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In this episode, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, discusses how to escape the goal trap by embracing curiosity and using “tiny experiements.” Most advice about self-improvement assumes you know where you’re going, but what if you don’t? Anne-Laure suggests that’s not a flaw, it’s actually the starting point. Her new book, Tiny Experiments, offers a way to explore change without chasing outcomes. In our conversation, we talk about curiosity as a guide, how to stay engaged in uncertainty, and what it means to choose persistence.

Key Takeaways:

• Importance of curiosity and exploration in personal growth
• Conducting small experiments to challenge the status quo
• Embracing uncertainty and learning from emotions
• Distinction between passive and active acceptance of challenges
• The concept of “field notes” for self-reflection and observation
• Understanding and labeling emotions to reduce anxiety
• Addressing procrastination through curiosity and exploration
• The iterative process of growth loops and adjusting one’s trajectory
• The significance of taking actionable steps in the present
• Developing mini protocols or “pacts” for personal experimentation

Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, former Googler and founder of Ness Labs, writes to 100k+ about evidence-based ways to achieve more without sacrificing your health – a topic dear to her after trying to schedule a life-saving surgery around her corporate calendar to avoid letting up on her goals. She’s been in Forbes, Refinery29, and Entrepreneur, and her new book is Tiny Experiments.

Connect with Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Website | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, check out these other episodes:

The Power of Visualization to Achieve Your Goals with Emily Balcetis

Why We Stop Noticing What Matters and How to Feel Alive Again with Tali Sharot

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Episode Transcript:

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:00:00  You actually don’t need to overhaul your entire life in order to reconnect with curiosity, with exploration, with being open to uncertainty, with those liminal spaces. You just need to conduct very small little experiments where you question the way you’ve been doing things, and you try a different way of doing those things.

Chris Forbes 00:00:31  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:15  Most advice about self-improvement assumes you know where you’re going. But what if you don’t? Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests that’s not a flaw. It’s actually the starting point. Her new book, Tiny Experiments, offers a way to explore change without chasing outcomes. In our conversation, we talk about curiosity as a guide, how to stay engaged in uncertainty, and what it means to choose persistence. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi and Laura, welcome to the show.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:01:48  Thank you so much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:50  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your wonderful book, which is called Tiny Experiments How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed world. And I mentioned that I have followed you online for a while. You’ve been writing for years and I’ve always found what you do really interesting. So I’m glad we get to have this conversation. Before we get into the book, though, 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 00:02:21  One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:02:48  I find it fascinating because it is kind of based on the idea that some emotions are inherently bad, while others are good. And I think that any emotion is just data. It’s just a signal from your brain trying to communicate something. And so I agree that you should not feed the ones that are going to make you feel worse, but you can still learn from them. And if you start being curious about those different emotions that you feel, including the very uncomfortable ones, including the ones where you might have a little bit of shame around them, you can actually learn a lot and grow a lot, I think.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:27  Yes, yes. As you were talking for the first time, something crystallized in my mind, which was that we talk about them as emotions, greed and hatred and fear, and they are. But there are also ways of acting. And the distinction there obviously is you’re going to have all kinds of emotions. It’s what you choose to do with them. Right? It’s it’s which ones do you choose to say, all right, I’m going to work with this in my little container. And which of these am I going to project out into the world? And I think that’s where the more conscious choice and the ability to pause comes in.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:04:06  Absolutely. This is fundamentally the difference between living a conscious, intentional life versus living a life on autopilot.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:15  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The place I want to start is entirely selfish for me. So it’s this. You have often talked about ways of managing all the information that we come across. I think you might call it gardening. Digital gardening. Am I and I’m curious.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:36  I’ve used, I mean, all kinds of tools Evernote, notion, roam, research. Right? Like, right now I’m looking at roam. It’s it’s the best book prep way I know how to do things. And AI is upending all of it. And I’m curious what for you Have there been any new tools that you’ve been like, oh wow, this is this really changes the game in the way that I organize information that I’ve got and put together.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:05:05  I still use room research to capture all of my information and knowledge, and anytime I’m reading something, I want to save information. But it’s become more of a quick capture tool for me and a way to connect with different pieces of information. I do a lot of my thinking in 1 or 2 different AI tools these days, because I feel like I can actually have a conversation with the information, you know, in a way that you can’t quite do it with a note taking poll. I’m going to share one fun tool that I discovered recently that was created by Stanford University.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:05:40  That’s called storm. And the way it works is that you ask it about any topic you want, and it will create a custom Wikipedia like page for you around this topic. And what I love about it is that you can basically create your own rabbit holes to fall into.

