrote a book about dark moods and their benefit. In it, she described an experience she had of reading a book. That’s gonna take me a second to set up, but I think it’s actually gonna be worth it. If not, Chris will cut it all out. But she’s describing a woman who is getting back into the job market after having been a parent. Right. And so kids are going off to school. She’s been out of the job market for 20 years. She’s older, and she’s expressing to her husband and son her concerns that her skills aren’t really up to date. And she knows that, you know, older women, it’s harder for them to get hired and all of this. Right. And her husband and son just are saying to her, no, no, you’re wonderful. You’re great. You’re going to be just fine. Right. And the psychologist who was writing the book was describing how they were. Right. And she had what the psychologist was calling a negative explanatory style. The woman writing this book had a big problem with this. Right. She was like, well, but of course there’s discrimination against women of a certain age, and you don’t have, like, of course she’s right. And I’m reading it, thinking, well, they’re both actually right in a way. Right. And this is exactly what we’re talking about. If she completely internalizes that attitude, then, yes, she’s going to have a hard time finding a job. And yet, if she doesn’t, if nobody recognizes those factors, she’s going to think that she’s all the problem. And the answer turned out to be relatively simple. Right. Which was that what she needed was her husband to just say, yeah, I understand, you know, that’s frightening. That’s hard, of course. Yes. I bet it’s going to be harder for you than it might be, say, for me, if I was to go look for a job like that’s all true. And then she’s heard. Because when we’re not heard on stuff like that, what my experience is is we end up arguing for our own limitations. We end up trying to convince everybody that we’re right, that it really is that bad and that hard. Whereas most people, if that difficulty is acknowledged, then we can move on to solution. But if nobody will acknowledge that difficulty, we end up arguing for it instead of then being able to move into this piece you talked about, which is like, okay, how do I prepare for the marathon, not the sprint?

00:42:49 – Yowei Shaw
That’s really interesting. Yeah. It reminds me of this experience that I would have again and again after my layoff, wherever, with friends and family, people who love me and want the best for me, when I would talk about my feelings of shame, despair, and maybe being a little melodramatic, whatever, people would sort of cheerlead me sometimes and sort of be like, no, no, no, you got this. You’ll be fine. Look at how much experience you have. Da da da da da. And it always bugged me. Like, it always made me so it was just like, no, no, no. Like, yeah, I know. And also, like, these are my feelings right now, and I’m allowed to feel these negative feelings, right? And, like, I know you want it to be okay. You want to put a band aid on it, but, like, we don’t know if that’s gonna happen. Like, if I will come out of this right. It’s almost like you want some acknowledgement of your reality, your emotional and material reality, so that you don’t feel insane.

00:43:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:43:53 – Yowei Shaw
You don’t feel like people are trying to crowd out your feelings. This whole experience with my layoff has really taught me that when people in my life are going through a hard thing, I just listen. I don’t try to say, oh, you must be feeling x or, oh, it’ll be fine. I try to listen first to what they’re saying, you know, because I think we’re uncomfortable with, like, those kinds of hard feelings because we want the people in our life to be okay.

00:44:21 – Eric Zimmer
Of course.

00:44:21 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah. One other thing I’m thinking about to go back to this myth of meritocracy is there’s been some interesting research. It’s very preliminary. There’s some research that suggests that when people don’t expect to be laid off, they are more emotionally wrecked than people who are aware of the possibility. And I think this gets at the same kind of thing we’re talking about, where it’s like, just knowing, having a kind of realistic view on what could happen helps prepare you more for the possibility so you’re not totally destabilized if it happens. And I think, yes, the myth of meritocracy, it’s half true. It’s half not true. And also, it’s a comforting story to tell yourself, because then if you have control, if you work hard, if you’re telling yourself that if you work hard, you will be safe, if you do a good job, you will be safe, then you can have control in this volatile, scary economy where people can be laid off and fired because we have at will employment.

00:45:35 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:45:35 – Yowei Shaw
That was one of the biggest lessons for me from all of this reporting, was like, oh, okay. It could be not motivating to think, oh, if I do a good job, I still might be laid off. I was afraid that I might kind of go in that direction of like, oh, like, well, then what’s the point? And kind of throw my hands up in the air. And I found that that’s not where I am right now. Like, I don’t have a salary job right now. You know, I’m doing my own thing, shooting my shot with this new podcast. But I just. I think that reality, even if it hurts, it is generally always more helpful than the false story. That’s comforting.

00:46:16 – Eric Zimmer
I tend to agree. I think what’s interesting about that is, like, many things we’re talking about is this balance. Right? Because if we were to really grasp and spend a lot of time thinking about how truly out of control we are in this world, it would be paralyzing. We would never get out of bed. Right?

00:46:37 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah.

00:46:37 – Eric Zimmer
As poet Mark Nepo calls it, the terrible knowledge that anything can happen to anyone anytime is true. You can’t live in that constant recognition of that fact, or you’d be a basket case. And yet there’s some amount of recognition of that that’s really useful, right? To really realize, like, yeah, like, life is a frightening and scary place, and terrible things happen to really good people all the time, and good things happen to bad people, and average things happen to average people. Like, it just all happens. And so it’s interesting, I think getting laid off at the age that I did, I was 28. My wife was six months pregnant with my son. I mean, it was a terrifying experience. I think that there was something about that that just I, from that moment on, did not believe that my safety came from a company. And I remember, I mean, I worked in software startup companies. So I guess for a while you do that. You just kind of know, like, well, the odds are pretty good this thing is not going to make it. I went on to do consulting for these really big companies, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies. And my mom would be like, I wish they would hire you. And I’d be like, they actually offered to hire me. And I said no. And she’s like, you’re crazy. And I was like, mom, do you think that working for this company is, like, safe? Do you actually think that, like, the fact that they hired me as an employee is safety? It’s not anymore. I understand in your day and age, perhaps it was, but it’s not anymore. You know? And I felt like the fact that I was a consultant and knew that I was going to need to prove to somebody else anywhere from three months to six months to a year from now that I was worth hiring was more safety. Again, there’s no complete safety, but it was more safety because I just assumed that sooner or later, they’re going to be done with me and I’m going to have to go convince somebody else. And so I just always felt like the fact that I knew that made me stay a little bit more on top of certain things. It’s not that any of its safety, but I think there was a. I’m not counting on a company to take care of me because. Because I don’t think that’s a safe bet anymore in today’s world. I’m not demonizing companies. I’m just saying that, like, as we know, if they need to cut costs, they’re going to cut costs. And if you happen to be part of that, you’re going to be gone.

