How to Build Resilience after Heartbreak with Florence Williams

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Florence Williams
Your brain doesn’t really make the distinction between being rejected by love and being sort of cast out of the klan to lie on the savannah and be circled by hyenas. You know, your body registers this as a very threatening state, like a physically threatening state.

00:00:24 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is a repeat guest at the one U Feed podcast. It’s Florence Williams, a journalist, author, and podcaster. She’s a contributor, contributing editor at Outside magazine and a freelance writer for the New York Times, Slate, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and many, many others. Today, Florence and Eric discuss her new book, a personal and scientific journey.

00:01:44 – Eric Zimmer
Hi, Florence. Welcome to the show.

00:01:46 – Florence Williams
Hi, Eric. So great to be here. Thank you.

00:01:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s wonderful to have you back on. We had you on, I don’t know the date. It’s been years at this point. We talked about your last book, which was all about nature. Your current book is called a personal and scientific journey. And you’re just such a great writer. It’s such a well written and beautiful book.

00:02:07 – Florence Williams
Thank you.

00:02:07 – Eric Zimmer
So we’re going to talk about that, but before we do, let’s start like we always do with a parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:45 – Florence Williams
I’ve thought so much through this project about the power of negative emotions. So I had never experienced heartbreak before. And when it happened, it so knocked me off my socks, changed the way my body felt, changed my health, changed the way my cells were functioning. And that’s what really drove me to write this book. So, you know, I had to confront, why is it that uncomfortable emotions are so difficult to deal with? Why do we avoid them? And so the one you feed, you have to make a choice sort of on a daily basis. Like, how are those negative emotions going to play you, and how are you going to play them? And I think it really became a driving kind of pursuit while writing this book.

00:03:30 – Eric Zimmer
I love, are you going to play the emotions or the emotions going to play you? I really like that take because it doesn’t say anything about that. You have to get rid of the emotion, right? Which, you know, it’s not a repression, it’s a relationship. You know, it’s how are you relating to and working skillfully with these difficult things?

00:03:49 – Florence Williams
And, in fact, I would say one of the profound and surprising lessons for me through this process was to sort of embrace the negative emotions while not letting them exactly play me. But they’re the ones who teach you, you know, and they’re sort of what you have to move through in order to grow. And I think I had been living my life pretty differently, you know, before that.

00:04:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So I’m going to ask you to tell a little bit of your story of heartbreak, but I’m curious, were you looking into this at all before it happened to you? Was this on your radar in any way as a writer, as a person who’s looking at different things? Or did it emerge wholly from, like, oh, my God, I’m right in the middle of this, and it’s terrible? What do I do?

00:04:34 – Florence Williams
I have to admit, it wasn’t really on my radar.

00:04:37 – Eric Zimmer
Okay.

00:04:37 – Florence Williams
And in some ways, I feel badly about that, because I have friends, you know, who went through heartbreak at various times, and I don’t think I was the best friend to them. I think I tended to sort of dismiss heartbreak as being sort of the realm of melodrama, a little bit overwrought, you know? Okay, so you got dumped by someone. You know, obviously that person was a loser. Move on.

00:05:00 – Eric Zimmer
That’s right. They’re not the right fit for you. Lots of fish in the sea come on.

00:05:04 – Florence Williams
Yeah. Pick yourself up. Don’t be so dramatic.

00:05:08 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, yep. So tell us a little bit about the events that led you kind of into this.

00:05:14 – Florence Williams
Sure. Well, I met the man who would be my husband when I was 18 years old. It was literally my first day of college, and we dated for seven years, and then we got married, and we were married for 25 years, two kids. And I think, like a lot of long marriages, I mean, there are moments of connection and there are moments of disconnection. And I guess I always had this sort of bedrock faith in it, and I had a desire, really, for it to work. I mean, there were so many things I was attached to about my life, but, you know, he didn’t really feel the same way, unfortunately. And I think often with heartbreak, when there’s a separation like this, a romantic split, one person wants it more than the other, and I was the one who didn’t want it. I was afraid of it. And it also kind of surprised me, honestly. So, you know, at one point, he told me that he wanted to go find his soulmate, you know, and that I wasn’t. It.

00:06:10 – Eric Zimmer
Ouch.

00:06:11 – Florence Williams
Ouch, right? Big ouch. And so I felt that rejection, and I felt that pain really deeply, you know, in my heart, in my stomach, in my pancreas, in my body. I had always thought that heartbreak was something that was in your head. There was a lot of sadness, and that heartbreak was sort of a metaphor. But as I kind of launched my investigation into what was happening to me and why I felt this way, I learned that our bodies really register this kind of pain in ways that I don’t think really get acknowledged or talked about enough.

00:06:46 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And we’ll go into that. I certainly like you. I have a history, I guess, unlike you. You’ve got sort of the one heartbreak. I’ve got a whole string of them.