Speaker 4 00:05:58  It’s like we need more.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:06:00  Yes, exactly. But instead of pulling into random ones, you’re pulling into your own highly curated rabbit holes. And so that’s an AI tool that I found incredibly helpful. It’s fun to use, and it’s a way to be more curious and creative at the same time.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:16  Yeah. Because I think, listeners, I promise this is just going to go on for another minute or two. Then we’ll get into the rest of it. But I’m sure all of you, all of us think about what do we do with all the information that we get? How does it become useful to us? And, you know, roam is a tool that was intended to sort of connect disparate ideas on its own.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:36  And I don’t think it fully realizes that promise. but I think I at some point, I mean, already to a certain degree does and can. The question is, how do you expose everything that you’re thinking about and consuming and reading to I so it can make connections that you don’t see. And I think that’s the question I’m still trying to figure out.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:07:00  And that’s the problem at this stage, is that although for a lot of the the pro versions of these tools, you can actually connect them to your documents and your drive. So you can do that. We are still currently at a stage where you need to prompt AI and ask it questions in order for it to do something useful for you, and so it is not necessarily going to help with the kind of emergent knowledge and exploration where you don’t know what you don’t know. And so in that way, to me, it is still more of a thinking companion that is helping me explore things I’m curious about versus doing a lot of the thinking from you, which it cannot do right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:40  No, it cannot do, although at least for me, if I ask, hey, I’m giving you 3 or 4 different things here. Find connections between them that I may not be seeing and it finds connections. Now, some of them are garbage, right? I mean, they’re not any good, but every once in a while I’m like, oh, wow, okay. I treat it sort of like you do, like as a thinking companion. It’s just I just assume I’ve got a really smart and incredibly smart person next to me that will be infinitely patient with all the questions I want to ask it, you know, and away I go. So anyway, okay, now let’s get into the book. The heart of the book is about how our way of thinking about goals up till now is not the best approach for us moving forward in today’s day and age. Share why that is so.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:08:35  I describe the types of goals that we’ve been using so far. The traditional way of doing goal setting as linear goals and a linear goal is a goal that is based on the assumption that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear vision and a clear plan.

And then if you work really, really hard, you’re going to get there.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:08:58  The problem, obviously, is that we know that in this day and age, this doesn’t really work because the world keeps on changing. You keep on changing. Maybe in the first place you don’t really know what you want and where you want to go. And so this idea of having a very clear vision of where you want to go kind of breaks down in today’s modern world. So I advocate for replacing this very linear approach that gives you this illusion of control and this illusion of certainty with a more experimental mindset, where you embrace the fact that you don’t really know where you’re going. Things are changing all the time, and maybe that uncertainty is not such a bad thing. Maybe you can actually learn from it.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:43  So you started your career at Google. And you made the decision after several years there, that you were on this locked in path at Google. It was very clear where you were going to go, what you needed to do to get there. You had your blinders on and you were just charging full speed ahead and that for you, that didn’t work right. That wasn’t the right thing. So you left and then you started. You did what you know, everybody does. When you leave something like Google, you start your own company. And so you created a startup and found yourself in essentially the same boat again. Right? It’s just, you know, it’s your boat this time, but you’re still pointing in one direction, going as hard as you can with the blinders on. And from there, you then launched the next phase of your life, which has been a lot of different things. A question I have for you is, how does this idea that we’re going to explore more in the book around these tiny experiments and a curiosity based, you know, exploration approach work for people who don’t do something as radical as you did or as I did, like leaving a career to, you know, mess around out here in the, you know, in the media world or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:59  I’ve got a career goals. I’m in an organization. I’ve put I’m putting my time in, I have somewhere I think I want to go. But I also recognize, you know, the blinders are on and I’m not I’m not growing. I’m not learning. I’m bored. I’m, you know, how do we take your model and and put it into that?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:11:18  Yes. two things. First, I don’t think, looking back, that I had to leave Google in the way I did, where I was just like, I’m done, I’m going to do something different. And now I’m going to build my startup. And I’m very aware that, unfortunately, this is a very common discourse that we get in the media where people say, quit your job, do your thing, follow your passion, which I think is actually quite dangerous and I was quite young at the time, and so I thought that’s what I had to do. So that’s one thing. Don’t necessarily do what I did and I don’t say in the book, and I never say do that because I think it’s actually quite risky to do something like this turned out to be okay for me, but it’s not always the case.