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Navigating Fear and Hope: the Everyday Courage That Shapes Our Lives with Ryan Holiday

May 30, 2025 Leave a Comment

Navigating Fear and Hope
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In this episode, Ryan Holiday explores navigating fear and hope and the everyday courage that shapes our lives. He unpacks how to confront our fears and how we need to do so, over and over. With great stories and insights, we are reminded that we don’t have to be fearless, we just have to begin.

Key Takeaways:

  • The concept of courage and its significance in everyday life.
  • The relationship between courage and fear, including how to confront fears.
  • The importance of personal agency and making choices that shape our lives.
  • The role of vulnerability in fostering connection and understanding.
  • Historical and contemporary examples of courage and heroism.
  • The four cardinal virtues: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom.
  • The idea that courage is not just for heroes but is present in daily decisions.
  • The impact of sharing struggles and experiences on personal and collective healing.
  • The notion that hope requires courage, especially in the face of adversity.
  • The importance of taking action and making decisions to overcome analysis paralysis.

Ryan Holiday is one of the world’s bestselling living philosophers. His books, including The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key, appear in more than forty languages and have sold over 10 million copies. He lives outside Austin with his wife and two boys … and a small herd of cows and donkeys and goats. His bookstore, The Painted Porch, sits on historic Main Street in Bastrop, Texas. His latest book is Courage is Calling

Ryan Holiday:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Ryan Holiday, check out these other episodes:

Why Community and Courage Matter More Than Ever with Laura McKowen

How to Overcome Cynicism and Embrace Hope with Jamil Zaki


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Episode Transcript:

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Ryan Holiday 00:00:00  Really what courage is, is the idea that I can change things, whether it’s this tiny situation or it’s some globally complex situation.

Chris Forbes 00:00:17  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:02  Every day we stand at a crossroads. One path is comfort. The other is courage. But courage isn’t just for heroes on battlefields. It’s in boardrooms, classrooms and kitchen tables. It’s the decision to speak up, to start over.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:20  To keep hoping. My guest today is Ryan Holiday, author of Courage Is Calling and one of the most influential voices in modern stoicism. We talk about fear, how to confront it, and how to act bravely not just once, but over and over. From the Stoics to Steinbeck, from whistleblowers to warriors. Ryan brings stories and insights that remind us you don’t have to be fearless. You just have to begin. I’m Erik Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Ryan. Welcome to the show.

Ryan Holiday 00:01:54  Yeah, thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:55  It is a pleasure to have you on. We are going to be discussing your latest book in a moment, but let’s start like we always do with the parable. There’s a grandfather who’s talking with his grandson, and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:20  And the grandson stops, thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather. Which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life. And in the work that you do.

Ryan Holiday 00:02:35  Yeah. That’s interesting. I talk about this in a couple different of my books. There’s a wonderful quote from Martin Luther King where he says that there’s a North and a South in all of us, meaning, you know, sort of a good and an evil, and that these sort of forces are always at a kind of civil war with each other. And I think this idea that we have a higher self and a lower self. There’s the part of us that knows what’s right and the part of us that doesn’t do what’s right. You know, the sort of part of us that is good habits and the part of us this bad habits. And the idea that you’re ever going to sort of perfectly be one or the other is probably unlikely.

Ryan Holiday 00:03:14  But I do think you give one more power than the other, which to me is sort of what that parable is about. You know, sort of day to day, which one has more control, who’s winning sort of more often than not is kind of how I think about it that pertains, you know, to the idea in the new book, Two of Courage. I don’t think courage is this thing that you sort of magically, perpetually are. It’s something that sort of day in and day out, situation by situation. You either choose or don’t choose. And the fact that you’ve chosen it before doesn’t mean that you’ll keep it forever. And the fact that you’ve screwed up and fallen short in the past also doesn’t mean that you can’t make a better choice now.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:59  Yeah, in your books in general, I see a lot of you looking at historical figures as ways of really seeing how other people have stayed with the analogy fed their good wolf to to sort of remind us, because I think, you know, it seems like there’s two parts to this.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:17  One is even orienting to what does that mean? What does it mean to feed my good wolf? Or what does it mean to live a good life or a life of virtue? Then there’s the actually doing it.

Ryan Holiday 00:04:26  Yeah. Although I would also point out that I do try to look also at examples of where the Bad Wolf has won out. Again, to further the analogy. I try to do both inspiring stories and cautionary tales. Yeah. The idea being, we can sort of learn from the experiences of others, the costs and the benefits of those decisions, and that they might stick with us when we are faced with choices or temptations or difficult situations. I think we tend to learn by story. We certainly remember stories, and they sort of help us explain what we’re going through in the present moment. So I tend to look, as you said, for stories that sort of remind us either of what we’re capable of, positive or negative, and what the potential consequences of that could be either way.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:14  Yep. So we’re going to get into your book in more detail. It’s called Courage is Calling. Fortune favors the brave. But before we go deep into courage, I’m going to ask you to sort of set it up because this is the first in a four part series. Yes, of different virtues. So say a little bit about what the different virtues are and why did you choose them.

Ryan Holiday 00:05:35  So in both ancient philosophy as well as in Christianity. And then we see some similar renderings of it in eastern philosophy as well. There’s this idea of the four cardinal virtues. Cardinal doesn’t actually have a religious connotation. It comes from the Latin word caritas, which means hinge. But the idea that there’s sort of four pivotal virtues that the good life depends on, and those four virtues in Stoicism and Christianity are courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. So this book is the first book in a series on those four virtues, courage being, I think, if not the most important, virtue, certainly the virtue that all the other virtues require almost from the outset.

Ryan Holiday 00:06:19  Okay. I can give you a quick definition of courage, or a quick definition of justice, or a quick definition of wisdom or temperance. But what does that actually look like in the real world? How does one apply it? How have people applied it, and how might we learn from them that that’s sort of what I’m trying to do in this book, as I do with all the other books. I usually pick a theme, as you said, and then sort of illustrate it with stories that are memorable and inspiring and, and sort of allow us to get into the particulars of. Okay. When you mean courage, you mean not show fear. No, it’s more complicated than that. So we’re trying to explore what courage looks like in reality.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:55  And I’m going to ask you to define courage in a minute. But I want to start where you end the book to a certain degree, which is with basically the end of one of my favorite books of all time, which is East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which I’ve read every couple of years for, I don’t know, 30 years now.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:15  And so I was wondering if you could just, you know, share with us kind of what you how you end the book around sort of the pivotal idea that ends East of Eden.

Ryan Holiday 00:07:26  Yeah. So at the end of East of Eden and actually Steinbeck talks about this at length. He has this wonderful book called The Journal of a novel, where he’s he’s sort of writing to himself as he’s working on the novel, and you see him sort of struggling with these themes, but he ends up talking to his editor about this, but he has this sort of breakthrough that the commandments are not, thou shalt not. Which sounds like you’re not allowed to do these things. And he says, actually the rendering is closer to. Thou may not or thou should not. Right. Meaning that we have a choice. And that the choice is everything in the choice is as you said, if you only had one wolf inside you. And it was the good wolf for the bad wolf. Well, then you wouldn’t really have any responsibility or accountability for who you were.

Ryan Holiday 00:08:18  Day to day, if you were a good person. That would be great, but it wouldn’t be really much of a credit to you because you were simply born that way. If you were a bad person, you really couldn’t be held accountable for that either, because it’s not your fault. It’d be like being short or tall. It’s not on you. It’s not a reflection of you. And so this idea that we have the individual choice, the basis of free will to choose to follow the ideas, to choose virtue, to choose which wolf we feed is, in fact, everything. I close the book with that story, but I open the book with a similar story that has no religious connotation, which is the so-called choice of Hercules. Hercules is said to come to a crossroads at either side of the crossroads. There are two goddesses. One goddess is the goddess of virtue. One is the goddess of vice. Vice says, look, you can have everything you want. It’s going to be fun.

Ryan Holiday 00:09:12  It’s going to be easy. It’s going to be wonderful. You’ll never have to care about anything again. And then the virtue, the goddess of virtue, says, I can’t make that promise. She says, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be sacrifice. It’s going to be difficulty. It’s going to challenge you. But she says it will make you great. It won’t be easy, but the challenge will be everything. And so this choice that Hercules makes is obviously said to be the sort of founding of his mythological greatness. And so the idea that we have this choice, that it’s up to us, to me, is the essence of what we’re talking about.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:48  Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. So let’s go into courage. Talk a little bit about to start. How do you define courage?

Ryan Holiday 00:09:55  Well, I struggled with this at the beginning because there’s said to be two types of courage. There’s moral courage and there’s physical courage. And then it’s like, do I want to focus on physical courage or moral courage? What’s more interesting? How do they pertain to each other? How are they different? And then I really as I thought about it more and more, I realized that, well, what do they have in common? What are their similarities? What’s their connection? And I realized that at the core, all forms of courage are about risk.

Ryan Holiday 00:10:23  It’s basically, did you put your ass on the line? Like, did you physically step up and run into a burning building? Did you, you know, follow orders under fire? That would be physical courage, of course. But what is a whistleblower? What is a truth teller? You know, what is an artist who pushes the boundaries of what we accept. Well, why do we admire that? Why does that count as courage? They’re not risking their lives, of course, but they’re risking their livelihood. They’re risking their reputation. They’re risking being looked at strangely or criticized. So, you know, they’re still putting their ass on the line. They might not die, but they could die of some form of social death. And so the idea at the core of courage, to me, is the willingness to risk and to put yourself out there.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:16  Yeah. You say that courage is the management of and the triumph over fear. It’s the decision in a moment of peril or day in and day out, to take ownership, to assert agency over a situation, over yourself, over the fate that someone else has resigned themselves to.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:32  I just love that idea. And the other thing you say, I think is so important around this is that inherent in this is the belief that an individual can make a difference.

Ryan Holiday 00:11:40  Yes. You know, we talk about this idea. It’s sort of now fallen out of fashion, the great man of history theory. And I don’t think it’s fallen out of fashion because it’s sexist. It’s the idea that, like, an individual can change the course of human history. There’s, first off, a certain amount of courage just in that belief. But it’s easier to sort of look at the idea that it’s all hopeless, that it’s all complicated, that it’s all too big for an individual to possibly affect. And so I think really what courage is, is the idea that I can change things, whether it’s this tiny situation or some globally complex situation. There’s a great expression. One again, these are all little sexists. So I’m not the coiner of the phrases, but there’s another one that’s like one man with courage makes a majority, meaning that almost all things start as a person who is alone.

Ryan Holiday 00:12:34  But it’s through their courage, it’s through their commitments, through the actions that they take because of that courage that they are able to make that thing a reality. They bring people to them where they bring people along with them. That’s what courage is about.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:51  The way you’ve structured the book is you start off by really talking about what gets in the way of courage for most of us, which is fear. So let’s take a step or two back, at least as far as the order of the book, and talk about what are some of the things that get in our way as far as fear?

Ryan Holiday 00:13:10  Yeah. So fear gets in the way. But what is fear? Fear is a bunch of specific fears, right? Fear of what other people will think. Fear of the consequences. Fear of standing out. Fear of looking stupid. Right? Fear of any number of things. But I think the irony is, often it’s not even those things we’re afraid of. We just have this vague fear, right? This sort of undescribed, unspecified, vague sense that it’s not worth it.

Ryan Holiday 00:13:40  Or it’ll be hard or it’ll be difficult. And so when we think of fear, I think one of the first things we want to do is just like, well, what am I actually afraid of here? Right. You know, you’re jumping off a high dove. What are you afraid of? Well, you’re probably afraid of dying, right? Well, like, let’s actually think about whether that’s physically possible here. That doesn’t mean it’s magically going to be easy, but you can sort of logically get to a place where, you know, okay, the fear I have is irrational. So if I push past it, I’ll be fine. Now it’s really just a matter of do I have the willpower to push past it? I think about this when I dropped out of college. You know, I was really scared. It was like I was 19 years old. I had no life experience. I had no sense of how the world actually worked. So I was afraid, basically, that if this didn’t work out, I would end up under a bridge somewhere, right? Like, I was afraid that by leaving college, I was cutting the only safety net that possibly existed between me and homelessness.

Ryan Holiday 00:14:45  Right? Which was, of course, fundamentally irrational. And so it was really helpful to have someone in my life. I had a mentor who was like, Ryan. I got sick for a year in college. I remember he told me this. He’s like, I got sick for a year in college. I had to take a year off, and I was in the hospital the entire time. And he was like, do you know how often this has ever come up in my life since that? I was gone for a year of college. It took five years instead of four years. He’s like, it’s literally not once come up, he’s like, this happens all the time. People leave and they have to come back. People leave and they never come back. But he’s like, it’s not what you think it is. It’s not as irrevocable as your fears are telling you that it is. And it was like, oh, okay, that makes sense. So then I decided to do it and that was the other part.

Ryan Holiday 00:15:30  So I went and did it. I remember I walked into the registrar’s office and I said something like, you know, I’m here to drop out of college and they were like, that’s not even one of the options. They’re like. You can take a semester off, but your credits are good for ten years. And so this thing that I’ve been so afraid of, actually, I had a ten year like, undo button that I could press at any time. And so it’s really important that one that we break things down. And then the benefit of breaking them down and proceeding, whether it’s jumping off a high average, dropping out of college, is now the next time there was one of those decisions in my life, I was much more savvy and aware that it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be, and that there’s almost always a way out.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:20  Yeah, that’s so good. I was just working on recording a short cast thing for Blinkist this morning, and we were talking about that exact point of like, hey, get specific about your fears.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:30  Like, really move out of the vagueness. You know, like, everybody will think I’m an idiot. And it’s is more like, well, there’ll be three people there, so three people will think I’m an idiot, right? Like, you know, get specific.

Ryan Holiday 00:16:41  And how many of them are even paying attention and give a shit, right? And so you’re, you realize like, often you’re like imposter syndrome, right? That’s a real fear a lot of people have. Well, what if they really investigate and they find out that I’m not as good as I think or whatever? And it’s like they’re not thinking about you at all. They don’t care, you know, like they are consumed with their own problems. Your obsession with yourself is making you think this is a bigger deal than it actually is.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:08  Totally, totally. Yeah. And then that second part of that that you said really is like, okay, well, if my fear comes true, how will I respond? I love the word.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:17  It’s not irrevocable. And I think that’s so important is to recognize, like, I mean, some decisions are irrevocable, but the vast majority of them are not. And you can change. I mean, when I left my full time job to start doing this podcast and the coaching and stuff full time, you know, I just had to spend a little bit of time and think, well, if this doesn’t work, here’s the 13 different fallback plans I could have. Right. The risk. Am I taking a risk? Sure. But like to your point, it’s not like this either works or I’m homeless. It’s like, well, this either works or I get another job. Like, it’s not the end of the world.

Ryan Holiday 00:17:51  Yes. There’s consequences. Right. We’re not saying like, don’t be afraid. There’s zero consequences. There’s consequences. But it’s the vagueness, the indescribable ness of those consequences that makes them loom much larger than they actually are. There’s a story I tell in the book about Ulysses S Grant.

Ryan Holiday 00:18:10  This goes to your point about, you know, sort of how many people are watching. He’s crossing the plains of Texas as a young soldier, and he hears these wolves like, and he thinks it’s like hundreds of wolves. He thinks they’re about to be devoured by this rabid pack of wolves to go to. The idea of this show and the guy he’s with is a tad more experienced, and he says something like, you know, Grant, how many wolves do you think there are? And Grant doesn’t want to sound like a like a wuss. And so he says, I don’t know, 20. And he was like, that was like half what I actually thought there were. You know, he thought there were so many rules. The guy here is, is he just sort of smiles. They finally come upon the wolves and there’s two of them. There’s two wolves. And what he realizes is and he says, I never forgot this for the rest of my political and military life. He said, there’s always fewer of them when they are counted.

Ryan Holiday 00:18:58  Right. So you take your fears, you take your risks. You think about the worst case scenario. Then you actually go like, okay, I’m going to inspect this. I’m going to like really look at it. You know, you’re like, well, I don’t want to say this. I might piss people off. And your idea of people is like a stadium, right? Or like but there’s actually like 15 of them, right? I think about this every time I say something that’s maybe a little political or a little controversial. You’re like, oh, people aren’t going to like this, but like people, it turns out to be like seven weirdos. Who sends you poorly, you know, poorly written emails that make you go like, how is this person reading my stuff anyway? I’m not sure they’re literate, right? Like, you realize that, like the people that you were worried about, you actually don’t care about and are far fewer in number than you would have if you had had to guess they’re actually were totally.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:56  I mean, I work with a lot of people who are trying to build their business and step out online a little bit, and they’re just like, I’m just worried that I’m going to get all these people hating on me. I said, no, no, no. Your biggest worry in the beginning is that nobody is going to pay any attention to what you’re doing. You don’t have to worry about the haters for a while, right? And then to your point, in seven and a half years of doing this, the number of people who’ve said anything to me, that’s really awful. I mean, it’s just so few.

Ryan Holiday 00:20:23  Yeah. And so what we often do is we make these things bigger than they actually are, so then we don’t have to do them right. If you’re like, well, I don’t want to piss people off, so I’m not going to do it or I don’t want to be laughed at, then we don’t have to do it right. It’s like the excuse to not put yourself out there.

Ryan Holiday 00:20:40  You’re looking for someone to give you permission to not do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:43  Yeah. There’s something you said near the end of the section on fear that I loved, and I’m just going to read it because I think it speaks to a different kind of fear. That’s really important, though. But you said we’re afraid to open up. We’re scared to share. We don’t want anyone to know how we’re feeling inside. And so all of us feel more alone. You know what pain is caused by the inability or the unwillingness to sort of share our difficulties, our fear, you know, the things that are going on inside us. And I just loved that idea of, you know, when we don’t do that, more of us feel alone.

Ryan Holiday 00:21:17  Yeah. Because I’m specifically talking about stoicism, which, you know, is a philosophy that a lot of people associate with having no emotions. That’s sort of the big stereotype of stoicism. In fact, that’s like what the word stoic means in English. Like the sort of lowercase stoic means like emotionless, invulnerable robot.

Ryan Holiday 00:21:41  And so I wanted to talk specifically about that, that like, hey, courage is not just, you know, charging into the fray under fire. Courage is also saying, like, you think about the soldier who does do that, right? But then the soldier who comes home and has trouble adjusting, or maybe they’re addicted to something, or maybe they’re depressed, or maybe they’re even contemplating suicide. I wanted to talk about the courage to say, hey, I’m struggling. I’m having a hard time. I need help because this is almost a scarier thing for brave people to do, right, to put yourself out there in that way. And so the idea of being vulnerable, as Brené Brown talks about this much better than I do. But the idea of being vulnerable is often the scariest thing in the world for people.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:58  It’s interesting. I’ve shared this before. Back when I had years and years and years in sort of a corporate world, although a lot of them were startups. But, you know, it was still sort of a business world.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:08  But the more that I sort of shared who I was, I shared my addiction history, I shared my depression issues, you know, the things that happened in my life, not in a like I’m talking about me all the time way, but just was a little bit more open about that. It was amazing. Over the years, the number of people that would come back to me and then say, oh, you know, this is going on because all of a sudden it was safe. Or to use your word, they’re not alone. Yeah. They recognize like, oh, okay, other people feel this way and it’s okay to talk about it here.

Ryan Holiday 00:23:38  We talked about this. Right. So it’s like, let’s say everyone’s scared of doing something. Maybe it’s a political stand. It’s standing up to a bully. You know, it’s, responding to an emergency. One man with courage makes a majority, right? One person says, no, we have to do something, and then they go do it.

Ryan Holiday 00:23:54  And the other one says, yeah, they’re right. Let’s go do something. But this is also true for mental health issues. This is also true for emotions. This is also true for doubts about something. Right. So the person who says, hey, I am having trouble with this. Like you think about what the MeToo movement actually was, right? It starts as women on Facebook saying, hey, something like this happens to me too, right? So put aside some of the political implications of the movement, put aside excesses or problems or cases that you agree with or disagree with the idea of women saying, hey, I was afraid to talk about this, but now that other people are are open to talking about it, I’m going to say, me too. That’s what the power of Courage is really about. And again, this is such important moral courage. First off, there’s an element of physical courage that we probably shouldn’t under state as well. But this is the decision to talk about a thing that why weren’t they talking about it before? It was uncomfortable.

Ryan Holiday 00:24:59  They thought they would be judged for it. They thought there might be professional consequences for it. They thought they might get a reputation because of it. Right. So the decision to put your ass on the line and say, screw all of that, it’s important for me to say this. It makes a difference for me to say this. I’ve been inspired by the other people who said it, and I am going to say something that is courage and it helps not just yourself, but other people.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:25  Yeah, that’s a beautiful example of it. So let’s now move into the courage section of the book. And the book is set up in that fear section, the courage section. And there’s there’s little essays under them. Yeah. You know, lots of different ones that tell stories from history and make points. So I thought I’d just grab a couple of them out of there and let you, let you talk about them. And then maybe you could pick 1 or 2 that you most want to talk about.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:51  But one of them that I liked was just start somewhere. Do something.

Ryan Holiday 00:25:56  Yeah. You know, I’m actually going through this right now. I’m working on this other book, and I’m struggling a little bit. It was going well, and then I got distracted and it’s anyways trying to remember that. Does it have to be perfect, particularly the first draft? I have to be willing for parts of it not to be good, and I just have to start. If I sit around and I wait for it to be easy. It’ll never happen if I wait for the perfect opening or opportunity. It’s never going to happen. If I want what I’m doing now to be as good as what I’ve done before, what I did even earlier on this project, again, I’m going to be sort of stymied or stuck. So I just have to start. And so today I was like, you know what? What’s the littlest thing that I could work on? I was like, you know what? I’ve got all this sort of loose research that I haven’t found a place for.

Ryan Holiday 00:26:43  I’m just going to start organizing that and hopefully that will sort of knock something loose, which it did. Yesterday was sort of a mediocre day. Today was kind of a mediocre day. But tomorrow I now suddenly, because I did this work, have pretty clear marching orders for what I need to work on tomorrow. So just start somewhere. You don’t have to magically do some huge, heroic, impressive thing. You just have to make a little bit of progress.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:12  I don’t want to divert the conversation too far from the topic of your book, but I’ve got to ask a question about how do you organize all your research? Because you are really good at pulling lots of different pieces together. And I am always fascinated by the authors that do that really well, how they organize it.

Ryan Holiday 00:27:34  So for me, I’m always reading these are books behind me, and as I’m reading, I’m like, okay. For instance, I’m writing a chapter on Churchill and is somewhat reckless financial habits. That’s what I was thinking about.

Ryan Holiday 00:27:44  So this is a book I read called No More Champagne about Churchill and his finances. And then these are all the pages that I’ve marked that I thought were interesting. And then I usually record them on notecards, and then the note cards are usually the building blocks of the book. So I have a big box, all the different, as you said, the book’s three parts. Then there’s chapters in each part. Those notecards get slotted in in their respective parts, and those are the building blocks for each specific chapter in each book.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:15  Makes total sense. So you’re doing it sort of paper based. Old fashioned way?

Ryan Holiday 00:28:20  Yes, definitely. And it’s not a perfect system. There’s like a thing I know I wrote down and it has a guy’s name on it. A baseball player that I want to write about, and I can’t find it. And I don’t know how I’m possibly going to find it. So it’s not a perfect system, but for the most part, it gives me everything that I need.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:37  Makes sense. Okay. Thank you for that. I just was fascinated to know. So back on to courage. A couple of these we’ve already hit. We’ve talked about how courage is contagious. You know, how one person being courageous spread. So that was one I was going to hit. We kind of talked a little bit about preparation makes you brave. so let’s move on to be the decider.

Ryan Holiday 00:28:58  Okay. The thing that’s scariest is making a decision, right? As long as you don’t decide, it can be anything. It can be everything. You won’t be held accountable. Right. The decision is when we pull the trigger and that that holds us back. So I was just, you know, just really talking about the power and the courage required to make decisions. Because if you don’t decide, sure, things will stay sort of in one spot, but by definition, you’re also not going to be making progress. It’s easy to endlessly debate things. It’s easy to endlessly research and consider them.

Ryan Holiday 00:29:39  It’s easy to ask for unlimited amounts of advice, but at some point you got to pull the trigger. You got to go. And that’s what that chapter is about.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:50  Yeah, you quote an expression in there that I think is great, which is whatever. You’re not changing, you’re choosing. It’s corollary is, you know, not making a decision. Is it kind of a decision unto itself. But I actually like this phrase better. What you’re not changing. You’re choosing which is really good. And then I can’t remember what was in the book or something else you wrote. I think you led me to it, but it was a a William James quote. There is no more miserable human being than the one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. So true. Having been there, I know how miserable that is.

Ryan Holiday 00:30:24  Yeah, to me that’s the importance and the power of routine. That’s the importance and power of sort of setting your ground rules. And for those who don’t do that, they face every day as an endless stream of unlimited decisions.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:41  Totally. I mean, with coaching clients, one of the first things we’ll work on is we have got to decide ahead of time, yes, what we’re doing. Because if you don’t, as you just said, you will spend a lot of your precious energy trying to figure out, well, when am I going to do it? What should I do? When am I going to do it so that when it comes time to do it, you already have sucked out half your resources or more, and thus it’s really hard to do when you know exactly what you’re doing, when then you could take all that energy and just sort of channel it, like do it.

Ryan Holiday 00:31:12  Totally. Yes, if you set the rules for yourself. And this is kind of where the virtues come in to play. Also, if you’re like, hey, I’m a person who defaults towards courage, then when a scary situation comes up, you’re like, this is what I do, this is who I am. If you’re like, I don’t really know what I believe.

Ryan Holiday 00:31:30  I don’t really know what I stand for. I don’t really know what’s important to me. Then you’re also winging it. And that’s when you go, but this will cost me money. but this could be hard, right? But, this seems fun, right? And so setting the sort of rules for yourself help you in those stressful, difficult situations.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:48  A lot of your work is about values, you know, what are the values that we have? Do you have any particular ways that you like of sort of determining personal values and getting clearer on what they are? There’s a lot of different systems out there. There’s a lot of ways to do it, but I’m just kind of curious, as somebody who’s pretty firmly ensconced in thinking about values, if you have any thoughts on, you know, for people who are like, well, I’m not really sure what my values are.

Ryan Holiday 00:32:15  I mean, what I love about stoicism in particular, and I brought up earlier that sort of stoicism and Christianity are aligned on these four virtues.

Ryan Holiday 00:32:22  What I like about the stoic case for those virtues is there’s no sort of metaphysical, supernatural explanation for them. I’m not faulting anyone who chooses it, but if you don’t believe that the idea is divine, it’s like, well, sort of, why should I do it right? So Christianity always has this sort of benefit of like, well, this is what God says, right? And stoicism, I think, is making the argument not, hey, if you live in opposition to the four virtues, you will go to hell. I think the Stoics are arguing your life will be held right. Your life will suck. You might be rich, you might be powerful, you might be famous. But that will bring you very little joy, very little happiness, very little meaning. And in fact, probably bring you the opposite of those things. Right? And so that’s really what I love about stoicism. It’s making sort of a logical, self-interested case for virtue and value.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:16  Now, are these four virtues that you talked about courage, temperance, justice and wisdom.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:21  Are those considered sort of the four core ones, you know? Is that sort of throughout stoicism or certain Stoics or. I’m just kind of curious how ensconced those four are, and then how many branches off of those four? Perhaps there are.

Ryan Holiday 00:33:35  Those are the core fundamental values of stoicism. And I think you would argue that every other thing that the Stoics talk about or believe could be ascribed to one of those virtues. So. So someone goes, well, what about love? Is that a virtue? And it’s like, yes, it is. But love, I think, fits under justice how you treat people, your connections to other people, so on and so forth. So I think those four virtues are all encompassing as far as values go. And it’s also important to remember that the four virtues don’t work in isolation from each other. So courage in pursuit of injustice to the Stoics is not impressive. In fact, it’s, you know, a vice, not a virtue. And wisdom is the virtue that helps us discover when and where the other virtues apply.

Ryan Holiday 00:34:25  Right? So these virtues can be configured in an unlimited amount of combinations that can give you clarity or guidance in each and every situation.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:58  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self control things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now. At one, you feed a book and take the first step towards getting back on track. A question that I’ve seen posed a couple times that I thought was an interesting question, and I’ve got kind of my thoughts on it, but I’m curious what yours were.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:54  Is that from a surface level? Buddhism and stoicism seem to have a lot in common. There’s a lot of overlap there. I’m curious if you have a sense of where you think there might be differences?

Ryan Holiday 00:36:06  Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I think what I particularly love about stoicism is its engagement in the world, where I tend to find with Buddhism, and both in the Buddhist texts, there is kind of a disengagement from the world. To me, the image of the Buddhist is the monk, and the image to me of the stoic is like the emperor or the general, or the person in the midst of the busy world. Like stoicism is founded in the Athenian Agora, the busiest marketplace in Athens. That’s not where I associate. I mean, there were Buddhist samurai. And Confucius, for instance, is a political advisor. So in the eastern tradition, there’s certainly some level of engagement. But I do think I see stoicism much more a philosophy of the world of the self, as opposed to so much of the detachment that we sometimes see in the eastern texts.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:03  Yeah, that makes sense. I would agree, and I think a lot of what’s happening in Western Buddhism is I think there’s a lot of correction oriented around that idea, where actually I think that’s not what is necessarily in a lot of the Buddhist core teachings. But you’re right, there is an idea of of withdrawing from the world. But there certainly is also a lot of talk about compassion and action. And I think that’s one of the things that Western Buddhism is doing right, I think is is correcting for some of that and saying, look, yeah, these things are great to develop this wisdom and this capacity for reflection and all that. But to what end? You know, not a metaphysical idea that like, oh, well, if I awaken all being simultaneously awakened, like know like is the wisdom that I’m developing, the compassion I’m developing, is it showing up in the world in a useful way?

Ryan Holiday 00:37:56  Yeah. Seneca was talking about the Epicureans, not the Buddhist, but I think it’s a similar point.

Ryan Holiday 00:38:02  You know, he says the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that the Epicurean says, I will not be involved in public life unless it’s unavoidable. And then the stoic says, I will be involved in public life unless it is impossible. Right. And I think that’s a distinction the stoic defaults to. I’m a philosopher. Plus I am a insert profession, important public role, etc. and I sort of tend to see the Buddhist as the. Well, I’m a I’m a philosopher. And yes, occasionally you have to do x, y and z.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:41  Yep. So let’s move back to the book and I want to hit on the idea. The last part of the book is around heroism and talk about the difference between, say, heroism and courage.

Ryan Holiday 00:38:58  So obviously fear holds us back. Courage is therefore rare. But there is something beyond courage. One of the examples I’ve come to explain this is that there’s like Michael Jordan walking away from professional basketball at the height of his greatness. Took immense courage.

Ryan Holiday 00:39:16  Would have been scary. It was real cost to it. Lots of people told him it was a bad idea. He had to go be bad at baseball in front of millions of people. He had to go from being the greatest to like a minor league baseball player, right? That took incredible courage. Now, is that heroic? Well, probably not. I mean, it doesn’t really help anyone. It doesn’t, like, make the world a better place. Same with Michael Jordan on that sort of flu game. Comes back from the flu. It’s courageous. Takes immense amount of endurance. You know, it’s not like solving world hunger or something, right? I contrast that with Maya Moore, who I think two, almost three seasons ago now walks away from, you know, an equally dominant career in the WNBA to work full time at freeing a man wrongly convicted, who was sentenced to life in prison. So the courage to walk away for oneself takes courage. The decision to walk away for something greater than oneself is heroic.

Ryan Holiday 00:40:19  And so what we decide to commit to, what our courage is in service of, is the sort of next and ultimate sort of level to think about and consider.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:31  Yeah. You say courage is not an independent. Good heroes have a reason. And you also say the difference between raw courage and heroic lies in the who. Who is it for? It’s a beautiful idea. So what are some of your favorite things you’d like to share around? Heroism. I’ve got a few here, but I’m going to let you lead for a second.