00:49:11 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah. I’m curious if your relationship with risk changed after that moment. Because my relationship with risk has changed as a result of my layoff. I would say that I am a pretty risk averse person, generally speaking. Maybe it’s like being the daughter of immigrants who are the children of refugees. It’s just like, I want to be safe. We need to have savings. Security is very important to my operating system after kind of, if the quote unquote worst thing professionally happened. I know it’s not the worst thing, but it’s one of the worst things. Just losing your job, it kind of liberated me from this kind of grasping need to control and be safe. This new thing that I’m doing, which is starting a podcast, I mean, it’s not a good time to start a podcast. I really might fail. I probably will fail, but I’m having fun doing it. I’m learning a lot, and it’s okay if I fail. Like, I think it has really rewired my relationship with failure, and just, like, my tolerance for it and my tolerance for risk, I’m grateful for that, actually.

00:50:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s hard for me to know what recalibrated my relationship with risk. I was a homeless, heroic at 25, so I clearly wasn’t playing anything safe to begin with. But this job was my first attempt to try and be safe. And it was interesting because when I got laid off, I actually did gamble a little bit because I was given severance, and I applied for unemployment. And I recognized also that there was job retraining money available. And so I took some of the severance and some of that money, and I invested in a series of software related courses, thinking like, I might be able to actually come out of this even better off, which it turned out to be the case. And so I think I was taking a risk then and then working in software startup companies. Like I said, after that, I think I just. You do that long enough, your relationship to it is just very different.

00:51:26 – Yowei Shaw
It’s like the water you swim in.

00:51:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it is. It is the water you swim in to a certain degree. And so I think I just, over the years, built more and more of a tolerance for it. Although it’s interesting, is, like, get older, I’m finding my risk tolerance becoming a little bit more like, well, hold on a second. Like, do you realize, like, the chance that, you know, this is, you know, I mean, running a podcast, right. Like, we’re in a pretty good position as a podcast, and yet it is hard out there. It is harder than it’s ever been out there. And there’s risk. You know, there’s. There’s risk I am aware of very regularly.

00:52:03 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. It’s like, it has really made me want to shoot my shot more in general. I feel like it has kind of unleashed this kind of aggressive, but not in a bad way, I hope. We’ll see. But just kind of this version of me that’s like, yeah, I’m gonna go for it, and it’s okay if I fail. I’ve already failed on my face in a very public way, so why not shoot my shot? Why not try? Yeah. I just feel less afraid.

00:52:35 – Eric Zimmer
No, yeah, I think that’s good. I think that’s good. I think that’s ideally the way to move to the best of our ability. We’re about out of time, but I would be remiss if I did not at least ask you about one of the things that you did as part of this project is you decided to create a layoff song. This sounds a little bit like the yowei shpah, but you decided to create a layoff song.

00:53:09 – Yowei Shaw
It’s exactly like the yo eh shba. I’ve discovered that I’m really into inventing weird rituals as a way of healing. So basically what happened was I was laid off, feeling bad, trying all kinds of things to try to feel better, reporting a series about it, doing this yo ei spa thing, massaging my friends, like, doing a lot to try to feel better. And I have to say, like, six months after the layoff, I was still feeling really, really bad. I really was not much further than I was at the very beginning, and that kind of bummed me out. And then I had this recital coming up. So one of my hobbies is I pole dance. I’m not good. It’s just for fun. My studio has this, like, very cute, kind of nerdy seasonal recital where you can do a solo or a group dance or whatever. And so I had a recital coming up, and I had signed up to do a solo thing, and you have to choreograph your own thing. And I’d never done it before. And I was like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? What song am I going to choose? And I was like, I know what I’ll do. I need to do an interpretive layoff dance because that sounds fun to me. Dress up in a Kleenex box and it’ll just be this ridiculous kind of joyous reclamation of this whole situation. And so then I started looking for layoff songs to dance to. Maybe not surprisingly, there are not that many layoff songs out there. It is not a well developed genre as of yet.

00:54:44 – Eric Zimmer
You slumb the depths of country music. You sure there’s not more out there?

00:54:48 – Yowei Shaw
You know what? I should have. But you know what?

00:54:51 – Eric Zimmer
That’s where you’re gonna find them. Sure.

00:54:54 – Yowei Shaw
But also, I’m not sure that would match the vibe of my choreography of the pole dancing.

00:54:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:55:00 – Chris Forbes
Yes.

00:55:00 – Yowei Shaw
So, anyways, I was like, why not just make my own layoff song? We’re already here. Why not go all the way? And I’m very lucky to have a music producer as a husband who can make it. So and so he helped me out, and we made this ridiculous song called Gold Star. And the reason why it’s titled gold Star is because after I got laid off, I remember people would do all kinds of nice things for me. Send me fried chicken. I love fried chicken. People would get me a massage. I love massage. Just all these nice things. But what I really wanted, if I’m being honest, was a trophy, okay? I just wanted a trophy to my self esteem. Something to combat the negative voices in my head. Like, basically, I want a gold star to sort of combat what I’m feeling. And so this is, like, I’m hoping it finds laid off folks, you know? This is sort of a gold star. Like, I’m soothing myself, and hopefully, you know, this can be a gold star for you. And then I made this ridiculous pole dancing video that is available online right now, though it might not be forever, because I might come to my senses and decide to pull it from the.

00:56:17 – Eric Zimmer
Internet if it’s still out there. When this episode releases, we’ll put a link in the show notes. I’ve heard the song. I have not yet watched the video. The thing that made me laugh the most during that process, though, I mean, every part of it is great and funny, was your husband introducing you to auto tune, which is a way of trying to make those of us who don’t sing very well sound coherent. And it’s so funny because he was like, I’ve never seen my computer have to work this hard. And it’s funny because this is quite some time ago, probably at least 15 years ago, I went to a friend’s house in Tennessee, and I used to be a songwriter, and so I had some songs, and I was trying to sing. And we got what must have been a very early version of autotune, right? It was a box. You didn’t plug it in your computer. And the running joke, basically, after that was that, like, anytime it tried to process me, the box would start smoking. It had to work so hard. So when he said, I’ve never seen this machine work this hard, I had a good laugh. I was like, I’ve been there. Oh my gosh.

00:57:24 – Yowei Shaw
Yeah. Autotune is my friend. Thank God for autotune.

00:57:29 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:57:30 – Yowei Shaw
There’s no way I would have the courageous to have sung that song or put it on the Internet without the help of a lot of autotune.