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:11:58  One thing. The second one is this is why the book is called Tiny Experiments, because you actually don’t need to overhaul your entire life in order to reconnect with curiosity, with exploration, with being open to uncertainty, with those liminal spaces, you just need to conduct very small little experiments where you question the way you’ve been doing things and you try a different way of doing those things, and where you stay very open to whatever the outcome is going to be. So instead of having that linear goal where you say, this is what success looks like and I need to get there, instead, you start from a hypothesis. You ask yourself, come. I think this might work. I think I might enjoy this. I think this could be interesting. What kind of tiny experiment could I design around that question, that hypothesis, so I can find out. And if it turns out that it’s not for me and I don’t like it, that’s not failure. That’s just data.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:16  Hey, everyone. I haven’t had an open spot in my coaching practice in over three years, but right now I’ve got a couple. But I work best with a certain kind of person. So if you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader and you’re ready to move from scattered progress and simmering self-doubt to aligned action, strategic clarity and real momentum, this might be the right time through something I call the align progress method will turn inner alignment into real world results so you can grow your revenue, reclaim your time, and finally, trust yourself as much as others already do. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at oneyoufeed.net/align.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:00 That’s how this podcast started. I had a solar energy company that ended up failing, and I was back in the software world doing consulting, and I just got the idea to do this thing. And so I just did it. And without a whole lot of thought. I mean, once I had the idea, then I put work in steadily, you know, a little bit. But there was there was no expectation that this was anything more than, let’s try it and see if we like it.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:25  And when I was doing coaching work with people, sometimes we would do exactly what you said, which is they would think they want to do x, Y and z. So we would start doing x, y and z, and then they would find out that that’s not what they wanted to do. And that in some ways feels like a loss. And it might be if it’s been this cherished thing you’ve thought you wanted to do. But ultimately it’s freeing, because now you can point your energy towards what is actually for you. And I just love the idea of tiny experiments. You know, just try something. I always think about this idea of, like, if you’re standing at the edge of the woods and there’s a path going in and about five feet down, it curves and you’re like, what’s around that path? What’s around that path? You’ll never know. By standing at the edge of the woods. You only know by taking a few steps in. And that’s, I think, kind of at the heart of your book.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:15:16  I love that, and I love how you mentioned how freeing it is, because that’s why the subtitle of the book is How to Live Freely in a goal obsessed World. It’s really the idea that once you free yourself from all of those what ifs that you treat in more of a paralyzing way, where a lot of people might think, oh, what if I changed jobs? What if I did that thing differently? What if I explored a different city, a different way of of being and of living? But because they see it as this very big change, they end up not exploring it at all. Yes. And there’s always, always a tiny, more experimental version that you can explore this question and actually find out. And as you said, if it turns out this is not for you, you’re actually freeing up mental space, creative energy that you can direct towards something else.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:07  Yeah. My partner and I, we live in Columbus, Ohio today, and there were reasons that we had to remain in Columbus up until about a year ago. And and now we’re in the where do we want to live? We could live anywhere in the world dilemma, right? And so part of our process, though, is just like, let’s go somewhere that is on the list for a couple of weeks, and most of the time we end up just crossing it off. Nope. Nope. Nope. We’re overly picky. I think that’s probably part of the problem. And there’s no right answer, which is I think the other thing that ties into kind of your book is that I think we get paralyzed because we think we need to make the right choice, the right decision, when that’s not really the way reality works.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:16:53  Exactly. And very often this obsession we have with making the right decision actually gets in the way of ultimately making the right decision, because we’re not allowing ourselves to iterate.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:06  Yes. Okay. So you recommend or you talk about in the book, going from this idea of linear goals to growth loops. Describe a growth loop.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:17:16  So if you keep on conducting the exact same experiment without learning from the data you’re collecting, you’re just going to go in circles.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:17:25  A growth loop is when you take the time to reflect on what you learned, and you adjust your trajectory based on all of these lessons that you had from the previous cycle of experimentation, and for each cycle, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t have that fixed destination, but you can trust that you’re going to grow. And this is why they’re called growth loops. Each loop you complete, each time you ask a question, you say, I’m going to give it a try, and I’m going to learn from this trial and then decide what to do next. I’m going to grow.