Ryan Holiday 00:40:50  Well, I open that part of the book with the story of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. And, you know, obviously it’s made for some great movies, but it’s also, I just think, one of the most indelible examples of selflessness and sacrifice in the history of Western civilization. These 300 Spartans. There was more because they were supported by some auxiliary troops. But basically, like a few thousand Greek soldiers went out and fought a Persian army that may have numbered as many as 1 million.

Ryan Holiday 00:41:22  And they did it, obviously knowing they would lose. I mean, nobody marches out against those kind of odds, convinced, like, oh, we’re really going to win this thing, right? So why did they go? Because they knew that this sort of shaky Greek alliance needed time to come together. There were people who thought the Persian threat was overstated. They thought it didn’t matter. They thought like, you know, we were better off handling this individually. And these 300 Spartans go out and make the ultimate sacrifice to bind these nations together to make a statement to show, first off, that it’s possible for the Greeks to fight and do real damage, but that a unified Greece is the only viable option. And, you know, you just read about these 300 guys. Every single one of them had children. And in fact, that was the point. The 300 Spartans were chosen specifically because they had children, because they believed that they wouldn’t let those children down, and that they were also protecting the younger soldiers who hadn’t had time to start families yet.

Ryan Holiday 00:42:32  So it’s just this, you know, magnificent story of human greatness, I feel of in this brief moment, they become more than just 300 people. They become legends, you know, they become transcendent.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:46  Yeah. In one of the sections called Going Beyond the Call, you talk about the Spartans again and you say the the opposite of fear, the true virtue Contrasted with that vice was not fearlessness. The opposite of fear is love. Love for one another. Love for ideas. Love for your country. Love for the vulnerable and the weak. Love for the next generation. Love for all. And you’re saying like that’s what was really underlying. What they did was love.

Ryan Holiday 00:43:12  It obviously wasn’t for their benefit that they were going out to fight this battle, because they weren’t coming home, and they knew that it was a selfless gift. For other people, I think about as America withdrew from Afghanistan, you think of these 12 servicemen and women who walked out for days on end into these crowds to load people up onto airplanes knowing that, you know, something could go wrong at any moment.

Ryan Holiday 00:43:39  And tragically, it did. And 12 of them lost their lives, but they also, in the process, were integral participants in one of the greatest humanitarian rescue efforts in human history. and they are not the recipients of the benefits of that risk. So. You know, if I decide to write a book that’s transgressive, there’s a danger to that. But if it succeeds, you know, I reap the rewards of that, right? Financially, reputationally, etc.. When you look at sort of truly heroic people, what makes it so impressive is that there was no real hope for them, at least of the benefits of that sacrifice.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:26  You tell a story in the section about The Audacity of Hope, about John Lewis. Do you want to share that one?

Ryan Holiday 00:44:33  That’s another one. I mean, you think about what John Lewis goes through in his life. I think he’s arrested 50 times. He’s beaten more than 50 times. He’s nearly killed several occasions. If there was ever a person who had reasonable justification for giving up on human beings, giving up on white people.

Ryan Holiday 00:44:54  Just giving up on people in general. It was John Lewis and yet who sort of continually was there with hope and forgiveness and optimism and commitment to change belief that change was possible. You think about, in a weird way, the courage that it takes to remain hopeful when people are showing you time and time again that they’re probably not worthy of that kind of belief. To be a black American in 1950 or 1960, and to believe that America was decent and good and would eventually, inevitably make progress in these areas. I mean, there was not a lot of evidence for that, right? I mean, there’s that expression when people show you who they are, believe them. Like we were showing over and over and over again, like sort of who we were. And so to have a belief, to have hope, to have the belief in yourself that you could actually affect change and make that real. I mean, that’s just one of the most magnificent things I could possibly imagine.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:06  Yeah, you say just about one of the craziest, bravest things you can do in this damned world of ours is to keep hoping, because there are so many reasons not to.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:14  That is so true. It is seems like such a, on one hand, crazy thing to do, but so critically important.

Ryan Holiday 00:46:22  Yeah, I mean, we’re not talking about sort of vague hope. Oh, this will take care of itself, right? This isn’t like, oh, I don’t need to do anything. It’ll work out. That’s not how it goes. But it’s the courage to believe that one has the ability to make a difference, to push the ball forward in some way. And I think also that on a long enough timeline, progress can be made.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:42  Yeah, I think it’s that holding those two ideas at the same time. Right. Like, yeah, things are really messed up. There’s all kinds of problems and it can get better. It’s really seen both of those. If you only see one of those, you either end up hopeless or you end up naively optimistic. But when you hold both of them, that’s a constructive and practical realism.

Ryan Holiday 00:47:04  Yeah. There’s a James Baldwin quote that I love.

Ryan Holiday 00:47:06  I’m pretty sure it’s in the book. He says not everything that’s faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced. Right. So sticking your head in the sand, pretending everything’s fine. Being afraid to look at it or deal with it. Obviously that keeps things the way that they are. That’s not to say that just because you’re brave enough to say, I’m going to try to do this, that the bill will pass, that the company will succeed, that the person will, you know, be willing to hear what you’re saying and, you know, go to rehab or, or whatever. But if you’re not willing to try, it’s definitely not going to happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:45  Yeah, I think that’s very spot on. Let’s end with you just sharing a little bit about your bookstore. You opened a bookstore right as the pandemic opened, and I’d be curious to hear a little bit about that story, but I’d be also curious to hear how has it been going? Say, since you’ve sort of talked about that in a couple different places.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:06  I’m kind of curious. The latest update, but for people who don’t have the first update, why don’t you give us that part?

Ryan Holiday 00:48:11  Well, it’s actually worse than you said, because I was I had just started the process. I had just paid for the location for which I was hoping to open a bookstore at the beginning of the pandemic. So then, you know, looking at things in the cold light of March 2020 and April 2020 and May 2020, as it literally looked like the world was falling apart and it wasn’t even possible to be open as a bookstore, right? My wife and I had to sort of sit there and go, are we sure we want to do this? Did we just light our life savings on fire? You know, but we stuck with it. We took our time. We really thought about what we wanted to do, why we wanted to do it, why we thought it was important and we pushed through. It opened in earlier this year and actually, so far it’s doing great.

Ryan Holiday 00:48:57  I mean, you never know with these things, but I think now, like, what if I had, you know, thrown in the towel in March? What if I’d cut my losses? It might have been cheaper in some ways. But when I watch people walk through the bookstore, as I did before I came up here to record this, it’s like, oh, this is what’s on the other side of those decision points. When you go to, I want to do the easy thing. Do I want to do the hard thing? Do I want to push through? Do I want to quit? I don’t think that I could have thought that what it is now and how it’s doing was possible, and I only found out that it was possible by pushing through, by trying. As they say, all growth is a leap in the dark. You have to take that leap. No guarantee it’ll work. It might blow up in your face, or it could surprise you and be even better than you thought.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:42  Yeah. So right now it’s going well then?

Ryan Holiday 00:49:44  Yes. fingers crossed. But yeah, it’s going great. And it was cool to like, launch, you know, my new book through my own bookstore.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:50  I was gonna say to you, did you throw yourself a book launch party at your own bookstore?

Ryan Holiday 00:49:55  No, no, no parties because of the pandemic. But, you know, instead of saying, hey, go buy this book from Amazon, which, of course, I also want people to do. I said, you know, buy this book from my bookstore or just like, hey, we can put my book in the window as a new release. You know, like, how cool is that? So yeah, there’s just been a whole other element to it that’s been really fun.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:17  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:32  And that’s exactly why I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at one you feed. Let’s make those shifts happen. Starting today when you feed. As someone who has paid attention to the work you’ve done over a few years, I know how deeply you love books you’re reading lists. I always love to get and see, and so I’m happy you’ve got a bookstore that’s really wonderful.

Ryan Holiday 00:51:14  Thank you. Yeah, it’s called The Painted Porch. It’s in this little town called Bastrop, Texas, right outside Austin. And the other thing I think about it just for other people, I’m not saying you should start a bookstore, but if you become successful, if you, you know, have achieved whatever you’ve set out to achieve, if that’s not allowing you to then go do things you’ve always wanted to do, sort of what’s the point, you know? And so I think the cool part about the bookstore is I love books, I love bookstores.

Ryan Holiday 00:51:42  And if I can’t do this now, what sort of is the point of the other things? Right? And so that’s sort of something that’s kind of empowered me along the way.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:51  Yeah. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope the book does great. I hope the bookstore does well and I hope to someday visit it. I need to get down to Austin to visit my brother who lives there. So I’ll come by.

Ryan Holiday 00:52:03  Please do. That would be awesome.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:04  Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it.Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

Filed Under: Featured, Podcast Episode

Failure as Fertilizer: Learning to Bloom Again with Debbie Millman

May 27, 2025 Leave a Comment

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In this episode, Debbie Millman explores how we can use failure as fertilizer and learn to bloom again. Debbie’s book and this conversation is about more than just gardening tips or tools, it’s about what happens when we let ourselves be bad at something, especially later in life. Debbie opens up about learning to grow and why failure might be the richest soil we have. Whether you’ve ever felt stuck, afraid to try, or unsure if it’s too late to start.

Key Takeaways:

  • Personal growth and development through gardening
  • Lessons learned from failure and embracing new experiences
  • The metaphor of gardening as a reflection of personal growth
  • The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on personal endeavors
  • The importance of understanding circumstances that affect growth
  • The balance between effort and environmental conditions in achieving success
  • The significance of being a beginner and confronting fears later in life
  • The role of external support and accountability in personal challenges
  • The interplay between creativity, self-worth, and professional obligations
  • The connection between nature, personal experiences, and emotional well-being

Debbie Millman was named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company, “one of the most influential designers working today” by GDUSA, and a “Woman of Influence” by
Success magazine. She is also an author, educator, designer, and podcast
pioneer. Debbie is the host of the Webby and Signal award-winning podcast Design
Matters, one of the first and longest running podcasts in the world; Chair of the first-ever
Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts, Editorial Director of
PrintMag.com, and the author of eight books. Debbie is the recipient of a Cooper Hewitt
National Design Award and a Lifetime Achievement award from AIGA, the Professional
Association for Design. She is currently a Harvard Business School Executive Fellow.

Debbie Millman:  Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Debbie Millman, check out these other episodes:

Fluke or Fate? Embracing Uncertainty to Live a Fuller Life with Brian Klaas

How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:01:12  It’s not every day that someone you think you know, someone urbane, accomplished, cerebral, shows up with mud on their boots and tears in their eyes from doing a pull up.  Debbie Millman, longtime host of Design Matters and acclaimed designer, returns to the show with a quiet surprise a book about gardening. But the garden isn’t about tips or tools. It’s about what happens when we let ourselves be bad at something, especially later in life. In this conversation, Debbie opens up about learning to grow and why failure might be the richest soil we have. Whether you’ve ever felt stuck, afraid to try, or unsure if it’s too late to start. This episode is for you. I’m Eric Zimmer. And this is the one you feed. Hi, Debbie. Welcome to the show.

Debbie Millman 00:02:03  Hi, Eric. Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:05  I am excited to have you back on. We are going to be discussing your latest book, which is surprising to me about gardening, and we’ll talk about that in a second. But before we do, we’ll start in the way that we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:27  One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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.

Debbie Millman 00:02:53  Well, as a designer, I think that we’re constantly in a mode of making very deliberate decisions about our work. Solving problems. Making choices about which direction to take. And I think that extends to every aspect of one’s life. I think that we don’t just design things, we design our choices and we design our paths. So the parable really dovetails quite seamlessly into, I think, what it means to be a designer.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:33  I’ve had you on the show before, and you very kindly had me on your show a number of years ago, and that day is carved into my memory as one of my favorite memories.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:45  Tell me why I was in New York City and you interviewed me. No, you’re a big part of it. You’re a big part of why I came to New York City. So I came to New York City and you interviewed me, and I believe I might have also appeared on Jonathan Fields show, but it was a whole day where I did things related to this podcast in its work, and at the time, I was still working a full time job in the software business. But it awakened this thing in me that was like, maybe someday this could be what I do, and now it is. But anyway, I just think back to that day. I remember coming to your studio and everything about it was wonderful. So I want to thank you for that day because I have a terrible memory. But that day really stands out to me. Thank you. That day also introduced me to you in person, at which time I thought, and this is similar to what you say in the book The Garden, about what your wife Roxann, thought about you, which was I was like, she is such a New Yorker, you know, sophisticated and design oriented, and all of these, like, New York type things.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:50  So I when I saw you had a book about a garden, had a little bit of a double take. I was like, oh, hang on a second, like, I’ve got you as this very urbane, sophisticated person. Not that gardeners aren’t sophisticated, but it just sort of surprised me. So when I was reading your book and you mentioned that your wife Roxann had the same reaction when you talked about gardening, it sort of tied all these memories together for me. So talk to me about why a gardening book now?

Debbie Millman 00:05:21  Well, it wasn’t something that I was seeking. but first let me just say thank you. Thank you for having me on the show again. Thank you for caring about my work. And thank you for sharing that memory, because it’s really wonderful. And I’m so glad that we have this connection. Me too. As far as why a gardening book now, it’s primarily because I was asked to write one.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:47  That’ll do it.

Debbie Millman 00:05:49  I was not in any way seeking about gardening, how to garden.

Debbie Millman 00:05:54  Anything about gardening? Honestly, I’ve always, as an adult, tried to cultivate some sort of greenery around me in the various apartments that I’ve lived in. Over the four decades I’ve been in Manhattan. But writing a book on gardening was not in my wheelhouse. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t on my bucket list. I had these various somewhat dubious attempts and results in the previous spaces that I tried to cultivate as some outdoor space gardening, and as I mentioned, various apartments since the 90s. But it wasn’t really until I came to Los Angeles during Covid that, no pun intended, that my efforts blossomed. Yeah. Roxann had gotten this house that I’m sitting in right now, two weeks before we started dating, and I had been living in Manhattan for all of my adult life. And so when we first met and started dating, we were long distance commuting to each other. And she has a beautiful house. The back yard when she first moved in was a very typical sort of suburban backyard. Beautiful, beautiful tree, a lot of grass.

Debbie Millman 00:07:11  Boxwoods boxwoods. And because I had always tried to cultivate some outdoor space in the various places that I’ve been living, when I first got here, I asked her if she would mind if I used it up a little bit, you know, with some potted plants and various herbs and things like that. There’s a beautiful garden center a couple of blocks away, so it was super easy, very convenient. And so that’s what I started doing. And it was very rudimentary because it was during Covid. Let me backtrack. Then when Covid hit the world, we decided that I would come to California because I had a lot more. time. We. We had sky. We had a car. It made more sense for us to be somewhere where we could get out a little bit. And so that’s what I did at the time. You know, we had no idea that the world was going to shut down for as long as it did. I remember the then president at the time saying, oh, we’ll be all back together for Easter.

Debbie Millman 00:08:15  And that was in March. And so I was like, oh, pack for two weeks and I’m sure everything will come back to normal after that. Well, we all know what happened after that. And so I need a lot more, I need a lot more underwear. And so we were here. I had a lot more time. I was working on a book at the time, but also had a lot of other time to do things and decided to expand my efforts in the garden as a way of trying to feel closer to the world. And I was having some luck because of the weather And so I started with the herbs, and then I went to lettuces. And then I got more ambitious and started to plant tomatoes and cucumbers and things that I really loved. And I was documenting that on Instagram, and I was making these little ten panel stories about what I was doing, but it was also very much about what was happening through the eyes of, of somebody. That was also, as the rest of the world was living through Covid and how gardening made me feel more hopeful and a bit more optimistic, and seeing how we could grow and evolve.

Debbie Millman 00:09:32  And the Ted folks who I have good relationship with through my podcast and through speaking there and so forth, reached out when the TEDx conference went completely online that year and asked if I could create some Interstitials between the online talks to break up the the talking and I made some stories about gardening. They asked me if I would make some visual essays that I would narrate and that would be shown throughout the conference. And so I made one about gardening. Fast forward to 2021, and for my 60th birthday, I had decided to take an expedition to Antarctica for two reasons one to see Antarctica, and then also to try and witness the total eclipse of the sun that was happening over Antarctica at the end of 2021. And it was a magnificent expedition, and it was everything I hoped it would be except for the eclipse, which I didn’t see because of cloud cover. And so I wrote all about that and also put it up on my Instagram. And somebody from a wonderful art director and editor saw it on Instagram, and she worked at a farm magazine and reached out and asked if I’d be interested in doing a piece for the magazine, which I did.

Debbie Millman 00:10:57  Fast forward another year as things happen and I get an email unsolicited from an editor at Timber Press, which is part of one of the Big five, Hachette, and she asked me if I’d be interested in doing a book on gardening. Having seen all of these visual stories that I had done, and I thought she was pranking me and like, I’m like a New Yorker, like I don’t write. I’m not a gardener. If you’re interested in my talking about my journey to try to be a gardener and the myriad failures along the way, and what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown and evolved and so forth. Then I’m all in. But if you’re expecting me to be the next Martha Stewart, you have the wrong girl. And so she wrote back and said, that sounds great. A quest to become better at gardening through the lens of visual storytelling would be welcome. And so that’s what I did.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:53  Yeah, and to say that it’s a book about gardening is to sort of describe it and also sort of not write, because there’s no real gardening advice in there unless you take like, move to California because it’s easier than New York to grow things like as advice, which you don’t even directly give.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:11  And like you, it’s a it’s a beautifully designed book that with very few words and not a whole lot of pictures, really conveys some beautiful things. Thank you. And I think it’s a lot like your design work in your podcast, which on the surface it’s sort of about the surface, right? And yet there’s a deep reservoir right underneath it of lots of depth and, and wisdom. And you kind of start off early on by saying that seeds are tiny and densely packed with their entire existence. What does it mean to exist? And you also sort of talk about how the universe itself sort of came out of this seed idea. And I think that’s a beautiful place to sort of start with this idea of something coming from not quite nothing.

Speaker 4 00:13:07  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:08  But almost nothing.

Speaker 4 00:13:10  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:11  Talk to me about how that, as an overall idea has been important to you throughout your life.

Debbie Millman 00:13:18  Well, as I was beginning to become more adept at gardening and was not just planting container plants and and things that I bought already born, so to speak, from nursery.

Debbie Millman 00:13:36  I was also planting seeds and to think that any plant, any vegetable, any tree starts from this sort of tiny, compact enclosure that then opens to create an entire universe of sorts is endlessly fascinating to me, and I’m somewhat obsessed, endlessly fascinated. I don’t know the right words here about how we all got here, and I think about it all the time, Eric. I think about it all the time. And in some ways it’s sort of depressing because I’m never going to know.

Speaker 4 00:14:21  We’re so far away.

Debbie Millman 00:14:23  As a species from understanding the mysteries of of how we got here and why we’re here and how it all started. And, you know, added the helium in the hydrogen. Get here in the first place. You know where the carbon come from. There’s so many questions that I have. And yeah, I’m on this quest of trying to understand my purpose here, and what my contribution can be and how I could potentially, if at all, make a difference. And so it all it all ties together the universe and the if we did get here from that, this big bang, this tiny, tiny, densely packed point then expanded to create what we are in such vastness that it’s inconceivable, it’s incomprehensible for us to even be able to envision.

Debbie Millman 00:15:18  Yep. What we’re a part of. And to think that, you know, trees have this grand underlying root system that communicates. And it’s all so beautiful and so abstract and so mysterious, and it all feels so mystical and magical in so many ways that It. For me, it became the ultimate way of trying to express the questions that I have and the tiny little answers that I tend to tell myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:56  One of the things that I really thought about a lot as I was reading the book is that you describe your early attempts at just buying plants and putting them outside and them dying and failing. And there’s two narratives, I think, that we we sometimes tend to separate about what doing anything successfully looks like. And one narrative is you just have to keep trying. You know, failure is just a chance to move on. You just if you just keep trying, you’ll succeed. And there’s truth in that. Absolutely right. I mean, you’ve talked about it a lot. There’s a lot of truth in it.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:37  And then at the same time, there’s another element that sometimes the story is, well, yeah, except it’s all about circumstance. And what I think is interesting about the gardening example is that you actually need to bring those two together. You can’t grow anything anywhere. You could keep trying and it’s not going to grow. Right. So it’s not all about just keep trying effort. And yet at the same time it is about iteration. It’s about learning. And it’s about saying, okay, if I want this thing to grow, whatever it is, whether it’s this plant, whether it’s my career, whether it’s my relationship, that there are circumstances, conditions that are more conducive to things growing. And I think that’s one of the big challenges that a lot of people wrestle with. It’s one of the I think the core tension is like, do I just keep going in this direction, or have I learned something that tells me, yes, keep going, but go in that direction. And I feel like your book somehow, to me, just brought that whole question into really clear focus.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:50  I don’t know what my question is now.

Debbie Millman 00:17:53  You sure do.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:56  That’s my reflection. I’ll let you go where you like with it.

Speaker 5 00:18:00  Well.

Debbie Millman 00:18:01  I write about how as I’ve gotten older, it’s a lot more difficult for me. Or it had been more difficult for me to attempt things that I’m not good at. And it’s a bit narcissistic in a way, in a lot of ways to think that if you try anything, you’re going to be good at it. Why should you be if you haven’t been taught, if you haven’t practiced, if you haven’t extended yourself into a realm that is further than what you’re currently aware of. And so asking for help has never been particularly easy for me. Asking for favors has not been particularly easy. And so the idea of trying to learn something new out of a school environment where that’s sort of the accepted norm. And it’s been a long time since I was in a desk, as opposed to behind a podium teaching. It took a while for me to realize that in order to, no pun intended or grow, that I had to ask for some guidance and that watching HGTV wasn’t going to be enough.

Debbie Millman 00:19:18  And so I really needed more deeper learning about the conditions that I was in. And this is a good metaphor for life, I think, and how to how to grow from there, how to get better at what I was attempting to do. And this experience actually helped me find the courage to begin to do other things that I’ve said for as long as I can remember that I really wanted to do, but for some reason had this obstacle path in front of me that felt too daunting to attempt. And it’s opened up that obstacle a little bit to make more attempts at doing things that I never really felt like I had the ability to do. And that’s been liberating in a lot of ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:12  Can you share what any of these new attempts have been? Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Speaker 5 00:20:17  But no, I’m fine with it.

Debbie Millman 00:20:18  I’m on day 481 of learning French on Duolingo.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:22  Nice.

Debbie Millman 00:20:24  You know, it comes a time where you’re like, I can’t keep saying, oh, I wish I knew how to speak another language.

Debbie Millman 00:20:30  I mean, yeah, you either do it or you don’t do it. I just it was tired of hearing myself wishing for this magical ability and thinking that somehow I’d learn it in my sleep. And so I’ve done this now for a year and a half, and I’m not very good. And I’m not a great learner, but I know a lot of words. Yep, yep. That’s been also revelatory. And then the other is getting into shape. And so I’ve been working with a trainer for two years. And so, you know, I’ve got a little bit of muscle happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:08  All right.

Debbie Millman 00:21:10  And so those two things are things that I never really envisioned that I’d be able to begin to do in the way that I’m doing it now. With consistency.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:22  I think that ability to do something and not be good at it and still do it is so sort of fundamental. And for some reason, for me, I think that it’s an ability that has gotten better in me as I’ve gotten older, where I think when I was young, I thought that how good I was at various individual things was some reflection on how good I was overall.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:47  And now I’ve realized, like whether I can roller skate or not says nothing at all about who I am as a person or my value. So if I go out and make a complete fool of myself, roller skating, which I assure you is what happens. I mean, the last time I went roller skating, they now have designed these things. They look like walkers on wheels, and I’m out there tottering around with one of them, which was, I mean, my younger self would never have gotten. Like, no way. My older self is like, well, this is kind of mildly humiliating, but I’m just going to keep doing it. But I think that maybe it’s certain things, like I decided early on I was going to be a musician, and I’m not musically talented.

Debbie Millman 00:22:31  Really?

Eric Zimmer 00:22:32  No, I’m not surprised.

Debbie Millman 00:22:34  I’m surprised.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:35  Yeah. I don’t know why I am. I am deeply not natural at it, but I love it deeply. But I’ve just stuck with it for, I don’t know, 35 years now.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:46  And I’m. I’m okay. You know, like my friend Chris is a natural. Like, I’ll spend three months figuring out and learning how to play something that he will then turn around and play in like an hour of time, which is mildly like, yeah, infuriating. And I’m like, you know what? That just doesn’t matter. Yeah, because I’m doing this thing because I love doing it. And I think that with your gardening is such a great example of you just embracing learning how to do something because you simply wanted to do it same way with French or with getting in shape.

Debbie Millman 00:23:20  Getting in shape has been the hardest one for me. Even harder than French I think, because I’m much more comfortable doing anything cerebral, and I’m also more comfortable learning anything on my own in that I can go at my own pace. I don’t have to worry about judgment. Yep. For lots and lots of reasons that we’ve talked about on on your podcast before. I for all of my life, have been very cut off from the physicality of living.

Debbie Millman 00:23:49  Yeah. And I always approach things from a much more cerebral point of view where I can think through things and not necessarily engage physically through things as much. Yeah. And so I was forced to start working with my trainer when I had surgery and needed to do PT, and that’s how I started my relationship with my trainer. He’s also a physical therapist. He’s a PhD in physical therapy, and I was very compliant with what I needed to do. The one physical activity that I did engage in on the daily was walking. I’m a native New Yorker and was always walking through the city and always walking wherever I could go because I enjoy it so much. And I didn’t want to give that up because that is my that was, at the time, my only physical activity besides pacing, you know. And so I started to feel better about myself physically and then decided that I should continue working with him in weight training and so forth. And so that’s what I’ve done. And I’ve even started running. People I tell they’re like, did aliens take over your body? It was.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:10  Yeah.

Debbie Millman 00:25:10  And I’m like, yes, they did a long time ago. Now I’m shooing them away.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:14  Right, right.

Debbie Millman 00:25:15  When I first started with him, because of all the trauma. If I couldn’t do something, Erik, I would start crying involuntarily. Like, it wasn’t like. Oh, boohoo. Poor me. This was involuntary projectile tears Here’s because I was facing so much of my own. I don’t even know what the word is. Bad wolf. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:41  Yeah.

Debbie Millman 00:25:42  Yeah. And so the first time I did a pull up actually cried, but it was not because of my trauma. It was because of my joy that I could actually do something like that. Yeah. And again, it was involuntary. And that’s been one of the most surprising things in my life, actually, I have to say, to be able to be conscious in that way or even allow my subconscious to bubble up in the way that it has. Yeah, has done a lot to help me.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:42  It’s hard to separate natural affinity from avoidance responses sometimes.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:48  Yeah, right. So I think I do have a natural affinity towards the brain. I think that’s part of who I am. And I think I was very disembodied for a lot of my life. And so yeah, physicality is something that I’ve sort of learned and I also, paradoxically, have figured out that it is, for me, the most important mental emotional health tool I have. If you forced me to only have one the rest of my life, which I’m glad I don’t because I need like 27 of them. But if you force me to have one, I would probably say it’s exercise. Really, because there’s something about what it does for me, the way it connects me up inside the way it releases anxiety, the way that it increases energy. It’s just it is for me. Maybe my most important one again. I’m glad I don’t have to choose, but it’s been a really important one for me. And the thing about exercise that I always find fascinating, and listeners have heard me talk about this a lot, but I do find it really interesting is how if something we come to see as so valuable for me every time I’ve ever done it, when I’m done, I’m like, I’m glad I did that.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:02  Like literally every time. Why does it remain hard? You’d think basic reward learning would have me running to the treadmill every day, but I don’t. And I think it’s just because it’s it’s such a significant output of energy that as organisms, we are designed to evaluate that amount of output very closely. You just don’t, you know, you just don’t go running around for no good reason as an organism trying to survive. But I still remain kind of fascinated by that. That dynamic of how I faced it today, I was like, I know I really the best thing for me to do would be to get on the peloton and ride. That’s really hard. So what I’ve learned to do is I just went like, well, okay, you’re preparing for Debbie. Instead of sitting in front of a screen reading, put in your headphones and just at least go walk outside in the sun while you prepare, you know? So those little sort of hacks. Yeah. Help.

Debbie Millman 00:28:58  That’s why I have to keep working with the trainer, Eric, because I’m too weak and lazy to do it on my own.

Debbie Millman 00:29:05  You know, David Foster Wallace talks about what a real leader is in Consider The Lobster, his collection of essays, and he talks about how a real leader is somebody who helps people who are weak and lazy to do things that they would not consider doing on their own. I’m paraphrasing. Yep. But we can weak and lazy were in that I’m not paraphrasing those words and that’s what my trainer does for me. He helps me get over my weakness and my laziness to do better things that I can do on my own. And if I don’t have an appointment with him, I don’t do it. And I’m hoping that I can get to a point where I can. The one area where I think I might is actually with running now, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be a runner. Maybe, maybe I’ll be able to do A5K1 day. But I experienced that runner’s high one time once and that was like, wow. Yeah. I never felt something like that before, but I totally hear you. It’s not like I’m going rah rah, time to run.

Debbie Millman 00:30:21  I mean, I haven’t run since the last time I had a training, session and I’ve been on a book tour, so you can only imagine what that’s been like. Yeah, and I do find it super interesting, this whole idea that you just brought up, because I don’t have any issue starting to make a drawing. I have no issue engaging in anything I really love. Yeah, on my own. I don’t need a trainer to draw. I don’t need a trainer to read. I don’t need a trainer to write. I need an editor. But I don’t need anybody to motivate me. So I do find that I have to think about that a lot. That’s a really, really interesting observation that I need to mull. Yeah. And if you do find the solution to that, please let me know.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:02  Well, for me, the solution has been accepting that like that. That’s normal. Right. That it’s just okay that like making myself do something very physical is always going to take a certain degree of coercion, right? I told you before the call, I just got done writing this book.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:17  I turned it into the publisher about a month ago, and a bunch of the book is about how we actually change. And one of the things that I’d picked up through years of doing the show, but also really got driven home as I did a lot more research for this book is that if you gathered all the behavior change scientists together in the world and you put them in a room. Right. I think the thing they would all agree on is that relying on our own internal engine, what we would commonly call willpower, is generally a bad idea for anything. That is, for whatever reason, for us, difficult to do.

Debbie Millman 00:32:00  Why is that?

Eric Zimmer 00:32:01   Because our environments matter so much, and willpower is a very finicky thing because it’s tied somewhat to mood, right? Because if we think about motivation or willpower in the sense that most of us know it, it has to do with how much we feel like doing something. And if you’ve got a mood system like mine, it is just up and it’s down and it’s up.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:27  There are some people who are a whole lot. Probably like, you know, steady or up at like 80%. I feel good 80% of the time. And for them might be a little bit different. But for people whose mood system is as variable is most people, you can’t rely on just that. So it becomes all about what are the strategies that you, as an individual, need to figure out that will get you across the start line for whatever that thing is? So there may be people listening to this or like, I don’t have a problem going running. I just get up and I just go running. But when I think about sitting down to do something creative, oh my God, it’s like a total block comes up.

Debbie Millman 00:33:06  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:07  And I would say they’re not lazy. You’re not lazy. It’s different in what we find easy to do. So for you you need to set up a structure. And a trainer is a very wise structure. It’s why fitness classes exist, because people are like, oh, if I sign up to go to the class, I’m more likely to go.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:25  And if I actually go, then I’m more likely to work hard. It’s just it’s wisdom, right? To know, like, oh, I need support, I need help, I need these structures. Whereas for somebody different, they might need to sign up for an art class to do it because they just won’t do it because for them the friction is high related to previous failure or doubts that they’re good at it. And so for all of us, I think that change to me, I always think of just as like a puzzle, like, what are the puzzle pieces that I need to put together that make this thing work and for you? With exercise, you finally got the puzzle pieces lined up, and they’ll probably get underlined again at some point. And you’ll need to go, oh, let me think. Okay. What what pieces do I need to put in here?

Debbie Millman 00:34:09  I think it also has a lot to do with who’s teaching you.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:11  Yes.

Debbie Millman 00:34:12  And I think that part of what has made me feel capable or emotionally available to do this is my trainer.