00:57:38 – Eric Zimmer
All right, well, we are gonna wrap up now in the post show conversation. We’re gonna talk a little bit longer cause I wanna talk about you’ve launched this new podcast to report on this, but there was an interim step in there along the way that ended up, I think, being the hardest, maybe emotional moment for you of this whole journey. And I’d like to talk about that a little bit in the post show conversation. Listeners, as always, if you would like access to that, if you would like access to ad free episodes, a special episode I do each week called a teaching song and a poem. And to be part of our community, we have community meetings once a month. We’d love to have you be part of the community and you can do that by going to oneyoufeed.net join Yowei. Thank you so much. This has been really enjoyable from top to bottom.

00:58:27 – Yowei Shaw
Thank you for having me. This was so fun. Thank you for listening to my song and not judging me too harshly.00:58:33 –

Eric Zimmer
No, it’s a good pop song.

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Jamil Zaki
I was talking with the columnist David Brooks recently and he said that he asks his students each year, do you think people are generally good or bad? And he said that over the last ten to 15 years, the proportion of students who say, yeah, I think people are generally bad has skyrocketed.

00:00:23 – 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 you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts dont strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we dont have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But its 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 Doctor Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Jamil trained at Columbia and Harvard studying empathy and kindness in the human brain, interested in how we can learn to connect better. Today, Jamil and Eric discuss his book, Hope for Cynics.

00:01:42 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Jamil, welcome to the show.

00:01:44 – Jamil Zaki
Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:45 – Eric Zimmer
I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, which is called hope for the surprising science of human goodness. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do, with a 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. 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.

00:02:29 – Jamil Zaki
I love that parable. I think about it all the time. And to me it speaks to something that is deeply true about people, based on not just my personal experience, but also my experience as a behavioral scientist and research psychologist, which is that our beliefs about the world are realities. Our inner realities are self fulfilling prophecies that change the lives we live and the relationships that we build. So if you have the belief that, in general, fear will win out, that in general, people are selfish and greedy and dishonest, well, then you’ll treat people that way, and they’ll treat you accordingly. That, I suppose, would be feeding the bad wolf. And if you instead choose to hope and to be more driven by the data, you will put faith in people, and they will bring their best out for you. I suppose that would be feeding the good wolf. I think that. Well, I love this idea in general, and I love that this is how you start your conversations, because I don’t think we focus on this enough. I don’t think that we understand as a culture how much power we have through our habits of mind to change the reality that we reside in. It really speaks to one of the most profound insights from all of psychology.

00:03:54 – Eric Zimmer
There’s something you talk about in the book. I’m jumping ahead a little bit here, but you say that Maya Angelou once advised, when you show people who they are, believe them. But what people show you depends on who you are. And then you go on to quote a psychologist, Vanessa Bones, maybe something called influence neglect. Say more about that.

00:04:17 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, Vanessa. Vanessa Bonds is a great psychologist who studies, again, this idea of influence neglect, which I think people should really try to internalize if they can. She has a great book about this called you have more influence than you think. And in general, the idea is that we imagine that other people are just who they are and that when we observe them do something, we’re learning about their true colors. This is wrong in at least two ways. First, people are totally different in different circumstances. If you put somebody at a high stakes poker table and then put them with somebody they disagree with about a political issue and then put them with their child, you will see three completely different people. They might be in the same body, but the different situations draw out different versions of who they are. So that’s, number one, is that when you see somebody, you’re only seeing one version of them. Insight number two, which comes from Vanessa’s work, is that the version that you see has a lot to do with you. I think a lot about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, right? That when you try to observe the physical world, the mere fact that you’re observing it at a quantum level causes it to change. And I often think Heisenberg applies to subatomic particles. But we also have Heisenberg’s friends and Heisenberg’s colleagues and family members. Right? When we observe somebody, the fact that we are part of their situation changes who they become in that moment. And so I think that we have a lot of responsibility and a lot of opportunity. I write and think a lot about trust, for instance. And we tend to imagine that trust is a risk that we are taking on. We worry about being betrayed, and that’s a fair worry. But what I don’t think we realize enough is that when you trust somebody, they often become more trustworthy because human beings reciprocate what others give to them. And when you distrust somebody, they often become less trustworthy because we retaliate the harms that other people do to us. So when we make decisions around other people, I think it’s critical to remember we’re choosing not just to learn about the person, but how we want to influence them, which version of them we want to bring out.

00:06:32 – Eric Zimmer
Right. It’s completely obvious on one level that how we treat other people has to do with how they treat us. If I had gotten on this call with you and been like, yeah, thanks for coming on. That book kind of sucks, but I can’t wait to talk about it.

00:06:45 – Jamil Zaki
Right?

00:06:45 – Eric Zimmer
Like, it’s obvious you and I would be having a different conversation right now. So it’s really obvious. And yet, like you said, most of us don’t actually think of it that way. It makes me think about one of my favorite things that, you know, listeners are probably like, he’s going to bring up the fundamental attribution error again, but I am because it’s such a great example. Right? And the fundamental attribution error, as I understand it, is that, like, if I saw you acting in an angry way, assume you’re an angry person. But when I act angrily, there’s a very good reason for it. Right? Circumstances apply in my case, but in your case, it’s who you are. As if circumstances aren’t playing an equally sized role in exactly how you are behaving.

00:07:33 – Jamil Zaki
You’re singing my song, Eric. I mean, I could talk about the fundamental attribution error all day.

00:07:37 – Eric Zimmer
Kindred spirit.

00:07:38 – Jamil Zaki
Finally, you know, the fae, as it’s called in my nerdy corner of the world, is most associated with one of my colleagues, the late, great psychologist Lee Ross. Lee was a brilliant and very kind person who thought a lot about how we think about each other. And I actually want to share with you that later in his career, Lee said that there’s the fundamental attribution error where we typecast people based on their behavior. We don’t realize how malleable other people are. But Lee said there’s also the truly fundamental attribution error, which is our sense that when we perceive something, we’re doing so objectively, this is what’s often known as naive realism. Right. That if I think a song is good, it’s because it’s good. If I think that that dress is black and blue and you think it’s white and gold, the question is not whether I’m wrong. The question is, why are you wrong? What’s wrong with your visual system? Right.

00:08:35 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:08:35 – Jamil Zaki
And this sense of the truly fundamental attribution error, the illusion of objectivity, is at least as damaging to our relationships and our ability to connect with others as the regular fundamental attribution error.

00:08:49 – Eric Zimmer
I love that because, indeed, that is the true fundamental attribution error, that we actually see the world in some kind of way, it actually is, versus very much a reflection of our conditioning.