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:01  The next thing in the book that ties to this is this idea of, instead of goals or habits or New Year’s resolutions or huge projects that we make pacts. It’s pacts, not like pacts of wolves, but pacts just for listeners. So there’s not not not confusion. What is a pact?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:18:26  A pact is a mini protocol for personal experimentation. It’s a very simple format that allows you to design tiny experiments, and it’s based on exactly the same format scientists used to design their experiments.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:18:42  So if you think about an experiment, you only need to know two things. And then obviously giving you a very simplified version of that. But you need to know what you’re going to test and the number of trials. That’s basically all you need to have. The essence of what the experiment is going to be a packed very similarly is deciding what action you’re going to explore for what duration. And so it follows this format for better. And so it follows this format I will action for duration. So for example I will write a weekly newsletter for six weeks. I will meditate every morning for one month. I will meal prep every Sunday for two months. I will action for duration. And this is a pact. I call it a pact because it is really a commitment. It’s a commitment to complete the experiment, to perform that action for that duration, and to withhold judgment while you’re conducting the experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:49  Yeah. There’s so many things about that framework that I really love. You talk about. It needs to be actionable, using current resources rather than like elaborate preparation.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:01  And one of the phrases I’ve always loved, and it’s been attributed to everybody from, you know, Snoopy to to God is something like use what you have, do what you can, you know, with what you have. I’m butchering it, but that’s it basically, you know. Yeah. And I love that idea of doing what we can with what we have right now. Right. Versus because how many of our dreams get deferred by when X when I have this, when I have that, and I think it’s so important. And I love this idea of time bounding it because you’re not making a commitment for the rest of your life. I’m a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic, and we had a concept of one day at a time, which is an extreme time bounding, but it’s an extreme problem when you’re first trying to to come out of addiction. But it’s a way of not getting overwhelmed by the fact that, like, is this really the right thing for me to do for the rest of my life? What am I going to do when I get married? What about like, all these things? You just go, well today.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:07  And I love that idea because the pact does that on a more reasonable level. But it also allows you, since you’re committing for a period of time, to find out about it, because meditating for two days, you don’t have enough information to make a decision about whether meditation is for you or not. But that’s where most of us live. We live either like I do it and I if I don’t get immediately good feedback, I give up. Or I chain myself to the idea that I have to do this thing forever. And I love that you’re you’re painting this middle way with these pacts.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:21:43  Yes. And, what are you talking about? Reminds me of of habits where I find it fascinating and a little bit crazy that so many of us decide to commit to new habits for the rest of our lives without having ever tried them before. And so I also think that having this experimental approach and saying, I’m just going to do a tiny experiment first, as you said, it’s going to be short enough that you can actually do it long enough that you can actually collect data.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:22:17  And it’s a way to figure out, is there anything I might want to turn into a habit that I can try it first? And it’s not because everybody around you, all of your friends, are raving about running, for example, that this is something you’re going to enjoy. So you can give it a try. Yeah. And then if it doesn’t work, it’s okay. There are so many other forms of healthy body movement. It doesn’t have to be that. And so you can try something different. So I think it’s also allowing yourself to figure out what actually works for you. Instead of copy pasting what the imagery is saying is good for everyone.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:54  Yes. And it keeps you pointed in in a direction long enough to be useful, because that’s the that’s the opposite of the commitment to everything is I just bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce between lots of different things all the time. So what you’re saying is having a long term goal way out there doesn’t make sense in the same way that it used to.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:15  And there’s lots of things that happen when we do that. And having no direction is also a bad idea, right? And so I’m a I’m a big middle way kind of guy. It’s one of my, you know, it’s part of my brand, I guess. And and this is such a middle way approach.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:23:33  Yes. Very often in the middle way is actually a pretty good answer. And, and I think in this case, that is that is the case long enough that you can figure out what works for you and short enough that you can actually do it. And as you said, having a sense of direction, but also not having the illusion that you actually know exactly where you’re going, precisely.