00:06:56 – Florence Williams
I’m sorry.

00:06:57 – Eric Zimmer
You know. Well, it’s interesting. The biggest one was to my ex wife, mother of my son. And I look back on that as both the most difficult period of my life and perhaps the most fertile period of my life for so many things. There was so much opportunity for transformation in it. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

00:07:19 – Florence Williams
Yes, I. I can really relate to that. Do you think, Eric, that it gets easier, that heartbreak gets easier the more you go through it? Or does it get harder? Is it cumulative? I’ve only had one big heartbreak, so I still don’t know the answer to that.

00:07:30 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a great question. I don’t think it gets easier. Well, no, I don’t think it gets easier. I do think there is a cumulative nature. You talk about this in the book, which is that the problem with heartbreak, unlike, say, death. Right. That kind of grief that comes from that is there is a element of I must not be lovable. That’s embedded in it. And when that happens multiple times, it’s almost as if you’re like, well, see more evidence. You know, I’ve got. I’ve got multiple pieces of evidence to back up this theory. Yeah. And it’s so interesting. I have been in a really good relationship with Ginny listeners. I’ve heard her on the show, and it’s been, I think, six plus years, and it’s been really good, and they’ve been six great years for me as far as my own development and all that. And I kind of wonder, like, how would I handle heartache now, heartbreak now? And I think the answer is it would still be extraordinarily painful, regardless of beast. I just don’t think it’s something that you evolve past.

00:08:32 – Florence Williams
I wonder, though, I guess the hope would be that at some point you don’t buy that story anymore of not being good enough.

00:08:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think there’s that, and I think there’s the other element. That is an interesting question to think about, which is how much of how strongly I am affected by heartbreak has to do with things that have happened to me in the past that haven’t been healed.

00:08:56 – Florence Williams
That’s right. That’s right. I think that’s one of the things you learn. Yes, yes. It all comes back around.

00:09:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So I’d like to think if it happened again, I would be in better shape because I had healed a lot of things. But I still think, based on the way we’re wired up, that it would be very painful. So let’s talk about that. You know, one of the things you said you thought heartbreak or sadness was something that was in your brain as if it didn’t exist. But what we know, and you point out, I’m going to let you elaborate on, is that that sort of pain triggers the same places in the brain that actual, real physical pain does.

00:09:30 – Florence Williams
Yeah, that’s right. I set out to talk to neuroscientists and immunogeneticists and psychologists to find out sort of why our bodies get so kind of implicated in our emotions. And one of the things I learned, there’s been so much research on people who fall in love and the neurotransmitters associated with falling in love. I think it’s kind of probably a fun research area.

00:09:54 – Eric Zimmer
Your subjects are all happy.

00:09:56 – Florence Williams
You know, your subjects are happy. It’s all sunny. But I spoke early on to Helen Fisher, who is a biological anthropologist, and she has scanned the brains of dumped people. And while they’re looking at pictures, actually, of their sort of rejecting departing beloved. And she found that the parts of the brain that get activated are similar. Not exactly similar, but basically the same, you know, very similar to where we process physical pain. And also parts of the brain light up that are associated with craving and addiction.

00:10:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:10:32 – Florence Williams
You know, just because someone stops loving you doesn’t mean you stop loving them. And your body on some level, kind of misses them and notes their absence and registers that absence. And you sort of want that back. You want those brain chemicals back, if not the person itself.

00:10:47 – Eric Zimmer
Right. And in the book, you mentioned multiple times, there’s this profound feeling of not being safe.

00:10:54 – Florence Williams
Yes.

00:10:55 – Eric Zimmer
That happens when you’re dumped. The early stages of it, for me, they feel a little bit like panic.

00:11:01 – Florence Williams
Absolutely.

00:11:02 – Eric Zimmer
I wouldn’t call it a full panic attack, but it is a, to use a word you’ve got in the book, hyper vigilance. Right?

00:11:07 – Florence Williams
Yeah. You feel deeply imperiled. And it makes sense because if you think about sort of how we evolved as mammals, we are supposed to feel safety in numbers. We form deep attachments that drive our every sort of behavior. And when your primary attachment partner takes off, you literally feel alone. Your brain doesn’t really make the distinction between being rejected by love and being sort of cast out of the clan to lie on the savannah and be circled by hyenas. You know, your body registers this as a very threatening state, like a physically threatening state. And so that starts this cascade of stress hormones, norepinephrine, you know, that. Then talk to our cells, talk to our organs, talk to our immune systems where white blood cells get made in our bone marrow. And they’re designed to be very responsive to our environment and it turns out to our social state. One of the researchers I talked to said, you know, our cells listen for loneliness, and when they detect it, boy, they really kick into high gear because it’s not a place where we are supposed to live for a long time.

00:12:18 – Eric Zimmer
Right. So let’s talk about some of the things that heartbreak slash loneliness does to the body. You know, we know how it feels. We can register the pain, but there are changes throughout the body that occurred. You notate a lot of them in the book. So I wonder if you could just elaborate on a couple of them.