Debbie Millman 00:34:24  You know, he’s so lovely. He’s so patient. He really. I was very clear with him when I started. I’m like, look, I have all these issues. And so I hope that you can be respectful of them. And I have a lot of limitations. And blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And he was like okay. He’s been super respectful always. But he’s also unwilling to let my own limitations, my own self perceived limitations impact my actual abilities. Yep. And I’m not talking about abilities to do any physical activity. I’m talking about my mental health.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:09  Your mental. Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this. And I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:40  And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one uEFI book and take the first step towards getting back on track. My partner Jenny, who you met when I came to New York. She’s a similar to you in physical things when we met. You know, it’s been almost 11 years ago. At this point, probably she just hated everything that had to do with exercise and movement. It was something she was like, I know I need to do it and I hate it, you know? And she could find periods where she made herself do it. And over time, she has learned, I think, just to appreciate it more. But I remember we took I was like, I really want to learn to play tennis. Like, why don’t we go take tennis lessons together? And the first two tennis lessons, similar to you, ended in tears with her. There was just something about a ball flying at her that just brought up.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:39  Like being scared as a child and like, I hate this. Yeah. You know, and and just the inability to know what to do. And just so I think some of that stuff is really real for us. And again, I think that people face this in different ways. I mean, I know people all the time were like, I really wish I could learn to play guitar. And I’m like, well, of course you can, you know? But you have to be really, really uncomfortable for a while in doing it right, because you’re going to be terrible at it for a little while. I mean, everybody’s terrible at guitar to start. Just because you can’t make those shapes with your fingers, your fingers just aren’t strong enough. But any learning to do anything. And so I think when we look at that and we’re like, okay, there’s this thing that I want to do and I’m having a really hard time doing it. To me is just about okay. What? You know, what’s the strategy that we can come up with? And you sort of snuck in the back door of it by having to have a trainer for your back that also then managed to shepherd you through another door.

Debbie Millman 00:37:33  Right?

Eric Zimmer 00:37:33  Yeah. Which is amazing.

Debbie Millman 00:37:34  I love how you’re helping me better understand myself in this podcast.

Speaker 6 00:37:43  It’s fantastic.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:44  So speaking of podcasts, when I was getting into and preparing for this interview, something happened that as I was doing and I was like, that is amazing. And it is this you have been doing your podcast. You are at the point I am at now. I’ve been doing this podcast a decade. So when I started this podcast, you had already been doing it for a decade before that. And everybody’s always to me like, well, you’re one of the early founders. I’m like, no, not exactly, but holy mackerel, 20 years. Does that fill you with pride. What? How do you feel when you think about 20 years of having these conversations?

Debbie Millman 00:38:23  It makes me very humbled about the nature of time, because that went by in flash.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:31  Yeah.

Debbie Millman 00:38:32  And I remember my first podcast, I was interviewing John Fullbrook, who was then the art director at Simon and Schuster, and I was super nervous.

Debbie Millman 00:38:42  I had my notes in front of me, but I also had, because he’s a book designer, a book jacket designer. I had covers of his books all pasted over my office walls so that I could easily refer to something. I chose John not only because he’s a fantastic designer and a good friend, but because he’s extremely gregarious. And I felt like if I choked, which was a really good possibility he could carry on with. Yep. Thankfully I think I’ve grown in the 20 years but it’s surreal Eric. It’s surreal. And it’s also surreal to see how both AI and the show have evolved and what it means to again, coming back to this pun that I don’t really intend but to to really grow as anything. Yeah. I didn’t grow up thinking I want to be a podcaster when I grow up. There was no such thing. And that this very unusual path that my life took, based on a cold call from an internet radio network. Please edit that out. Like, what if I hadn’t picked up that call?

Eric Zimmer 00:40:03  Isn’t that fascinating?

Debbie Millman 00:40:05  It’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:05  I interviewed a guy recently. His name is Brian. I think you say it Klos. And he wrote a book called fluke, and it is a on many levels. Do you know the book or.

Debbie Millman 00:40:14  Yeah, I’m going to read it. It’s a great, great title.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:17  Yeah, it’s all about how life is like you just described. Like. Yeah, you don’t answer that phone. Your whole life is different. You know, he talks about how the city of Kyoto was originally on the slate to be bombed by the US, and it turned out that the war director of the US had gone to Kyoto about 20 years before on a vacation and loved it. So he said, no, let’s not do that one. Like it’s crazy. Like that is life. When you look at it, there’s just all these things that I could have just decided not to do. X and my whole life would look different. And his point is ultimately that if you embrace that, how little we actually control and how little actually happens, like, you know, for a reason that it can be freeing and liberating.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:09  It’s also deeply disconcerting on on some level, too, I think.

Debbie Millman 00:41:13  Yeah. I mean, it takes both the good and the bad things. And puts them in a completely different. You see them through a different lens. And I think that’s also something to honor.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:25  Yeah. It goes a little bit back to what we were talking about earlier with gardening. Right. Like there’s both what you do which matters, what you do matters. And there’s all the elements that you can’t control about growing anything. You can be more strategic, like you cannot plant roses like you once tried to do in a fully shady patio that that’s plant a fern there. Right? There’s strategy. And ultimately, though, you control what you can, but there’s a certain element of it that is just out of your control. You can’t make something grow.

Debbie Millman 00:42:03  That’s for sure. You don’t control nature. Not in the slightest. nature is much bigger and stronger and more capable, and that is a very liberating realization. You can do your best.

Debbie Millman 00:42:17  You can try your best. You can try to provide the best possible conditions, and you have to just leave it at the door.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:48  Another point of intersection with you and I a little bit is that your wife? Roxanne and I both did a project with a company called Rebind II, where you pair a person like Roxanne with a book. She did Age of Innocence. I did the Daodejing and mine is about to come out. I think hers has probably been out for a little while. The Dao is all about that idea of you just have to work with the way nature is, if you try and go against it, you’re going to lose every time.

Debbie Millman 00:43:17  I had a plant that had died and it had been really established. And then over the years, in a previous home that I lived in, and I talked a little bit about this in the book, the rhododendrons in my previous home. And I was devastated to watch them die and wanted to pull them out of the ground after they had died.

Debbie Millman 00:43:40  And it was really hard. I felt like I was fighting with nature. You know, it didn’t want to come out of the ground. And if pulling a plant out of the ground is fierce, you know, so is everything else.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:57  Yeah. I don’t know if you said this in a book itself or elsewhere, but I put it under the notes I have for the book, which is failure is fertilizer. It feeds the next attempt, the deeper insight, the unexpected path. And I love that idea because it doesn’t just say, just again, this idea that we mostly talk about with failures, try, try, try again. But I think that the wisdom there is. Yes. Try again. But as you point, like maybe there needs to be a deeper insight before you try again. Maybe there needs to be a different path. You actually have to be learning. It’s not just keep trying.

Debbie Millman 00:44:34  Right. And I think that it’s really important to be conscious about your failures and not just keep trying.

Debbie Millman 00:44:47  Because if you keep trying to do something the same way without understanding what led to the failure and what you can do to improve the odds of success. I don’t know why anything would be different if you just keep trying in the same way.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:04  Yeah, I think it’s one of those really difficult things about people who are trying to build anything. I’m thinking of it in a business sense, having been in the startup world for a lot of my life. But it’s really hard to know. It’s like, do I just need to keep going in this direction? Because it just takes time and people are slowly coming on? Or is this the wrong idea, the wrong direction? When do I pivot? How have you thought about that in your life? Like, do you have any way of sort of thinking through that, whether as a designer or in any way?

Debbie Millman 00:45:35  I think it depends on who you’re doing things for.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:38  Okay.

Debbie Millman 00:45:39  And the bar that you need to be able to reach in order to do something.

Debbie Millman 00:45:47  If you’re doing something for someone else and you’re getting paid to do it, there’s much less tolerance for failure. And that could include your shareholders. It could include a board. It could include, clients. If you’re doing something for yourself, I think you have a bit more leeway. For example, when I started the podcast, I was working a full time job. I was working as a as a corporate executive, and I was making a good salary, so I wasn’t dependent on this other effort that was really started as a labor of love. I didn’t need to monetize it. I didn’t need to do anything other than really fulfill my own creative dreams and hopes and aspirations. And to a large degree, it’s still the case for me. I’m lucky that I can monetize it in some ways, but I’ve never been dependent on it. And when you take out the dependency equation, it gives you a lot more freedom to experiment or evolve in ways that don’t impact others. If you’re being hired to make something for something else, or for the public or for profit, it does change the way in which I think you approach anything and ever so slowly.

Debbie Millman 00:47:15  You know, now that I’m in my sixth decade, I’ve tried to eliminate the need to fulfill any obligation to the outcome for others purposes. And it’s taken a long time, and I’m very lucky and privileged that I’m in a place right now where I can do that more frequently. Yeah, but that’s also a choice. You know, I’m not as comfortable anymore fulfilling financial obligations. I don’t want to live a life anymore where I’m working to increase the market share of of products that I don’t feel proud of doing. And and I did that for a very long time. Not that I wasn’t proud of them. I mean, I, I am very proud of the work that I’ve done. I just don’t feel the need to redesign any more fast food restaurants, or over-the-counter pharmaceuticals or soft drinks or salty snacks. And again, I’m very lucky that I was very successful doing that. But there comes a time where you have to decide how much more of this work do I want to do in service of that work? And so I feel extremely privileged to be able to take the talents that I manifested and grew and developed over my corporate career, and now applied them to movements and efforts that I feel are helping the world be a little bit safer or a little bit kinder.

Debbie Millman 00:48:48  And that’s the work that I’m trying to dedicate myself to doing now.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:52  Yeah, it’s a really tricky thing. I mean, we started this conversation with me sharing this magical day in New York City, coming to your studio and me being like, God, I wish I could do this full time. And now I get to do it full time. And that comes with a shadow side to it, which is that this thing that started just because I wanted to do it and loved doing it, now provides a living for me and for a couple other people. And so it’s different. And I think for me, the thing that I have to sort of continually sort of do is like, yes, I have to hold that there. It’s it’s real, it’s true. It needs to be. And I also need to turn as much of my attention as I can to what about this matters to me most deeply. And that actually is then what ends up creating the best work. But it’s always a mixed thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:45  I wanted to ask you about your career you talk a lot about, and you’ve advised a lot of young people about their careers, and it’s easy to look at your career, maybe many people’s careers, but I can look at your career and I can see it. Okay. It started, you know, down over here to the left. And today it’s up over here to the right in that all the things you just described are true. Like, you are better able to do the work that you want to do. You’ve had some degree of financial success. So if I look at it I go, okay, look. Start it down here to the left. Ends up here to the right. Straight line up. That’s not it. Right. So I was wondering if you would share a little bit about some of the times that you might have felt like, okay, my career was going well, and now all of a sudden it feels like, oh, you know, or any sort of bumps in the road or different things that sort of give us a little bit more of the nature of the up and down that happens in that chart if we zoom in on it.

Debbie Millman 00:50:45  Yeah. I mean, I don’t know anything that is just a straight line up. I can’t even imagine what that would be like. I graduated college in 1983 and moved to Manhattan. I’m a native New Yorker, so it wasn’t that big a jump, you know? And the first 13 years of my career. There was some success there and some highlights, but for the most part it was a lot of despair as I was trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be. I graduated with a degree in English Literature, so I wasn’t really prepared for the big time, and at the time, I wasn’t in a place where I either could or wanted to go on for a higher degree. I wanted to live in Manhattan and, you know, be a working girl, so to speak. And because I didn’t have a lot of training or a lot of guidance or any money, it was really, really hard for me. And I was also grappling with a lot of unresolved trauma and was living on my own for the first time in my life.

Debbie Millman 00:51:59  And I often say that I consider that first decade of my career just experiments and rejection and failure and bit of humiliation and then quite serendipitously, ended up in the world of branding. You know, I had some skills in design coming out of college because I worked on the student newspaper, and the editor of the section also had to put the paper together, and that meant designing it. And that’s when I discovered my love of graphic design and began to develop the skills that were required to be a graphic designer. It was still pretty rudimentary, although I had, I think, a good eye and some good ideas. I didn’t at that time have the drafting skills that were required in the 80s. I developed them and and that was a good thing. Again, it was very serendipitous, a fluke that I ended up in branding. And then, as you were talking about earlier, discovered I had a natural ability for it. My brain just understood the psychological underpinnings of wanting to engage with products that made people feel either better about who they were, gave them more social confidence, made them feel like they were part of a bigger tribe, were enjoying a moment that they were engaging with that brand and what that did to our psychological makeup.

Debbie Millman 00:53:23  And though even that entry point was marked with difficulties, I came into an agency that was mostly comprised of young British guys, and I came in as a sort of loudmouth female American that was challenging for the first couple of years. Then I was embraced, mostly because I was doing well, you know, for the company. I was bringing in a lot of business. And so I was then finally embraced. But then, you know, when I was bringing in the business, part of my original offer to join the company was that I would begin to earn equity. I knew that the senior partner was interested one day in selling the company. And so I wanted to be part of that. And initially there was some resistance as. There would be for anybody asking for equity. And I had to to say that if I didn’t get equity and I don’t know where this courage came from, then I’d have to leave the company. And I didn’t want to leave the company because it was the first time in my life that I was really successful and happy doing what I was doing.

Debbie Millman 00:54:25  And at this point, I’m in my mid to late 30s. I didn’t become a partner at Sterling until I was 38, and I was terrified that they’d call my bluff and say, okay, well, sorry, you know, we don’t want to give you shares. and then I did get on an equity path, which became, you know, really important to my life. But I remember that night going home and thinking, oh, my God, what have I done? You know, I made this threat that I would leave this job that I love, that I’m finally good at something, you know, from a professional point of view. And and then thankfully, that worked out. But there were a couple of moments in there where I wasn’t sure it would, and working in new business the way I did is a constant street fight because you’re competing with other agencies. You’re at the whim of what a client might or might not want. I was the chief rainmaker for a long time in the division at Sterling that I was running.

Debbie Millman 00:55:23  You can only imagine what that pressure was like, especially for somebody that is not only competitive, but using their success to boost their self-worth. And that is really challenging because if you aren’t successful at something, if you don’t win a piece of business, that can just decimate whatever little self-esteem you’ve built. And so I had to get off that hamster wheel. But that’s a really long time. And I still grapple with that. Not necessarily in Rainmaker, but just in any area where I have to prove myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:55  Yeah, I think that that is something that many of us wrestle with and I think we can get better at, but I don’t know if it ever completely goes away.

Debbie Millman 00:56:03  Yeah. I’ll let you know. I’m still searching for that. That’s my holy grail, Eric. That’s my holy grail. Just to feel good as is.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:12  Well, that is sort of the ultimate way to be. Because, as we’ve said, you sort of can’t necessarily make what is aligned with the way you want it to be.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:24  So a certain ability to be like, okay, this is I’m going to be okay with with what is is the thing many of us are striving for. I suspect that there’s a creature, though, who may be good at this is Maximus Toretto. Blueberry adept in this skill?

Debbie Millman 00:56:44  Well, Maximus Toretto. Blueberry. The little multi-GPU we adopted during Covid is really an example of what it means to live in the moment, to have utterly no self-consciousness consciousness about any of our bodily requirements and is is proof that unconditional love exists. So Max is not my first dog. Max is Roxanne’s first dog, and so it’s wonderful to see all of those realizations birth themselves in her and the realizations and the relationships she has with Max, which is just heart bursting. I can’t even explain it. But the first dog that did that for me was my dog, Duff. And that was 25 years ago. One of the great loves of my life taught me what it meant to feel loved unconditionally and to love unconditionally. And that is one of the great, great gifts to the world that our pets can do for us.

Debbie Millman 00:57:47  And so I love to have my furry, my furry family around me. We have two cats and a dog.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:55  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at one UFI eBook. Let’s make those shifts happen. Starting today, one you feed e-book. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up with the happy image of Maximus and your wife and your old dog. And I think it ties right back to kind of where we started, which is nature. Dogs are are part of nature, and there’s a special type of connection that comes from being in partnership with nature.

Debbie Millman 00:59:00  Yeah. And also witnessing what grows and what develops and what evolves with or without our participation.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:09  Well, Debbie, thank you so much. It’s always such a pleasure to talk with you. And I appreciate you joining us.

Debbie Millman 00:59:14  Eric. Thank you. Thank you so much for all of your kindness and generosity to me. And thank you for a really nice interview.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:21  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode length to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

Filed Under: Featured, Podcast Episode

From Benches to Breakthroughs: A New Approach to Mental Health with Dixon Chibanda

May 23, 2025 Leave a Comment

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In this episode, Dr. Dixon Chibanda explores from benches to breakthroughs: a new approach to mental health. He explains why storytelling, radical empathy, and solving daily-life problems often outperform medication-first approaches; how three simple steps—opening the mind, uplifting, strengthening—turn elders into community healers; and why hope, not symptom checklists, is the truest measure of success. Along the way, you’ll hear how ancestral wisdom blends with clinical science, how labels can hinder more than help, and how the very grandmothers Dixon trained ended up transforming him.

Key Takeaways:

  • Discussion on anxiety and its management through personal values and positive actions.
  • Importance of human connection and storytelling in mental health care.
  • Overview of the Friendship Bench initiative and its origins in Zimbabwe.
  • Role of trained grandmothers in providing mental health support within communities.
  • Need for accessible mental health care and addressing social determinants of health.
  • Integration of Western psychiatric principles with African cultural practices.
  • Significance of empathy and nonverbal communication in building therapeutic relationships.
  • Training process for grandmothers in cognitive behavioral therapy and effective communication.
  • Use of support groups to foster community and shared healing experiences.
  • Emphasis on the power of storytelling and vulnerability in the therapeutic process.

Dixon Chibanda, MD, is the author of The Friendship Bench: How Fourteen Grandmothers Inspired a Mental Health Revolution.  He is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Zimbabwe and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and director of the African Mental Health Research Initiative (AMARI). His “Why I Train Grandmothers to Treat Depression,” TEDx talk has been viewed over 3.2 million times and the Friendship Bench project he founded has been featured in major media like The PBS News Hour, New York Times, LA Times, BBC World Service, and more.

Dr. Dixon Chibanda:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Dixon Chibanda, check out these other episodes:

Why We Need to Rethink Mental Health with Eric Maisel

Insights on Mental Health and Resilience with Andrew Solomon

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:02:07  It’s a heartbreaking truth. Someone can know they need help, even want help, and still not get it simply because they can’t afford the bus fare. Today’s guest, Dr. Dixon Kharbanda, lost a patient to suicide for that very reason, a loss that changed the course of his life.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:27  Out of that heartbreak, he started something quietly radical the friendship bench. Now, grandmothers trained in basic therapy offer life changing care from wooden benches across Zimbabwe and increasingly, the world. In this conversation, we explore how Dixon weaves clinical science with ancestral wisdom and how human connection, not just diagnosis, can unlock healing. We talk about the power of storytelling, the danger of labels, and how even Dickson himself was transformed by the very grandmothers he trained. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Dickson, welcome to the show.

Dixon Chibanda 00:03:08  Thank you. Eric, thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:10  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to talk about your book called The Friendship Bench How 14 Grandmothers Inspired a mental Health Revolution, and talk about this movement in general, which I think is one of the more beautiful things I’ve read in a long time. But before we get into that, we’ll start, like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:40  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.

Dixon Chibanda 00:04:07  Thanks, Eric. For me, it means being constantly immersed in the stories, the lives of the people who have shaped my journey, not only around the work that I do at Friendship Bench, but in my career as well. So in this particular instance, that would be, I guess, the 14 grandmothers that I started this project with. They have profoundly influenced the course of my life and career.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:39  Beautiful. Why don’t we start with you telling us about the friendship bench for people who aren’t familiar with it?

Dixon Chibanda 00:04:47  Great. So the friendship bench, in essence, is really a brief psychological therapy or talk therapy that is evidence based but is delivered by trained community grandmothers. Started off in Zimbabwe. The trained community grandmothers who are trained in the basics of what we call cognitive behavioral therapy, are located a wooden park bench in their community. We facilitate referrals to the bench of people who are lonely, people who are depressed, and those referrals can come through social media, through schools, through the police station. You know, in cases of, for instance, intimate partner violence and the grandmothers on the bench provide this structured therapy, usually 4 to 6 sessions. And after those sessions on the bench, people are then encouraged to join a support group in their community. So that, in essence, is what the Friendship Bench is in a nutshell.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:50  Let me set the table a little bit for listeners here. You were a psychiatrist in Zimbabwe, and I think you at one point quoted a statistic like it was something like one psychiatrist for every several million people in the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:08  Right. And that obviously is problematic. And as an attempt to try and solve this problem a little bit, to try and say, how can we actually provide more care to more people, you, through working with different people, came up with this idea that these grandmothers who are not trained psychiatrist, trained psychologists in the academic sense that we normally would think of them, but they were trusted members of the community that they could, with a little bit of training, provide really good support to the members of the community.

Dixon Chibanda 00:06:47  Yes. So, you know, during my formative years of, you know, working in a large hospital as a psychiatrist. I lost a patient of mine to suicide. Erica was her name. You know, I write about Erica in my book. Erica had been under my care for just over two years when she took her own life. And I distinctly remember the day that Erica’s mother called me to tell me that, that Erica had taken her own life. Erica had hanged herself from a mango tree in the family garden.

Dixon Chibanda 00:07:21  I was devastated, Eric. But I think what really hit me hard about Erica’s death was the fact that both Erica’s parents knew that Erica needed help, and Erica herself knew that she needed help. But they didn’t have, you know, the equivalent of 10 USD to get onto a bus to bring Erica to the hospital where I worked. Erica’s parents were literally trying to save up for bus fare to bring Erica, who was severely depressed. She’d had a relapse to the hospital. And it was during that process of trying to save up the equivalent of 10 USD that she actually took her own life. And so that story hit me so hard. And at the same time, you know, I kind of got into this soul searching journey. And I realized then that I needed to find a way of making it possible for people to get evidence based care or talk therapy from the community where they lived, as opposed to coming to the hospital. And so that was really the beginning of the idea of friendship. So, you know, Friendship Bench was born out of a tragic event.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:38  Talk to me about the origins. How did you arrive at this idea?

Dixon Chibanda 00:08:43  Well, after the loss of Erica and getting into, I think I actually got into a depression myself. You know, in this soul searching journey. Trying to figure out what to do with my life. With my career as a psychiatrist, you know, and talking to a lot of people. I then realized that actually, one of the most reliable resource that we have in communities across the world are grandmothers, you know. And I realized from talking to people that, you know, grandmothers are like the custodians of our local culture and wisdom and knowledge. And I thought, how about if we could train grandmas in the basics of cognitive behavioral therapy and provide them with the skills to reach out to those in their communities who need therapy? And so that’s really how it started. And in my book, I talk about the first 14 grandmothers Because when I started this project, it was just the 14 grandmothers that I had. Of course, now we have in Zimbabwe alone, we have over 3000 grandmas and we have a presence in many different parts of the world.

Dixon Chibanda 00:10:01  But, you know, I’m just kind of zeroing in on the first 14. And it was those first 14 grandmas that really helped me to understand the power of human connection and the power of embedding healing in stories, you know. And so this is how Friendship Bench really started. And it’s been shaped by those 14 grandmas. At the moment, there are only six of them left. But it’s just really been a tremendous learning opportunity for me, both as a psychiatrist and as a human being.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:36  I think that’s the beautiful thing. Well, there’s many beautiful things about this, but one of them is that you brought. Okay, I’ve got a psychiatrist, Western trained view of mental health. And so I’m bringing that to the table, the cognitive behavioral therapy part that you’re talking about. But they met you with lots and lots of their own ideas and own wisdom that emerge out of the actual culture. And I think it’s the combination of those two things coming together is part of, I think, probably what makes it so successful.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:12  If you had just said everybody do CBT, that may not have been really nearly as effective. Or on the other hand, if it had only been, you know, the contributions of individual grandmothers without a little bit of, you know, guidance in mental health practices. But when they both came together, you created this thing that seems really special.

Dixon Chibanda 00:11:32  Yeah. Yeah, that that is so right. Eric. I often refer to the journey of the Friendship Bench as striking a balance, you know, equipoise between, you know, Western models of care and an African cultural heritage, and bringing all of that together in a way that produces the results that are acceptable not only within an African context, but in a northern hemisphere context as well. I’ll give you an example. You know, when I first started a friendship bench with the first 14 grandmothers, naturally, being a psychiatrist, I thought this whole model would be based on, you know, the principles of, of DSM five, you know, where you focus on a diagnosis.

Dixon Chibanda 00:12:22  You know, you focus on the symptoms, you come up with a diagnosis, and then you establish a treatment plan, you know. And the grandmas were like, no, you need to focus on the story because human beings connect through stories and through those human connections. That’s when healing begins to emerge. And so with time, I realized that we had to find a way of connecting stories and DSM five, and really creating a sort of way of harmony between the two, if you like. And my journey has consistently been about that. And I’ll just share one more example about this, this sort of equipoise. You know, when I started Friendship Bench, I being a psychiatrist, I wanted to call the initiative the mental health bench. You know, I was I was thinking as a psychiatrist and the grandmas, you know, were like, you know, that’s not really going to work in this community. And I resisted. And interestingly, Eric, when we started with the mental health bench, nobody actually wanted to come and sit on a mental health bench until we changed the name to Friendship Bench.

Dixon Chibanda 00:13:38  And all of a sudden everybody wanted to sit on a friendship bench. And I learned my first big lesson, you know, are the names that we ascribe to things can make or break those things, you know. So I really became sensitive to the language that we use around mental health. And I also realized that a lot of what we use as professionals can fuel stigma in mental health. So we really have to be careful with labeling people. there’s room for that. But oftentimes what is more important is the story that people bring, you know, to the bench, not the diagnosis.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:16  So a big part of what made this work in Zimbabwe was that these grandmothers were steeped in a culture that they could bring to the table. And I’m curious about what do you see in more westernized places where the culture is devolved in their lifetime a lot. It’s very different, or there isn’t the same cultural reference point, and there isn’t necessarily the same respect for the elderly that there might be in places that are a little bit more traditional. What do you see as you try and take this different places?

Dixon Chibanda 00:14:50  Eric, you know, when we first started taking friendship Bench to different parts of the world, our hypothesis was the northern hemisphere, particularly the developed countries, would be very different. And I am increasingly surprised at how similar communities are across the world and how people even in Washington, D.C., or in New Orleans or in London, in Germany, these are places where we’re introducing Friendship Bench. You find that intergenerational connectedness, when given the right space, is extremely powerful because the elderly or the grandmas are addressing loneliness through this work. Yes, young people, by engaging and interacting with the grandmas are addressing this sense of belonging, which a lot of our young people have lost because, you know, our world has become so disconnected. We’re always in front of our devices. But when you bring the two together, you have this amazing intergenerational connectedness, which is so powerful. So actually, you know, there’s a lot more that connects us as human beings across the globe than separates us or divides us.

Dixon Chibanda 00:16:11  Last year in October, we were in El Salvador, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that the way people relate to the elderly, the way people connect with their grandmas, is no different than in Zimbabwe or in Tanzania or in Liberia and all these other places where we’re doing this model. So I really think at the very core of what we do, the most fundamental human connection that we see is stories, Yet all human beings across the globe connect through stories. It doesn’t matter which culture you’re coming from, and that’s fundamentally what Friendship Bench brings. You know that connecting human beings through stories.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:51  I’m glad that your hypothesis and mine were similar about how this would work in the Western world. And everything you’re saying makes sense, right? I think we do know universally, that one of the most healing things that can happen is simply one person really listening to another. Yeah, a lot of modern studies, you know, trying to figure out like, what therapy is most effective. And it seems like the answer often is the one in which the person has the best rapport with the therapist leads to the best outcome.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:20  Like, that’s the single most important thing. Yeah. I want to ask a question about stories. So when you say stories, there’s obviously the stories that the client comes with, I don’t know what. What do you call people who come to the friendship bench for help?

Dixon Chibanda 00:17:34  You know, it depends where you are. In Zimbabwe, they are called, Grandchildren because it’s, you know, it’s just an affectionate way of referring to them. But in New York City, for instance, people who came to the bench were called clients or benches. You know, it varies.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:49  Yeah, I like grandchild. So the grandchildren come and there’s obviously the story that they bring, but there’s the stories that the grandmothers bring. And I’m curious, does that emerge completely organically out of each grandmother’s experience, or are there connective healing stories that are taught to grandmothers that are part of what they use?

Dixon Chibanda 00:18:15  Yeah, that’s a great question. So when we train the grandmas, we lean into their stories. As you know, as you may imagine, someone who has lived for several decades has a rich history, has a rich lived experience.

Dixon Chibanda 00:18:35  You know, these grandmas, I like to say that, you know, they carry the battle scars of life with grace and dignity, and they bring those battle scars to the bench. And one of the things that I learned as a psychiatrist is the importance of sharing your own story as a way of connecting with clients. Naturally, you have to respect certain boundaries as you do so, you know. But the grandmas bring their own stories. But what we emphasize is the use of empathy or expressed empathy, which is the ability to make people feel respected and understood when they open up to share their stories. We emphasize, you know, nonverbal communication, the use of eye contact, the use of silence as a tool. You know, most human beings feel extremely uncomfortable when they silence. You know, in fact, you know, for a lot of people, silence makes them feel kind of awkward. But with the friendship bench, the first level training is really all about using all of those sort of intuitive non-verbal strategies that you can use to engage with other human beings.

Dixon Chibanda 00:19:48  It’s really, as you said, Eric, it’s about building that rapport. We call that therapeutic alliance. That is the most important part of the work that we do at Friendship Bench, and that’s what we really emphasize in the first level training. In our training as three levels, level one, two and three. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:04  How much training does a grandmother go through before she’s sort of put on on a bench?

Dixon Chibanda 00:20:10  That usually varies depending on the level of education or the grandma. The more educated, the less time they may need. Okay. So we work with grandmas who have minimal education in Zimbabwe. Most of them have, you know, the equivalent of junior school education. And it takes a month for them to be able to understand the basic components of the therapy, which is, you know, problem solving, behavior activation, activity scheduling, and psychoeducation. You know, those are sort of the active ingredients of of friendship bench and anchored in all of that. Is that the rich storytelling component, the ability to get people to feel comfortable with feeling vulnerable.

Dixon Chibanda 00:20:56  You know, again, that was one of the big lessons I learned from the grandmas. You know, if there’s one thing we do at the Friendship Bench is make people feel comfortable to feel vulnerable because it’s through that vulnerability that they share their stories. And it’s through that sharing of story that connects and the healing process begins. Yeah. So we train for a month, but after the month of training, they are then encouraged to have practical exercises under supervision. And that supervision can be under a clinical psychologist or a mental health nurse. And then once they go through that supervision and they pass that supervision, they are then allowed to see clients on their own. But again, it varies depending on where we’re training. I mean, we recently trained folks in in London, and that training only took seven days because the people we were training already had some experience of counselling. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:56  This in my mind, is similar to an emergence we’re seeing in the West, at least a little bit more of which is peer support.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:05  The purest model of it is the one that I sort of came of age in, which was 12 step programs. I’m a recovering heroin addict. And so, you know, that’s obviously all peer support. There’s no training. There’s no there’s just nothing. It’s just you just all end up in a room and there’s a few guidelines and hopefully it all goes well. I also think, though, that there’s more of a peer support movement emerging where people are trained a little bit to provide a little bit more support than they might know how to do natively. Yeah. Now, in a lot of those, what ends up being part of the binding connection is that for me, if I’m going to a 12 step meeting and I’m talking about addiction, I’m talking about addiction with other addicts. If somebody is giving peer support for bipolar as an example, they share that in common. Is there any attempt to put certain people with certain grandmothers based on life experience?

Dixon Chibanda 00:22:59  Oh yeah, we have that. You know, over time, what we’ve done is the grandmas amongst themselves have become experts of very specific issues.