00:09:03 – Jamil Zaki
That’s right. That’s part of why I love the two wolves parable, because it speaks to the idea that there is no single reality. And I think about this all the time. A lot of my work these days centers around the question of, are people fundamentally kind or cruel, compassionate or callous? Good or bad? And these are philosophical questions that will never be answered, I think, in a clear, scientific way. But the way you answer the question matters enormously. And the way that we answer these questions has been changing. I was talking with the columnist David Brooks recently, and he said that he asks his students each year, do you think people are generally good or bad? And he said that over the last ten to 15 years, the proportion of students who say, yeah, I think people are generally bad has skyrocketed.

00:09:55 – Eric Zimmer
Wow.

00:09:56 – Jamil Zaki
And data bear this out, right? So, as I write about in the book, in 1972, about half of AmEricans believed most people can be trusted. And by 2018, that had fallen to a third of AmEricans, a drop as big as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008. So we are living through a deficit in trust and in our faith in each other. And you might just say, well, that sounds like it feels bad, but, hey, maybe people are just right. But I think the point, again, to this idea of the truly fundamental attribution error is that when you perceive that, it changes how you act in the world. And if a lot of us lose faith in each other all at once, it literally changes the world that we create together.

00:10:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Makes me think of some of the research we start to see about loneliness, which is that if you’re lonely, you begin to think more suspiciously of other people, which, of course, makes you more lonely. It’s this negative spiral that you get into that is a feedback loop that is not headed in the right direction. There’s something that you say in the book, though, about this idea that when you ask people, they will say that people are not good. To the extent that we used to believe maybe that people are good, but that if you then ask people are the people that you know in your life better or worse than they used to be, they’ll say they’re about the same. So it’s like on one level, we are saying out there, beyond what we actually can see with our own eyes, it’s all bad. But when I look with my own eyes at the people around me, well, actually, people seem pretty good.

00:11:41 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, brilliantly put, and I appreciate you picking that out. I think that this speaks to both the nature of the problem and to some potential solutions, or at least treatments for the problem. Cynicism, this idea that people are generally self interested and untrustworthy and rotten is very prevalent on our screens, on tv, on our computers, on our doom scrolling, endless feed phones. There is a vast perception that people in general are pretty terrible. And that’s for a bunch of reasons. One is that these media companies that give us this information have learned that human beings have a natural instinct to pay lots of attention to negative information. So they feed us more and more negative information, and we feed the wolf that is based on fear and judgment from that information. And by contrast, when we go off of our screens and interact with actual human beings, things go much, much better. The way that I think about it is that there is a neighborhood size hole cut into our cynicism. And as you put it beautifully, when we think about abstractly what people are like, we’re terribly judgmental. We’re quite hopeless. But when we think about the people we know, or even just the people we see on a regular basis, we feel completely different. And that, to me, is really sad, because it suggests that there are really big misperceptions that are clouding our ability to see each other clearly and to connect with each other. But it also speaks to a gigantic opportunity, which is that if we can move past those misperceptions and actually pay more attention to the good data that we’re taking in, the accurate data that we’re taking in from our real lives, there are pleasant surprises everywhere.

00:13:38 – Eric Zimmer
I. Yeah, I love that idea. So let’s back up a second and maybe start from the beginning a little bit more. You say early in the book that, exploring decades of research, I discovered that cynicism is not just harmful, but often naive. I think we’ve talked a little bit about the harmfulness, right. The way that if we perceive others to be a certain way, we’re going to get that back in response to a certain way. So that’s one of the ways it’s harmful. Are there other ways that it’s harmful?

00:14:09 – Jamil Zaki
Oh, yeah. Unfortunately, cynicism seems harmful in basically every way scientists can measure. Cynics tend to be less healthy than non cynics, so they tend to suffer from more depression, loneliness, heart disease. They die younger than non cynics, so all cause mortality greater among cynics. Cynicism does not help us succeed. So if you follow cynics and non cynics overdose ten years of their careers, cynics earn less money and are less likely to rise to leadership positions in their work. Cynicism, not surprisingly, bad for our relationships. It’s also bad for our communities. Cynical communities tend to be less civically engaged. People vote less if their trust in each other is low, they donate to charity less, volunteer less, and even engage in activities like self harm more. So really, the most famous line about cynicism is probably from Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, who in Leviathan said, we need a strict government because left to our own devices, human life is nasty, brutish and short. Unfortunately, that probably applies best to cynics themselves. Right. It seems that, again, through self fulfilling prophecies, if you write people off, it’s just enormously difficult to be vulnerable. And if you’re unwilling to be vulnerable, it’s enormously difficult to build the relationships that human beings depend upon for psychological nourishment. And that’s a really tragic. Again, another of these vicious cycles that we see in the psychology of cynicism.

00:15:42 – Eric Zimmer
Before we move on to cynicism being potentially naive, I suppose we should define it a little bit, or I would imagine many people listening to this are going, well, am I a cynic? I don’t know. Right. I mean, some people know, you can sort of tell. Some people know they’re cynics, we know some people, we can be like they’re cynics. But for a lot of us, we might be like, well, am I? I’m not entirely sure. What are we talking about here? When we say someone’s a cynic?

00:16:06 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, it’s a really important question. I think of cynicism as, and I want to be clear, I’m talking about modern cynicism, not the school of cynicism, which was an ancient philosophical school, but modern cynicism. Is a theory, the theory that in general, people are selfish, greedy and dishonest. And there are ways to measure that in yourself. For those of your listeners who really want to go deep, you can find online the cook medley cynical hostility scale, which is a questionnaire developed in the 1950s. It includes questions like the do you agree or disagree that most people are honest, chiefly through fear of getting caught? Eric, I wonder whether you agree or disagree with that.

00:16:52 – Eric Zimmer
In classic fashion for me, I would actually ask about five follow on questions to that. I’d be like, well, honest about what? I think we can be honest and dishonest about different levels of things. Maybe it’s easy to be dishonest about small things, but about big things, or how much is the harm that would come from being dishonest? So, absolutely, I’m terrible at these sort of tests because I’m always like, well, I don’t have enough information to answer this question.

00:17:23 – Jamil Zaki
You sound just like a social scientist. This is what we always do. We love to say, you can’t answer that question. You need context. Yeah, but in general, right, there are 50 questions sort of like that. Do you think people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught? Do you agree that people generally don’t like helping one another? Do you think that most people can be trusted? These yes or no questions, and they’re pretty negative statements, and the more of them you agree with, the higher you would score in cynicism. Another way to think about cynicism is through what that theory does in terms of our behavior. Right. So if you think that most people are on the take, they’re just out for themselves. Well, that’s going to change what you do.