00:12:37 – Florence Williams
Yeah, I mean, that feeling of sort of near panic or hypervigilance sets off some very specific symptoms. For example, sleeplessness, agitation, difficulty digesting, because your body’s sort of gearing up for some kind of, you know, fight or flight. For me, it was a lot of weight loss. My blood sugars were sort of messed up. I mean, deeply messed up. My gut bacteria was messed up. I ended up with an autoimmune diagnosis some months after the split. That was type one diabetes. And what I learned from talking to researchers is that sometimes these autoimmune diseases do, in fact, have an emotional trigger. They are made worse by inflammation. And inflammation is kind of the key. So when I talked to a psychologist at the University of Arizona, David Spara, he said to me, you know, the story of divorce is an inflammation story. You know, I had never heard that before. And so then I met with a researcher at UCLA, and we actually analyzed my genetic markers, my transcription factors, which are basically signatures for inflammation. And we did this at various time points after the separation. And that became kind of one of the central threads of the book, kind of looking at how my cells were responding to loneliness and how they were responding to different science based interventions that I was very eager to try in this sort of urgent bid to feel better, to feel healthier.

00:14:02 – Eric Zimmer
I love that aspect of the book. You’ve got biomarkers that you’re trying to sort of pay attention to to see what’s working, what’s not, in addition to just the. The correlation and making the correlation to how I’m actually feeling. Right. And I think that naturally, a lot of us will emerge from heartbreak and hopefully start going, all right, what’s this next phase of my life look like? And we start adding and building things in which I think is a natural process, and you go through it. And I just love that you’re also bringing the science along with it. You know, it’s interesting, when you said that the story of divorce is an inflammation story, there’s also. You’re talking about heart health at a different point in the book. One of the people you quote, the tragedies of life are largely arterial. So there’s actual heart aspects to this also.

00:14:51 – Florence Williams
Yeah. It’s so fascinating to me that, you know, for millennia, cultures across time have known that the heart is in some ways the seat of the emotions, probably because it’s, you know, one of the few organs we can actually feel. We can feel it pumping.

00:15:05 – Eric Zimmer
I.

00:15:05 – Florence Williams
We know it stops sometimes, you know, during crises. And people have known for a long time, too, that, you know, of course, husbands and wives sometimes die within a couple of days of each other or within months of each other because their heart stop. But it was only in the 1990s that researchers in Japan were able to start imaging the heart during heart failure to see that people were coming into the hospital with sort of symptoms of heart attack, but there was no sign of an arterial blockage, which is. Is kind of the standard cause of a heart attack. Instead, these people were experiencing this weird distension of the left ventricle quadrant of the heart. So it was like ballooning out and then being unable to pump correctly. And they named it Takeatsubo, after a lobster pot, which has this very bulbous head and a narrow neck. So it looked like this quadrant of the heart. So it’s the stress hormones, like adrenaline, landing on receptors in the heart and causing it to just literally balloon out like that and sort of freak out. So we know now that takeotsubo makes up about 5%, probably, of all heart failures, you know, showing up in the hospital. About 5% of those cases will result in death. Another 20% will result in, you know, continued sort of cardiac risk. And we know that especially middle aged, postmenopausal women are about 80% of the patients, which is kind of interesting. So there seems to be something protective about the estrogen sort of counteracting that adrenaline. But we know that people suffer this kind of heart failure after the death of a spouse or the death even of a pet. Sometimes it’s after the death of a sports team that you’re particularly. There are cases in the literature men suffering this when their sport team loses the World cup. And sometimes it just seems to happen, you know, for no known reason. But this is really interesting. There are cases that really spike after natural disasters when there’s a lot of, you know, adrenaline that makes sense. And there’s just recently a new study showing that cases have spiked during the pandemic, during COVID Interesting, especially in women.

00:17:16 – Eric Zimmer
Interesting. So do we know of any things that make any factors that make us more susceptible to the really damaging effects of heartbreak or of having, like, heartbreak tear us up more? Is there anything that sort of says, like, people like this or have had this happen or this sort of thing are more likely to have, like, just heartbreak, to feel catastrophic versus people who might say, well, you know, yeah, I mean, again, I’m not saying anybody’s gonna be like, well, big deal, right. But I seem to be one of those people. For whatever reason, it was earth shattering to me.

00:17:53 – Florence Williams
Yeah, right.

00:17:54 – Eric Zimmer
And I had friends who, yeah, it was painful, but it did not seem to just devastate them in the same way it did me. And I just don’t know. Is there anything that explains that sort of difference?