Dixon Chibanda 00:23:10  You will have grandmas who just focus on, clients who come to the bench with intimate partner violence issues. Got it. You have grandmas who focus on people who are living with HIV because the grandma herself is living with HIV. So yes, we do that. Exactly. You know, but ultimately, regardless of that peer to peer component, human beings will connect. If there’s genuine express empathy, which is anchored in deep storytelling.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:01  I think that when you match people in shared experience, that’s like a potential extra. But to your point, I mean, we’ve seen this in our programs. We do connection around certain values or wanting to improve or be different can happen amongst very disparate people given the right environment. One of the things I thought was very interesting was you say in the book that most people coming to the bench don’t want treatment for depression. They want treatment for their problems with money and people. I think in the Western world we tend to suddenly go, oh, you’re feeling that way. You have depression.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:36  So we’re going to treat the depression. And it seems like there was a very clear orientation from the beginning that very often the reason they feel lousy is they have legitimate life problems, and any attempt to help them needs to be rooted in helping them address the actual problems.

Dixon Chibanda 00:24:57  That is so true. You know, and interestingly, when I first started Friendship Bench and I write about this in the book, you know, I wanted to focus on the symptoms, you know, like, hey, because the grandmas were taught how to use screening tools, you know, like the PHQ nine, which is used globally. And and I was emphasizing focusing on those symptoms. And it was the grandma who were like, you know, those symptoms actually happen as a result of these social determinants of health, like, you know, intimate partner violence, poverty, you know, living with HIV. And so that becomes the focus. And when you address the problem, as you rightly say, the symptoms get better so you don’t have to worry about the symptoms.

Dixon Chibanda 00:25:44  Focus on the issues that people bring to the bench, you know, and that is what we really focus on. Although, you know, we can, for instance, establish that a person might be going through a social issue. And as a result of that, they have major depression, according to DSM five. We certainly do that. But we also understand that that depression is largely fueled by those social circumstances that need to be addressed.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:14  Right. Because you have a process in which a grandmother very early in the process can say, hey, this person needs more care than we’re going to be able to provide here, or we need to refer them on if there’s more serious psychiatric disorder. And I think you’re not saying that there’s not a place for westernized approaches to medicine where we use certain medicines, you know, antidepressants or other things to treat people. It’s just that I think we’ve gotten things in a lot of cases backwards here in that I think the way most people are treated for depression or anxiety today is they go to their primary care doctor usually and say, oh, I’m depressed and they get an antidepressant or a lot of primary care doctors these days hand you some version of that screening question you’re talking about.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:04  You fill it out and you may leave with a prescription. And there are some ways in which I think that this filtering down to primary care physicians has been a value for our society. But there are plenty of ways in which I think it is problematic. And I think the problematic thing is, to your point, it’s worth trying to address the global situation first, like in someone’s life. It’s the same sort of thing, like trying to ferret out whether what somebody is dealing with is natural grief over something. And when does it turn into depression? And, you know, tweezing these things apart is not simple.

Dixon Chibanda 00:27:42  Yeah, it definitely is not simple. And this is why at friendship bench we use algorithms. We use these screening tools. For instance, a common phrase that we use is red flag to identify clients who might be severely depressed or suicidal. You know, when clients present with such severe symptoms, they are stepped up, you know, to see a grandma who is more experienced. And normally what would happen is that, for instance, I’ll give you a classical example.

Dixon Chibanda 00:28:13  Someone comes to the friendship bench in their suicidal. They respond yes to the question on suicidal thoughts, which is question 11 on our screening tool. If a grandma who is engaging with that client is not comfortable with dealing with suicidality. She will refer to the next level, you know, to a grandma who actually focuses on that, and that grandma will use a more precise screening tool to establish whether those suicidal thoughts are really serious or not. Very basic questions. You know, have you thought of when you would do it? How would you do it? The usual stuff that any, any therapist will kind of ask. But in all of that they still the person’s story. Yeah. And what we find at Friendship Bench is that, you know, over 80% of the people presenting with suicidal ideation crying out for help. And when you give them that space to genuinely share their story, healing begins. We discourage our grandmas from immediately referring unless somebody is a genuine red flag. Yeah. And you know the other thing about friendship, which I have to just mention, Eric, if you don’t mind, is that everything that we do at Friendship Bench is rooted in rigorous research.

Dixon Chibanda 00:29:38  We have over 100 peer reviewed scientific publications, including clinical trials, which show that these grandmas are effective therapists. So it’s not just something that, you know, we just wake up and think about like that. We actually test all these things through these rigorous studies, which are published in peer reviewed journals, scientific journals.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:01  Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting part because that’s not how it started. Obviously, it started as an experiment, right. Like you’re like, okay, let’s go do this. But since it’s gone on and been successful enough in a I test sort of way, like looking at it like, wow, this seems to really be working. You were then able to say, all right, now let’s apply academic methods of research to this to see. Is it really? And the answer seems pretty convincingly that indeed it is. I wanted to ask you about there’s three steps that you address in the book, and I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce these words because I butcher English words on a regular basis.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:41  But the three steps are opening the mind, uplifting and strengthening. And I was wondering if you could speak the I assume there’s Zimbabwean words for them, and then tell us about what each of those are.

Dixon Chibanda 00:30:53  Yeah. So the first level training is called opening the mind in the local language that is covered up for. And essentially these terms or the pillars of the friendship bench are really terms that the grandmas, you know, conceived. And all I did was put them together. But these were ideas based on, you know, the wisdom and knowledge that these grandmas have that have defined the program. So opening the mind or As we call it in Shona, literally means creating space for people to feel comfortable to share their stories. You know, for people to feel comfortable with being vulnerable. And that is really the first level. And that is achieved by using some of the, you know, earlier terms I shared, like expressed empathy. You know, I’m now using the English equivalent, you know, expressed empathy, which is really making people feel respected and understood.

Dixon Chibanda 00:31:54  Using eye contact. Using nonverbal communication. Using silence as a tool. All of that is embedded in that first level training, because we strongly believe that friendship banks, that when you make people feel comfortable in that first level where their mind is opened, they then begin to see things that they were not able to see prior to that, you know. And that’s when healing begins. You know, in a lot of therapies out there, Eric, we measure success on the basis of reduction of symptoms, which is, you know, the most sort of common thing when you’re thinking of, you know, clinical psychiatry or psychology based on DSM five or the ICD ten at Friendship bench, you know, we measure success based on hope. Yes, we do have all these other screening tools. But for us, success is when we instill hope in a person. And oftentimes when you instill hope, you haven’t necessarily removed all the symptoms of the depression. But that hope makes a person feel that they can carry on.

Dixon Chibanda 00:33:06  They still have a chance, you know? And so we focus very much on on that element. And that is built in that level one with opening the mind. And the level two is, you know, the uplifting level. And that is where we begin to go into some of the more structured components of how to use screening tools to identify people who are genuinely suicidal or who are psychotic and need to be referred to a psychiatrist, or people who have severe depression and may benefit not only from the talk therapy, but also from an antidepressant, you know. And then level three is now the structured therapy around problem solving behavior activation and activity scheduling. So this is how the training actually runs. And if you ask me, based on the years of working with the grandmas, I still think that first level training of opening the mind is the most important, because that really sort of creates that space for healing.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:12  One of the things that you talk about is that the grandmothers described this to you, which was that clients get overwhelmed by multiple problems.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:21  And so part of what they do is help clients focus on one problem at a time. Say more about that.

Dixon Chibanda 00:34:28  Yeah. You know, typically people who come to the friendship bench have numerous challenges. So, for instance, I can give you an example. And this is a real life example. You know, a woman comes to the friendship and she’s feeling suicidal because she’s unemployed. She’s HIV positive, she’s in an abusive relationship. She has no money to send her child to school. And so she’s just completely overwhelmed with all of these challenges. And she comes to the bench. And what typically happens is she opens up to the grandma. She shares. She talks about all of these things, all the issues that are affecting her in her life. And what we’ve found over the years is, is oftentimes when people have numerous challenges, they struggle. They actually struggle to figure out which of those problems to start working on, you know, and that is something that the grandmas are sort of work with a client on.

Dixon Chibanda 00:35:24  And we use a term called the ping pong to describe the interaction between the grandma and the client, because often when the grandma summarizes which is part of the problem solving, the grandma will summarize this story. And again, that summary of the story is an indication of being anchored in the present. You know, so we test the grandmas in terms of their ability to reflect back to the client what they’ve heard. And that is so powerful because it makes a person realize that someone is listening to me, you know? Anyway, so so when the grandmas reflect the story, the grandma will then say, so which one of these issues would you like to start working on? Your average client will say, I don’t know. You decide. You tell me which one I should start working on. And we always train our grandmothers never to select the problem. The grandma simply throws it back to the client. You know, by saying something like, you know, I wouldn’t possibly be able to stand in your shoes.

Dixon Chibanda 00:36:26  I’m here to help you select one problem. And so you have this exchange, which can take 30 or 40 minutes until a client suddenly decides, you know, I want to focus on making sure that my child goes to school. And then the grandma will say, all right, if that’s what you want to focus on, let’s work on that. And and the interesting thing, Eric, is that people that come to the bench will select problems to focus on, which I as a clinician, as a psychiatrist, may think this doesn’t make sense. Like for instance, if someone is HIV positive, my instinctive focus should be, hey, we need to put you on medication for HIV, you know? So in this particular case, this woman is HIV positive, but she is interested in focusing on getting her child to school. And when you dig deeper into the story, you find that if she gets her child to go to school, she will then have time to go to the primary health care facility and address the next problem.

Dixon Chibanda 00:37:34  You know, and so we never actually assume that what we think is the biggest problem is what we should tell the client to focus on, because clients will always come up with something which is completely out of the box in terms of what they think is a priority. And so that’s the level two. And then after that, when a problem is selected, they will then brainstorm together for solutions. And we train the grandmas on how to use what we call the smart action plan, which essentially stands for, you know, coming up with something that’s specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely, you know. And so the grandmas have to go through all of that because, you know, when you come up with a solution, the more it addresses the smart sort of elements, the more likely it’s going to work, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So it’s not in a nutshell. You know, those are some of the components that we kind of focus on. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:28  I’m a big believer in that a lot of the value that we can offer to people is helping them create a plan that will work. I often think of it in this way. You’ve probably heard of, like the trans theoretical model of change, the stages of change model, right? And it posits that there are at least three steps before the action step. Right. There’s a pre contemplation. There’s a contemplation. There’s a planning. But all of us immediately try and jump right into the action step.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:59  Which usually doesn’t end well because there’s no good coherent structural plan. And so, you know, having the grandmothers deliver that is really valuable. I want to talk for a minute about how the grandmothers helped heal you?

Dixon Chibanda 00:39:16  Yes. You know, I shared earlier on about the loss of Erica, my patient who took her own life by suicide. And I hadn’t actually shared Erica’s story with anyone. I kept it inside me because I was struggling with the guilt. You know, in the feelings of imposter syndrome.

Dixon Chibanda 00:39:36  Even after I started working with the grandmas, you know, but, you know, over the first year or two of working with the first 14 grandmothers and watching them interacting with clients, I began to realize that I needed to open up about my own pain, about my own story. And it wasn’t planned at all. It actually happened one morning when we were having a debriefing session, and I write about it in the book. I only started talking about my pain, the loss of Erica. And it was the response from the grandmothers. That really kind of made me realize how powerful what they were doing was, because after I shared my story and I cried in front of the grandmothers, you know, what they did was they broke down into a song. You know, they started to sing this song, this soothing, you know, Shona song. Each one of those 14 grandmothers just knowing where to place her voice. And they sang that song for me, which was almost like ten, 15 minutes.

Dixon Chibanda 00:40:44  And after that they prayed for me. That is all they did, Eric. They sang and prayed for me while I was in the middle of them, in a in a sort of circle. And, and, you know, I just broke down. But when it was all over, I felt this sense of immense relief. And after that, I was able to share Erica’s story And, you know, I subsequently went on to talk about Erica at Ted in New Orleans. And I think that was only made possible because the grandmothers had taught me about, you know, the power of being comfortable with being vulnerable in situations like that. So, yeah, that was really a powerful moment for me.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:45  We’re going to try something here that I don’t know if it’s going to work, but we’re going to try it. It occurs to me that the best way to try this would actually be to have the grandmother here and Karen here. And we have neither of them. But what I’d like to do is I’d like to read a listener question that we got.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:03  We’ve recently started taking in some listener questions, and I’m trying to get them answered in various shows. Now, again, I think this is only going to be so useful because there can’t be the back and forth that we might want. But I’m going to read the question, and I just wonder if you could sort of give us a sense of how a grandmother might approach this. Sure, sure. Okay. This comes from Karen. And Karen says, about five years ago, I divorced from my ex of 40 years, and I felt liberated and tried loads of new things. However, recently I met and fell in love with a married man. It was intense for both of us, but it ended when he was caught between two lives. He had other issues and he took an overdose. He survived, but the next day he decided to return to his family and immediately cut off all communication with me. Since then, I have been completely stuck. I’ve tried to go back to my life and put energy into it, trying to get out and about, but it’s not working.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:01  I feel completely without energy and self-belief and I’ve withdrawn from work. I’ve tried so many things. I’ve also been doing some therapy and I’m reading a lot, but I’m still really stuck. So any suggestions would be extremely helpful.

Dixon Chibanda 00:43:14  If a grandma was listening to this story. The response? I didn’t mention this, but this is something we train all our grandmothers to. Always start off by saying, would you like to share your story? So let’s say this story has been shared. Yeah. As a grandma, I would want Karen to tell me more. You know, I would say, Karen, I would like you to share more. start from wherever you want to start. But I would like to know a little bit more so I can be in a better position to help you. So I would then listen to Karen. And by listening to Karen, you can see where the emphasis is. She might subconsciously not know where the emphasis should be. But as we tell our stories, The areas that are really hurting us the most tend to emerge.

Dixon Chibanda 00:44:10  You tend to see these patterns in the story as it’s coming out, and we trained the grandmothers in what we call the rule of three. What are the three most salient features of this story that are coming out? And so those three most salient features are in this case, I wouldn’t know what they would be. The grandma would at some point then say, if I heard you correctly, you are struggling to come to terms with this breakup. It’s affecting your sleep, it’s affecting the way you are. You’re interacting and relating with other people in your life. Would you like to share more and you see where it goes? So it’s it’s really, Eric, about tapping into a story which has not yet been told, but it’s there inside her because what she’s shared is very much the surface. There’s a deeper element in in those different components of a story that need to come out. And as it comes out, so does the healing element. So I would encourage Karen to share more. You know, that’s what I would do.

Dixon Chibanda 00:45:16  The other thing is that grandmas don’t tell you what to do. Friendship is not about telling you what to do, but it’s about unpacking what’s happening and you realizing on your own. As you unpack, you know, you get, you hit that moment and you’re like, oh my goodness, this is what it is. You know, that’s what normally happens. And the other thing as well, before I forget, you know, apart from doing all of that, a grandma would also intuitively ask the questions that are part of our screening tools. Yeah. You know, to establish whether Karen is actually struggling with major depression. Yep. Or she’s, you know, struggling to come to terms with the loss, but she’s not clinically depressed. So that’s also important.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:02  Yeah, because there’s elements in this story that could point towards that potentially, if you’ve sort of grieved the loss, but you’re really still stuck with no energy, you know, no self-belief. I’m not saying that Karen is depressed. I am certainly I’m not even grandmother level trained.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:20  So I will stay far away from the DSM five. I can say from my own experience, however, that describes often for me what depression has looked like. I’ve dealt with the initial thing, but something about that shock sent my, in my case, my depression prone system into a spiral. There is another term that comes out of your languages Shona.

Dixon Chibanda 00:46:45  Shona. Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:47  I’m not going to attempt to say this either, because I’m glad I didn’t try before because I was so far off it might have been embarrassing. What is thinking too much in Shona?

Dixon Chibanda 00:46:57  Thinking too much in Shona is.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:00  I would have been closer on that one. Talk to me about why that was part of what the grandmothers identified, and why that was a key part of the therapy.

Dixon Chibanda 00:47:10  So one of the things that we’ve done on Friendship Bench, you know, as we expanded, you know, we validated screening tools. We came up with the most appropriate terms and the whole process of coming up with the term involved, not only discussing with the grandmothers, but with clients as well, you know, to come up with a common terms that resonated with both grandmothers and clients.

Dixon Chibanda 00:47:37  And we found that fungi, very often when it was serious, severe, I had the elements or symptoms of your DSM five criteria for depression. And so that’s why we shifted to the term fungi, which resonated with with the community, but then our CSR has different levels. This CSR, which is really like your DSM five major depression, which needs attention more than just what the grandmothers can give, you know, maybe medication and stuff like that. But the mild moderate versions of depression could then be handled. So this really is a reflection of how people identify the emotional struggles, which I guess we could say are linked to the DSM five diagnosis of depression and anxiety as well. You know, together with ICD ten.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:34  Yeah. Back to your point about the mental health bench versus the friendship bench. Terms that resonate with our lived experience are always so helpful. You know, I think the Western term that we might use for that, that I know a lot of people listening to this show and people I’ve worked with have identified with is the term rumination, right? It’s you just going around and around the same thoughts again and again.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:58  It’s not like you’re thinking too much in novel and creative ways. It’s just you’re thinking about the exact same thing again and again and again and again.

Dixon Chibanda 00:49:07  That’s exactly what it is.

Dixon Chibanda 00:49:09  You know, and we always place a time frame to it as well. You know, just like in DSM five, if you had these symptoms for more than two weeks, you know, so which is like for a day or two, it cannot meet diagnostic criteria of DSM five or ICD ten, you know. So duration is also important.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:27  So it sounds like the initial friendship bench lasts. Did you say six weeks? Yeah. And then you encourage people to go into sort of an ongoing support type group.

Dixon Chibanda 00:49:39  Yeah. So what we do is after the experience on the bench, folks are encouraged to join support groups. So in essence, you know, it’s a little bit like you have people who’ve had the same experience on the bench. They’ve gone through those three levels of opening the mind, uplifting and strengthening.

Dixon Chibanda 00:50:00  They are then brought together in smaller groups. You know, often these are groups of 15, 20 maximum 30 people in a community, and they then use the same skills that they got from the bench to collectively address larger issues that they may be facing. But here’s the beauty of what happens in these circles or support groups. Every member of the circle, it’s a little bit like AA, actually. Every member in the circle has an opportunity to share how they’re doing and what they’re struggling with and what they think is a priority issue for them. And so each group has what we call a talking piece. So only the person who has the talking piece can speak. And so after everybody has shared, what then happens in these groups is they collectively decide on which problem or problems they want to focus on. It can be a problem that a single person is facing. Or it can be a problem that several people are facing and they collectively bring our resources together. They are with them together. And sometimes the problem could be something that is financial and they will.

Dixon Chibanda 00:51:16  They all get together to help each other. So these support groups have been running for more than ten years. You know, some of them, you know, and so it’s really a powerful way of sustaining the model. After a sessions on the bench.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:31  Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense to me because a question I was going to ask and then I remembered that you have these support groups was lots of people. If I use Western experience, go to a therapist six times and they still got a long way to go after the end of those sessions. And my experience is that true change happens a little bit by little bit. Right. That’s the way most change happens. And one of the things that stops a lot of change is that we get discouraged partway through, or we just sort of slide off paying attention to it. And and so for that reason, you know, support groups or communities of practice or different things like that are are real ways to, in essence, keep going, keep making improvement beyond just working with a therapist.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:23  And one of the things I’ve thought that I found in my own life is really interesting is I have had a fair amount of healing that has happened by talking to a trained therapist. I have probably no, not probably. I have definitely had more healing happen in group dynamics. There is something about that that a lot of us don’t want because we’re nervous about it. But my experience has been it’s incredibly powerful to have that group dynamic. It brings something else to the table that you don’t get when you’re just talking with one other person.

Dixon Chibanda 00:52:57  Oh, yeah. That is that is so, so true. Eric, what I think happens, that is what I’ve observed at Friendship Bench, is it helps to build that sense of community, that sense of belonging, which is so powerful when you have that sense of belonging. You then get hope. Yeah. You know, you have hope.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:17  I just want to read a sentence to you and let you reflect on it as a way of heading out of here.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:23  You say at the core, the model is anchored in the power of storytelling, which we’ve talked about to transform us from the inside out and the belief about empathetic presence. But this is what I love. It says it can create a ripple effect of healing, beauty and goodness. Say anything you would like in response to that as a way of wrapping up.

Dixon Chibanda 00:53:43  Well, in essence, that makes us comfortable with feeling vulnerable in the presence of other people. And that’s really sort of the foundation of healing.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:55  That’s beautiful. And there is no doubt that what you’ve done has created a ripple effect of healing, beauty and goodness and addressing a problem that our world really does have, which is lack of availability to getting help with our struggles. And so it’s a beautiful thing you’ve done, and I genuinely appreciate you joining us on the show.

Dixon Chibanda 00:54:15  Thank you for having me, Eric. Thank you very much.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:17  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend.

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Filed Under: Featured, Podcast Episode

Beyond Anxiety: How Curiosity Turns Fear Into Fuel with Martha Beck

May 20, 2025 Leave a Comment

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In this episode, Martha Beck explores how to move beyond anxiety and how curiosity turns fear into fuel. She dives into why anxiety can’t simply be silenced. It has to be replaced with things like creativity, curiosity, and a deep kindness towards ourselves.

Key Takeaways:

  • Discussion of anxiety versus fear and their psychological implications.
  • Exploration of societal factors contributing to increased anxiety levels.
  • Importance of living authentically and in alignment with one’s true self.
  • The role of creativity and curiosity in overcoming anxiety.
  • Neurological aspects of anxiety and the brain’s functions related to creativity.
  • The concept of breakdowns leading to breakthroughs in personal growth.
  • Practical techniques for managing anxiety through self-compassion and kindness.
  • The significance of sensory experiences in activating creativity and reducing anxiety.
  • The idea of a “creativity spiral” versus an “anxiety spiral” in personal development.
  • Reflection on the power of imagination and intention in shaping one’s reality and life purpose.

Dr. Martha Beck, PhD, is a New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her “one of the smartest women I know.” The founder of Wayfinder Life Coach Training, Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher. Her recent book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her latest book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose,
was an instant New York Times Best Seller.

Martha Beck:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Martha Beck, check out these other episodes:

How to Find Peace and Balance in Managing Anxiety with Sarah Wilson

Why Anxiety is Good For You with Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:01:02  Fear is instinctual. It’s like a cobra in a box of kittens. It grabs our attention and it won’t let go. But anxiety, that’s something else. It’s the ghost of fear haunting us long after the danger is passed or before it even occurs. In today’s conversation with Martha Beck, we explore why anxiety can’t simply be silenced. It has to be replaced. Replaced with creativity, curiosity, and a deep kindness towards ourselves. And when we do that, something important begins to happen. Life starts to feel like something we can actually live rather than just survive. I’ll take any opportunity to talk with Martha. I think she’s one of the most gifted and thoughtful teachers we have today. I’m Erik Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Martha. Welcome to the show.

Martha Beck 00:01:55  Oh, Erik, it is so good to be back. I love this podcast.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:59  Oh thank you. I love talking with you. It’s a pleasure to have you on and it’s nice to see you again. We’re going to be discussing at least part of the time, your latest book, which is called Beyond Anxiety curiosity, creativity and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. And I’m sure we’ll veer kind of all over the place, but that may anchor us.

Martha Beck 00:02:18  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:18  But before we get into that, we’ll start the way 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 the 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.

Martha Beck 00:02:57  It’s everything. I grew up in a very rigid religious system in Mormonism, and was told to follow the rules and only feed any impulse that had been given to me by the religion. And when that happens to you, a lot of people who leave Mormonism don’t go to any other religion because you break free from it so hard that you reject all belief systems.

Martha Beck 00:03:21  When I was around 1718, I went off to Harvard. I started getting different types of thinking, and then it just sort of blew up in my head, and I decided that the only thing I could do to build my life was to find what felt like the truth and what felt like joy, and that I would go toward that no matter what. And if something felt like fear or less joy and less freedom, I would not go there. As life went on, I made my choices based on that, and that’s sort of shaped everything. And I’m so grateful for that metaphor that so many people out there are hearing it now.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:56  Yeah, I think that’s a great way to segue into your book, because what you’re basically saying there is you tended to follow, if I use the subtitle of your book, The Things That Made You curious, the things that made you creative, the things that made you calmer and use those as a guidance versus following the things that made you fearful or anxious.

Martha Beck 00:04:22  I mean, it’s interesting because I’ve had a whole career helping people build their lives based on feeding the good wolf and following your better angels or whatever it is. But I also had very high anxiety and a lot of people that I’ve worked with and people that I’ve known as friends, very creative people, had tremendous amounts of anxiety, and I didn’t see that always as part of the Bad Wolf, because it’s so innocent to be afraid in a world where things go wrong and where we all know we’re the one animal that knows for sure we’re going to die. So I thought anxiety was just part of the human condition. And so I didn’t steer away from it. The way I have learned to. It wasn’t until I started living by this code of absolute integrity. And I wrote a book called The Way of Integrity, because I came to find that if I only did things that felt aligned with all the parts of my being body, heart, mind, soul. If I just always walk the line of truth there, then I wouldn’t feel any psychological pain, which has been true for me.

Martha Beck 00:05:26  But people came up to me after I wrote that book and said, I’m living in total integrity, but I’m afraid all the time. And I thought, okay, so that’s just the human condition. And then I thought, no, no, that’s not the way it works. And so I went and I researched anxiety, and I dug into it and into the brain science and into the social science of it. And what I found is that we live in a society that really encourages high anxiety. And the way we learn and the way we organize our lives is very conducive to high anxiety, but it actually isn’t normal. What’s normal is something that’s not around most of us anymore. That is. Sorry. I’m going on and on. But if you and I had been born 300 years ago, we would have woken up surrounded by nature, by animals, hearing the trees, water, other people’s voices. We would have spent the day and a group of people we mostly knew doing things with our hands, as well as our minds that were deeply meaningful to us.

Martha Beck 00:06:24  And that type of scenario is what we evolved to live in. And that’s what puts the nervous system in a state of regulation. And nowadays we live in a profoundly abnormal situation for the animals of our bodies, and we’re anxious because we’re in cages all the time. And some of those cages are physical and some of them are psychological. And in this book, in the research for it, I tried to find my way out of that. And so two thirds of the book are about what happens after you get away from that. And it’s actually really fun. That’s where the curiosity, creativity and finding your life’s purpose come in. There there is my dissertation. Everybody can go to bed now.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:08  Well, I think that, yes, I think we are probably living in a deeply anxiety producing culture. We are living in ways that don’t allow us to soothe ourselves. And we can go back, though, to say the Buddha. And he’s writing about something similar a little bit. Right? He’s going back and he’s saying like, hey, these things that you manufacture in your mind cause you to suffer more than is necessary.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:40  And so I think that it’s just gotten worse. Right? I think that the world that we may have lived in when we were closer to nature had more, maybe natural balms in it than today’s world does. Yeah, it keeps getting amplified. There’s something that you talk about in the book that I’d love to really start with, which is that you talk about fear, which is a natural response. You make examples in the book. I love your Kittens and Cobra’s example. It’s like if you open up a box and there are eight kittens in one cobra, what are you going to pay attention to? Right. The cobra I just think that’s so. It made me laugh when I heard that. But if there was a cobra in this room, I would naturally be fearful. And that is natural. Yeah, but you describe anxiety more as like being haunted. Right. I love that phrase. Tell me what you mean by that.

Martha Beck 00:08:29  Well, fear is like being shot from a cannon. I interviewed a lot of people who’d been through life threatening situations, and they experienced fear in those situations, the way animals probably do.

Martha Beck 00:08:41  And that was an extremely intense bolt of alertness and energy that allowed them to react to the emergency, whether it was a car accident or being mugged or whatever it was. And then the feeling went away. The hormones dropped. It was gone. Once they were safe. Unless they had lingering trauma. And this is where humans can do things in our brains that are not good for us, that most other animals cannot. And that is that the part of the brain that tells stories and thinks in logic and abstraction and time starts to tell a story about how there is danger out there waiting to get us. It’s not in the room anymore, but it could be back any second. And what if this happened? And what if that happened? And just today, looking at my Instagram feed, it was like a thousand terrifying stories. Legitimately terrifying. Yeah. And I was saying, when I got on with you, if I’d known this would be happening when I wrote the book, I may have shaped it slightly differently.

Martha Beck 00:09:38  But you were reminding me that it’s still true. I’m in a completely comfortable room, well fed and housed and healthy. There is nothing for me to be afraid of right now. So looking at my Instagram feed and painting a picture with my mind of a world that is very dangerous, pure anxiety, I just let myself fall into the trap of doing that again. But at least now I know how to get out.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:04  Yeah. So let’s talk about separating these two things, because, yes, you and I were sort of extrapolating on this before we started, which is that for certain people today, let’s say you are an immigrant in the United States right now. It’s a time that I think it’s reasonable to have fear.

Martha Beck 00:10:23  Yes, absolutely. And and well, here’s the thing. That bolt of fear that fills the body with cortisol and adrenaline and everything, that’s only for things that are physically here and now and so that you can fight, flee or do whatever. Then there is alertness and awareness.

Martha Beck 00:10:43  So I said, other animals don’t have anxiety because, you know, if your dog or cat is in a safe room, they relax. They saved their energy. I’ve watched an antelope get charged by a lion and it took off running really fast in. The lion gave up and just stood there and panted, and the antelope stopped immediately and went back to grazing like you don’t waste any energy on that adrenaline response unless you absolutely have to. However, if you are in the African wilderness where I saw that, you’d better be very aware. Yes, if you’re not aware and alert, then danger will come upon you and you might not have time to get away. Once I was with some friends and we were relaxing on this riverbank in Africa, and I put my head down on the sand because I wanted to see if I could hear the footsteps of elephants. And I did, and I was like, you guys, there are elephants. And my friends were like, Marty, there are elephants, get in the damn jeep! And I was like, but I can hear their footsteps.

Martha Beck 00:11:46  That was stupid. That was just plain stupid. I wasn’t afraid when I ran over and got in the Jeep, but I was alert and I was aware and I had a plan. That Jeep was parked there for a reason. We didn’t go far from it for a reason. Like we knew the boundaries in the social science sociology. They say that those who are not prepared to remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I think that’s George Santayana. If we don’t keep our wits about us now, danger could very well come upon us quickly. And yes, it is unfair and horrible that that risk is distributed unequally. Yep. Yeah, it’s a scary time, and it’s a time to not get anxious because if you’re anxious, you fritter away the energy that you could have being alert, prepared, engaging with your life and creatively trying to figure out what to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:44  Yes. And I think what you just said there is kind of the key to the game, because I always go back to and I reference it a lot on this show because it’s one of the most foundational teachings I think, that I know of, and it emanates out of the Serenity Prayer.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:01  Right? The courage to change the things you can, the acceptance. But there’s a part of it where Stephen Covey took it for me a step further, and he talked about the circle of influence and the circle of concern. And the thing about it that I come back to again and again with all these situations was his point was, if you spend all of your time out in your circle of concern, worried, frightened, anxious, afraid, your circle of influence shrinks. But the more time that you put in your circle of influence, the more it grows. And I think the corollary of that is what you’re talking about, which is this idea that being anxious doesn’t prepare us better to deal with the world. It exhausts us? Yes. It disheartened us. It discourages us. And so finding a way to work with it skillfully actually makes us safer.

Martha Beck 00:13:59  Yes, much.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:00  But the thing about anxiety, and you alluded to this in the beginning where you were like, oh, I think it’s not this thing to move away from, is it always convinces us that it’s right.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:09  Yes. Well, yes, I know anxiety is bad and I shouldn’t be anxious, except I really have a reason to be this time. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:18  And it’s not that you don’t. It’s just that it’s a profoundly not useful response.

Martha Beck 00:14:23  And it’s based on such a weird factor of the human brain. And there’s a neuroscientist named Ian Gilchrist who writes brilliantly about this. The left hemisphere of the brain is the one where most of the language and almost all of the anxiety are located. My friend Jill Bolte Taylor, who was a neuro anatomist who had a stroke, a left hemisphere stroke. She said that working only with her right hemisphere when she didn’t have a left hemisphere, effectively, there was no anxiety whatsoever. No time, no fear, just presence. So what Ian Gilchrist and a lot of other neurologists have written about is the part of the brain, the left hemisphere, that generates most or all of our anxiety. It has a characteristic called hemi spatial neglect, which is so weird and I don’t really know the reason for it.