00:18:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:18:04 – Jamil Zaki
Trusting people is a gamble. It’s a social gamble. We put faith in somebody and we stand to gain if they show up and we stand to lose if they don’t. And cynics think of that as a sucker’s bet. They think of it as a terrible gamble. And so they’re much less likely to trust people in economic games. They’re less likely to trust people in terms of opening up about their struggles or putting faith in people in any way. So that’s another way that you might look to yourself and your own behavior to assess your cynicism. How much are you willing to bet on other people?

00:18:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. In that regard, I’m not a cynic. I do think people are generally good and can generally be trusted. And yet I believe also in the parable of wolves. Right. We all have good and bad things in all of us. But in general, I’m not cynical about people where I might tend towards more cynicism. And I wonder if this is a different aspect of it. Is cynicism towards the size of the problems that we might face societally. So I may be hopeful about people in general, believe people are generally good, they want to do the right thing, they’re decent people, and not feel hopeful at all about, say, our ability to solve the climate crisis. And so is that cynicism? Is that something different? What is it when it’s not applied at an individual level or a personal level, but at a scope of the problems that we face? Level?

00:19:38 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, that doesn’t sound very cynical to me at all. And I should share, by the way, I really appreciate you being transparent about where you fall on all of these dimensions. I want to also be open with your listeners because I feel like sometimes when somebody writes a book about something like cynicism, they’re saying, oh, it’s bad, it hurts us. It sounds like they’re calling other people out or judging people. I want to be really open, and you know this from reading the book, Eric, but yeah, I struggle immensely with cynicism. In fact, I would consider myself a cynic at the time that I started writing this book, and now I would consider myself a recovering, definitely not recovered, but recovering cynic. So for those folks out there who feel this way, I’m right there with you. I’m not standing apart. I think that to your point about, well, on the one hand my faith in people, and on the other hand, my faith in our ability to tackle a problem here, you’re really nicely getting at some of the dimensions of hope. So maybe we can talk about what hope is and we can try to put these pieces together.

00:20:39 – Eric Zimmer
Sure. Yeah.

00:20:40 – Jamil Zaki
So hope is different from optimism. Optimism is the idea that things will turn out well, and sometimes it can be a complacent feeling. Right. You think? Well, I think the climate crisis sounds bad, but I’m sure scientists will figure something out in the next 30 years. So there’s nothing really that I have to do here. I think optimism actually is really similar in some ways to cynical hopelessness, which is, hey, nothing’s going to happen. I’m a doomer. So again, I don’t have to do anything, right? Because my actions, if you are certain of the outcome, then your actions do not matter one way or the other. And I think sometimes that can be fair and totally uncynical. For instance, if there was a giant meteorite headed to Earth and all the nuclear weapons in the world aren’t enough to stop it and we will be obliterated in six months. It would in no way be cynical to say I think we’re going to be obliterated in six months. That would be realistic. I think with things like solving or even addressing the climate crisis, this is a little bit different because it’s a collective action problem. And so our belief in each other now relates to our hope for the future. Right? Hope is the idea that things could turn out better and that our actions mattered. It’s an empowered and action oriented emotion. And one thing that I write about with respect to climate is that people in the US at least greatly underestimate how much other voters in the US care about the climate crisis. So it could be that I don’t think we’re going to be able to do anything about it because I think I’m the only one who cares. If that’s where you’re coming from, Eric, then I would say, well, maybe let’s look a little bit more at the data about what other folks want. And maybe if you realize that other people want the same thing you do, maybe there’s a little bit more collective efficacy, a sense of possibility for what we could do together.

00:22:54 – Eric Zimmer
Lets go back for a second to the claim that cynicism is not just harmful, which we covered, but often naive. Talk about the naive piece.

00:23:04 – Jamil Zaki
This I think is so important because it counters to my mind what has become a cultural stereotype. When I write about hope and talk about hope, I get made fun of constantly. What is this, Obama 2007? Come on. It’s so try hard. It’s cringe, it’s naive, sometimes even worse. It’s privileged, it’s toxic to hope, it’s denying our problems. And by contrast, people say, yes, cynicism, it feels bad. But you know what? Cynics are right? And so if it feels bad to know the truth, well then I guess I’ll feel bad. To which I would say, not so fast. Let’s look a little bit more closely at the data. And it turns out that the data here are quite clear at a number of levels. One, people think that cynics are smarter than non cynics. So if you ask people, if you describe a cynic and a non cynic, you say who will do better at cognitive tests? Who will be wiser? 70% to 85% of people pick the cynic. But then if you actually give cynics and non cynics cognitive and social tests, cynics do worse than non cynics now, why is that? Well, cynicism, as we’ve been talking about, is a blanket theory. It’s an assumption about people. And if you move through the world with an assumption about people, you won’t engage in a lot of critical thinking. You will paste that assumption on to every situation in your life. It’s actually a very unthinking, or in other words, naive way of viewing the world. And it turns out that that makes cynics wrong in a bunch of different ways. In fact, even folks who would not consider themselves cynics tend to underestimate people. There’s decades of evidence that people don’t realize how trustworthy, generous, open minded, and warm others are. So cynicism here, it’s naive in terms of the way that people are thinking, which is resting on assumptions. And it’s also demonstrably wrong when you compare our cynical assumptions to the data about what people are really like.

00:25:07 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you talk about moving from cynicism to something that you call skepticism or maybe hopeful skepticism. I mean, it’s not just plain skepticism, but it’s a skepticism with a modifier.

00:25:22 – Jamil Zaki
That’s right. No, you nailed it. It’s hopeful skepticism. Yeah. Again, I love the opportunity to help people understand when two words that they’re using interchangeably mean completely different things. That’s like one of my jobs as a research psychologist. And that’s true here as well. We often think that cynicism and skepticism are the same, but they’re really not at all. So cynicism, again, a blanket assumption about people that we use to argue basically for how bad everybody is. A cynic will pick up any evidence that somebody does something negative or harmful, and they’ll say, aha, that’s who they really are. And they’ll explain away evidence about the person’s positive qualities. Right. They’re thinking like a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity. Skepticism is not a lack of faith in people. It’s a lack of faith in our assumptions. If cynics think like lawyers, skeptics think like scientists. They say, wait a minute. What evidence do I have to support each claim that I’m making, each belief that I’m carrying? And it turns out that skeptics, well, first of all, skepticism and cynicism not correlated with each other in people, right? So being one doesn’t mean that you’re the other. And second, whereas cynics tend to fall for conspiracy theories more, they tend to do worse at understanding other people, skeptics do much better they learn more quickly and they’re more adaptable. And then the hopeful piece to hopeful skepticism is simply an understanding that oftentimes our factory settings, our default mode, is too negative. So it’s an open mindedness to the evidence that the world and other people bring, plus knowledge that we have a bias and preparedness to push against that bias.