00:18:06 – Florence Williams
Yes, you know, we know that there are personality traits that seem to make people both more resilient and a little bit less resilient. You know, the data is not destiny here. But in general, people who, on personality tests, you know, sort of register as being a little bit more neurotic, a little bit more introspective, a little bit more anxious, you know, sort of tend to ruminate and cognitively engage, you know, with their emotions, are going to be harder hit, you know, by some of these emotional blows. And also, we know that people who’ve had early life traumas and childhood traumas are going to be more susceptible, you know, to future challenges. But I was so encouraged to talk to Florence Williams at the University of Utah, who said, you know, yes, we know heartbreak is really hard, and we know that especially, you know, people who split up after these long term relationships and divorces. Do you have higher risk for early death? They have higher risk for depression. They have higher risk for metabolic disease, for cardiac disease? I mean, it’s kind of a grim litany, frankly. But we also know that there are certain traits that make you more resilient. And this was the really heartwarming news to me. You can actually cultivate some of those traits and try to become better at them. And the one that was surprising to me and changed the trajectory of my whole reporting over the two or three years of this book was, she said, the people who can really engage with beauty, people who can experience awe on a regular basis, who can cultivate awe, these are the people who seem to be able to make more meaning and sense of their tragedies. They can create more connections between their frontal cortex, which is kind of their seat of their self concept, and their sensory and motor parts of their brains, in a way that that helps them create meaning, helps them find perspective, helps them experience conflicting emotions like, yes, utter pain, but also, wow, joy and beauty and possibility. The people who might be able to find a kernel of optimism in that, that became true for me during the course of my journey. So I just glommed onto that as life saving advice. Not only could I experience beauty, but she was telling me that I could get a. Get better at it.

00:21:02 – Eric Zimmer
The trait you’re describing is often considered on a standard personality test. How open are you to new things? Right. How open are you in general?

00:21:11 – Florence Williams
Yes.

00:21:11 – Eric Zimmer
And there’s a lot of people that say, you know, where you land on that personality test is sort of where you are. Like, these things don’t move. Right.

00:21:19 – Florence Williams
They don’t tend to move much.

00:21:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You’re stating that you’re either introverted or you’re not right? Yeah. And so, you know, openness to new experience and the ability to find beauty, you’re saying, is trainable. What are some of the ways to do that?

00:21:34 – Florence Williams
Well, she’s a huge fan of starting early. So, for example, childhood art education. You know, it’s just tragedy, really, that we don’t have more of this, you know, in our schooling system in the United States. But this kind of developing an appreciation for art and for beauty is a lifelong gift that’s going to help you survive totally the blows of life. And so, you know, wonderful if we could start that early. But with things like awe and beauty, you know, it’s sort of like a mindful practice. You can go out, you know, around your block and you can say, okay, I’m going to find some things that are beautiful on this walk around my block, and I’m going to look at this flower. There’s a way to sort of, and I love this micro dose awe that I learned about from a study that I participated in where there’s an acronym for awe, awe, where the a is attention. So, you know, on your walk or as you’re going through life or even inside your house, you know, if you have a house plant or you have an incredible meal or you’re looking at your baby, you know, attend. Right? Just pay attention to that. And of course, philosophers talk about this all the time, that attention is love and love is attention. You know, don’t space out while you’re looking at this beautiful blossom. And then the w is for weight, so stay with it. Stay with that attention. And the e is just exhale just two breaths.

00:23:02 – Eric Zimmer
Say that last one again.

00:23:04 – Florence Williams
Exhale, exhale. You know, so you may be staying with this moment of Beauty for a couple of breaths. You know, it’s like a 1 minute practice. And if you do it a couple times a day, there is some emerging data showing that it really does improve people’s well being. It improves their moods. It improves their feeling of purpose in their lives. It gives them some perspective. We know that the science of awe is so interesting also relatively new field of study. But in the presence of something beautiful, we are kind of naturally pulled out of our own thoughts. Our rumination sort of stops dead for a minute when the moon comes up or when we notice the owl in front of us on the path or whatever it is. And I’ve had that experience where I’ve been just so lost in some kind of conversation that I’m thinking about that I had. And then this owl jumped out in front of me on the trail, and it was like, whoa. Completely stopped thinking about what I was thinking about. I felt the presence of something beyond myself. Right. And that in itself is an incredibly helpful just feeling of connection and perspective.

00:24:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I love that acronym usage. And I love the idea of the weight and the exhale. Reminds me of Rick Hansen, who talks about a practice taking in the good, which is pretty much the same thing. If you’re HavInG a good experience, stay with it a little bit. Give it. Savor it. Give it a little more attention. There are other attentional exercises that I think can be very helpful in this regard, too, which is things like, you know, I often play with seeing the edges of everything.

00:24:46 – Florence Williams
What would be an example of that?

00:24:48 – Eric Zimmer
Well, if I’m looking out my window right now, I mean, I’ve looked out this window 10,000 times. Right. And what we know, you know, about the brain’s sort of predictive nature, right. Is that there are. Some people believe that I’m not even really registering what’s out there at some level. Right. My brain is sending down a prediction of what it expects to see. My senses are sending up what they do see, and if they match, I never have to process it. So something like looking at the edges would just be like, let me look at the edge of everything I see. Where are the edges of that building? Where are the edges of that tree? It just causes me to have to actually look.