Martha Beck 00:15:14  But people who have lost the right side of the brain, so they’re only working with their left side of the brain. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. So someone only having a left hemisphere not only only works with their right and left leg, they actually don’t believe their left arm and leg belong to them or that they even exist. They don’t shave the left sides of their faces. They don’t look at people who are on their left. It’s this weird thing the left hemisphere has of believing that it is the only thing in existence, and that it is absolutely right and its stories are the only truth. So if you go out online, you can see a lot of left hemispheres screaming at each other. I know the truth and your perspective does not matter. It’s not real. And that was a really amazing thing for me to study, because it describes so much of what I see going on as people anxiously shout at each other. But it’s a very bizarre kind of mental illness, really.

Martha Beck 00:16:14  And in, Gilchrist says, we act like people who have had a right hemisphere stroke. So it’s very weird.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:20  We did a fascinating episode. It’s been several years ago, but we had Jill Bolte Taylor on. We also had a friend of mine. He was originally like a coaching client. And it just over the years I’ve gotten to know him, who did indeed have a right brain injury.

Martha Beck 00:16:36  Really.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:36  And still has a right brain injury. And his recovery has been all about how does he bring that right brain online? Wow. You know, so he’s kind of the opposite of Jill, right? Yeah. He was Jill’s opposite. And I love the way when you talk about this, you do the standard disclaimer that I think is worth doing real quick, which is so that all the neuroscientists can settle down, which is that look, of course, we are all using all parts of our brain. Brains connect. You know, there’s there’s networks. It’s not as simple as saying this part of the brain does that.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:08  Right. And, you know, the split brain experiments and all these different things show us there are very different ways. And I think that some people, I think, get all into like, it’s all should be all the right brains and no.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:21  Whole brain. The problem is that we are oriented in one direction. Yeah, 98% of our time. It’s sort of like when we talk about being present and people are like, what are you supposed to be present all the time? And I’m like, no, try it. Like, let’s try and get the ratio to like 10%. Like, you know, like if I could get to 10% present, I would take it, you know, like, I just need to move in that direction. And I think it’s the same thing. Like we want to move in the direction of wholeness. And I wanted to talk about this because you recently talked about this very eloquently, and it’s going to take me a second, but, well, actually, I’m going to let you do it because you were talking about the idea of break down and a break through, and then you went to talk about the double slit experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:07  So kind of walk me through this because I think this is really important.

Martha Beck 00:18:10  I have no memory of what you’re talking about or what I was smoking, but I’m going to follow that lead and you just tell me where I’m off.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:17  Okay? All right. I’ll fill in the gaps.

Martha Beck 00:18:18  All right. So I think that if you go long enough in a state of anxiety, which is a sort of false fear, you do things. You create things in your psychological life and also around you in relationships and the things you build in the world, whatever you make things that are inherently flawed because they are based on a limited version of reality. So people who go out and sort of build themselves a giant pyramid of power without any meaning in it, they’re creating something out of anxiety that is destined to collapse. And so they will have breakdowns at some point. And I, I had that when I was at Harvard and I had a child with down syndrome, and it broke down my whole like concept of intellectual meritocracy and everything.

Martha Beck 00:19:04  Anyway, you’re going to you’re going to break down if you feed that wolf forever. So what happens then though, is what the left hemisphere sees as fragmentation. And letting go is actually gives space and permission for the meaning systems and the perceptions that we see more with our right hemispheres to come back into consciousness very fully. And if we can contextualize both together, we’ll be living in a really interesting paradox. So when Jill had her stroke, her left brain went on and off for a while, and she was in the shower for part of that, thinking that it would help this horrible headache she had. And she told me that when her left brain was active, she saw her hand against the tiles, and when her left brain went off duty, so to speak, what she saw was not hand and tiles, but two intermingling fields of energy. And both perceptions are accurate. So the double slit experiment pertains to this in that way back in, in like 1923. So it’s been more than 100 years ago, someone designed this experiment where if they shot little photons through a screen that had two slits in it, it would behave like like water.

Martha Beck 00:20:21  If you threw two buckets of water through two slits, they would make a certain pattern where the water would disperse differently, but then come back together after it went through the slits. Then when they tried to observe this process, what happened was completely different. The photons went through the two slits and created two perfectly vertical straight lines, as if you’d shot a number of bullets through a screen. So one interpretation of this, and has been the paradox of of matter for as long as I’ve been alive, is somehow when consciousness is not observing or we’re not measuring what is happening to particles, they’re just waves of energy. What Jill saw with only the right side of her brain, when we’re observing them and controlling them, the probabilities of that energy cloud collapse into a point. And it looks like solid matter. It behaves like solid matter. And we are living in both realities all the time. And I think when you get back to a balanced brain, what you’re talking about, even 10%, if you get back into nature and you integrate, your right brain starts to wake up the way it does when mine does.

Martha Beck 00:21:32  When I go into nature, you begin to see a vast array of possibilities. In reality, instead of the narrow, tight, circumscribed, nasty little lives that our culture prescribes for us.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:08  In my Zen training, we talk about this in the sense of the relative and the absolute. The relative is a good example would be think of like my hand, my hand. I could just describe it as my hand and it is 100% my hand. And it does things at hands do. And luckily it works well. And it’s all that. That’s the absolute view. It’s the hand. It’s a whole thing. There’s another view that is 100% true at the same time, which is that these are all separate fingers. Yes. And these fingers are not the same as each other. This finger is different from that finger. That’s different from that finger. And so I think what the physics pointed to, what the spiritual traditions have pointed to, is that there are indeed these two views of the world. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:51  One is that everything is one unitary whole thing. And the other is that there’s all this division and separation and fear. And at least what Zen teaches is that the fully realized view is that you can see both at the same time. Yeah. Now, most of us are not fully realized, but what I think we can do, and I’m going to tie this back to breakthrough and break down in a second, is I do think that even if we’re not fully realized enough to see that all at the same time, we can learn to switch back and forth. Yeah, we can go. And we’re looking at it only this way. There’s another way. Let me look over that way. Right. And we can do that. And I think that as we look at the world today or honestly, our lives, at any point we can see all the things that are kind of wrong, the breakdowns that are going to happen, all of that. And we can see that there’s a breakthrough that’s possible and that neither of those things is right or wrong.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:49  To the other. It’s the holding both, or at least, as I said, being able to switch back and forth, at least try to switch back and forth.

Martha Beck 00:23:57  I think you can get to the point where you hold both things at once. I mean, I think that’s where we are, where we’re in flow, that famous psychological condition. It’s a state of bliss. It’s very difficult to sustain, but it’s also fun. Could I use that word? Sure. I started having the experience in meditation. I don’t even know if I should be talking about this, but when I was meditating a lot in the forest, it was quite common. Like every day everything would pixelate and turn into these showers of light and animals would come up to me. And it was very it was very woowoo. And which is why I don’t talk about it much. but hour after hour after hour I would sit in it and try. I knew that the brain is plastic and can be rewired, and I knew that my culture had wired my brain to believe in a very boring existence.

Martha Beck 00:24:47  Life is a bitch and then you die. Like, why not get off now? But I knew that my brain was going outside my culture and even outside its ordinary view of material reality. And I remember going to a meeting with my book agent and an editor during that time, and I was in this Manhattan office looking down at the city, and they were talking about, I said, I just don’t want to kill more trees, man. I don’t think, like, if I’m going to write a book, it has to be worth the trees. And then I actually said something. I don’t know what was being said, but I blurted without knowing I was going to say it. Oh, oh, you guys still think that’s real? And I pointed out at New York City and what I meant was just the buildings. Of course it’s real. But there was a blaze of energy, of the life energy, of consciousness, of millions of humans. And I was like drunk on it. It was so huge.

Martha Beck 00:25:45  I kind of like living that way. And that’s why I had to go back and write Beyond Anxiety. Because after all that meditation, when I’d got to that place, there was no anxiety anymore. I don’t know what you plan to talk about in this podcast, but I’m enjoying.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:59  We’re good. Although you’ve just now I just turned my book into the publisher about a month ago, and now I’m like, is it worth the trees? You’ve set a new bar that I have to clear here.

Martha Beck 00:26:10  Oh, I’m.

Speaker 5 00:26:10  Sure yours is going to be worth the trees, no.

Martha Beck 00:26:13  Question. Yeah, but I think things are breaking down in large ways. You know, you look at climates, ecosystems, and then you look at the human systems all over the world, and you look at our local political systems and, and even things like supply chains and stuff. And the fear is that they will break down. And I think that that’s a very legitimate fear. In fact, I think it’s a near certainty at this point.

Martha Beck 00:26:37  I think we are out in the wilderness where we need to be alert. And I was trying to write about this, Eric, and I was I was reading all these books on economics, and they weren’t tracking because there was no economic policy that matches what we’re seeing today. And I was like, I don’t want to read this. And then something inside me said, read about fungus. And I was.

Speaker 5 00:27:00  Like.

Martha Beck 00:27:01  Whoa. And I started reading about the mycelial networks that exist under every forest ecosystem. They’re made of fungi and roots and mosses and algae. And they are constantly conveying chemistry to each other. Coordination, communication, water. And the whole forest knows itself through this mycelial network. And I believe that there is something similar coming up. It’s like a city has been shattered and through the stones of the fallen buildings, a forest is rising that is made of a new way of living and allows us to be a new kind of human. And I think that’s pretty cool.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:45  Yes, I think there is both those things.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:48  Like you said, there is breakdown and it’s the sort of old back, the cliche of the, you know, Chinese symbol of crisis and opportunity.

Martha Beck 00:27:55  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:56  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this. And I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one uEFI eBook and take the first step towards getting back on track. So let’s redirect here a little bit to specific ways of working with anxiety for people who have anxiety, because it’s a topic that always does well on the podcast, right? So let’s start with this phrase here, which you say anxiety can’t just be ended.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:01  It must be replaced. Yeah. What does that mean?

Martha Beck 00:29:04  That was the big.

Speaker 5 00:29:05  Like.

Martha Beck 00:29:06  Smashing gong moment for me doing the research, because I was trying to learn a little about the neurobiology of anxiety and how it works. So I was looking at the left hemisphere and how the very ancient structures sound, the alert, and then the storytelling structures that are more recently evolved. Tell a story about it that feeds back into the more primitive structures. Okay. So there’s this anxiety spiral. But it started ringing a bell in my mind because a few years earlier I had done a course on creativity and I had studied the neurobiology of creativity, and I realized that the sort of spiral I was seeing on the left hemisphere when we’re anxious, is what’s happening in the right hemisphere when we’re creative. And I knew from a huge amount of research that when we get anxious, it flatlines our creativity. And I thought, where’s the research that says when we’re creative, it flatlines anxiety and there was none. But I started to think these two things may toggle that when our anxiety is up, our creativity is down and vice versa.

Martha Beck 00:30:09  This was during the pandemic, and I did experiments on myself to see if I could change my anxiety levels by turning on my creativity, the right side of my brain deliberately. And oh my goodness, it worked like the best drug you can imagine. I would get up in the morning and just do things that I knew would activate the right hemisphere of my brain, and I went into absolute and total delight. It was like being a little kid again. I can’t even describe the joy I felt, the liberation. So I thought I got something going on here. So I started working with people on zoom calls, you know, 100 people, 300, sometimes a thousand. And I would have them put in a number to represent their anxiety score, which was usually high because we were in lockdown. And then I’d have them do like mental exercises that forced them to open up the right hemisphere of the brain into that creative mode. And then I’d say, now put in your anxiety scores again and it would be 00000.

Martha Beck 00:31:11  So I realized that it’s not enough to calm down your anxiety and make it go away. If you don’t turn on the creativity systems, the anxiety will creep back in and culture will force it at you. And you know the Cobra kitten paradox or tendency that’ll send you into anxiety. But if you are in a creative space, if you’re going through this sort of spiral that starts with curiosity and turns into connection and then into courage, compassion, a sense of meaning, all these different things open up when you’re creative, and there is simply no space to be anxious. And I have to tell you that since that time, my life has been almost deliriously happy. It actually works.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:58  Yeah, when I read that line, anxiety can’t just be ended. It must be replaced. The first thing that came to mind was addiction. You know, my history as a as a recovering heroin addict. And that’s a deep belief I have about addiction. You can’t just yank whatever substances out of somebody’s life and expect it to work.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:16  It’s fulfilling a purpose in there. Exactly. Now, it’s not doing its job very well anymore, right? You know, it’s it’s actually wrecking the entire system, but you can’t just yank it out, it has to be replaced. And when we look at behavior change, it’s the exact same thing. If you’re trying to get somebody to change a habit, there’s a habit loop. And what you want to do is change the behavior in the middle. You can’t just get rid of it. And so I thought a lot about that. And I certainly know that, you know, in my own life, the ability to be curious about something changes something from, as A.J. Jacobs said to me once, which he got from Quincy Jones. You reframe it from a problem to a puzzle. Yeah, right. You stop saying, I have problems, I have puzzles, and immediately there’s your shift. There’s another thing that you do, though, before we get to creativity. And I think this is an important one, which is that you talk about the creature.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:09  So talk to me about what you mean by creature and why that’s even like sort of a preliminary step, even to the creativity side.

Martha Beck 00:33:16  Yeah. Because if I go to somebody who’s super anxious and I say creativity will fix that, you know, sing a song, no, it’s.

Speaker 5 00:33:23  Not going to work.

Martha Beck 00:33:24  That’s bullshit. Excuse my language. Yeah, but here’s the thing. In our very left hemisphere dominated society, we see our brains as machines. And so an anxious brain is a broken machine. And you take chemistry and you take analysis, which is like analysis literally means to chop something up to see how it works. And you, by God, fix that machine. But the anxious human brain is not a machine. It’s a frightened animal. And if you approach an animal and say, I’m going to chop you up or numb you with chemicals or bring you down, I want to end you. This is the way people talk about their anxiety and they don’t know they’re threatening a frightened animal.

Martha Beck 00:34:02  And so here’s the interesting thing as well psychiatrists. And I love that they’ve studied this and that. There are meds that can be helpful. And I’m a big fan of all of that. But it’s such elitist knowledge. It’s so rare. But every single one of us, from little babies to old people and everyone in between, male or female, Every gender knows inherently how to approach a frightened animal. We don’t have to learn that in graduate school. The calming of anxiety is such an important survival skill that we are born with it all through our DNA. So I’ve asked so many people this and they always give the same response. So if you were to open the door and find a puppy, a bedraggled, tiny, freezing, shaking, grubby little puppy on your doorstep, and you made up your mind that you were going to help this animal, how would you approach it? Physically, how would you actually approach the animal?

Eric Zimmer 00:35:05  Very slowly. Very calmly. Little bit by little bit and quietly.

Martha Beck 00:35:11  Yeah. Making reassuring sounds and all of that. That calms the amygdala. And I was so struck by this when I read a book by an FBI hostage negotiator named Chris Voss. Boss, brilliant, brilliant hostage negotiator who went out and dealt with, you know, sociopathic terrorists. Murderers. And how did he do it exactly the way you just described. Soft, low voice reflecting their experience. So they know that they’ve been seen. You know that he calls it the late night DJ voice, like, yeah, okay, here’s what I think you’re saying. And the calling is like, yeah, I hear you. So he even says Study Oprah because she can do that. So the first thing you do with your own anxiety is to realize that it is that frightened animal, whether it’s a tiny little puppy or a big scared horse, it’s frightened. And the only way it’s going to calm down is if you approach it with compassion and with gentleness and with kindness. In fact, I came to see the Dalai Lama has said, my religion is kindness.

Martha Beck 00:36:24  And I thought, oh, what a nice thing to say. Oh, I think that is a statement of incredible power. Kindness to the self is the balm that starts to soothe those jagged edges that we have inside us, that we need medication or drugs or whatever. We’re trying. We’re trying to soothe the pain. And the best soother for that pain is gentle, loving, compassionate energy. Giving that to yourself.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:56  I think it took me years to come to similar conclusions. CBT and even a lot of the Buddhist enquiry methods, all these ways of working with our thoughts have been an enormous gift that we have. And my experience is when the emotional level rises above a certain point, none of that works at all. It doesn’t work. And so the first step is and the analogy I use, you’re using frightened animal. But I think of like a child, like once a three year old has gone into full tilt, you can’t reason with a three year old at that point. You can’t be like, now look, it’s good to share our toys.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:35  You know, you’ve got to get the kid to calm down. Then you have a chance of working with the stories. And I think it’s the same with us. Like if we can’t calm down, no amount of trying to come up with the right thoughts or the rational thoughts or the helpful thoughts. And like you said, kindness is kind of the way to do that. Because when we’re not kind to ourselves, we just keep turning the emotional temperature up. I mean, that’s what that’s what harsh self-criticism does, is it just keeps turning the emotional temperature up. You’re going in the wrong direction. And so you get to it with the creativity. Creativity is a great way of redirecting the brain Towards a learning different capability, but it can’t do it when it’s boiling.

Martha Beck 00:38:25  Yes, the soothing of the parts of ourselves that are in legitimate pain is so important. And I’ve done the same thing you did where I sat in meditation and I thought, okay, well, I can go past my fear and my sorrow and everything into no thinness, right? And I did.

Martha Beck 00:38:39  I had a lot of mystical experiences. But I also realized, and partly being a mom does this for you, teaches you this. It’s something that Jack Kornfield, the great meditation teacher, talks about. He talked about teaching someone who broke down and started sobbing midway through this long meditation session, and the other students were really angry that he was disturbing things and everything, and he had been unable to sit still and hold at bay the memory of burying his seven year old daughter, who had died. The grief had hit him so hard, and so the other students didn’t know this and they were like, shut him up! And the meditation teacher came and took him to a different place and just sat there with his arm around the guy’s shoulders and let him cry. And then that man became a meditation teacher, and he said, Now I’m the one who takes people out of the group and holds them while they cry. And that is, I think, the most sacred work that any human being can do.

Martha Beck 00:39:42  And it is absolutely necessary to come out of our fear.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:46  So what are some techniques for soothing the creature?

Martha Beck 00:39:52  So it’s very physical. Okay. I mean, it’s so interesting reading Chris Voss’s work because you realize that even when somebody’s got a gun to someone else’s head, there’s an unregulated three year old inside them, and they will respond to certain physical triggers, like being spoken to softly being held. So if you put a blanket around yourself, if you’re alone, if you have someone that you love around you, you can ask for a hug that will help, but you put a blanket around yourself and then you start to do something that I call kind internal self-talk. So it’s kist or kissed, which is a silly name, but I don’t mind it anymore. I used to be embarrassed by it, but all you need to do is just make those kind sounds that you would offer to a three year old, or to a puppy, or a man who was grieving an inconceivable loss. You just say things like, I’ve got you.

Martha Beck 00:40:45  You’re right here. You can feel exactly the way you’re feeling. That’s a really important thing. If you’re anxious, don’t say, calm down, everything’s fine. You stop and say, are you afraid? I get it? I’ve been there. I’m here, I love you. Go ahead and feel it. There are no limits here. You’re not wrong. You’re not broken. You’re not bad. I’m here for you, I love you. Just pour kindness out of the part of yourself that can access compassion. There’s a line from Nissar Maharaj that I love that says the mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy. So when you’re in grief, you’re holding an object the way a child would hold something painful and it’s agonizing. And you can get lost in that. But if you can access awareness simply by saying to yourself, I’m here for you, I’ve got you. We’re all right in this moment.

Martha Beck 00:41:50  We’re just here together. You become the awareness that is the mother force, watching the mind in its agony. And you can start to locate yourself in the compassion instead of in the anguish. And that is a massive crossroads in your whole life.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:10  I know that a lot of people report that they find this very difficult after a lifetime with a really strong inner critic is just continuing to try and do your best. The path forward here.

Martha Beck 00:42:24  I would piggyback on other people’s experience. Thank God. When I was in my 20s, I had group therapy because I was completely numb to my own pain. But when I saw other people in pain, my heart opened and I could see that there was nothing bad about them and that they deserved and needed comfort. I felt the impulse to offer it to them. That’s why I became a self-help author. So what I would do is like these phones we have that feed us all the doomscrolling. They also feed us things like stories. I love things that just are images of compassion.

Martha Beck 00:42:59  Like there’s a guy who goes and plays a pink guitar to different animals and you know, the horses. He plays to them and they come and they kiss him on the face while he’s playing. I saw a video of a cat giving birth behind a water heater in some city street, and while she was giving birth, a pigeon built a nest around her to keep her safe. By the time she was nursing five kittens, there was a nest and this little pigeon running back and forth like that cat would have killed him. He didn’t care. He was offering kindness. And when I see the kindness of the one consciousness that I think animates it all, it breaks through some of that human calcification in me and opens my heart a little wider. It’s worth looking for those things.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:03  In the sort of calming the creature aspect. You talk about using our senses. Yes. Give us a practice there.

Martha Beck 00:44:12  All right. Let’s do it in real time. And I love doing this with large groups on zoom because I have them put things in the chat.

Martha Beck 00:44:20  So we’re going to list a few items and I’m going to write them down so I don’t forget them. And then I’m going to ask you to use the right hemisphere of your brain to activate sensations in your memory and create a story. So tell me two things you love to taste.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:38  Oh, boy. I’ve been eating a very particular diet lately, so, Pizza.

Martha Beck 00:44:45  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:47  I’m not sure this is going to be helpful. What else? This may cause grief. Dark chocolate.

Martha Beck 00:44:54  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:54  Dark. I can’t have dark chocolate.

Martha Beck 00:44:56  Okay. Two things you love to hear.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:01  Oh, boy. The sound of me playing my guitar.

Martha Beck 00:45:04  Okay. The guitar. What’s another one?

Eric Zimmer 00:45:07  Birds.

Martha Beck 00:45:08  All right, so imagine yourself in a place where you can hear a lot of birds singing. You’re playing your guitar. You got this delicious pizza with some dark chocolate there that you’re munching on between songs. Now tell me two things you love to touch with your skin.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:25  My dog. And I guess my partner.

Martha Beck 00:45:32  Wonderful. So let’s say your partner is leaning against you lovingly while you play the guitar. Your dog is right there on your feet. Maybe you got the chocolate. You got the pizza, you got the guitar, you got the birds. Now tell me two things that are not food that you love to smell.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:49  This is quite an experience I’m having here. Let’s see. What do I love to smell? I guess roses and coconut shampoo.

Martha Beck 00:46:02  Ooh. Okay, so let’s say your partner’s just had a shampoo with the coconut shampoo, and you smell that wonderful scent drifting off clean hair and you’ve got your dog and you’ve got roses all around you. There’s just a rose garden around you. And the birds are singing. Your guitar is going, you got the chocolate, you got the pizza. Now tell me two things you love to see. But you haven’t mentioned yet.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:26  Two things that I love to see that I haven’t mentioned yet. Well, any kind of tree, really. Trees are. I’m a big fan of trees and pictures of my son.

Martha Beck 00:46:36  Okay, so there are pictures of you. Wouldn’t it be better to just have your son there?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:41  Well you didn’t.

Martha Beck 00:46:42  Or do you just like the pictures?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:43  Well, no, I’d rather have him there. But that you were just asking me.

Martha Beck 00:46:46  Like to see your son?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:48  I love to see my son. Okay.

Martha Beck 00:46:49  Even though there’s no limits on this.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:51  All right?

Martha Beck 00:46:51  No limits. So your son is there. He’s sharing the pizza and the chocolate. He’s smiling. He’s singing along with the guitar. Your partner’s there with the coconut hair. You got your dog, you got the trees, you got the roses. You’ve got all these things at once. Now really picture it. The taste of the pizza. Taste it. The chocolate here. The guitar. Hear the birds. Feel the weight of your dog’s head on your feet. Feel the weight of your partner’s shoulder against yours. Like really, really vividly create this scene. And now tell me how anxious you are when you’re doing all that with your brain.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:27  Not anxious.

Martha Beck 00:47:28  You can’t be. You literally can’t do it because all those sensory things are handled on the right hemisphere. And that’s what I meant about we’re in this abnormal environment because when we’re out moving among plants, animals and one another, people we know all of that is activating our right hemispheres. It’s not a chance in hell that we’re going to go off into just left hemisphere thinking, but put us in an office under fluorescent lights, with a boss glaring at us and money to be made and all that stuff is gone, and we’re living in a prison.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:03  And the point of the exercise, though, is that even if I can’t manifest all those things around me imagining them. Yes, I am able to shift the state of my brain.

Martha Beck 00:48:16  Yes, and we’re always imagining things. And those are always shifting. The state of our brains. So most of us think, okay, this is going to go on the way it has or this is going to get worse. We tend to remember our worst heartbreaks and injuries because we want to guard against trauma.

Martha Beck 00:48:33  So we’re continuously projecting an image of a world that is very dangerous and very cold and very harsh. That’s an imagined reality for most of us in most moments of time. Most of us are pretty much okay most of the time, but we’re not in the okay. We’re in the imagined terror. When you just did that, you weren’t imagining something as opposed to letting go of real life. You were simply replacing what you usually imagined with what I was telling you to imagine. Yeah, they’re equally valid, and I prefer the the one that makes us feel better. I prefer to feed that wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:08  Yeah. Well, I think about that all the time. This idea that we are a fair portion of what we would call our reality. We are making up.

Martha Beck 00:49:18  Oh, my God, I would. I believe almost all of it. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:21  I mean, a lot of it. And so I always think about this idea like, well, if I am sort of co-creating so much of reality, whether that’s what I’m imagining, whether that’s the stories I’m telling, whether it’s the meaning I’m giving things, then which version of that is most useful to me? You know which version is most useful if back to the double slit experiment, light is both a particle and a wave, which it is.

Martha Beck 00:49:48  Well, everything is all matter is both particle and wave.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:51  Yeah. If that’s the reality then in any given moment, which interpretation is most useful for me? And obviously I think we can say that it’s probably more useful if I’m going to be living in an imaginary world, to be living in an imaginary world that calms me and soothes me and makes me better able to function in the world I’m going to then be in.

Martha Beck 00:50:14  Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And it gets even better than that, because what you imagine you tend to create and you can believe in the New Age manifestation thing, or you can just believe in directed attention. You’re not going to create something you’ve never imagined. So by going into those parts of imagined reality that feel positive, you actually come up with the ideas that will allow you to make the best life you can have to make amazing, fabulous things instead of just repeating what you’ve been taught to imagine by your culture. So yeah, it’s not just a useful thing to go into it.

Martha Beck 00:50:51  It is fundamentally formative of the rest of your life. That’s what I mean by creativity. It’s not about painting, singing, dancing those are all wonderful, but it is the creation of your life itself that your whole brain wants you to focus on. That’s what I believe. And there’s no anxiety when you’re doing it.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:14  So we’ve talked about anxiety. We’ve talked about curiosity. We’ve talked about creativity. And then the last part of your subtitle is and finding your life’s purpose. So that seems like a big last thing to tag on the end there. Not that you haven’t been talking about life purpose for a long, long time. And we are at the, you know, the last several minutes of this conversation. But why did life’s purpose come into the end of your search for how to work with anxiety?

Martha Beck 00:51:45  It’s inevitable. So if you look at the two spirals that I was that I talk about in the book, The anxiety Spiral on the left side of the brain, it makes your life tighter and tinier.

Martha Beck 00:51:55  It makes you avoid more and more things. It pulls you inward and captures you on the right side when you go through a creativity spiral. It starts with curiosity and then it goes to connection, and then it goes to a whole new types of synergies, putting together information in new ways. And then it goes back to curiosity and into more connection. And it creates a spiral of creativity that opens you up instead of shutting you down. So the more you know, I mean, look at what you’re doing now, like this concept of feeding the right wolf and the healing you’ve done in your life. You couldn’t help wanting to reach other people who were also potentially suffering the way you’ve suffered. So it was part of your creativity spiral to start to create this in order to fulfill your own longings, your own desires, your own joy. Frederick McNair, the theologian, said, your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. And you can’t help wanting to feed the hungry.

Martha Beck 00:53:05  When there’s this fullness of joy that is generated inside you. And the more you help other people, the more it feeds the joy. So you end up in a cycle similar to the one that has people trapped in their rooms shaking and trembling, only the opposite effect. It’s like a mirror opposite in the brain, and it has exactly the opposite effect. And if you keep pursuing that, if you keep creating on a day to day basis, what can I make with today? Doesn’t it have to be art? It could be a conversation. Could be getting dressed in the morning. Whatever you create, that becomes your right life. As it gets bigger and bigger and bigger it becomes. It morphs into your life’s ultimate purpose. And you don’t have to go looking for it. It shows itself.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:50  Say that question again. What can I make today or with today?

Martha Beck 00:53:54  Yeah. Once you’ve calmed yourself down, if you’re anxious, you’ve been kind and you’ve calmed yourself down. Just look around and think.

Martha Beck 00:54:01  What can I make? Ache instead of oh my God, what are we going to do now? What are we going to make now? And that little shift between do and make is the difference between flight and creativity. So every moment of your day is something you can potentially make. And meditation is so beneficial for that because it shows you you are making things in your mind without moving at all, all the time.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:29  You literally can’t not do it without extensive training. Yeah, and even then, I don’t think you realize that your brain stops. You just relate to it completely differently.

Martha Beck 00:54:39  Yeah. And even so, you’re making a different brain. And the ancients knew that that’s what they were doing, even though they didn’t use that language. Now we’ve been able to observe it with instruments, but they were creating with incredible intensity just sitting there.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:54  Yeah, yeah. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:04  Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at one Your Feed ebook. Let’s make those shifts happen. Starting today one you feed e-book. I love that idea to where you say that essentially what you’re doing is you’re you aren’t going out and necessarily tracking down your life’s purpose. Nah, you are living your way into it. Yes. As I would say is that book is largely about little by little. You live your way towards what that purpose is.

Martha Beck 00:56:01  And every moment that you free yourself from unnecessary fear and anxiety and come back into the present moment and think, What can I make now? Every moment you do that, your life’s purpose is emerging like a spring that’s been held down by a lot of rock.

Martha Beck 00:56:20  And every little bit you pull away, there’s more flowing outward. It starts to water a whole garden that you can’t even imagine. It’s a function of nature. And in the end, as with all flow, you’re just riding along, going, oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening through my life, through my body, because I’m not really doing it on purpose anymore than I’m making rainbows appear in the sky. It’s worth going for.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:49  Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation where I want to ask you about what a sanity quilt is and who the kind detective is. Oh, yeah. All right. So, listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show conversation as well as ad free episodes, a special episode I do for you each week where I share a teaching, a song I love and a poem I love. You can go to one. You feed, join and become part of the community.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:19  Martha. Thank you as always. It’s it’s a real pleasure to have you.

Martha Beck 00:57:23  It’s an honor. Thank you so much.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:25  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.y.

Filed Under: Featured, Podcast Episode

Move Your Body, Free Your Mind: The Science of Movement and Mental Health with Caroline Williams

May 16, 2025 Leave a Comment

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In this episode, Caroline Williams shares how moving your body can free your mind as she dives into the surprising science of movement and mental health. Caroline spent years studying the brain until she realized she was ignoring half the equation. She explains how movement of all kinds, walking, stretching, dancing, and even laughter can reshape our emotional landscape.

Key Takeaways:

  • The connection between physical movement and mental health.
  • The role of interoception in understanding bodily sensations and emotions.
  • Evolutionary perspectives on the brain’s function related to movement.
  • The impact of physical activity on brain chemistry and emotional well-being.
  • The importance of posture and its influence on emotional states.
  • The benefits of strength training for mood and self-esteem.
  • The decline in physical strength among youth and its implications for mental health.
  • The concept of “movement snacks” and integrating small bursts of activity into daily life.
  • The relationship between dance, rhythm, and emotional connection.
  • The significance of breath control and its effects on relaxation and mental clarity.

Caroline Williams is a science journalist and editor. She’s a consultant for and a regular contributor to New Scientist. Her new work has also appeared in The Guardian, the Boston Globe, BBC Future, and BBC Earth among others.