00:27:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you say in the book that cynics imagine humanity is awful. Skeptics gather information about who they can trust. And then this last part in particular, being less cynical then, is simply a matter of noticing more precisely. And I really love that idea of just like you said, set our assumptions aside and let’s actually notice and pay closer attention and question our own default settings about the way things are.

00:27:44 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think that oftentimes, again, skepticism here can actually not be simply different from cynicism. It can be a treatment for cynicism. When you think about cognitive behavioral therapy for depression and anxiety, what a therapist will often do is say, a patient will say, okay, I think that I’m awful or worthless, or I have personally, Eric, some social anxiety. So I’ll often think that people are judging me or don’t like me. And when I was in therapy, my therapist would say, okay, well, Jamil, you’re a scientist. Defend that claim. What evidence do you have that people really don’t like you? Has anybody ever acted like they like you? If so, then you’re maybe not making a complete argument. And that idea of what I call turning our skepticism on our cynicism, being skeptical about our cynical assumptions, is a mindset shift that can allow us to say, well, wait a minute. Where is all of this coming from? And I think oftentimes we trust our instincts. People are even proud. They say, I’ve got a lot of intuition. I trust my gut. To which I say, fine, you can do that. But oftentimes our gut instincts are really awful. We have gut instincts that tell us, be nicer to people who are your same race than somebody who’s a different race. Or when you’re hungry, judge people more morally. We would never trust those instincts and the instinct to always look at the worst parts of people’s behavior, the worst parts of the world is adaptive in certain ways. Maybe it helped us survive 200,000 years ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s helping us now. So I think that we don’t need to trust our gut when it comes to cynical judgments. We can be skeptical. We can be open minded instead.

00:29:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I’m always a little bit skeptical of the intuition. It’s a big thing in personal development, which is just trust your intuition, trust your gut. And I’m like, well, kinda sometimes there’s plenty of times our gut sense leads us way wrong. And a lot of the research, particularly if you look at some of the stuff about, like, even Malcolm Gladwell’s, that’s Kahneman thinking fast and slow. But this idea of intuition, people who are trusting their intuition in those stories he’s telling, are people who have thousands of hours of experience in that very thing, to the point where they’ve internalized vast amounts of information. And so it’s not that I’m totally against intuition, but I’m just not a believer that, like you said, like, it’s always right. I think it’s used right. It is an input into a system that should have multiple inputs.

00:30:29 – Jamil Zaki
This is brilliantly put. This is a really nuanced and important point. You’re saying that, hey, wait a minute. Intuition is more useful if you have expertise, because you have a crude experience that feeds into that intuition. I do want to complicate that even more. Eric, if I may, please.

00:30:46 – Eric Zimmer
I love complication.

00:30:48 – Jamil Zaki
I can tell your game for this, which is awesome. So a lot of people would say, yeah, in fact, my cynicism counts as expertise because I’ve been around people. If you feel hope or you trust people, that’s because you’re naive. I am not naive. I’ve been around the block, and I’ve learned, through tough one lessons, through betrayals, through disappointments, that people can’t be trusted. And I think that that’s actually the illusion of expertise more than its real expertise. Because, as you said, expertise means you’ve got a lot of information that’s going into your intuitions. But one thing about cynicism is that it causes us to take information in in an uneven way.

00:31:29 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:31:30 – Jamil Zaki
I’ll give you an example. Right. So when you trust somebody, and that was the wrong choice. Oh, you get feedback. Right. You learn that that was a mistake. You maybe think about that mistake for months or years or decades, but when you don’t trust somebody, and that is a mistake, when you miss an opportunity for a friendship or the love of your life or the greatest business partnership you would ever have, you don’t know that betrayals are visible. Missed opportunities are invisible. And that means that the information that we’re taking in is only really half of the information that we could take in. And in that way, our experiences don’t always lead to expertise. If we’re taking in information in a way that’s biasing us more as we gain more experience.

00:32:19 – Eric Zimmer
Absolutely. And because those experiences that are negative like that, we weigh far higher also, right?

00:32:28 – Jamil Zaki
Yes.

00:32:28 – Eric Zimmer
It’s an example of a trauma perpetrated on somebody. They obviously and rightfully so, weigh that very, very highly. But it’s not indicative of the reality out there. And I love that idea of saying that. It’s that we’re not taking in information in a balanced way. And I think that’s why what you’re saying about our experiences of people, right, because the news is unquestionably and always going to point out the negative. It’s the person who went into Starbucks today, refused to wear a mask and threw their coffee at the barista.

00:33:04 – Jamil Zaki
Yep.

00:33:05 – Eric Zimmer
Right?

00:33:05 – Jamil Zaki
Yep.

00:33:06 – Eric Zimmer
And that’s what you hear. But simple. Paying attention will tell me that I’ve been into thousands of Starbucks thousands of times and I’ve never once seen a bit of behavior like that. And it just is this sort of not fully bringing things in. And one of my favorite sort of counters to cynicism is, I think about there’s uncertainly people behaving poorly right at this very minute. Of course there are. And there are also so many people behaving kindly and decently and nobly, or just fine, decently. You drive down the road and that’s the case. It’s like we are all somehow hurtling down the road at 70 miles an hour, largely obeying the rules and getting along. And the occasional person that counters, that is the exception, not the rule, but it’s the one that we then say people are idiots, like you said. Can we take in more information and keep the negative information from assuming too big of a role? It’s like we weight it with like ten points of preference for every good thing we see. But it’s probably even way worse than that. The ratio, if we were to give it a ratio.

00:34:19 – Jamil Zaki
The person who cuts me off in traffic is the star of my day’s story. The 950 people who follow traffic laws all around me on that same drive float into the landfill of my lost memories. That’s true of so many things. Plane crashes is a major news story, and it should be. It’s a tragedy. Of course. 60,000 planes land without crashing is a non story. In some ways, the exceptions are what we focus on rather than the rules that make those exceptions exceptional.

00:34:56 – Eric Zimmer
Precisely. Yeah. If 1000 planes crashed a day, we would cease to pay much attention to it. We’d just be like, well, planes crash all the time. I mean, it wouldn’t make the news anymore. It’s the same thing I always think. Like, we talk about things that are dangerous, and I’m like, I think statistically, the most dangerous thing that we do, and we all do it every day, is get in a car, is drive.

00:35:15 – Jamil Zaki
Absolutely.

00:35:16 – Eric Zimmer
It’s far more dangerous than all these other things that we worry about, and we do it every day with barely thinking about it, which shows you that we’re not actually adding up the reality in a coherent way.