00:25:26 – Florence Williams
That’s interesting.

00:25:27 – Eric Zimmer
Or you could do this with color. You know, let me see all the green that’s out there. It’s a way for me of. I think, of actually looking.

00:25:36 – Florence Williams
Yeah. And it pulls you into some kind of process that’s not about your head, your thoughts.

00:25:42 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that’s right. Now, the thing that you’re talking about, though, is the element that goes a little bit beyond that, which is how do you then go from that sort of mechanical thing into a little bit more of a state of almost appreciation. Right. But as they say, I think Mary Oliver said it best. Right. That attention is the beginning of devotion. Right.

00:26:05 – Florence Williams
There you go. Yep.

00:26:06 – Eric Zimmer
You know, so how do we devote ourselves to something? We pay attention to it. And I think, you know, my Zen training talks so much about this, about just the ordinary thing. If you give it enough attention, it will come alive.

00:26:17 – Florence Williams
And I think you do get better at it the more you do it.

00:26:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:26:22 – Florence Williams
For example, I’m during the pandemic, one of my little rituals, when I, you know, we all felt so housebound and isolated, and I would walk every night to go look at the sunset. And it just became, you know, this automatic part of my day. It’s like, oh, time for the sunset. I’m gonna run, run down the street and go look at the sunset. And it’s, when you do that, it’s impossible not to sort of drink it in, you know, like this bomb it just, you. You become better at doing it, I think.

00:26:49 – Eric Zimmer
So you found over that time that you began to develop the skill of appreciating the sunset more.

00:26:55 – Florence Williams
Yeah. And really trying to sort of access the awe in it as well.

00:26:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:00 – Florence Williams
To find myself stilled by that beauty.

00:27:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:04 – Florence Williams
And then the other interesting thing that happened is that there were a number of my neighbors doing the same thing. And so, you know, I would see the same people every night and I felt closer to them. You know, I didn’t know them, but pretty soon I did and we would say hello. And so it became not just this personal awe experience, but it became a collective awe experience, which was incredibly comforting and, you know, a really nice anecdote to loneliness. If you can experience that kind of unselfing in the presence of other people, it sort of amplifies it, I think.

00:27:39 – Eric Zimmer
So it sounds like you had a location that multiple people agreed was an optimal place to watch a sunset from. Is that accurate? Yeah.

00:27:47 – Florence Williams
So I live in Washington, DC, and I’m about, I don’t know, five blocks or so from the bluffs overlooking the Potomac river. So it’s one of the few places where you actually can get a little bit of a vista.

00:27:59 – Eric Zimmer
Got it.

00:27:59 – Florence Williams
It looks west and there’s the sunset. Wow. I mean, it just, you know, some nights it was. It was lame, but usually it was pretty great.

00:28:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah. So let’s move into. Now we’ve talked about what heartbreak is, how difficult it is for us, the things it does to us. Let’s talk about where did you start to turn for healing? I don’t think we’re going to get through all of it, but maybe, you know, highlight a few key places.

00:28:26 – Florence Williams
Sure. I became so motivated to try to do what was kind of science based in my kind of urgent bid to get healthier. And so I turned, per this conversation with Florence Williams, I turned to spending a lot of time in nature trying to focus on beauty. I went on a wilderness trip to even try to kind of crank up the volume on the awe and the immersion. So I embarked on a 30 day wilderness trip. I did half of it alone, which had kind of some unexpected results, I would say. Actually it was good in some ways. It was not as helpful in other ways. I did some EMDR therapy, which is supposed to be good for emotional trauma, and there’s some interesting emerging research about that. And I did some psychedelics, actually working with a clinician in a therapeutic setting, again, to, I would say, heightened the awe kind of dose that I was trying to go for. And there’s a lot of science there, of course, and it was really helpful to me.

00:29:23 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s start with nature. You wrote a book called the Nature Fix, which was all about how nature is healing for us and critical for us as humans. Did you find yourself naturally just. I guess that’s a funny sentence, naturally turning into nature, like you just kind of knew it and you went to it? Or was it a case of sort of having to rediscover that?

00:29:43 – Florence Williams
I was so primed already to think that nature could be helpful. Having written the nature fix, I felt like I was leaning on every lesson I learned from that book, not just because, you know, the subtitle of that book was how to be health, happier, healthier, and more creative. Now I felt like I needed it to survive. You know, it was a whole different level of kind of need. And so it was an intuitive place for me to try to seek help. But in that book, I only talk about sort of the dose curve of nature immersion up to three days. Like, I end the book with the so called three day effect. It talks about the interesting things that happen to your. Your brain and your body after three days outside. And I felt like, okay, but I feed a lot more than three days because this is a really big heartbreak. I’m going to go for 30 days.