Caroline Williams:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Caroline Williams, check out these other episodes:

Understanding Choice Points for Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise with Michelle Segar

The Science of Breathing with James Nestor

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Episode Transcript:

Caroline Williams 00:00:00  It’s the most common beat in Western pop music, and it’s also this resonant frequency at which if you just let people walk, that’s what they will go to. And if you get people to tap along to a beat in a lab, that’s also the beat that they are most accurate at.

Chris Forbes 00:00:21  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:06  What if one of the most effective tools for your mental health was your body, not as a replacement for therapy or medication, but as something with profound power in its own right? For me, if I could only choose one intervention for my mood, for my mental health, it would probably be exercise.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:26  And today’s guest, Carolyn Williams, helps explain why. As a science journalist, she spent years studying the brain until she realized she was ignoring half the equation. In this conversation, we’ll explore how movement of all kinds walking, stretching, dancing, even laughter can reshape our emotional landscape. I’m Erik Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Caroline, welcome to the show.

Caroline Williams 00:01:52  Hello. Thank you very much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:54  I’m excited to talk to you about your book. It’s called move. How the new Science of Body Movement Can Set Your Mind free. And listeners know I am a big proponent of moving my body primarily in order to make my mind feel better. So we’ll get into all that in a little bit. But let’s 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:31  And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents, 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.

Caroline Williams 00:02:46  I think it’s a really fascinating one, because not only is it true in life, but in science, you know, there’s a real basis for this. Before I got really into movement, my career, 20 years or so as a science journalist, was looking at the plasticity of the human brain and how it changes. And it really is true that what we do, the way we behave, the way we think gets written into our brains in, you know, physical connections between neurons and in the pathways. And, you know, as you sort of walk these paths through your brain, they become more, more.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:22  Worn.

Caroline Williams 00:03:22  In, worn in. Yeah. That’s the word I’m thinking of indented, but that’s not really the word, I mean, but yeah, they, they become like, like pass through long grass, they become better traveled.

Caroline Williams 00:03:32  And so, yeah, it’s absolutely true that, that if you choose to be positive and to choose kindness and compassion, that’s been shown many times that that can actually change the way that your brain works and the way you live your life. So there really is something solid behind that. And that’s sort of the way I like to operate. I guess I’m a bit of a natural skeptic. I want to look for the science, look for, you know, where the evidence lies. And it absolutely does back that up for sure. So I try to live that way myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:01  Yeah, I was reflecting earlier today on, you know, I occasionally just somewhat jokingly say like, well, I’m just a bag of chemicals, right? Like, yeah, at the end of the day, we’ve got neurotransmitters and we’ve got hormones and we’ve got electrical connections and synapses, and it’s just all very physical. You know, it has a very physical element to it. It’s chemicals, all that sort of stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:25  And yet those things both control how we feel. And then also the things that we do can change those chemicals. There’s just such an interesting interaction between the two that you would think like, well, if it’s all chemicals, then the way to intervene is chemically, but not necessarily. And your book is a big testament to that, that there are ways of changing what’s happening inside not just our body, but our brain through the way we move.

Caroline Williams 00:04:53  Absolutely. I mean, that’s one of the things that got me started on this whole thing. I’ve been so interested for many years in what’s happening in the brain and how to, you know, change brain chemistry, how to change the way you think and feel focused on the brain. And then it sort of became obvious to me that thinking of your brain is if it’s not attached to the rest of you is kind of weird. And of course, there’s all this pipework that, you know, all the blood flow packed with hormones and, and all kinds of other stuff, and that all the wiring and the electrical activity that’s going up and down our nerves, that all impacts what happens chemically, physically, and as a result, emotionally and the way that we are able to think.

Caroline Williams 00:05:33  So obviously what happens below the neck matters for how we think and feel. And going on from that, it became quite obvious that things that we do to our bodies can change that chemical environment and change the electrical environment. And as has a knock on effect on everything. So. So in a way it’s liberating because you can then use your body as an extension to, to to sort of tweak these parameters and change the way that you feel and the way that life feels to you as well, you sort of outlook on the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:03  Yeah. I always find it funny when people talk about like the brain body connection as if they discovered something radical like, oh, I mean, obviously it’s it’s always been connected. You know, I’m not quite sure how we got to. It’s so disconnected. I had a strangely I’m taking things off topic here. Sort of. Not really. I had an epiphany about a week and a half ago. I was doing Loving Kindness meditation, and it was a guided meditation.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:30  And the leader of the meditation instructed you to try and notice where in your body you’re feeling this thing happen. And I realized where I was feeling it mostly was my face, and I had been discounting the face as part of my body for a long time. Every time I was told, look for where this emotion is in your body. If I noticed it in my face, I was like, no, that’s my head. Where’s in my body?

Caroline Williams 00:06:57  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:57  But I had this moment where I was like a dummy. Hey, your face.

Caroline Williams 00:07:01  Your face is part of your body.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:03  Is part of your body. It is an emotional center. It’s where I happen to feel a lot of things. And that’s sort of on topic as far as the brain body connection.

Caroline Williams 00:07:13  No, I mean, it’s really relevant because a lot of people struggle to tune in to where these feelings are. So there’s this thing called alexithymia where people aren’t able to put names to their emotions. And if you can’t do that, then it’s really hard to regulate your emotions.

Caroline Williams 00:07:29  So, so things like meditation and, you know, checking in with your body can be a way of sort of tuning in and going, okay, so I’m feeling this right now. I wonder how I can change what I’m doing with my body or, you know, with my face, which is part of my body. And how that can then have a feedback that will maybe make me feel differently. So yeah, that’s really, really relevant. And so that came up quite a lot in my research, that being able to tune into your body and know what it needs and know what your entire body, brain, mind needs is, is a really important skill. And because and often if we’re so sedentary, we’re so disconnected from our body, we’re up in our heads all the time that we don’t often make that connection. So. So it’s a really important aspect of tuning in to your body.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:14  Yeah. So let’s start with talking a little bit about what the brain evolved to do. And I’d also like to talk a little bit about what certain people think the brain is doing, what its role is. Can we talk about those two things real quickly before we move into the specifics of movement?

Caroline Williams 00:08:33  Absolutely. Because this this is where it all comes back to. So we tend to have this idea that brains are there for thinking, and, you know, working stuff out. But actually, if you look way back in our evolutionary history, not every organism on the planet has a brain. Even a lot of animals don’t have brains. And at some point, evolution had to make a decision whether our brains were worth investing in or not. And there’s this very well known neuroscientist called Rodolfo Linas from Colombia. And he pointed out that there’s this creature called the sea squirt. In their adult form, they just look like sort of bagpipes stuck to the bottom of the ocean. And they suck in water through one pipe and they blow it out through the other, and they don’t move. But in their young form, in the larval form, they’re sort of like tadpoles. They swim around the ocean, and their job in life is to find a place on the ocean to attach and live out the rest of their lives.

Caroline Williams 00:09:25  And when they’re in this juvenile stage, they have sort of a very basic brain. And the reason for this is that it needs to coordinate its movements away from things that are harmful and towards rewards. So it’s a basic system. What will kill me, what will help me pass on my genes. And so this basic brain is connected to its basic tail and it swims around. When this larva finds the perfect spot, it attaches basically by gluing its head to a rock. And one of the first things it does is reabsorb its entire nervous system. And it never makes any decisions ever again. So Lina said, well, this just goes to show what a brain is for. A brain is for informing your movements in the world so that it can increase your chances of survival by taking you towards things that will keep you alive and taking you away from things that will kill you. And if you’re not going to move, then you don’t need the brain. And you know they’re expensive bits of kit, they’re high energy and they take a lot to run.

Caroline Williams 00:10:22  And so yeah, from right early on, brains were there to inform our movements in the world. And you can see that everything that’s been added on later right up to our, you know, our clever emotions, you know, if that emotion comes from the words and the Latin for to move away from something. So emotions inform us about what we need to get away from and what we need to get to. So everything else that’s come since then has been about informing our movements in the world, which is something that you don’t often think about. You think brains. Yes, we’ve got a cracking brain for for thinking of very clever thoughts. But at the basis of it, our brains are there to help us move sensibly.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:01  Yeah, I love that analogy of the sea squirt. It explains a lot about the editor of this podcast, Chris also, and what what has happened to him. I think basically what you said is once they stop moving, they basically just get rid of their brain. They just don’t have it anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:15  Yeah, yeah.

Caroline Williams 00:11:16  Yeah, yeah. It just gets recycled because the energy can be reused for something else. And, you know, I’m not saying that a poor editor, I’m sure he’s a lovely man. Very clever man.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:25  Let’s just say he doesn’t move much and he’s not very smart. I’m just making some connections here.

Caroline Williams 00:11:30  I wouldn’t like to comment, but. But it’s true that, you know, in humans, especially this, use it or lose it Nature of our brains became even more sort of tied together in the point of our evolution, when we became hunters and gatherers, because then, you know, our ancestors could maybe sit around in trees munching on fruit and get away with it. And they were absolutely fine when we started moving further afield and looking for food. We had to evolve to be able to stand on our feet and walk long distances and, you know, forage far and wide and hunt. But we also needed to be able to work together to bring down prey, because humans are quite puny, really.

Caroline Williams 00:12:10  You know, we’re not very fast. We’re not very strong. We also needed to be able to, you know, communicate, to work together, to remember the way home. There’s a lot of cognitive work that goes into being a hunter gatherer. And so there’s this idea that that once we started taking this, this way of life, our physiology type together, moving around, being active with the health of our brain. And that explains why, you know, we’ve known for a long time that physical activity prompts the brain to be particularly plastic. It adds more connections. It adds more blood flow. You know, everything works better when you’ve been active. And the reason for that is because these two things go together. That point in our evolution, it stopped being optional to move because if we don’t move as much as our evolutionary history says we should, then the brain starts making savings. And over a lifetime that can be quite significant. So, you know, there is these quite frightening statistics that 13% of Alzheimer’s cases can be traced to a sedentary lifestyle.

Caroline Williams 00:13:07  So over your lifespan, you know, if you’re too sedentary, yeah, that can have a real impact on how your brain ages.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:14  Yeah, Alzheimer’s is a topic near and dear to my heart and my partner Jenny’s heart. Her mom is deep in that disease now, so brain health in general is better with movement. Lots of studies show that I want to pivot a little bit to mental health now, which is similar but slightly different. You say that poor mental health might be part of the price we pay for a cushy life of sofas and supermarkets?

Caroline Williams 00:13:42  Yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day, we are the only creatures on the planet where movement is optional. You know, we can get food, we can find a mate, we can entertain ourselves. We can do everything we like from sitting down and just moving our thumbs and fingers a little bit if we want to. So we have to seek it out. And, you know, statistics suggest that by and large we don’t.

Caroline Williams 00:14:03  And also in working life nowadays, you know, even for people who write about movement for a living, spend a lot of time sitting in this very chair and not moving. So we have to seek it out if we’re going to do it. And obviously, there’s been a real change over over the past decades. We move a lot less than even sort of our parents generation. And we have seen this catastrophic rising in mental ill health and loneliness and all these other sort of things. And clearly, there’s more than one thing going on. I’m not saying. Oh, well, that’s, you know, a straight line between our sedentary lifestyles and mental health. But given that we have got this trend and we know that movement and exercise, even just going for a walk is really, really important and really good boost for mental health, as is strength training. That’s a really, really important one that a lot of people neglect. Being physically stronger has been shown really, really conclusively to help with anxiety and depression and just make people feel more powerful in the world and able to cope that this is measured psychologists call global self-efficacy.

Caroline Williams 00:15:06  And that’s just basically a way of saying, I feel like I can handle stuff. And when people have improved their physical strength through through weight training or body weight training, they do feel more capable. So I think there’s a real role to play in becoming more active in particular ways as well. That could really improve people’s mental health.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:27  I’m going to jump backwards a little bit. Maybe I want to talk a little bit about interception and what it is, and how that leads to what certain scientists call a global emotional moment, and then link in how movement ties into that.

Caroline Williams 00:15:41  Yeah. So interception is sort of a little known sense that we have, and it’s the sense of the internal state of our body. So rather than thinking of, you know, the brain is the master computer that sort of just sends messages downstream. Interception is about a crosstalk between the body and the brain. So you think of the brain more as a sort of facilitator. That sort of takes all the information that’s coming in about, you know, what hormones are in the blood, whether you’re hungry, whether you’re thirsty, whether you’re feeling, whether the fight or flight responses kicked in, you know, all these kinds of things that are going on, even down to our heartbeat.

Caroline Williams 00:16:20  You know, the way that we’re digesting our food, all this information is being passed back and forth, brain and body all the time. And what we know is that slight differences in the messages that are going from the body, these introspective messages can really affect mental health. And there’s this whole body of research now that suggests that some people are more or less sensitive to their introspective signals, and that can make you more or less susceptible to things like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, all kinds of mental health issues. And it’s involved in things like autism and ADHD and all these kinds of things. The global emotional moment is basically your brain’s picture, you know, taking in all this information. So there’s a part of the brain called the insula that takes all this information and puts it all together and comes up with a sense of how I feel now and the I bit of it than me. The sense of self comes from these bodily signals, and putting them all together brings this global emotional moment. And so it stands to reason that if you do anything to change these messages, then that global emotional moment will change.

Caroline Williams 00:17:28  And so I think tweaking the dials is something that could really benefit people. As I said earlier, tuning in, doing something to change the messages and that will change the way you feel in the moment, but also in the long term. So the strength stuff is really interesting because the idea behind why strength might make you feel more capable is that you’re upgrading these introspective signals from your muscles and from your bones that are just maybe giving this unconscious sense that I’m strong. It’s fine. You can stand down the anxiety because if anything happens, I can handle it. And maybe that’s what explains the very strong link between increased strength and feeling more powerful.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:05  Yeah, I think this is a really important topic. This idea of interception and signals coming from the body that we aggregate them generally, and it creates this global emotional moment because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about to thoughts cause emotions do emotions cause thought. And you know, it’s a big debate a lot in psychology. And I think the answer is, as near as I can tell, it’s a bidirectional relationship.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:30  I almost more and more I’m starting to go. Are they even different or are they co arise. Yeah. The thing that first got me really going wait I’m not sure that thought always causes emotion is because I was able to notice very clearly. Some days I would wake up and I would just immediately feel a certain way before I’d had any thought. And then it felt like every thought got filtered through that feeling. And that’s what you’re describing. That global emotional moment is sort of like the weather that’s inside. Yeah. Our brain. Yeah. And then our thoughts can’t help but to some degree be influenced by that weather.

Caroline Williams 00:19:10  Yeah. So one way I thought I heard it described I really like is background music. It’s sort of like the background music to our lives. So like when you’re watching a film, you know, you’re watching a horror film and you can’t quite work out why you’re feeling on edge, but it’s the background movement that’s kind of making you nervous. Yeah. And yeah, by changing these introspective messages, you can change the background music on your life so that rather than feeling like, oh God, you know, you know, you can actually do something that makes everything feel a bit more positive and feel a bit more possible.

Caroline Williams 00:19:41  That’s what the power of moving can do in the moment and long term, that if you can change those messages, then in general, your background movement, your life will be better and will be happier, will be more capable.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:51  Yeah. We interviewed it’s been years ago, a woman named Michelle Seeger, and she had done some writing on movement and how it makes us feel. And she said something. I won’t get it exactly right, but it’s stuck with me all these years, all these interviews, which is like, if your body doesn’t feel good, your brain, your mental state, you’re going to feel like shit. The flavor of that may depend on your particular neuroses and conditioning, but if the body is out of whack, it’s going to influence it. And I think that’s what we’re saying with interception. What you’re saying is when we move, it helps the body be in a better place. And thus the messages that we’re getting in the brain are better changing that background music to something that is more enjoyable.

Caroline Williams 00:20:35  Yeah. And in sort of ways that you can’t even put your finger on. Yeah. So just like, you know, when you’re feeling down and, and depressed and miserable, sometimes you don’t know why. Yeah. you know, but if you can improve the background messages, then you can just feel okay. Yeah. For reasons like you don’t have to dwell on you just feel okay, and you’re bumbling along through your life and everything is groovy. So yeah, there’s a lot you can do. And I think it was not really a surprise to me when I started thinking of movement this way. It was sort of a penny dropping, like, well, of course I never feel more like myself than when I’m halfway through a yoga class or, you know, on a long walk or or, you know, kayaking or just doing something active. I know who I am, I feel good, I know what I’m capable of. And everything’s great if I’m slumped down. Not moved. I mean, I had to isolate for ten days when I had Covid.

Caroline Williams 00:21:23  Oh my goodness, I was the worst version of myself ever. I mean, in theory, I could have written several books in that time, but. Well, not really, but, you know, I could have done a lot of work, but I was so miserable. I was so lethargic, you know? And I think if anyone who is quite active sort of knows this in themselves, but it’s kind of interesting to put the science and the philosophy behind it and say, yeah, for me that means there are good reasons to seek it out and to not be lazy even though it’s comfortable.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:49  Yeah. This speaks to two of the mantras that I use on the show the most. One is depression. Hate’s a moving target. It has always been true in my case. And then the other is sometimes you can’t think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking, right? And it speaks to the fact that the action in this case we’re talking about movement.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:07  The actual physical movement changes the way we think. Yeah. Versus just sitting there trying to feel better and think better. Sometimes it just doesn’t work.

Caroline Williams 00:22:17  So my previous book, Override My Plastic Brain in the US was all about trying to think, you know, trying to do something to my brain to change my brain’s workings, you know, to make me less anxious, to make me more creative, to, you know, to change various things. And especially when it came to anxiety, the thing that bugged me about it is that most of the treatments revolve around thinking your way out of it. Thinking I feel anxious about this. Well, logically, that shouldn’t be the case. I can tell myself that I don’t need to be anxious about this and that. That’s not how it works when you’re living it, you can’t think your way out of it. Of course, there’s the issue with things like depression that getting moving in the first place.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:55  Yes.

Caroline Williams 00:22:56  Is a problem. And really interesting research that I found was one of the first signs that an antidepressant medication is starting to work is that people have an increase in voluntary movement, so people want to move more.

Caroline Williams 00:23:08  And then that starts off the, you know, the nice cycle of upward movement, hopefully. But yeah, I think it’s absolutely true that if you can get over that barrier and get yourself moving, then you’re off and you’re off and running. And that’s been shown time and again. Yeah, I wish I had an easy answer to how to get off the chair in the first place, but.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:26  I know that is a cruel irony of really severe depression, is that, yeah, one of the things that might help you a lot is one of the things that’s very hardest to do, which is, you know, why really learning to start small can be helpful. Like how, you know, what’s the what’s the littlest thing I can do with physical activity? The thing I’ve noticed a lot is that let’s say I’m thinking, all right, I need to do a 45 minute bike ride. And my brain thinks about that, and it thinks about the amount of energy a 45 minute bike ride takes.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:59  It knows what it takes. It’s done it. It’s like, okay, that’s a lot of energy. And it compares it to what it feels currently. And it’s like, that’s not doable. Yeah. Which is why the strategy of like, all right, Eric, just put on your bike shoes. Get in the other room. Works. Yeah, this is my own sort of interpretation of what I think is happening in my brain. But my brain is going, oh. Bike shoes are, you know, one unit of energy. You’ve got one unit of energy. I can do it that way until at some juncture, the energy starts to generate from the workout itself and propels me. So that strategy has saved me more times than I can count.

Caroline Williams 00:24:38  I’ve been quite slack on the getting out of bed and doing early morning yoga of late, but I was regularly getting up at six and going sort of half an hour down the road and doing an hour and a half of yoga in the morning.

Caroline Williams 00:24:48  And the way I managed to do that was when I woke up and groaned. Getting out of bed is my least favorite thing in the world. I should just say to myself, tuck and roll. And I would just tuck, roll out of bed and go tuck.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:00  And roll and that’s good.

Caroline Williams 00:25:01  Yeah, tuck and roll hasn’t worked for me that well recently. But now I do go out on a lot of bike rides with friends and having them appear at the door and say, why aren’t you ready? to spur me into action? So, yeah, it’s either pressure from outside or some sneaky strategy can be the way. But, you know, one of the people I met during the research for the book was Marcus Watney, who’s an ultra marathon runner who has suffered with depression his entire adult life. And even he said to me, I just couldn’t understand, how can I push myself to run an ultra marathon over several days when my feet are bleeding and I’m absolutely exhausted? And yet sometimes I can’t get myself out of this depression? You know, I’ve clearly got the strength of mind to do that.

Caroline Williams 00:25:42  Why can’t I do that? So even the best movers struggle with it.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:15  Let’s move into talking about some specific types of movements. One of the things I loved about this book is you set it up as globally, movement is really good for us, but then we kind of go through different types of movement and some of the specific benefits. So let’s talk a little bit about walking. What did you find most fascinating about the research you did into walking?

Caroline Williams 00:26:37  For most people it’s, you know, such an accessible thing that most people can do. I was surprised at how it was such a multi-use tool. So there’s the research into creativity. So, you know, just in a brain focused sense, we know that when activity is turned down in the frontal parts of the brain, which is the bit behind the forehead, that we tend to think less in straight lines, you know, that’s the part of the brain that kind of keeps us tethered and keeps pulling us back and says, don’t be daft, that won’t work.

Caroline Williams 00:27:04  And, you know, keeps us with the obvious options. And we know that, you know, artificially turning down activity in that brain region makes you more creative. We also know that walking does something very similar to this brain region. And so if you go out at a sort of a moderate pace where you’re not having to expend much effort, you’re just sort of meandering, and that tends to turn down this thinking bit of the brain. And the brain goes wide. And that’s been shown to increase creativity. So we have this idea, I think, in modern society, that if we need to work and come up with something new, we need to sit at our desks and bang our head against the desk until we come up with a great idea. I mean, that’s completely not the way we should be doing it. Science says go for a walk and go for a wander. And I think we need to sort of, you know, rebrand working is something that can be done on the move.

Caroline Williams 00:27:50  So that’s one way of using walking that’s really, really easy. And it sort of spills over for about 20 experiments, like for about 20 minutes after you come back for the walk. So have a brainstorming meeting, go out for a wander, come back, and you should have better ideas. Is another way. Is that faster, more brisk walk? So there was some really intriguing research. I came across this this great guy called Dick green, who started off looking at pipe works in oil fields and then turned his attention to pipe work of the human body into the blood vessels. And it’s, you know, I guess it’s sort of the same thing, really. And he found that we essentially have these pressure sensors on our feet. And then when we’re putting weight on our feet and walking, that sort of sets up turbulence in the, in the blood vessels, which adds up to a boost of blood to the brain. And I guess that’s in a way that’s not that surprising. That’s why you feel a bit more alert when you’ve been up on your feet and moving.

Caroline Williams 00:28:39  But he found this sweet spot where our footsteps are at 120 steps per minute, and our heart rate is also at 120 beats per minute. And our heart rate and our footsteps synchronize. And this gives you the best boost of blood to the brain, something like 20%. The even cooler thing about this is that 120 beats per minute. It’s the most common beat in Western pop music. And it’s also sort of this resonant frequency at which if you just let people walk, that’s what they will go to. And if you get people to tap along to a beat in a lab, that’s also the beat that they are most accurate at. There’s something magic about there’s 120 beats per minute. The good thing about it being common in music, you can Google any of your favorite genre of movement and 120 beats per minute, and you can find the music that you can step in time to and just get going. And it seems to make, you know, when your heartbeat gets into synchrony, that’s when you get a boost.

Caroline Williams 00:29:34  So, you know, he doesn’t have firm data that this is what happens in your brain works better. But what he says is it could really account for this feeling of well-being we get when we’re out and moving briskly. So if you want to, not necessarily think broad thoughts, you want to get out there. And after a period of sitting and getting lethargic, you want to g yourself up again and get back in the room. Then going for a very quick stomp is a really effective way of doing that.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:02  At 120 beats per minute, I love that. Yes, there is another idea in that section on walking that says our bones are in constant conversation with our brains. What does that mean? That’s an intriguing statement.

Caroline Williams 00:30:15  I know, because we tend to think of our bones as being these sort of dry, dusty sticks that hold us up and that they don’t do very much. But in reality, they are a living tissue that’s constantly being built up. If we stress them by by putting weight on them or they get broken down, if we’re not putting weight on them and, you know, we start to lose bone density.

Caroline Williams 00:30:35  And when we’re actually building up bone, there is a hormone released from that bone that goes into the blood, and it doesn’t actually have anything to do with the bone building process. What it seems to do is travel to the brain. It sort of docks onto the part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is important for memory. And it’s been shown in in experiments to Improve memory and just make the brain function better. It seems to have an effect on anxiety as well. So this is all sort of connected again. So when we’re putting weight on our bones, we’re strengthening our bones. We’re making our body more able to move us around, away from danger towards rewards. It’s also giving a boost to our brain to learn better and to retain information better. To me, that was a really surprising one. You know, you think of hormones, you think of glands. You know, you think of, you know, all different kinds of things. You don’t think of your bones as secreting hormones that help your brain to work properly, but they absolutely do.

Caroline Williams 00:31:29  So this is really interesting research that we’re now looking into it in terms of cognitive aging, because the bad news is that when you get to about middle age, the production of this hormone osteo calcium drops off. And so you have to do a lot of weight bearing exercise to keep that going, which is, you know, that’s something that’s very important, especially for women in middle age when estrogen starts to drop off, it needs to happen anyway. But this is another reason to keep your bones healthy and to do that weight bearing exercise, not only will you feel better, your brain might work better as well. So yeah, that was a real surprising one for me.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:01  And by weight bearing exercise, in this case we mean walking. Walking is a weight bearing exercise.

Caroline Williams 00:32:06  Yeah. I mean anything that’s holding up your own weight against gravity and moving counts as weight bearing exercise. So we don’t know yet. It’s too early in the research to know whether, you know, adding ankle weights while you go for a walk, you know, gives you, you know, more osteo cassin or whatever.

Caroline Williams 00:32:20  So any form of weight bearing exercise, we don’t know whether more is better, but I would probably suspect that more is better. But I don’t have any data to back that up. So don’t quote me on it. But yeah, I mean what’s the worst that can happen? You can move better, get stronger. all good things come from that.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:34  Yeah. It makes me feel like I need to walk more. My primary cardio exercise is now this peloton bike, which I love and has been great for my amount of time I spend doing cardio and a lot of different things. But it is not, as you say, a weight bearing exercise in the same way. And the other thing about it is it’s not outdoors.

Caroline Williams 00:32:54  Yeah. And, you know, there’s other stuff. This isn’t in the book, but I’ve written about balance and researchers who were working on, you know, our balance is another thing that declines with age. And being on a stationary bike is great for cardio, but if you’re on an actual bike, you’re having to fight gravity and you’re having to keep yourself upright.

Caroline Williams 00:33:10  So being on a stationary bike or a treadmill doesn’t tax your brain in quite the same way as being out in the real world and dodging obstacles and having to look over your shoulder and that kind of thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:20  Yeah. Yeah. You write that depressed people walk differently than non depressed people more slowly, hardly moving their arms and assuming a slump posture with their eyes to the floor. I was really struck by that last part, the eyes to the floor thing. I’ve been doing something the last, I don’t know, month or so. It’s called the Alexander Technique. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across it.

Caroline Williams 00:33:40  Yeah, I don’t know much about it, but I have heard of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:42  I don’t either still after a month. But part of what the Alexander Technique is trying to do is to get you to recognize Sort of your habitual patterns of use, your body being, you know, the main one, and undo those by sort of letting them go. But one of the things that my Alexander Technique instructor has pointed out to me is that my natural use is head down slightly, looking more towards the floor.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:12  That’s sort of where I naturally orient. And as I’ve started to pay closer attention to that, I’m like, yeah, even when walking, I’m kind of a little bit of that head down. So I was struck by that eyes to the floor piece. You actually talk about it also in the section about core exercises. Also that this is another thing, but I was really struck by that because like I said, it was just pointed out to me this week that I do that.

Caroline Williams 00:34:33  Yeah, I do it too. I catch myself all the time and I have to remind myself, look up, you know, look out at the world and, you know, head up posture matters. Yeah. And that’s another thing. The sort of the core research is, is really interesting. And the effects of just changing the way again. It’s the messages that your body is sending about how you feel. And you know, we know that slumped posture. You know, everything from, you know, a defeated chimpanzee will will sit and slump down and sort of broadcast the message, leave me alone, I give up.

Caroline Williams 00:35:07  that sort of come through to us as well. But the benefit of being a human is we can reflect on that and we can change it. And then we feed back that, you know, the body then tells the brain, okay, you’re setting up straight. You must be feeling better. and there’s some really interesting research into what causes that. And I don’t know whether your listeners will probably know about Amy Cuddy’s power posing research that she got a really hard time because she then linked changes in posture, changes in hormones in the body that hasn’t been backed up by other research. But the fact of posture affecting the way you feel has been backed up many, many, many times. So we’re just still looking for the, you know, the killer mechanism that explains exactly. So, I mean, there’s one potential one that I know in the book, which is really interesting to me for the same reasons I was talking about, like thinking your way out of stress, because there are links that have emerged between like neural links, literally wiring pathways between the adrenal glands that pump out stress hormones and the parts of the brain that control movement.

Caroline Williams 00:36:08  So it’s like this strip of brain tissue across sort of where your headphones go across the top of your head. And these wires from the adrenal glands end up in the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement of the core. So the trunk muscles, the ones that keep you upright or not upright. And it’s really interesting. There’s something to do with movement. There’s something to do with this movement of this midsection of your body and the posture that you keep. It’s linked in with the stress system. And so to me that suggests that rather than having to think your way out of a stressful situation, there’s something you can do with your body. You can strengthen that core, you can change your posture, you can take control and tell yourself via your body that everything’s all right and that you can stand down this stress response. So to me, I mean, I’m hoping that there’s going to be more research in this area. You know, they’re working very hard on it. That will show us exactly how to do that.

Caroline Williams 00:36:58  But but this link, given that we know that posture makes you feel better and that these links are there, it would suggest quite strongly that having strong core, a good posture can, you know, really effectively change the way you feel and how you deal with stress.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:12  In that section on core, you talk about that neural pathway, but you also say that it’s the area of the body where most of our internal organs are found, which means it’s the point of origin for a lot of our inter perceptive messages that we were talking about earlier. And so that that area being, you know, in good shape, so to speak, might improve the way we feel also in that way because the intercepted messages.

Caroline Williams 00:37:40  Yeah. And then there’s this also idea that, you know, this area of the body because the organs are there. So these, you know, the messages from the heart, from the lungs, you know, everything is coming from the stomach, everything’s coming from this region that maybe this sort of is a focal point.

Caroline Williams 00:37:55  So there’s one neuroscientist who thinks that this is why we have this sense of being in our bodies and looking out of it, because these intercepted messages are in our sort of core of our body. So there’s something special about our trunk because that’s where we are in, in some ways. so I think that’s a really interesting viewpoint. You know, a lot of people think, oh, the me is in my head, behind my eyes, actually, maybe a lot of me is is in my mid section of my body where all the important stuff. But the brain is important too. But you know, the other important stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:26  Is there’s a lot of other important stuff. Yes. Yeah. Let’s hit strength training a little bit more. You hit on it to some degree, but there have been studies that compare different forms of exercise or they show and you write about that. Strength training is faster and more powerful effects on self-esteem.

Caroline Williams 00:38:45  Yeah, yeah. So this was one of the things that really surprised me because, you know, everyone knows cardio makes you feel good, gets the blood pumping, endorphins, blah, blah, blah.

Caroline Williams 00:38:53  But studies have shown that strength training alone, regardless of whether you’re doing cardio or other forms of exercise, do lift mood. They help you feel more powerful and more capable in your life. So, and that’s one area that I think is quite easy to neglect. You know, you can go out and do or go for a run. You can go and cycle or swim or whatever. But but actually focusing on your physical strength is something that’s easy to miss. And it’s really important, and especially in young people, because there’s evidence that young people are less strong than they were ten years ago, as are a lot of adults as well. And that, you know, maybe that’s feeding into some of the anxiety issues that we’re seeing in young people. And, you know, that they’re they’re feeling really under pressure, unable to cope. So, you know, giving them strength at an early age can hopefully give them some tools to take forward into their adult life and feel confident and feel that they matter and that they’ve got something to offer the world.