00:35:29 – Jamil Zaki
Exactly. Last year, I surveyed 1000 AmEricans, and I asked them, in general, do you think that the pandemic. So 2020, early pandemic, 20, 2021, and 22, do you think that people around the world during those years became kinder, less kind, or did they stay just as kind as they had in the years before the pandemic? And 60% of my sample believed that the world had become less kind during the pandemic. Barely 20% thought that it had become kinder. But the data from this massive project called the World Happiness Report are clear and go in the exact opposite direction. Volunteering, donating to charity, and helping strangers all increased enormously over the pandemic. So there’s two pieces of news there. One, the good news. When push came to shove during one of the hardest times, the worst disasters most living people have experienced, we showed up for each other. That says a lot. The second thing, most people don’t know that that happened, which I think is a tragedy. And again, whenever I talk about this stuff, people will say, wait a minute. You can’t discount people who commit murder or assault or do awful things. It’s like you said, right? Saying that plane crashes almost never happen would be a disservice to people who really are devastated by those events. And, of course, I in no way want to diminish the real harm that is going on all around the world right now. The question for me is not, is everybody good? Is everybody helpful, is everybody kind? But rather, can we correctly understand the average person? And I would say that it’s very clear that the average person underestimates the average person. And that is both a really sad state of affairs and, again, an opportunity. Because if we recalibrate, not only will we know each other better, there will be much more reason to have hope for the future that we can build as a community.

00:37:30 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love that idea. Let’s talk about two neighborhoods in a japanese city. I don’t know how to pronounce Japanese.

00:37:39 – Jamil Zaki
Kobe.

00:37:39 – Eric Zimmer
Kobe. Thank you. Yeah. And I’m not even gonna pronounce the two neighborhoods. I’ll let you. I’ll let you. I’m just gonna stay out of this. Or let you do that.

00:37:45 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah. So we were talking earlier about how cynicism hurts individuals, and trust and vulnerability can help individuals and how that’s also true at the community level. And I was telling you that trusting versus less trusting communities tend to be more civically engaged, more economically prosperous. But it’s also true that trust, the bonds between people in a community, strengthen that community, especially during difficult times. And one amazing example of that that I write about and learned a lot about for the book is this disaster, this earthquake that occurred in the japanese city of Kobe in 1995. And it was a horrible disaster. Thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed. There are two neighborhoods in the general Kobe area that are not that far apart, Mano and Mikura. And they’re similar in socioeconomic status, population size, et cetera. But they were different in a key way, which is that Mano had this history of organizing together as a community to advocate for environmental protection. The details matter less, but what you need to know is that these people counted on one another. They had been through struggles together. The level of interconnection in this neighborhood was high. Makura had less of that history. And when the earthquake struck, there were fires that followed the earthquake, massive fires. And the trust that folks in Mano had made a huge difference. People in Makura kind of waited for the fire department to arrive, and many of them lost their homes and sadly, many lost their lives. People in Mono did not wait. They organized kind of in a grassroots way. Came up with a bucket brigade and pulled hoses from factories and were taking water from the rivers around there. The tragedy was still a tragedy in both neighborhoods, of course, but the number of homes lost in Mano was a quarter of what it was in Makura. The number of lives lost in Mano was one 10th of what it was in Makura. So we think about trust as great when things are good, but trust is probably even more powerful when things are going terribly. And it’s one of the fundamental needs that we have in times of adversity is to be able to count on one another.

00:40:26 – Eric Zimmer
There’s another story in the book about. Actually, I’m just gonna tee it up and let you tell it. But it’s about two villages.

00:40:34 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny, you know, because we’ve been talking about the parable of the wolfy feed. And I think that’s often a parable at the individual level. Right? Like about personal development, I think of the brazilian fishing village example as actually one version of when we feed a different wolf as a community than another community does. So in southeastern Brazil, there are two villages separated by about 30, 40 miles. Again, similar in a lot of ways, religion, socioeconomic status. Theyre both fishing villages. And one village is by the ocean. And it turns out that in order to fish on the ocean, you need heavy equipment and large boats because the waves are large and its pretty dangerous. And so that type of work is fundamentally cooperative. Fishermen work in teams on the lake because theres no waves and the fish are smaller. People work independently, and actually, they often run into each other on their small boats only when they’re competing for the best fishing spots. And about ten years ago, economists, including a friend of mine, Andreas Liebrandt, went to those villages, and they gave the fishermen in those villages different social games to play, assessing how trustworthy they were and how generous they were. And it turned out that when fishermen started their career, it didn’t matter which village they were in, they were equally trusting, equally trustworthy, and equally generous. But over time, the environment shaped these people. If you were in a cutthroat, competitive workplace, you became less trusting and less trustworthy over time. And if you were in a cooperative, positive sum workplace, you became more trusting and more generous over time.

00:42:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it gets back to what we talked about earlier, which is where your view of other people will shape the behavior you get back from them.

00:42:33 – Jamil Zaki
Exactly, yeah. And I think it’s also not just your view of other people, but the structures that you are in. I think that one thing about today’s culture is just how unequal we are. Times of great economic inequality tend to be less trusting. Times and places that are more unequal tend to be less trusting as well. And that’s not because people have a bad attitude. It’s because structurally, when things are very unequal, people often feel like they have to compete, like their lives are a zero sum struggle to meet their basic necessities.

00:43:08 – Eric Zimmer
There was something that you said in the book. You say that it didn’t matter who they were. Rural and urban, liberal and conservative baby boomers and Gen Z may not agree on much, but they all believe humanity is in a state of vicious decline and that we yearn for a gentler, friendlier past that never was. Is this just a feature of human beings as we age?

00:43:34 – Jamil Zaki
It’s an interesting question. So this is work by Adam Mastrioni and Dan Gilbert, who look at this illusion of moral decline. They look at surveys over a 70 year period, hundreds of thousands of people. And at all times, people say things were great 20 years ago, but they’re terrible now in terms of morality. Right. People were great 20 years ago and not so much now. And the irony, of course, is that some of the people in these surveys, they’re now other people’s 20 years ago. Right. So people in 1970 think that 1970s AmErica is very untrustworthy and unkind compared to the 1950s, but people in the 1990s think that 1970s AmErica was great.

00:44:14 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Right, exactly.

00:44:16 – Jamil Zaki
And so I do think that there is a little bit of nostalgia here. I think that because we have this negativity bias when we’re thinking about what’s happening now, we’re so hyper focused on the threats in our environment. There’s also something known as the psychological immune system, which is the idea that over time, we acclimate to our circumstances and even block out some negative things that have happened in the past. So Dan and Adam think that it’s a combination of these two effects that we’re seeing. One, I’m so focused on everything bad that’s happening now. And two, I tend to sugarcoat the past, and you put those together and you get this illusion that things are getting worse, even when they’re demonstrably, in some cases, getting much better.