00:30:32 – Eric Zimmer
So what were the aspects of that that felt really healing? And what were the aspects of that that felt more challenging?

00:30:38 – Florence Williams
Well, I did half of the trip with other people and half of the trip alone. So the first half was the half with other people. And, you know, for me, I loved the planning the trip. Even the logistics of an expedition can actually pull you out of kind of the limbic parts of your brain and force you to sort of be really cerebral in a way that’s helpful. Right. To deep emotions. And then I also just wanted to spend good times with my friends and family. I felt so much comfort from being surrounded by them. I had all of these friends and family who signed on, and so I felt very supported by them. They were helping me kind of self actualize, but also, they just also really liked being on the river. And so it was kind of a lot of jolly times. Say it was sort of jolly and fun.

00:31:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:31:25 – Florence Williams
And then everyone disappeared and it was like, okay, now I’m going to do the really deep work here. I’m going to learn how to be alone because I have not ever in my life been alone since I met my husband when I was 18. I’m going to learn to access bravery since I’m scared of this future that looks so different and so feel so insecure. I wanted to feel the metaphor of paddling from one destination to another tell.

00:31:55 – Eric Zimmer
Listeners about what the trip was real quick.

00:31:57 – Florence Williams
Yeah, so it was 30 days down the green river in Utah, starts in southwestern Wyoming, and then flows through a lot of Utah to merge with the Colorado river in Canyonlands National park. It’s one of the sort of premier river trips you can do in the United States where you can be on the river for that long. You know, most of it is through public land. So you need a series of permits to go through these different canyons. There are different permitting agencies, including indian reservation. So it’s, you know, it’s logistically complicated for the solo piece. I was in Canyonlands National park for most of that. Also some Bureau of Land Management land. And so there’s only one resupply point in that two weeks, one road that goes in. So I had to sort of line that up, you know, plan the food. And I felt like I just needed to mark this passage in my life by doing something kind of grand and something that would carry me through this passage into what I thought would be kind of a better story of myself as literally the pilot of my own boat. Metaphors were just irresistible to me.

00:33:11 – Eric Zimmer
And so what were the good and bad parts of those 15 days?

00:33:15 – Florence Williams
I think that I did access a lot of bravery. I think I felt like, okay, I can be alone. I can take care of myself. I can be self reliant. But I also had this realization that I don’t want to be, that I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to take care of myself. I learned that. And it’s just through the absence of having other people around me that the value of having other people around you is to help you not feel so bad about yourself. You know, that if you tend to go down these dark rabbit holes, it’s the company of people you love who help pull you out of that. You know, it’s one of the tremendous values of our social, you know, instincts. But, you know, beyond that, we are healthiest when we don’t just rely on ourselves. It’s kind of our cellular superfuel as a species that we do help each other. And so if we deny ourselves that opportunity, we’re just not going to kind of hit our real potential, I think. And those were all big revelations for me because I don’t think I had wanted to rely on other people so much. I think I did want to kind of embrace this kind of self reliance. You know, this is the myth that we’re all sort of fed from such an early age. I also wanted to connect with people through dark emotions. You know, I think I had been taught that dark emotions aren’t necessarily something you want to share with other people. Nobody’s comfortable with them. Let’s just put on a happy face and keep going. And I found myself so resisting that and wanting to sort of have more authentic connections with people in my life that necessarily involved expressing that.

00:35:18 – Eric Zimmer
I think earlier on, and this is certainly my journey also in this, which was earlier on my view of spiritual development, of getting healthier, of being psychologically well, all that was kind of. There was an element of self reliance in it, and there was an element of psychologically healthy people don’t need other people. Right. Sort of a codependency. Right. The opposite of codependency. Codependency was saying, you know, you lean on other people too much, you care too much what they think, it’s what rules your life. That’s a problem. And certainly it can be. But more and more, I’m seeing people talking about the fact that we are social creatures that do need each other, and there is a healthy way to do that. Not only is there a healthy way to do it, it is healthier for us to do it, to find connection and that we thrive best in connection with other people. And it just seems that that is a theme that is coming up more and more.

00:36:25 – Florence Williams
I love it that people are talking about this more. And in some ways, I think one of the silver linings of the pandemic is that we have realized the value of connection more, and we’ve kind of fallen on our knees a little bit and said, yeah, this is a hard time. Let’s talk about mental health. I think those are really, really positive developments, but I also worry about, especially younger people now who do consider themselves the loneliest demographic, which is so interesting. They’re the most anxious, they’re the most lonely. They’re the most concerned about their mental health. I worry about them, and I think that they live in very challenging times where they are not making the authentic connections, maybe that we sort of grew up with in the absence of the Internet, in the absence of social media.