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:56  You know what you’re going to do for a period of time. And you talk about it also being continuous, involving repeatable actions. Right? That’s again, back to the the book I’m writing. You know, how a little becomes a lot, right. It’s that that sort of thing. So I love this pact idea. I want to ask about field notes. Tell me about what field notes are and how you use them and how they’re useful in this overall framework.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:24:26  A question I often get is how do I even come up with an experiment that’s interesting to explore? And how do I make sure that this experiment is something I’m actually curious about, and not something I’m copy pasting from other people around me? And so for people who ask me this question, I recommend a little exercise that I call self anthropology because I invite them to pretend for just one day that they are an anthropologist, but with their own life as the topic of study. And so what does an anthropologist do? They go and they study a new culture, and they know nothing about this culture. And so they have no preconceptions, no assumptions. And they take a notebook with them and they take field notes, observations, again, no judgments. They’re just taking notes and asking questions like, why are these people doing these things like that? Why do they care about that? Why does this thing? Is why is this thing so important to them? You can do the same thing with your own life.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:25:28  Asking yourself, why do I spend my time like this? Why do I use my energy like that? Why do I care so much about this? Just like an anthropologist taking little field notes and asking yourself, why are things done the way they are in my life currently? No judgment, just observation. Those observations I guarantee you I’ve worked with lots of people using this little tool. I guarantee you you will notice things that you’ve been doing in a certain way just because. Because routine, because habits, because that’s the way things have been done around you, whether it’s in your company business or in your personal environment. And when you start questioning the way you’ve been doing things, when you know how things are, you can start imagining how they could be, what could be different. And this, this is the seed for a tiny Experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:21  What I love about your field notes. I love the idea in general, and I think many of us have heard some version of this, which is you’ve got to be reflective or you, you know, keep a journal or.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:32  And so I was like, well, what does she mean by field notes? So I went out to your Nest Labs website, and I looked up your field notes, and I found an example of field notes. So I just want to read a couple of these to listeners, because this is different than the way I imagine being reflective. 10:04 I’m going to finish the first draft of the Combinational Creativity article. 10:46 I fell into a Wikipedia black hole again. Who knew so many inventors got killed by their own invention?  I didn’t read that clearly until now.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:05  God. That’s good. I just lost half our listening audience. They’re going to be like, whoa. Okay, I got to check that out. Chris, my editor, I guarantee you 100% is just not going to edit now until he looks at it. How many inventors got killed by their own invention? 1145 made good progress. Need to get ready for my workshop. I’m not going to go through all of these, but hey, between the public speaking and getting VA, I feel like I’m starting to increasingly value investing in good tools and systems.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:34  So it’s just these it’s not this grand sitting down and puzzling out everything that’s happening and trying to make meaning out of it all. It’s, as you say, it’s observational notes about what happens during the day. What did you do? In what ways did you not do what you thought you were going to do? How did you feel as you were doing X, Y, or Z? And I just think this is a great approach, an easier way to approach being reflective than sitting down and having to puzzle out meaning.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:28:05  Yeah. And the reason why it works so well for a lot of people is that a lot of the, the reflective tools that people recommend require you to sit down every day for month or for the rest of your life again, to do this. What I like about this little exercise of field notes is that whenever you feel a little bit stuck, or whenever you feel like you might want to do things differently, or if something is not quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it, you can do this for just 24 hours, 48 hours at most, and you take those little notes throughout the day, and then you look back at them and you will see patterns emerge.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:28:41  And so it’s also a form of reflection that is very action oriented in the sense that you’re capturing these observations. So you can then decide what to experiment with. But it works for people who haven’t really had success with maybe daily journaling, morning pages, those kind of formats. It’s a little bit more surgical where you can do it four hours, 48 hours and you get what you need out of it, and then you go on to experimenting.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:23  Do you have any recommendations for how people could remember to do these? I think that’s the for me, I feel like I would take without consciously designing this. I would take one field note at the beginning of the day, and I’d take another at the end of the day, and that would be it. It would be all the in between where I forget to do it.