Caroline Williams 00:39:51  So so is something that we’re missing out on. And I think we could definitely do better with.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:55  Yeah. The studies that you referenced were a little bit staggering, depending on how you measure strength. We’re talking about a 20 to 30% decrease in youth since the year 2000. That is not very long ago.

Caroline Williams 00:40:08  I know it’s kind of terrifying really. You know, I have a 12 year old and I think, oh, luckily he’s a fidget like I am. So he’s always on the move and doing stuff. But but yeah, I mean it’s still very easy to go through school and come out the other end and feel that physical activity and movement is not for you, and you’re not a sporty kid and you’re not very strong, and that’s really got to change. It’s not helpful because those kids then leave, and then they’re not the ones who who seek out movement in adulthood. And you know, when you really have to seek it out because you haven’t got the time anymore, like you did when you were a kid.

Caroline Williams 00:40:41  Yeah. So I think we need to, to do better for children in schools. You know, we’re cutting down on p time. We’re cutting down on break time, recess time. And kids aren’t playing outside like they used to. They’re not walking to school like they used to. yeah. Yeah, there’s all kinds of things that they’re not doing that are playing into this. And I think, really needs to be urgently looked at.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:02  Yeah. And as you said, strength training is one of the easiest areas to let go. Like I mentioned, the cardio bike that I have sitting next to me here, I just use it a lot and I love it. Strength training has proven to be more challenging for me to do consistently. What’s actually worked for me is I found I’ve really needed a trainer, someone virtually, and luckily I’m in a position where I’m able to afford that from time to time. But yeah, it is. It’s a harder thing for me to motivate myself to do and to know, like, what’s the right level? How much should I be doing? There’s more nuance to it.

Caroline Williams 00:41:38  Yeah, it’s not obvious, is it? Going for a run. You know, when you’re breathless and you know you can go a bit further than you did last time? It’s a bit tricky, but, I mean, it doesn’t always have to be using weights and in a gym or, you know, doing anything like that. We can build stuff into our lives. So I try and make an effort now so you can’t see from the screen. But I’m actually really small. I’m four foot 11. I’m quite slight. If I’m out somewhere and someone say if I’m carrying something and someone says, can I help you with that? I always say, no, no, I’m fine. You know, I’m making an effort to to carry things because that’s really important that you can use what strength you have and keep it going. So it can be as simple as as choosing to carry your shopping home, choosing to lift and carry stuff rather than putting it in a shopping trolley. You know, we can build these things into our lives and after a while they become habits.

Caroline Williams 00:42:23  So that’s another way of doing it. For people who aren’t necessarily into getting into Lycra and lifting weights and don’t because a lot of people don’t feel comfortable.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:32  I’m not in Lycra. That’s. I’m not wearing Lycra. Yeah, not. I’m telling you.

Caroline Williams 00:42:37  I know.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:39  Chris. On the other hand, Chris is. No.

Caroline Williams 00:42:42  Poor Chris, he’s loving the Lycra. Well, he’s halfway there then.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:45  He’s wearing Lycra, but he’s not. Yeah, he’s halfway there, but he’s not moving. Really tight Lycra in this case.

Caroline Williams 00:42:53  Yeah. I mean, it can also be body weight exercise as well, because, you know, I spent some time with the move knit community who are interested in using your body in a sort of human animal kind of way. So they don’t lift weights, they lift boulders, they don’t, you know, sweat. They don’t go to a swimming pool. They might swim in a river, you know, things like crawling. I spent a morning crawling in a park in London.

Caroline Williams 00:43:14  My goodness. I mean, I really could not move. The next day I.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:17  Had to go.

Caroline Williams 00:43:18  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was quite incredible. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be that complicated. And even so, the main change that I’ve made to my working life to get more movement in is rather than sitting at my desk all day. I spent a lot more time sitting on the floor because the one thing about sitting on the floor, you have to get up and you know your leg pressing your entire body weight every time you do that. And if you’re like me and you keep forgetting you’ve lost your pen, it’s upstairs. You have to run upstairs. Get it up, down, up, down. Yep. And in studies of, you know, people in the blue zones, you may have come across places in the world where people are far more likely to live to 100 than anywhere else. So studies of these people, you know, there’s lots of factors that seem to feed into their long lifespan.

Caroline Williams 00:44:00  But one of them is that they have movement as part of their everyday life. So these little old ladies in Okinawa and Japan, they have low tables and they’re constantly hopping up and down from these low tables and, you know, going out gardening and foraging and bending down and stretching up. So sort of building that kind of stuff into your life can, can actually improve your strength. And, you know, they call them movement snacks in movement, which I love because it’s a bit like, you know, when you’re sitting eating snacks, you know, they add up in terms of calories without you really noticing. and that can have a real physical effect. It’s the same for movement snacks. They add up over time. You don’t notice that you’re popping up and down from the floor, but you’re still strengthening your legs. You’re still improving your overall strength, so it all counts. And the less you’re doing in the first place, the more a small amount will have an impact. So it doesn’t have to be going out and becoming Arnie, getting really big bulging muscles.

Caroline Williams 00:44:50  And in fact, that’s the other thing about strength training. The improvements in mental health and in feeling more confident and powerful. They happened before any physical changes were detectable in the muscles. So it’s not even that you have to build more muscle. It’s just letting your body know that you can do it and that the strength is there and it sort of releases a bit of latent potential that you didn’t necessarily know you had. So yeah, you don’t need to get buff. That’s not necessary at all.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:35  All right. Dance. Let’s talk about dance. Of all the exercises that we’ve talked about, probably the least number of listeners are doing.

Caroline Williams 00:45:44  Yeah. Yeah. Very, very few people dance. And when we get to adulthood, we seem to stop dancing, which is a real shame. And it’s a really fundamental part of what it means to be human. So no other creatures dance. Or if they do, they’re dancing at a different rhythm that we can’t work out. But they don’t dance like we do to the beats, the 120 beats per minute like we do.

Caroline Williams 00:46:05  And there are lots of theories about why that is, that humans as dancers. And one of the things is that it helps us bond. You know, this whole point of needing each other and needing to be socially bonded. Dance is a way of bringing us together. And so the idea behind this is that when we moving, you know, we have these so proprioceptive inputs Is that so that’s a slightly different to interception. It’s it’s the bodily sense of where our body is in space without having to look. And that’s an important thing of knowing who I am and where I end. And you begin. So when we’re moving, we have this proprioceptive sense of where our body is in space. If we’re moving in synchrony with somebody else, then the information about their body movements coming in through our other senses, our brains get confused. They can’t really separate the two. And so this sort of breaks down the barrier between me and you, and we start to feel more connected. And there’s all these intriguing experiments where they get people to move in time together, and then they get them to do kind of gambling tasks, and they can either stuff each other’s chances of winning or they can cooperate, and everyone goes home happier.

Caroline Williams 00:47:06  And people are far more likely to cooperate with each other when they’ve moved together first. So there’s something about being a human, caring about other humans, feeling connected that moving together just makes happen naturally. So yeah, it can be embarrassing to dance with other people, but it doesn’t have to be dance. It could be yoga, it could be Tai chi. It could be an aerobics class, you know, it could be all kinds of ways moving in synchrony with other people. But it’s something I think we’re missing out on. Definitely. And and you can actually get the same effect on your own. So I spoke to this neuroscientist called Peter Janata who he works on the psychology of the groove, which is, you know, getting into the groove of music and feeling like you can’t help but move your body to it. And he says that when you’re listening to music that’s made by other humans moving their bodies, that’s how the sound is getting creative. You’re moving along with that. It’s kind of like an invitation to join in with the band.

Caroline Williams 00:47:58  And so you’re moving to the movements of other people, and you can still get this sort of sense that you’re part of something bigger than yourself. So, so even dancing alone in your kitchen, which I do quite a lot of, can help you feel connected to other people in society. So that’s, to me, is the most important reason to sort of get over ourselves and dance a little bit more.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:18  In this science of the groove, he surveyed a wide number of people about the Grooviest song, and regardless of their musical interest, one song kind of came out head and shoulders above the rest. What was it? Let’s give the listeners a second to guess you guess listeners. Yeah, I guess. What do you think is the most grooviest song? I’ll tell you, it is not groove is in the heart by delight, so you can take that one off your list, even though it’s pretty groovy.

Caroline Williams 00:48:45  It’s probably up there, though.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:47  It might be. All right. Now you can tell us.

Caroline Williams 00:48:49  Okay, okay. I think everyone who ever heard this will get it immediately. It’s Superstition by Stevie Wonder. And the reason why maybe is because it’s got this syncopated beat. So you’re not just stomping along to the beat, which does do something amazing to us. We sort of we feel connected to the beat. We feel empowered that we’re going along to it and we get this boost of dopamine. We feel good. But the syncopated beat, it’s sort of like a secret rhythm. We can decode it, and then we can sort of roll our hips and move the arms around, and then you kind of feel groovy. I mean, it’s a it’s an old, It’s an outdated word, but we’re bringing it back for neuroscience. And one idea about, you know, why this makes us feel good is that there are the balance. Organs of our inner ear are connected to the limbic system, which is the brain’s sort of emotional control senses. So when we’re sort of dancing, we’re sort of almost falling and catching ourselves.

Caroline Williams 00:49:39  And the syncopated beat gives us this is a bit like, you know, in the same way a joke makes us laugh because it sets up expectations and it violates it. You know, it pulls out the rug from under our feet, and we laugh because it’s funny. The same sort of thing happens when we’re trying to follow a syncopated beat. We’re almost falling over and we catch ourselves and we feel good. And so we have this kind of lovely feeling that we just feel amazing. And that’s where we can’t help but move our bodies to it. So I love that. I can’t resist superstition. That was played a lot in my university years and it gets me grooving every time.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:07  So yeah, dancing is good. I’ve taken up the occasional just put it on a song and you might call what I’m doing jumping around more than dancing, perhaps my old punk rock days, But hey, you know, it does work.

Caroline Williams 00:50:19  Well that works. The sensitivity of the kind of gravity detectors in our ears, they’re very sensitive to up and down movements.

Caroline Williams 00:50:25  So that’s why, you know, when especially when it’s loud. There’s this thing called the rock and roll threshold where when the music is above this threshold, I think it’s 120dB. I could be remembering it wrong. But anyway, when it’s loud enough, people start moving and they can’t help but Bob and you know, even if it’s just a stomp of the feet and a bounce of the head, you can’t help it. And so, you know, sort of pogoing along. It’s the sort of dancing that you could do anywhere in the world if someone was drumming and you wouldn’t look daft. It’s the kind of, you know, the toddlers do when they first start moving with the beat before they realize they’re supposed to be embarrassed and they’re supposed to not do that, you know, stomping around and, you know, bashing the air with your fists. It makes you feel good. So, yeah, you can do it by yourself. It’s okay. Yeah. and it still works. I actually had the most embarrassing experience joining in with a freeform dance group that I went to, sort of as part of my research, and it was.

Caroline Williams 00:51:15  It was pretty embarrassing, the whole thing when we were wafting around, you know, just as your body wants to. And you and I was like, my body doesn’t want to move. My body wants to go home. This is awful. But when the beats got going and, you know, the whole room was just stomping along, it was amazing. And and by the end of it, I had this sense that I wasn’t moving my legs and arms. They were moving me. I was just along for the ride, and it was just this amazing feeling. I was on a total high of a days afterwards. And you know, this was how we got out of our minds and just enjoyed being rather than thinking before, you know, we invented other ways of getting out of our minds. And it works and it’s free and you can do it and you can still drive home afterwards. So yeah, it was a bit of an eye opener for me. I have to say.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:56  I did a conscious movement free form movement class virtually.

Caroline Williams 00:52:02  And did you keep your camera on?

Eric Zimmer 00:52:03  Yeah, yeah we did. And my partner was here with me and yeah, that’s a strange experience, you know, like just move in the way your body wants to move like you. I was like, my body wants to hide in a chair in the corner the minute you’ve suggested this. Yes, exactly.

Caroline Williams 00:52:19  Don’t ask my body. It has no idea.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:21  Yeah, but yeah. Over time, I began to unwind a little bit and enjoy it.

Caroline Williams 00:52:26  Yeah. I mean, I sort of had to work with myself because I was hanging on to the radiator in the corner of this sort of drafty village hall. And I thought, you know, seriously, the only way you’re going to look ridiculous in this situation is to stand there and not do anything. These people don’t know you. I mean, I had quite a few friends that said, I’ll come with you. That sounds funny. I’m like, no, that’s exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:42  What I’m.

Caroline Williams 00:52:42  Going on my.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:44  Own. That’s what I was saying. Having my partner here in the house with me almost made it worse. You know, it would have been easier with a group of strangers. You did another of the things that I suspect would be really great, but watching it from the outside, it looks painful to even be a part of, which is laughter. Yoga.

Caroline Williams 00:53:03  Yeah, yeah, even even. He even gives me a nervous laugh just even thinking about it. But yeah, but I mean, the reason for doing laughter yoga is that studies suggest that laughing, a proper belly laugh is a better workout for your abs, for your core, than crunches. So, I mean, ideally you would have friends that make you absolutely crack up a lot and, you know, make your belly sore at the end of it. But if not, then laughter yoga isn’t is another way of going about it. But yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:36  You still you still look skeptical. Yeah, I don’t get the sense you’re going back.

Caroline Williams 00:53:41  No, no, I don’t really think that is my thing. Luckily, I have very funny friends and a funny husband and a funny child and a dog that I could either laugh or cry at most of the time because he’s such a ridiculous animal.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:51  But what kind of dog? Now, I got to ask. We’ve talked about him twice now.

Caroline Williams 00:53:54  Yeah, he is a collie crossed with a New Zealand hunter, which is basically they took Welsh collies to New Zealand and thought, we need a bigger dog that can be more demanding. It can run up mountains and it can bark at the top of its lungs for 14 hours straight. So he’s quite demanding.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:12  Wow.

Caroline Williams 00:54:12  Yeah. I don’t know what I do know what I was thinking, I was thinking, I want a dog and I like collies. And I didn’t really read up enough about Hunter ways. I don’t recommend it unless you really want to run up and down hills. But he’s great. He gets you great character, he gets me moving.

Caroline Williams 00:54:26  And you know, there’s really no option if you’ve got someone he doesn’t do what my previous dog did, which is just come and stare at you until you take him out for a walk. You can ignore a stare. He will come and literally bark in your face until you go. Fine, fine. I’ll take you out. So yeah, it’s not negotiable for him at all. And seeing him, you know, I was saying before about, you know, if other animals dance, maybe we just can’t tune into it when he gets together with other herding breeds that it’s like they they click into each other, right? Okay. You go on the inside, I’ll go on the outside and you just run in circles and it’s like a form of dance, and you can see that they just feel amazing when they’re doing it. So maybe we just can’t tune in.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:00  I’ve had mutts in the past that have a significant amount of collie in them. The herding instinct is fascinating to watch in them.

Caroline Williams 00:55:06  Yeah, it’s very strange, isn’t it?

Eric Zimmer 00:55:08  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:08  I have a Boston terrier. She’s old, but she’s still active. And she does. I call it her ball or her bone dance. She. She loves her ball. And sometimes she loves a bone. And basically she just gets on her back and rolls, like, I mean, she doesn’t roll. She gets on her back and wiggles on top of this thing she loves. Just over and over and over and over again. I mean, it looks to all the world like she is dancing.

Caroline Williams 00:55:33  Yeah, we call it doggy breakdancing. Yeah, Django does that too. My dog does that too. He likes likes a bit of breakdancing and he usually teams it with her. It’s like he’s singing and dancing when he’s doing it. Yeah. You have to be a mad dog person to understand.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:47  I know, I know. We’re going to we’re going to have to pivot here so that we don’t turn this entire show into dogs. Stretching is another part of the book, another type of movement.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:56  So I want to make sure people get all of them. We’ve got walking, strength training, dance, the core stretching. But where we’re going to end is breath control. I’ve been very interested in breathwork over the last year. We had James Nestor on who wrote a great book about the breath. And but you brought up some really great things there also, and I wanted to start with, meditation. And the most common style of meditation probably is to sit and just follow your breath. Don’t control it, just follow it and observe it. But you talk about how a scientist or two got interested in, hey, what’s happening in the benefits of meditation? Is it something to do with what’s being done with the mind, or is it something to do with what’s being done with the breath? Can you share a little bit more about that?

Caroline Williams 00:56:44  Yes, this was sort of trying to tease apart whether it’s the act of mentally focusing on the breath that gives you these sort of changes in brain function and the way that you feel, or whether it’s something to do with the breathing.

Caroline Williams 00:56:57  And it’s really interesting that the actual act of breathing through your nose in and out, through your nose, what you’re basically doing is harnessing your brainwaves and sort of taking their rhythm under control, which sounds completely out there, but it kind of makes sense when you think about the way that the brain works. And again, it’s all about getting information from your environment and then using that sensibly to improve your chances of survival. So when you’re taking your breath through your nose, there’s a lot of information about the environment, how safe or rewarding it is in in that. And so this information goes to the the olfactory cortex, which is sort of at the top of the nose. And then to make use of that information, what you then need to do is to get other brain areas. So the bits that are to do with memory, to make sense of what this information means, and then emotional responses, you know, does this make me scared? Does this make me happy? Whatever. And for all those different brain regions to talk to each other, they need to be on the same brainwave frequency.

Caroline Williams 00:57:55  And so as a result of that working of the brain, when we breathe in and out through our nose, the whole brain starts to synchronize and beat to the same rhythm. And when we slow down our breathing, that has the effect of slowing down brainwaves as they propagate through the brain. So even as I’m saying this, it sounds so far fetched, but this is what studies are showing with EEG, which is looking at the frequency of brainwaves across the brain. And so when you really, really slow it down. So this particular experiment was looking at when you slow your breath down to three breaths per minute. So that’s really quite difficult to keep up. In fact, in the study, a few of the volunteers actually fell asleep during the study because they were so relaxed they just drifted off. But that can sort of take you into this altered state of consciousness, where you are more in a sense of of being rather than thinking, you know. I’m not big on sitting around. This explains why all these expert meditators commit to all this, sitting around and breathing slowly, and can actually do this for this long because it takes you to this amazing state of just being and being at one with the universe.

Caroline Williams 00:59:03  I haven’t managed it myself, but it seems worth aiming for to me. I would definitely fall asleep. Sleeping is like my my thing. I can definitely fall asleep anywhere but at different rates. You know, six breaths per minute is a lot easier to do, and that’s if you get people to breathe at different rates. The one that they tend to say that was the most comfortable and relaxing is six breaths per minute. And interestingly, in studies of things like chanting, reciting the rosary in Latin, sort of these sort of prayer based practices, studies of those have found that it tends to naturally make people’s breath go to six breaths per minute. So it’s almost like humanities worked out that this is how you feel good. This is how you feel calm and held and looked after. So breathing at six breaths per minute has all kinds of benefits. It fills your lungs more effectively. It activates the vagus nerve, which calms the whole nervous system down. And so it’s just this very easy. I mean, it doesn’t even feature when you think about movement, but this is a voluntary movement that our species can do and not many others can to sort of override just the in and out of oxygen into our bodies and to take control.

Caroline Williams 01:00:09  And that can change the way that we feel. And it’s such a simple thing. You don’t have to be fit. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to be able. Anyone can do it. It’s really, really important thing to do. And we don’t know yet how important it is or whether it makes any difference if you do that breathing whilst moving. So I find that when I’m breathing and moving, that’s how I get myself into that kind of calm state is by doing yoga and focusing on breathing. But it seems that there is a small amount of evidence that it might be even more effective if you’re moving and breathing at calm rate at the same time. So you maybe hit more of these buttons. You get the core exercise, you get the strength, you get the breathing, you get the stretching. All of these things in one.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:52  Yeah. That’s one of the things about yoga that when I take it in a class that I wish is that it would slow down, you know, because you’re moving on the in and the outbreath, you know, is that the movement would span a longer breath.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:05  More to that, you know, 5 in 5 out count, which is, yeah, that’s what six breaths per minute works out to. Right. Five on the inhale, five on the exhale.

Caroline Williams 01:01:14  So the kind of yoga that I really fell in love with sort of about ten years ago, more than that now is Ashtanga. And you don’t follow the instructor.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:22  You do your own pace, right.

Caroline Williams 01:01:23  You do your own pace. And that’s when it really clicked for me that I wasn’t breathing. Now breathe out. Now I was like, well, how do you know when my lungs are full? You know, but if you’re doing it at your own pace, you can really you can really feel it when you get going. I have got into that state of being and just calm and awareness of my body, and it’s an amazing feeling. And you don’t necessarily get that if somebody is dictating your breath.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:46  That’s right.

Caroline Williams 01:01:47  That’s.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:47  Right. Yeah, yeah. I always find that I’m like, the speed is off for me.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:51  Yeah, I found the six breaths per minute. I think certain people call it coherent breathing. Fascinating that that is the rate that ties to a lot of ancient prayer type practices. And then three breaths per minute does take a little bit of effort. But it’s interesting. I’m practicing a little bit differently now, but for a while I was a very focused Zen Buddhist. So I was was really doing that type of meditation. But if you go back further into the Zen tradition, there is talk about controlling your breath in a way that doesn’t typically show up in what we think about with meditation. And it was about this very light. So you’re not moving a lot of air, but you’re doing it, you know, closer to what you’re describing, which is that, you know, three breaths per minute.

Caroline Williams 01:02:39  That’s really interesting. So yeah, you don’t have to be sort of huffing and puffing and making a real effort, but what you’re doing is sort of taking control and sort of controlling the rate.

Caroline Williams 01:02:48  Yeah. The research which suggests that what you’re doing is really sort of slowing down the activity of the brain, and then that can get you into this state of Zen. I guess, you know, the state of being and being one with the universe.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:00  Yeah. And I think that’s what makes slow breathing hard for a lot of people is we tend to equate slow breathing with deep breathing, which we then sort of naturally equate with moving a lot of air. So there’s this like, you know, this strong. Yeah. You can’t inhale that forcefully for 10s. Like it doesn’t work that way. It’s a much lighter moving less air. Over a longer period of time. Anyway, thank you so much, Caroline, for coming on the show. Thank you so much for this wonderful book that teaches us so much about how to move. And you’ve just got a line which is basically the message is move more in your brain will thank you in the long run and in the short run.

Caroline Williams 01:03:40  Absolutely. Yeah.

Caroline Williams 01:03:42  Yeah. Your life will will be better. Yeah. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? You’ve moved.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:46  You’ve you get healthier.

Caroline Williams 01:03:48  You’ve had a good time. Yeah. You can always sit down afterwards. Yeah. And, you know, at the end of the book, I talk about rest and the importance of rest. It’s not about necessarily getting more exercise in. It’s about moving your body around more. And it doesn’t have to hurt. You don’t even have to change your clothes and shoes. You just have to remember that you’re an animal that needs to move and stretch and breathe and make sure that you do that.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:08  Well, thank you so much.

Caroline Williams 01:04:09  Thank you very much for having me. It’s been lovely to talk to you. I think I’ve learnt a lot too.

Filed Under: Featured, Podcast Episode

Navigating the Messy Parts of Life: Embracing Imperfection and Growth with Josh Radnor

May 13, 2025 Leave a Comment

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In this episode, Josh Radnor discusses the messy parts of life and embracing imperfection and growth. Josh Radnor explains how, even outward success, fame, acclaim, creative fulfillment isn’t enough to quiet the deeper battles within. He shares how real freedom comes not from achieving perfection, but from making peace with the messy, unfinished parts of ourselves. From navigating identity and public image to sitting in deep discomfort. Josh offers a powerful reminder that a meaningful life isn’t built on external measures. It’s shaped from the inside out.

Key Takeaways:

  • Discussion on the duality of human nature and the internal struggle between positive and negative traits.
  • The significance of thoughts and actions in shaping a meaningful life.
  • The role of time in personal growth and self-perception.
  • The complexities of self-image and public persona.
  • The importance of embracing imperfections and the “messy” aspects of life.
  • Reflection on the wisdom gained from aging and life experiences.
  • The negotiation between acceptance and action in facing life’s challenges.
  • Insights on meditation and the emotional challenges it can provoke.
  • The value of community and shared experiences in personal growth and healing.

Josh Radnor is an actor, writer, director, and musician. Recent television: Hunters (Amazon) opposite Al Pacino and Fleishman is in Trouble (F/X, Hulu.) He is best known for his leading role on CBS’ Emmy-winning How I Met Your Mother. Additional TV: Rise, Mercy Street, Centaurworld, Grey’s Anatomy, Six Feet Under. He wrote and directed two feature films (happythankyoumoreplease & Liberal Arts) both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the former winning the 2010 Audience Award. Other film: Afternoon Delight (dir: Joey Soloway), Social Animals, 3 Birthdays, All Happy Families. Theater includes the world premiere of Itamar Moses’ The Ally (The Public Theater), Little Shop of Horrors (Kennedy Center), Richard Greenberg’s The Babylon Line (Lincoln Center), the Broadway production of Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Disgraced. He made his Broadway debut in The Graduateopposite Kathleen Turner. As a musician he made two albums with Aussie singer-songwriter Ben Lee as Radnor & Lee. Solo music: One More Then I’ll Let You Go, Eulogy: Volume 1 & Volume 2. You can find his popular Museletters over on Substack. 

Josh Radnor:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Josh Radnor, check out these other episodes:

A Soul Boom Discussion on Mental Health, Spirituality, and Connection with Rainn Wilson

Spiritual Journeys with Rainn Wilson & Reza Aslan

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:01:17  We often imagine that once we have it, all the inner struggles will disappear. But as Josh Radnor reminds us today, even outward success, fame, acclaim, creative fulfillment isn’t enough to quiet the deeper battles within. In this conversation, Josh shares how real freedom comes not from achieving perfection, but from making peace with the messy, unfinished parts of ourselves. From navigating identity and public image to sitting in deep discomfort. Josh offers a powerful reminder that a meaningful life isn’t built on external measures. It’s shaped from the inside out. I’m Eric Zimmer. And this is the one you feed. Hi, Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Radnor 00:02:02  Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:03  I am really excited to have you on and talk with you about your new podcast, Substack. Your life as a musician and obviously your life as an actor. But before we get to that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:25  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.

Josh Radnor 00:02:50  Yeah, it’s one of the greats. I mean, it’s a you built the entire show around it and I understand why. I think it’s about free will at some core level, but I also am very suspicious of people who say they’re all good. And I’m also suspicious of people who say someone is all bad. I think that we have worlds inside us. We have the whole world inside us. And so I just think it’s an honoring of the fact that there is that dark wolf, but it’s also an acknowledgement that where we put our attention is what we grow.

Josh Radnor 00:03:25  So I sometimes think about it like I have like 51% of like the light wolf in me and 49% like there is a slight majority of like the wolf of kindness and virtue and all that. But there’s this other part of me, and I think we’re in a shadow denying society. That’s why there’s so much blame and shame and accusation and finger pointing and scapegoating. So I think it’s a sign of great mental health to acknowledge the dark wolf inside you, to at least say it’s there, and then you might be much less trigger happy at pointing the finger at other people.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:58  Yeah. In one of your essays on Substack, you actually talk a little bit about this. You talk about internal family systems and Richard Schwartz. We’ve had Richard on the show to talk about internal family systems. And I think the thing when I hear the parable today, right, I’ve been reading it for a decade now, is that like, there’s not two wolves inside me. There’s a whole bunch of them, right? I mean, there’s a lot going on in there when I pay close attention.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:24  And but I think ultimately you sort of put your finger on it when you said it’s about where do I put my attention? And I think putting our loving attention on the parts of ourselves that might seem like the dark wolf, that’s the way you do it, right? You know.

Josh Radnor 00:04:40  Right? Right? Right. Yeah. I think Richard Schwartz really cracked something there. This kind of search for some sort of solitary identity feels like folly. Yeah, like you just have to kind of acknowledge that there’s, like, a chorus of voices, wounded parts of ourselves even, you know. Ancestors are, you know, higher kind of voices that are wiser than our maybe our current self. Like those are all in there too, and they’re all accessible. I think if we get quiet enough or skilled enough at kind of just asking to be contacted with them.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:08  Yeah. You’ve got a new podcast out, which is a rewatching of the show that I guess we would say made you famous, which is called how I Met Your Mother.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:18  Yeah. And in that show, there’s the character who’s, I don’t know, in his late 20s, early 30s. And there’s also the character as a 50 year old, sort of that narrating. Right. And I think what you just said there sort of ties to this idea that we can access wiser parts of ourselves. And one of the ways to do that, actually, I think, and lots of different traditions have talked about this, is to imagine your 50 year old self or your 70 year old self or your 80 year old self. So the show way back when was kind of on to an idea that I see recur in psychology and various indigenous traditions about trying to contact that part of you that’s actually already wise.

Josh Radnor 00:06:01  Yeah, yeah, it’s true. And it is something we’re unpacking on how we made your mother the podcast Craig Thomas and I are doing. My wife is a clinical psychologist, and one of the things she will sometimes ask patients to do that she’s told me that I think is so wonderful is if they’re tied in knots about something and really confused about an issue, she’ll say without thinking, what is your 85 year old self say? You know, and the 85 year old self is there.

Josh Radnor 00:06:26  It’s ready to communicate. Most of the time it’s this is not a big deal. Or don’t let’s not worry. Let’s not worry about that, you know? But I’ve asked Craig and Carter, the other co-creator, about this notion of an older, wiser narrator character looking back on his life. There’s that great Kierkegaard quote, life can only be understood backward, but it has to be lived forward. So you have this narrator, wiser voice who’s looking back, and he can be a little more lighthearted about things because he knows how things worked out. Whereas the character I was playing was much more stumbling through one foot in front of the other. You know, I asked them they were in their late 20s, early 30s when they were writing the show. I mean, it lasted for a decade, but like, it was a kind of chutzpah, you know, to say like, oh, no, we’re going to write this older US voice, this older, wiser voice. But they were also the age of the protagonists.

Josh Radnor 00:07:14  Yeah. And they said it was almost like a hope. It was like a hope that there was some voice out there that could be guiding and benevolent. I think ultimately, it’s a very sweet part of that show, that there’s this narrator that knew that he landed on his feet so he can tell all these embarrassing stories about himself.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:33  Absolutely. Yeah, I think that, again, that idea is that wisdom is actually not that complicated. Like, we can keep reading about it. And I’ve been making podcasts for a decade on the general ideas of what it means to live a good life. They’re not that complicated. The problem is that a we forget them constantly and b, we don’t know how to live them.

Josh Radnor 00:07:58  Right. Right. I mean, I think that you can almost recognize truth by its simplicity. If something is almost like overly complicated around systems or around, you know, minutia, it’s obscuring something. I think the reason fairy tales are so powerful and certain children’s stories are so powerful is because if it’s wise and true, perennially true, we get it intuitively.

Josh Radnor 00:08:20  We don’t have to do any calculations, you know, to get it. It’s just evident. But I agree with you that we have the kind of built in for getter. I always think of that movie memento where he had to tattoo, you know, he would have amnesia every day and he had to remind himself what happened. I feel like wisdom is like that. Like you have to look at the word like change or like, this too shall pass. Like like perennially wise sayings. Like, yeah, sometimes when you’re struggling and a friend says, you know, it won’t be like this forever. It’s like the simplest, most true thing you could ever say. But sometimes it comes to you as if it’s like Moses on the mountaintop. You know, it’s like it’s divine revelation. Like, oh, I won’t be feeling this way forever. That’s unbelievable. It’s like, I know that intellectually, but sometimes when we’re going through it, it’s tough to remember.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:04  Absolutely. I’ve talked about this on the show a bunch of times, and I’m bringing it up because you reference King Solomon in one of your Substack posts.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:12  But there’s something known as Solomon’s wisdom. And what it means is that King Solomon was really wise when it came to everybody else’s life, but apparently his own life not so much. And so it’s called Solomon’s paradox, right? And it means that idea that I could be really wise about your life or my friend’s life, but when it’s myself, I have a hard time seeing it. It’s just this paradox of being human.