00:37:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I think there’s another element to that that I think is interesting, which is there’s an idea out there that stress becomes stress when you perceive it to be harmful to you. Or let me say that differently, stress becomes harmful when you perceive it to be harmful. Harmful. Right.

00:37:30 – Florence Williams
Right.

00:37:30 – Eric Zimmer
And I’m going to make another analogy, which is sleep, right? I’ve rebelled a little bit in my own head and with people close to me a little bit with what I refer to as the sleep police, right. Because now everybody is saying, like, you’ve got to get 8 hours of sleep or, you know, you’ll, you’ll get the bubonic plague next week, right? Which I get the over correction saying, look, this is really important, but I have restless leg syndrome. And when it kicks in, I don’t sleep well. Well. And so now I’m not sleeping well. And all I’m hearing all the time is how destructive it is to me that I’m not sleeping well. And I worry that all this research about how bad it is to be lonely could be doing the same thing to people who are already lonely. And now they’re being added to that is, oh God, how bad is it for me to be lonely? And to the extent that any of those things help us take positive change, to the extent that the sleep police help somebody to go, you know what? This 5 hours of sleep nonsense I’m doing isn’t really a good idea. I should put more effort into getting sleep really positive. To the extent that knowing how destructive loneliness is to us helps us move towards positive direction, I think it’s helpful. But I worry about a tipping point with all this stuff.

00:38:51 – Florence Williams
I think you’re right, but loneliness is such an interesting emotion because it’s subjective. So you can be in a marriage and feel lonely. You can live in a house full of people and feel lonely. And yet it seems to have a very highly adapted reason, which is that it is a signal. The feeling of loneliness tends to make us feel like there’s something we don’t have that we want. There’s a disconnect between what we want and what we have. And by noticing that and feeling it, it actually is supposed to, I think, propel behavior drives us to seek a little bit of comfort or a little bit of connection. The irony though, is that if you feel lonely for too long, it kind of does the opposite. It makes it harder for you to have connection because you’re more suspicious of other people. You maybe feel worse about yourself. It’s one of these emotions, sort of like heartbreak, that I think exists for a reason, but it can also kind of morph into something more destructive if it lasts for too long.

00:39:54 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a really great point. It turns into something that’s harder to get out of the longer you’re in it.

00:39:59 – Florence Williams
Right.

00:40:00 – Eric Zimmer
And what I find really interesting is, you know, you just stated something, which is that kids these days, you know, teenagers, are considered the loneliest. Now, forever, it’s been senior citizens. Right. Senior citizens were, you know, it was just very clear they were the loneliest. And we understand why. Right. Their partners are passing away. Their friends are passing in a way. They don’t have a job. Right. They’re isolated in ways. But it is sort of stunning that kids feel that way now. I’m not even sure what to do with that information.

00:40:30 – Florence Williams
I don’t know either, but I think we need to pay attention to it. I’m really concerned about it.

00:40:34 – Eric Zimmer
Me, too. I’m concerned that the people who generally have the most energy to solve that problem don’t feel like they can solve it. You know, youth does have an energy of, I feel like, the ability to make things happen. And I get. When you’re 70, it’s much harder to be like, all right, I’m going to go to three social events today. Right. You’re tired, but when you’re 18, that’s a different thing. And so, yeah, I’m with you. I find it somewhat alarming.

00:41:02 – Florence Williams
Yeah. It’s why I feel, frankly, so motivated to talk about the things that can help build resilience, such as authentic connection to other people, but also to the natural world. You know, I really do believe that by helping young people connect to nature, by helping them get out of their own anxieties a little bit, you know, I do very strongly feel that it’s part of the solution.

00:41:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I do, too, 100%. I remember my last bad heartbreak, and I remember exactly what I did. I just made a last minute decision to go to this nature retreat in Ohio for, like, four days. And it’s basically. It’s entirely off grid. You’re by yourself more or less, except meals are provided for you. And it was transformative for me. It kicked off something really valuable in my life. And, you know, nature was certainly a big part of that. So I think that is one path. And did your research lead you into other paths out of loneliness for people?

00:42:00 – Florence Williams
Yes. So, you know, I told you that we did this experiment where we looked at my white blood cells for markers of inflammation and also for markers of virus fighting ability, which is something you really want when you’re going into a pandemic.

00:42:15 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:42:17 – Florence Williams
With this researcher, Steve Cole, who has, in fact, done a lot of interventions with populations where he’s looked at their immune cells and how they may improve after, for example, they try Zen meditation or after they try volunteering in schools. And what he has found is that where he sees the best improvements in people’s immune cells immune profiles is not necessarily when they report feeling happier or kind of more mirthful or they’re able to seek more pleasure. He says that he sees the biggest improvements when they feel like they have meaning in their lives and purpose in their lives. And that’s not the same thing as waking up every morning, you know, feeling amused, totally, and sort of, you know, calm. It’s this kind of larger. Right. North Star. And so I thought that was fascinating and also not something that we hear of as an antidote to heartbreak or an antidote to loneliness. You know, it’s not necessarily being with other people. It’s feeling like you’re doing something worthwhile, like, there is a why that you are answering in your life. And eventually, ideally, that will lead to feelings of connection with other people.