00:44:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I always think of it as a sure sign of getting old, and I’m exaggerating a little bit. But when I look at the sort of ways in which we ossify potentially as we get older, it’s one of the big ones. On my internal checking, like, am I starting to say things like, it was better when, as, like, a sign that tells me that, like, I need to keep, like you say, keep taking in more data.

00:45:28 – Jamil Zaki
I feel the same way about being confused by younger generations. And, you know, I think the worst version of that is being judgmental of younger generations. I hear all the time, because a lot of my work focuses on empathy and kindness. Aren’t young people just jerks? Aren’t they self centered, narcissistic influencers? And I think, no. And I also want to know how many of these folks do you know, I teach college students every day. I think I have a lot of experience with young adults, and they are some of the least selfish, most globally conscious people I’ve ever known, much more than I was at their age. So I think when we start stereotyping people who are younger than us, that’s a red flag that maybe we’re getting older than we realize.

00:46:09 – Eric Zimmer
Exactly. Talk to me about what solutions journalists.

00:46:14 – Jamil Zaki
Are solutions journalism is an attempt to provide an antidote, or at least counter programming to many of the things we’ve been talking about as we’ve been talking about. Generally, journalists and news organizations focus on the negative because that’s what will keep us clicking and scrolling and watching. But that gives us a biased sense of the world. Right? We’re basically only being shown the worst half of humanity by news organizations. So solutions journalists try to do the opposite. Now, I should say that when I say do the opposite, I do not mean puff pieces about a dog that was stuck in a tree but is rescued. Or even great stories, like a veteran comes home to their family who doesn’t know that they’re there. There are all these beautiful stories that we call human interest stories that are of just lovely anecdotes. That’s really great, and that’s completely fine. But solutions journalism is not that. It’s instead using journalism and storytelling to teach people about folks who are really trying to address big problems that we’re facing. So, for instance, young people engaged in activism to combat the climate crisis, or to roll back gerrymandering and re empower voters in the midwest, or people who have been imprisoned advocating for their rights to vote. This is news about positive trends that are directly related to the negative news that we hear all the time, not disembodied or apart from news. Oftentimes, I think the old stereotype is you hear four days and 55 minutes of bad news and then the last five minutes on Friday is a human interest story that’s supposed to basically be an escape from reality. Solutions journalism is not an escape. It’s a confrontation with negative journalism by saying, yeah, these same issues. There are positive developments on those fronts.

00:48:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I loved the story about gerrymandering in Michigan that you tell. Do you want to walk us through that very briefly?

00:48:24 – Jamil Zaki
Sure.

00:48:25 – Eric Zimmer
Because I think it’s a great example of this and the sort of example of something positive happening around an issue that often seems intractable.

00:48:34 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, this is the story of Katie Fahey, 26 year old Michigander, who worked in a recycling plant. I mean, really not somebody who was high up in politics or involved at all, although she was engaged. And after the 2016 election, she wanted to find a nonpartisan issue, something that people generally agreed on that she could make movement on. And it was gerrymandering. Right. Kind of anti democratic splitting of districts such that votes don’t count as much. And she created this grassroots campaign, and people laughed her out of every meeting that she had at first, she’s, again, this young woman, not taken seriously, but she did it. She collected 300,000 signatures from around Michigan and got a ballot initiative passed. And now Michigan is one of the most democratic states in the nation, meaning that people’s votes are relatively counted compared to more gerrymandered states. I think it’s such a great example of how not being willing to lose faith in each other can actually create positive change.

00:49:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s a really great story. And to hear about how she did it and the different people who came together. And it is an example of this solutions journalism that is really useful. And you talk about your couple of hot button issues. One is democratic institutions crumbling, and this is a great piece of solutions journalism to that. And you’re also, you said I’ve become a climate doomer. I also think there is good news on the climate front along with all the bad news. It’s not that they replace each other, but I’ve spent more time looking for stories that highlight some of the good things that are happening again, not as a way of becoming optimistic necessarily, but as a way of seeing a more full picture.

00:50:30 – Jamil Zaki
That’s right. And I think it’s important this point you raise, finding and seeking out positive news is not a matter of putting rose colored glasses on and being complacent. Finding good news a makes us more accurate because having only bad news in our feeds is like wearing mud colored glasses. Right. So trying to balance the information that we get is not putting on a pair of rose colored glasses. It’s taking off the bias that we’re already wearing, or at least most of us are. And second, it’s not complacent. You know, when we read, when we learn that other people support climate action, in many cases of social movements that empowers us, people with hope are more likely to agitate, to take part in protests, to pressure lawmakers to make change. So being hopeful is not being complacent. In fact, it’s the opposite.

00:51:21 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a book, you’re probably familiar with it, Hans Roslane, and it’s called possibilism. Is that the. No. What’s the name? Factfulness. But he talks about, he says in the book, I’m not an optimist or a pessimist, I’m a possibilist. I love that idea. Because what he’s saying is that both the positive and the negative, they’re both true. There are negative things in the world, there are positive things in the world, but that he’s focused on possibilism and he basically says that recognizing the good things that are happening does not make him naive. It makes him somebody who can believe in positive action happening. And you sort of say this somewhere else also, that when we don’t believe that good things can happen, you say it forecloses on the possibility of anything better. And I love that idea of cynicism becomes, again, as we’ve mentioned, in different ways, self fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent, because if you don’t believe that things can get better or have gotten better in certain ways, you won’t do anything different.

00:52:31 – Jamil Zaki
And I want to be really clear, that’s helpful to a certain group of people, that’s helpful to elites or others who want the status quo to remain. I mean, autocrats, authoritarians, they use cynicism. They cultivate cynicism in their people because a population that doesn’t trust itself is much easier to control. Right. So I think we often confuse cynicism with a radical emotion. And actually, it’s the opposite. It’s often a tool of people in power to remain in power. Yeah. I love, of course, factfulness. I’ve often, when I was writing hope for cynics, felt like I was in conversation with Hans, and he’s a public health scholar and focuses on trends in the world that are positive. And I think that as a psychologist, I’m very focused on our view of each other. And I think that those are really bound up with one another because to the extent that we believe in each other now, we can also believe that those positive trends can continue, that we can continue them. And to the extent that we lose faith in each other, we also lose faith in the future that we can build.

00:53:35 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Thank you so much, Jamil. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. It’s called hope for the surprising science of human goodness. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and find other parts of your work.

00:53:52 – Jamil Zaki
Thanks so much, Eric. This has been totally delightful.

00:54:11 – Chris Forbes
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