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:29:41  That’s the key word in between. So the idea of having timestamps was actually inspired by an existing journaling method that is called interstitial journaling, because you’re actually right in between. And so the technique, and that’s why you only do it for 24 hours or 48 hours, is that you write something every time you switch tasks.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:30:02  So anytime you go from one thing to another, or anytime you notice you’ve been off task. So that’s why you have one in here where I’m on the Wikipedia rabbit hole. So and that’s it. And so if you just apply this I’m switching task. I write one line, or I noticed that I haven’t written in a while because I’m actually doing something else I should not be doing right now. You write something. That’s it.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:24  Wonderful. There’s so many more things in this section that I could talk about, but I want to move on to the idea of disruption and uncertainty in our lives. Certainly there are big and little disruptions that we all go through. Right? The big disruption is you lose your job, your relationship ends, or you have several of those things happen. What Bruce Feiler calls like a life quake. So there’s those. But then there’s also just smaller disruptions. And then there is, in many cases, a lot of uncertainty that we exist with. Tell me how you think about working with those things.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:31:07  For me, the most important step and the first one before you do anything, when you’re faced with that kind of uncertainty or disruption is just to understand that the instinctive response that we have, the response of fear and anxiety is completely normal. And that from an evolutionary perspective, our brains are designed to reduce uncertainty as much as possible because this is what helps with survival. And so removing a little bit of the self-blame that we might be experiencing when we have fear and anxiety and when we say, why am I reacting like this? I shouldn’t be able to feel in control. I should be calmer. I think it helps to just accept the fact that it’s just your brain trying to do its job, and it’s completely okay. Once you’ve done that, then you can start actually applying some of the more practical tools that will allow you to actually deal with disruption.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:02  So you talk about moving from a response one to a response two I think that’s what you just sort of alluded to there. But but talk to us about how so?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:32:13  When you think about any kind of disruption, they have two kinds of effects on you.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:32:19  The first effects are subjective. They’re your actual response. As I say, fear, anxiety, worry not feeling in control. And so it’s important to start with these. For this there is a tool psychologist called effective labeling. And it’s a fancy word. Psychologists love their jargon. But really what it means is just naming your emotions. It’s really putting a name on the emotion. And that could be I’m scared again. I’m worried. I’m stressed. I did not include that in the book because it’s so easy to find if you look it up online, but there are lots of those emotional wheels that you can use if that’s helpful for you to name those emotions. For some people, a bit of journaling can be helpful, but that’s the first part. And there’s research showing by when we just name those emotions where we just label them. We already reduce a lot of the anxiety around that, and a lot of the negative impact that it has very often is just a lot of the anxiety is around not really knowing what we’re feeling.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:33:26  So that’s the first step, which is dealing with the subjective experience. Once you’ve done that, and only once you’ve done that, you can then move on to the second step, which is dealing with the objective consequences. And you can only do that if you’re in a state where you’re calm enough that you can actually look at what is happening here. Again, what’s quite interesting is that sometimes we try very, very hard to fix whatever problem is happening, when in reality doing nothing is the best solution, which is very hard to admit because we’re in a state of panic and we feel like we need to feel in control.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:07  So I want to ask you a neuroscience question. And it is really about whether an oversimplification that I tend to think about makes any sense. And it’s basically similar to what you just talked about, which is that when the more emotional parts of our brain, the limbic system or the the the fight or flight system, I’m not quite sure the best way to refer to it, but when that part is super activated, it takes resources away from the prefrontal cortex, where we’re able to think through and come up with creative solutions and put things in perspective and and do all that.  Is that a reasonable oversimplification of the way things work?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:34:52  It’s slightly different, and I think it’s helpful actually to make the distinction.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:34:58  So the problem mainly comes from the fact that when the amygdala is over activated, it also reduces connection with the prefrontal cortex. And so it’s actually okay to experience stress and anxiety if you’re also still connected with your prefrontal cortex that is able to recognize that anxiety for what it is and to still make rational decisions. And so it’s not so much that it’s taking energy from the prefrontal cortex is that it’s really just not listening to it, and almost like shutting it down and making all of the decisions. And so to me, that’s why the reason why I make the distinction, and I always try to really communicate it in this way, is that it is not about shutting down that amygdala response, because, again, it’s such a natural, deeply ingrained response. It’s a survival response. It’s more about reactivating that connection with the prefrontal cortex so you can see it for what it is and still make rational decisions, even though you will still feel a little bit of anxiety.