00:43:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. My experience. I mean, I have sort of a close, firsthand experience with that, which was in AA, which was a big part of my life for a long time. That was the foundational element. Right. Which was to work with other people who were struggling with what you were struggling. And that’s not exactly what you’re saying, but what it was was purpose, it was service, and it was connection.

00:43:49 – Florence Williams
Exactly.

00:43:50 – Eric Zimmer
The line that I remember was nothing. So much ensures immunity from drinking than working with another alcoholic. There’s some AA people out there who are gonna be like, you didn’t quite get that. But it’s close. It’s close. And so, yeah, I agree. I think that’s so important. The other thing I’ve been thinking about, I think a lot about how do people build community? How do people go from being lonely? You know, how does this happen? And one of the things I’ve realized recently is that it’s not that I realized. I found some research recently that said, you know, in order to make connection with a new person, right? So if you’ve already got existing connections, right. Nurture them. Right. But if you need to make new ones, you’re just like, I just don’t have any in my life, or I have very few, and I need to make new ones. It takes a lot of time it does, yeah. And so what I see a lot of people doing, and I’ve done this in the past, is I go, all right, you know what? I got to find some connection. I’m going to go to the local meditation group because I’m interested in meditation. There’ll be people there that are like me, and that’s how I’m going to do it. And I go once or twice and I don’t feel connected because that’s not how it works. And so then I go, this isn’t working, and I give up. Or I do a volunteer thing that only happens once or twice, and that’s not enough time either. So one of the things that I’ve been talking with people about is really saying, you know what? Pick a couple things. But it’s going to take a commitment. It’s going to take, I’ve got to keep going even when I’m uncomfortable, even when I feel like I don’t fit in even in the beginning, because it just takes a certain number of hours. The research is different on how long it is, and I’m always skeptical of, like, 21 days to a new habit. Right. It’s so variable. So it takes more than seeing somebody twice for an hour.

00:45:35 – Florence Williams
That’s right. And I think that there are other ways to connect and to feel connection. I mean, you know, face to face with other people is one way. It’s a great way. But you can have a meaningful connection with a pet. You can have meaningful connection. And I’m really big on this with nature. You know, if you have a sort of favorite spot or a couple of spots where you can go where you get to know the seasons and you get to know the birds and you get to know, you know, the patterns of the water or the rocks. You know, it sounds a little goofy to say it, but I think there’s some compelling research here showing that when people can feel connected to the natural world, it can be a great antidote, actually, for loneliness.

00:46:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. I think that’s a really important point to kind of keep coming back to. It’s not only other people. There are lots of ways to connect. And even back to what we were talking about earlier around beauty and art, I have deep connections to pieces of art, pieces of music, things that do feel like connection, they are valued.

00:46:36 – Florence Williams
So I guess, like the great trifecta, you know, to sort of sum it up, the great trifecta of kind of heartbreak antidote or loneliness antidote seems to be this sort of beauty plus connection plus purpose. I think it’s very hard to rely too much on one of those over the other. It seems to be, you know, in combination seems to be sort of a pathway into ultimately feeling a sense of belonging, feeling like the things that you do matter, and ultimately, of course, increasing your capacity for love, which is really what it’s all about.

00:47:11 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I can’t think of a more beautiful place to just kind of wrap up. That was a great summary there. Beauty, purpose and connection. I want to take a second and let you share a little bit about. There’s an audio version of your book, which I think is really exciting. One of the things that’s so great about so many of these books like yours is you talk to so many interesting people and we get you sort of giving us that in the writing, but I think in the audiobook, we can actually hear these people, right?

00:47:40 – Florence Williams
Yeah. Thanks so much for asking about that. I’m really proud of this audiobook that we made. That’s very unusual. As I went around reporting the research for this book, I had my tape recorder and I taped everyone I talked to. I also taped myself in an audio journal. I taped my friends. I taped my therapist. And so when we made the audiobook, we decided to actually pull that tape into the book. So it’s not just me reading the text, it’s actually these real conversations layered in as well as really beautiful music and sound design. And so it feels like a very immersive, I think, audio experience, and I hope people will check it out.

00:48:19 – Eric Zimmer
And it sounds like a lovely companion for being heartbroken.

00:48:24 – Florence Williams
I hope so. You know, I really wanted the book to be hopeful because I think that heartbreak is, you know, as difficult as it is, it is a path to transformation and how lucky that we can get that 100%.

00:48:37 – Eric Zimmer
Well, Florence, thank you so much for coming back on. It is always a pleasure to talk with you.

00:48:42 – Florence Williams
You too, Eric. Thank you so much for having me.

00:49:00 – Chris Forbes
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