Josh Radnor 00:09:40  Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes people. I’m not speaking about my wife here, by the way, but sometimes I think people in the helping professions often have a genius for seeing other people’s stuff. I don’t know if it’s easier, but it’s sometimes very difficult to apply your own guidance to yourself. I mean, I have sometimes, like a friend has reached out for advice and I like that. I think that’s one of the great things about friendship, is you’re all kind of trading off, being each other’s mentor and cheerleader and confidant. But when a friend comes to me and they’ll ask me some advice and I’ll, I’ll say something to them and then I’ll hear it back and I’ll go, I should do that.

Josh Radnor 00:10:16  That’s really that’s like, that’s really good. You know, sometimes we have to displace the advice to have it come back to us.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:23  Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the idea of, well, actually, you and I did not bond over something that we should have bonded over first, which is that I live in Columbus, Ohio.

Josh Radnor 00:10:34  You live.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:34  There now? I grew up there. I live there now. I’m in Denver today. Okay. But I now live in Columbus, Ohio.

Josh Radnor 00:10:40  Yes. Wow. Whereabouts? Where do you live?

Eric Zimmer 00:10:42  I’m near Goodale and 315. Sort of Grandview.

Josh Radnor 00:10:45  Ish. Okay. Yeah. My sister lived in Grandview for a year. She’s back in Bexley, where I lived.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:49  Is that where.

Josh Radnor 00:10:49  You grew up? That’s where I grew up. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:51  Okay.

Josh Radnor 00:10:51  Yeah. Oh, no. She lived in Granville. Okay. That’s different. But Grandview. Yes, I know Grandview very well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, how cool is that where you grew up?

Eric Zimmer 00:11:00  It is? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:00  I grew up in Worthington.

Josh Radnor 00:11:01  Oh, in Worthington. Okay. Cool. Yeah, I did theater with a lot of people from Worthington.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:05  Yeah. So I just. When I saw that, I thought that was cool. Oh, nice. Okay. Back to what I wanted to talk about next, which is identity. One of the things that I think you’ve talked publicly about this, both on the podcast and on your Substack, is that you got to be known really well and beloved by a whole lot of people for a particular character. Right. Talk to me about that experience and how it has been for you and how it has evolved over time.

Josh Radnor 00:11:35  God, it’s been 20 years of navigating that. Right. So I think it’s like it would take me a long time to unpack each phase. I guess no one prepares you certainly in drama school, for you’re going to be playing one role for nine years. Like, that’s not something they think you’re going to do a role for three months or like, you know, like do a check off play for, you know, four months.

Josh Radnor 00:11:57  So I had to figure it out on my own. And sometimes I did that rather inelegantly in other times I was able to have some more grace around it, but I just found it to be an incredibly strange, disorienting thing. I mean, first of all, your anonymity getting eroded and strangers knowing who you are when you don’t know who they are is a very strange, disorienting experience anyway. Famous, strange. Being visible is strange. People having ideas about you, projections about you. They read a quote of yours that was taken out of context. And then, I don’t know, they don’t like you or you remind them of someone like you. Feel a little bit in your more vulnerable moments, like you got a dartboard on your chest. You’re just walking through the world, and you feel like people are kind of sizing you up or having opinions about you, and some of them are often quite lovely, but that also feels suspect. Like you feel like these people don’t really know me. They know they have this idea of me.

Josh Radnor 00:12:47  I went through some crisis with it, and I used various forms of kind of healing, and and I was just on the hunt for something that felt more authentic in the midst of all that. And it drove me much deeper on a spiritual path, weirdly. I mean, not maybe not weirdly, but like, it’s understandable. And then I got off the show, and as an actor, I was only looking for roles that felt very far from the role that I had played. Anything that reminded me of the DNA of the part I wouldn’t do. But I also became a musician, and I’ve written and directed films, and so I was really just trying to diversify. But what I realized I was actually doing was running. I was running away from it. You know, I said in that Substack that you referenced that this character I played, Ted was a part of me, like in the ifs sense, like he is a part of me in that he was literally a part that I played.

Josh Radnor 00:13:38  But there’s also I can feel I revealed something to the world of myself through that character. I got married a little over a year ago, and my wife had never seen the show, and she said, look, I’m curious. And that was a good thing for us, for our relationship, that she had never seen the show. But she said, I’m curious about this time in your life that I missed. I want to see it. So I decided it was time to rewatch it and we just decided to formalize it. Craig and I are doing this rewatch and we’re having a great time talking about it, but there’s been something wonderful about having, much like the show itself, having this older, wiser perspective on it rather than being the person inside of it, but actually looking back on it and seeing, oh, I wasn’t half bad on that show. And the show itself is delightful and I’m so much kinder to myself watching it now. So I’m having like a very meta, very interesting experience re-engaging with the show.

Josh Radnor 00:14:30  But in terms of identity issues, it was both shattering and also opened up all these avenues of my life, for which I’m incredibly grateful.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:39  I love how you talk about it in such a nuanced way. And you referenced nuance in the beginning, right? We’re not all bad. We’re not all good. I think nuance is kind of the secret sauce to wisdom to a certain degree. But you talk about it in the sense like, imagine that you were in high school. We were all in high school, and 20 years later, all anybody ever wants to talk about is who you were in high school. Not anything you had done since all of that and how that might get to be tiresome or confusing. And yet, at the same time, you’re also recognizing this profound gift that you got, right? I mean, that changed the trajectory of your life in a positive way. And I like seeing you kind of come back and revisit it from a more holistic place. And I think the lesson for all of us is around identity.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:27  Yeah. And that identity is ideally, in my mind, fluid meaning I can play this part of me, I can play this part of me, I can, I can see this, I can see that. But we tend to get fixed in this idea of who we are. Yeah. You know, we just get locked into I am This Way. And as somebody who studies change and has written a book that will come out next year about change, what I know is that we are all capable of change. But if we believe we’re not, we’re really stuck.

Josh Radnor 00:15:58  Right? And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, like, I had an acting teacher at NYU named Ron Van Loo, and one of the first things he said to us was, you need to expand your definition of yourself. You’re here to expand your definition of yourself, that you’re not this thing, you’re all these things. And when you’re more things and when you know yourself to be more things, you can play more things truthfully, you can access more of yourself to play a wider array of characters in a larger sense.

Josh Radnor 00:16:27  Like my brother in law, Gideon Jacobs, I saw him in this one man show that he created last night, and it’s this blind preacher character, and it was really fascinating. But he’s obsessed with the second commandment in the Torah, which says, thou shalt not make any graven images. Right. And his whole thing, you know, going back to the Garden of Eden again, not speaking literally, but allegorically, this notion that humanity in its primordial state was unselfconscious and connected to all that was. There was no separation. And then there’s this bite of this apple, this kind of primordial wound, and suddenly it’s, oh, my God, I’m naked. Oh my God, you’re separate from me. Oh my God, God is elsewhere. It’s actually like a horror story, if you think about it from an existential point of view. Totally right. And his thing is that the commandment against images is actually quite profound, that what happened to Adam and Eve allegorically in the garden was that they suddenly got a self-image which is grievous to our psyche because we’re watching Ourselves.

Josh Radnor 00:17:33  And now image is everything, and it’s proliferated to the point where I even think about, like, the iPhone. You know, I mean, one he points out the apple, right? Like, we all have these devices in our in our pockets that are these apples with a bite out of them. And then the iPhone, the iMac, the iPad, the you know, there’s this kind of I, I, I, I and this recursive kind of loop of images images self images. What does it say about me? What does it say about me? And I am as hooked by this stuff as anyone. I’m not hovering over this as some sort of like angry prophet. I’m in the midst of this negotiation and as I think we all are with image and identity, I think that everyone is dealing with it on some level. It’s not just famous people. Everyone has some persona or a maybe a private self. And then there’s like a public self. I don’t like to create that much of a distinction between the two.

Josh Radnor 00:18:23  Like, I don’t want to have a persona, even though I’m going to be different with my wife than I am on a post on Instagram or something, but I also don’t want to feel like I have this Jekyll and Hyde split in myself. But I think identity is really tricky. And when you become famous and you become famous for a particular role, it just pours fertilizer all over the many things that can be troubling about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:45  Yeah. What you just shared about your brother in law is fascinating. I had never heard that take on the second commandment. I’m a longtime Zen practitioner. Right. And one of the things that we do in Zen is we’re trying to see through this illusion that we are this separate thing. Right. Right. So I’ve always seen the Garden of Eden story as like I’ve been able to see the parallel there like that separateness. But I never thought about the second commandment in images that we create.

Josh Radnor 00:19:14  Yeah. A friend recommended this book by a Sufi mystic. That’s all about music.

Josh Radnor 00:19:19  And in the first paragraph, he says, music is the only form of art that’s not idolatry, because there’s no form. It’s from a transcendent kind of realm. You can’t draw music, you know you can’t capture it. Yeah. You know, I love painting and dance and theater, obviously. I mean, I’m not an anti image person, but I think sometimes when we have an image of ourselves and we are constantly critiquing it and looking at it from all different angles, it takes up a lot of time and energy, but it’s also psychically quite draining when someone has a peak experience. One of the ways that one defines that is a loss of self. Absolutely right that you go away. And Georgiana, my wife has pointed out that like often after those peak experiences, we say I could die now, right? Like you’re resolved enough to the point where you feel like your life has achieved some sort of meaning, that you wouldn’t be haunted by regret, that you’ve seen through it in a Zen sense.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:18  Let’s change directions a little bit. There was a line that you used. I don’t know if it’s a line you’ve used before, or if you just tossed it off, and it’s during the how I Made Your Mother podcast, but you referred to how you view that show and you know your relationship with that character, and you use the phrase the mercy of time. And I just loved that. Did you just kind of toss that off?

Josh Radnor 00:20:43  I think maybe I’ve said that before. I don’t know if it’s like a catchphrase of mine. Yeah, yeah. But I do think that there is a merciful quality at a time. I mean, often we look at time as a bully or a grim reaper, kind of, you know, after us. But at the same time, if you’ve aged, say, and you have a different perspective on your life, if you have more forgiveness for your life or people in your life, if you find yourself less self-conscious, less obsessed with the opinion of other people, that’s all time doing its work.

Josh Radnor 00:21:17  If you’ve ever had grief, if you’ve ever had loss, relationships ending innumerable kinds of heartbreaks to feel not the same way you felt in the aftermath of that and the shrapnel of that. That is the mercy of time, that time. It is a healer in some profound way. So I don’t know. I’m glad I was able to say that. Yes, you can look at this as a goofy sitcom, but it also had some quite deep existential things it was chewing on at the same time.

Eric Zimmer  00:22:00  I think time is so interesting.  I’m here in Denver this week, spending time with my mother, who’s 80, who I spent the last decade of my life with her in Columbus with me, but we moved her out here about a year ago to be near my sister, and she’s in a senior community, so I have been there a lot this week, and you can’t be around old people that much without starting to think about time and the obvious downsides to it, the decaying body and the challenges that come with that.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:26  And I do think time is a healer. And I also think it’s necessary but not sufficient for certain types of healing. Right. Like I do think time will take the sting out of a lot of things, but I don’t think time necessarily gives wisdom, right? But I often look at myself and I think about. You know, I was a homeless heroin addict at 25. I’ve been on a path of recovery since and all this stuff I’ve done. And I look at myself and kind of where I’m at, and I sometimes think to myself how much of how I feel now is all that work that I put in and how much of it is just the fact that I’m, you know, much older now. Right. And time has sort of done its thing to a certain degree.

Josh Radnor 00:23:08  Yeah. Yeah. It’s a really interesting question. I also don’t think time confers wisdom. I mean, I think that you have to accept wisdom. It’s almost like it’s on offer. It’s almost like the library is there.

Josh Radnor 00:23:22  There’s free books Yes. With all the great wisdom, all the greatest stories, all the greatest. Everything. You can go there. You can go there. You can get a library card and you can read it. And I feel like wisdom is kind of like that. It’s floating out there. I think you have to volunteer for it. You have to kind of say, I would like to receive this. And then it almost like picks your antenna up in a different way, so you’re more attuned. We just met. But you strike me as someone like me who loves a good quote, who’s always on the hunt for some new thing that you can kind of throw in the the wisdom backpack and kind of carry it along with you, right? That’s always been really interesting to me. I also think when we’re younger and you’re interested or when you get the sense, okay, I understand that I’m not going to be young forever, like I’m going to age. And, you know, a lot of young people simply don’t believe this.

Josh Radnor 00:24:14  And it’s again, maybe that’s the mercy of youth. Is that you? You don’t know that you’re going to age. You think you’ll be the center of culture forever. And it’s like, no, you won’t. There’ll be another generation come along and your slang is not going to work anymore. It’s going to be like, okay, Boomer, everyone gets okay. Boomer. You know, so but I think if you’re looking because I was always scared of aging, but I always was like, well how do you do it. Well yeah. Like who are the people that I think are doing it? Well, I love this Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, very much. Do you know Richard Rohr? Sure. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:48  I’ve had Richard on several times and visited him and.

Josh Radnor 00:24:51  Yeah, yeah, I listened to yours with Richard. I do remember that. Yeah. So I’ve gotten to spend some time with Richard, and I got to sit with Ram Dass a few times, and there are just these characters that I just say their bodies are betraying them, or Ram Dass is no longer with us.

Josh Radnor 00:25:04  But, you know, he had a stroke that really immobilized him in certain ways. And Richard’s had his health challenges. So the body stuff feels non-negotiable. I mean, you can try to keep the wheels on as long as you can, but there is a kind of sparkle in the eye of someone who Knows something. They’ve gotten to an age and they know something. And they’re not bitter about roads not taken and regrets. And they just seem to have called a truce with the world. You know, I think Richard calls it like, you know. I’ve heard it said like dropping the war with reality, right? Like I’m no longer at war with reality. And I want to be a person who ages with some grace. And I don’t just mean, you know, looking good. Although that would be terrific. But I really mean being the kind of person that a young person would look at and say they look like they know something, or they look like they’re doing it right, or I’d like to get advice from that person.

Josh Radnor 00:25:59  That person seems like they maybe know something.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:01  When I meet old people and interact with old people, it’s always instructive to me because I see like, okay, that’s where I want to go. And I see like, that’s definitely where I don’t want to go. Right. Yeah. And so, like, in the way that my partner’s mother when she had Alzheimer’s. That was a huge wake up call to us. Like, okay, health. Like we can’t prevent it. But there’s a lot of stuff we can do that’s going to make it less likely that we get Alzheimer’s or other things. Yeah. So I think about it in a health sense. I think about it in a sort of old people sort of start to fossilize. So like pushing myself towards new experiences, which gets harder, I think as you age, I just feel it already at 55. And then also, like you said, I think about it emotionally or spiritually. In that way, life is going to get hard from here in some ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:53  Like I know what’s coming, so I need to be training now to the best of my ability so that I’m able to be one of those people that is able to do it with a certain degree of grace, because I can see how easy it would be to not do it gracefully.

Josh Radnor 00:27:07  Yeah, it’s also like wisdom is on offer, but so is cynicism. Yeah. You know, that’s also like an option. You know, there’s again, these are wolves. Right. They’re all wolves. But I always thought it would be such a tragedy to live one of these lives, which I consider a gift. I mean, I’d rather I say in one of my songs, I’d rather be here than not be here. I always thought it would be such a tragedy to get to the end of it and be filled with resentment and bitterness and grievance and, you know, like, I want to get to a place where I am more forgiving, more compassionate, more generous. But, you know, I also don’t want to undersell that.

Josh Radnor 00:27:50  Life is tough, you know? Yeah. It puts up a real fight. You can make a very strong and compelling argument that the world is meaningless and that bad people triumph and good people suffer. And you could compile a lot of data around that. You could make as equally a compelling case about the opposite. Right. Again, these are all wolves like. But I always thought it’s so much more heartening, and it makes the universe for me, so much more inhabitable. To choose the latter? Yeah. To say I believe there’s meaning. I believe there’s a purpose to this thing. I believe that what undergirds this is something benevolent. You know, that doesn’t mean that death isn’t real. It doesn’t mean pain isn’t real. It doesn’t mean that, you know, we’re not going to struggle in myriad ways. But I just have to get my mind sharpened. And it’s a daily practice because I have to forget her. You know, I have that thing that I forget. But, you know, conversations like this help.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:47  Yeah. I think I’m a little bit more existentially turned in that I’m not a believer in any sort of ultimate meaning, but I don’t think that makes life meaningless. I just think it means we need to discover our own meaning and imbue it into our life. But I agree with you 100% about there are different ways to view the world. I mean, you know, the old way of calling it was optimism and pessimism. and that’s an oversimplification. Those are binaries. But there is a view that orients towards the goodness that is in the world, the kindness that is in the world, the beauty that is in the world, the connectivity that is in the world. And if both are true, which I think they are, and we’re making it up, we’re making up the meaning we want to give it, because that is what I think we are largely doing. Then a really good question is like, which is the.

Speaker 4 00:29:38  Most useful.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:39  View, right. Which view is going to be better for me and the people around me in this world? And, and for me, it’s the view that is not cynical.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:48  It’s not pollyannaish either. And that’s where I’d kind of like to take the conversation, because you have a great article on Substack that I really loved, because you you got into perhaps my most pressing question that I think about these days, and it’s this idea that, as you said earlier, dropping the war with reality makes a lot of sense, right? Because reality wins. And we also have a view of ourselves and the world that could be better. And those things sometimes are at odds with each other. And I think a lot about how do you know which of those levers to pull the I should change this lever, I should accept this lever. And I just love to hear you think through that question.

Josh Radnor 00:30:37  Okay, so I have written quite a bit about this in terms of we want to accept there’s a negotiation that has to take place between acceptance and action. Yes. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:46  Exactly what.

Josh Radnor 00:30:47  I’m talking. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, the way I think through this is if I throw a temper tantrum about something in my life or something happening in politics or the world, you know, Anne Lamott, yeah, I think she has some great salty kind of wisdom.

Josh Radnor 00:31:06  And I just, I really like her quite a bit. But she says there’s three types of problems in the world. There’s me problems, you problems and God problems. She calls God problems. Wars, hurricanes, you know, natural disasters, things that are so outside of her ability to actually control and influence. And then you problems are obviously you problems and me problems or me problems. And she says she gets into suffering when she tries to fix God problems and new problems. Right. So that makes a lot of sense to me. That just clarifies things. For me. It’s a bit of a serenity prayer kind of breakdown, you know, what can I control? What can I not control? I try to avoid having temper tantrums around things as they are because like you said, reality wins. But I think we have a much better chance of at least getting called on to participate. If we start with acceptance like just a blanket acceptance like this is how it is right now. And then we look at what we might be able to change in effect and what we can’t.

Josh Radnor 00:32:10  And sometimes you’re going to, you know, try to twist some knobs and it’s not going to work. And other times something will move the needle. But I think starting with like a kind of radical acceptance, it takes me out of some pain. Right? Because the pain is in the resistance. It shouldn’t be this way. Yeah. And then you’re you’re really at war with reality and you’re really in a losing position. You’re just this spec shouting in the Grand Canyon or something for for something to be different.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:38  I love what you said there. The negotiation between acceptance and action. That’s really good because that’s what I think it is. I think often about one of the first guests on the show is a gentleman named Andrew Solomon, and he wrote a book called The Noonday Demon.

Josh Radnor 00:32:53  I read The Noonday Demon. He’s very brilliant. Andrew Solomon, he’s brilliant.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:56  Yeah. He wrote another book called Far From the Tree.

Speaker 4 00:33:00  I read that too.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:01  Yeah, yeah, an amazing book. But what stuck with me through all the years, and this is a decade ago that we first talked about this was he was talking about parents whose children are autistic.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:12  Yeah. And he talked about how hard it is for them because there are some group of people saying, you can change this, you can fix this. Some of that might be snake oil, some of it might be real, some of it. But you can do something. And then there’s the you can’t do anything about this. Right. And you accept it. And if you accept your child for the way they are, maybe that’s just an all around easier case. And what I love that he said is if you know you can’t change something, it’s easy to go about the business of accepting it. Yeah. If you know you can change something, it’s easy to go about the business of changing it. And most of us live in this very difficult middle part. But I think the way you just said it is a really elegant, almost poetic way of saying it’s the negotiation between acceptance and action and that that negotiation in certain situations never get settled. It’s not like you all reach an agreement and it’s done. You live in the negotiation?

Josh Radnor 00:34:11  I think so. And live in the question. But also. Yeah. I think nature is useful to kind of pay attention to. I mean, I lived in California where it was less visible, but I’m back on the East Coast and just watching the seasons happen and watching, you know, the flowers bloom and then fade away in the fall and the leaves fall off the trees, and then the barren and the snow and the and you know, a farmer knows that there’s a time to sow and a time to reap. I think in America especially, or in the West, we have this idea that we should always be growing. Growing, growing. Doing. Doing, doing. It’s almost like disobeying the laws of nature in some fundamental way, because there is a time for rest. I mean, true rest, you know, really gathering another round of information, not more energy. And I try to remember that this might not be a season of change.

Josh Radnor 00:35:06  This might be a season of acceptance. You know this. I didn’t grow up Christian, but a lot of my friends who grew up like in more evangelical circles, they always say, you know, I’m in a real season of doubt or this is a real season of abundance, you know? And I always liked that language. I always thought it was like useful language because it implies that it’s not forever. And again, that’s a mercy.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:43  We’ve referenced suffering a little bit. And you talk about discomfort. Is the doorway as the name of one of your Substack posts? And in it you did something where you put a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. And I was struck by that because I’ve taught this program for years called Wise Habits, and I use a lot of Calvin and Hobbes strips to teach, because I just think there’s so much wisdom in them. Are you also a fan.

Josh Radnor 00:36:08  A casual fan? I had stumbled across that. Happiness isn’t enough for me, I demand euphoria. I think that was exactly.

Josh Radnor 00:36:15  That was the one. Yeah, I stumbled across it and I just pulled it, and I had it in a file of things that kind of delighted me. It’s also something, you know, my friend Hal says about addicts. He says the only emotion acceptable to an addict is euphoria. He says, you know, it’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Where’s my euphoria?

Eric Zimmer 00:36:33  You know? Yes. I’m a lot of years sober and I still laugh because I relate with that. And I love that Calvin cartoon because where it starts is him enjoying a nice day. He’s like, here I am enjoying this nice day. You know, and then he thinks, but I’m not euphoric. Right. And then the last frame says, I can’t remember whether he said I need to stop my mind while I’m still ahead or my mind is out to get me, or something along those lines of like, he’s able to see Knowing what I know about you and your taste, from reading your Substack and looking at a lot of the things you reference.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:08  Calvin and Hobbes, I think, is a deeply, deeply wise strip across the board, and I think it’s one of the more brilliant works of art in humanity, is that.

Josh Radnor 00:37:17  Bill Watterson.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:18  Watterson.

Josh Radnor 00:37:19  Yeah, I think he’s a Kenyon grad. I think he went to my college where I went, okay, there was a lore, kind of Kenyon lore that his senior year he drew cartoons all over the wall. He kind of did like his own Sistine Chapel of cartoons on the wall, and they painted over it. And it’s this kind of like lost masterpiece, like somewhere in a dorm at Kenyon or all these early cartoons.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:44  That’s amazing.

Josh Radnor 00:37:45  But I think he was a philosophy major, and that’s why he called it Calvin and Hobbes. And yeah, yeah, I don’t know, it just really it really struck me. I just thought it was it was a funny thing, you know, that human thing. You know, if a little is good, more is better. Yeah. Can I ask, when did you get sober?

Eric Zimmer 00:38:00  Well, I got sober from heroin in 1994.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:03  Okay. I stayed sober about eight years. Then I started to drink again. And I drank for about three years. Yeah. And then I’ve been sober from that for, like, 17 years. So the vast majority of my adult life has been in sobriety. Yeah. Which I’m very grateful for. In many ways. I’m grateful that. Like, when I start, I just kind of burn the house down pretty quick. And it’s pretty clear, like, okay, something needs to happen, right? Versus like the long goodbye kind of thing.

Josh Radnor 00:38:30  Yep yep yep. Absolutely.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:32  Speaking of Ohio and Bill Watterson, there’s a big cartoon library at OSU, and they have one of the biggest collections of Bill Watterson cartoons in the world. And so you can go visit a little bit of a shrine for me. We talked a little bit about this idea of negotiating acceptance and action. And I think that some of the things I pulled for that came from a post of yours about not minding what happens, which is a Krishnamurti quote.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:00  Yeah. And I wanted to talk about something in particular that you talk about in there, which is you on a Vipassana retreat. Was that just this last December or is it the December before that?

Josh Radnor 00:39:14  No, no, it was last December. Like six months ago. Okay. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:17  Yeah. You open to sort of sharing your experience?

Josh Radnor 00:39:20  Sure. Yeah. I mean, it was a real challenge for me. Like, it was. It was much more challenging. Have you ever done a vipassana?

Eric Zimmer 00:39:27  I have done long, silent retreats. Not a specific vipassana. Unless you consider insight meditation society like Jack Kornfield, Tara Brock.

Josh Radnor 00:39:36  How long are those? Like eight days or nine days?

Eric Zimmer 00:39:39  Yeah. 7 to 8. There’s some weekend ones. Yeah. I’ve mostly done Zen sessions, which are eight days.

Josh Radnor 00:39:46  Okay. Yeah. And that’s total silence.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:48  Total silence. And like you said, no books, you know? Yeah. I’m like, two days into it and I’m like, I’ll give you $100 for a cereal box to read.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:56  You know, like, give me a cereal box to read.

Josh Radnor 00:39:58  I know they had these instructions in the room about how you were supposed to clean your room when you left, and I read those like it was the Talmud or something. Like I was I went so deep on this thing in a fascinating way. It shows you what you’re addicted to in a broader sense, not just about in chemicals or or anything, but really about, like, I’m addicted to words. I’m addicted to information. I’m addicted to the news. I’m addicted to, you know, and I’m also addicted to talking. Like, truly just talking. It was a very fascinating experience and an experiment. It was what it felt like on my psyche. Yeah. And largely I was in an enormous amount of discomfort for for the majority of the time, I would say. But I felt incredibly unmoored and kind of confused about even not being able to say certain, like pleasantries, like in the line at the dining hall, like if you felt like you cut someone off.

Josh Radnor 00:40:56  You just want to say, oh, sorry. Were you here? Do you want to go? Like you couldn’t do any of the, like, little signifiers of we’re in a society and we’re sharing space. I just found it really challenging. I ended up having to talk to the teacher a few times because I was one night I was borderline almost having a panic attack, and then I found I enjoyed these talks and they were only about 4 or 5 minutes long, but I enjoyed being witnessed. The basics of like relational communication are very important to me. And when I was supposed to exist in silence without them, I felt deep grief. I can’t, I don’t know, it was so much harder than I thought it would be. And my meditation practice has been really wonky since I got back.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:43  Interesting.

Josh Radnor 00:41:44  My wife and I were at the Botanic Gardens this morning and we meditated, and it was so nice. And I, I was like, I really want to get back into a practice, but I think I had like a I wasn’t quite trauma, but it was definitely like something got provoked.

Josh Radnor 00:41:57  I had moments of fear. I had moments of grief. I know they say, you know, lots of stuff’s going to come up. But something about it I found very challenging. That said, by the end of it, you know, once you’re allowed to talk for the last day, like I felt like I had been paroled, like I was I was so excited. You know, I went on these long walks up and down this road every single day, like three times a day. I just didn’t know what to do with myself and I. And I saw my monkey mind really, really in action. Yeah. And I saw how I’m in a society. There’s another Krishnamurti quote. It’s no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society. I don’t know if you’ve come across that one. Yeah, yeah. And I am somewhat adapted to this society. I mean, it’s the one I grew up in. It’s like I do fairly well navigating it. And then you take me out of that society, and I don’t have my whatever op eds to read or my books to read or my music to listen to.

Josh Radnor 00:42:54  And I realize, oh, I’m a little bit insane, actually. Like, my mind is so far from being quiet. Although I will say I had a couple of meditations where I had no body, no time. You know that that I did. I did taste that timeless realm. But the getting there, it was rough. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:15  They can be rough. I actually do okay with the silence in groups of people. I’m a little shy, so I actually find it sort of enjoyable to be in companionship and not have to figure out what to say.

Josh Radnor 00:43:28  Yeah. My wife is the same way. She’s done 2 or 3 of a personas, and she always appreciates not having to talk.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:34  Yeah, I like that part. And even when what I’ve learned is when the silence ends, I’ve learned to take myself away. Because it just is. It’s overwhelming to me all of a sudden. But I do like being with the people like that. I mean, it’s not that I want to be alone.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:48  I enjoy the community aspect. I think for me and you said in this post, I think you said that boredom and discomfort are the two emotions you most can’t tolerate. And I think that’s very much me too. And it’s the no reading that just kills me. Yeah. That’s probably the hardest for me because I can entertain myself pretty well with a book. I’ve gone on a couple with the spiritual teacher Adi Asante. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him.

Josh Radnor 00:44:13  Oh, yeah, I know I do. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:14  They do something interesting, which is they give you. It might be 2 or 3 paragraphs of his, and that’s all you’re allowed to read. So you do what you did with the cleaning instructions on the wall. Right. You’re like, I’m reading it. But for me, I descend deep into it, like, since it’s so little to read and I want to read so often, it becomes ultimately certainly a contemplative act, if not a meditative act.

Josh Radnor 00:44:41  Yeah. I also hilariously like I would make my bed as if it was going to be inspected by the military.

Josh Radnor 00:44:47  Like, I would just.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:48  Say anything.

Josh Radnor 00:44:49  You’re trying to give yourself any activity. There were certain days where I just unfolded and folded all my clothes. I didn’t even have that many clothes there, but I just was looking and and it also showed me how addicted I am to action and doing this. You know, I really I was constantly looking for something to actually do. That’s why these walks outside just became like my lifeline.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:12  That’s interesting. I was just thinking how funny it would be if we segue into a commercial for Vipassana retreats, how mad they would be about, like Josh Radnor says that.

Josh Radnor 00:45:23  Well, also, I mean, they’re free. And I loved the Goenka talks at night. You know, they have these pre-recorded talks from Goenka who were I think they were in the earlier mid 90s, these talks, and they’re fantastic and they’re really inspiring. And one of the things he says is we give you a taste of what it’s like to be a monk for ten days. Yeah.

Josh Radnor 00:45:45  We take away the world from you. We give you all your meals. All you’re here to do is be contemplative and sink into this place. My wife tries to remind me. She says, when you came home from that, you were euphoric. But like, two days later, I went into this, like, weird, kind of down depressive state that that didn’t lift for a while. So I’ve been struggling in some ways. I wrote that Substack piece to try to work through what that experience was for me, what it meant, and maybe I’m still working through it as I talk, even. I’m kind of like, oh yeah, I need to do some more processing of that. You know, it was incredibly rewarding, but it was also very hard. And when people say, would you go back? My answer right now is no. You know, I hear wonderful things about like insight and all that.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:30  But yeah, I don’t know if Addy Ashanti is still doing retreats. It turns out that those have been my favorite because they don’t feel like an endurance contest, right? You do have to be quiet.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:42  You can only read this thing, but it doesn’t feel like meditation battle and like you’re meditating for like ten hours a day. You know, he gives a couple talks. He actually does a guided meditation. There’s just a little bit more happening. You still meditate a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it just felt less arduous in the bad way. Not that some difficulty isn’t good, but too much difficulty as you’re reflecting can be too much. Well, we are at the end of our time for this. You and I are going to continue in a post-show conversation, and we’re going to talk about a Substack post that you wrote called Locked Doors. But I’m going to put a slightly different point on it. This conversation is for any of you who wrestle with wanting what you can’t have, which feels like a story of my life up to a certain point. Listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show conversation, ad free episodes, a special episode I do. And to be a supporter of the show, you can go to one.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:40  You feed join. And last thing I’ll say, Josh, if you want a way back into meditation, that feels nice. A friend of mine and one of the best meditation teachers I know, Henry Shukman, has an app called The Way, and it’s really good. It’s just very nice. He’s got a great English accent. It’s just very soothing and wonderful. So anyway, thank you, Josh, for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Josh Radnor 00:48:06  Absolutely. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:08  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:38  One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

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