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:03  So that’s sort of the effective labeling then that’s what that is intended to do. Right. It’s connecting. It’s reestablishing that connection. And however, what I find interesting, though, is that in some cases, when the emotional activation is really, really strong, I guess it’s the same thing you’re saying. What I have also found is that in addition to something like effective labeling, that sometimes some sort of somatic practice, whether that be movement or self-soothing touch or there’s I mean, there’s a lot of them that that also helps. And the way I’ve thought of that is it turns down the, you know, over activation back there so that that communication can start happening.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:36:50  In both cases, what they have in common, affective labeling and any kind of somatic processing practice that you have is that you’re not trying to repress the emotion, you’re not trying to solve anything. You’re reopening that door, Actually, you are letting the emotion with a somatic practice. You are, in effect, letting the emotion move through your body.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:37:12  And with affective labeling, you’re recreating that connection with your prefrontal cortex. And this is why those practices work, because you’re not trying to shut down that emotional response. You’re accepting it. You’re integrating it.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:26  Yeah, I really love that because emotions don’t just shut down. It doesn’t work that way. I mean, I’ve often said that like, I feel like in any situation there are like a few different things. You, you know, you’ve got thought, you’ve got emotion, you’ve got behavior, and emotion just doesn’t have a lever that you can grab and pull, as my experience thought does. Right? I mean, I can’t stop what pops into my brain, but I can I can work with it. And behavior has a lever also. So those are the things that I that we have to use because we can’t just turn off the emotion. It just doesn’t work that way.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:04  Yeah, absolutely. And, we can actually learn a lot at a cognitive level from our emotions if we decide to listen to them and, to work with them.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:17  And so, as you mentioned, there is the somatic processing that we can use if the emotion is very strong. And so that’s a way of processing it. But if we feel like we’re in a state where we can do that, actually being curious about your emotions can be incredibly powerful as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:35  Yes. Curiosity seems to be the, the the wonder drug that I, you know, keep hearing about again and again and again. But it makes sense. It makes sense. Let’s talk about since we’re talking about neuroscience a little bit, let’s talk about the neuroscience of procrastination.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:55  Yeah. So it is actually related to what we were just talking about. And when we’re procrastinating Fascinating. There is actually this lack of communication happening in between your prefrontal cortex and the more emotional center. So let’s just go back to what is procrastination in effect? Procrastination is not doing the thing that you feel like you should be doing. And what happens when you procrastinate? You blame yourself. You feel like, why am I not doing this thing that I should be doing? And so it’s the opposite response to what we’ve just described, right? You’re not curious about the emotion.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:39:33  You’re not curious about the procrastination. You’re just blaming yourself. And so in this chapter in the book, that’s really the question I ask. What would it look like if instead of having this response of self-blame and shame and trying to push through using willpower whenever we’re procrastinating, we actually looked at it with curiosity instead. What would happen if we just ask, hey, hello procrastination, what are you doing here? What are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to communicate to me? And I share a very simple tool in this chapter that people can use to have this conversation with their procrastination. So the tool is called the triple check. And what you’re asking is where is my procrastination coming from? Is it coming from the head? Which means that there is a resistance at a rational level where you don’t think that you should be working on this in the first place? Is the problem coming from the heart, which means that at an emotional level, you don’t feel like this is going to be fun or interesting or exciting, or is the problem coming from the hand? Which means that although at a rational level, you think like, yeah, I should do this at an emotional level, you feel like this looks like fun.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:40:51  At a practical level, you don’t believe that you have the right skills or the right tools or the right support network in order to complete the task.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:01  Yeah, I’ve not heard that framework and I love it. I think about this question a lot, which I mean, we can call it procrastination, but the question I think about is a little bit broader, which is why do we not do the things that we think we should do? And obviously the first problem is in that sentence, right. Should we need to be clear on why we’re doing what we’re doing and be doing the right things? Because if we’re not, then everything’s going to be challenging. But I’ve always broken it into two sort of components that I think you’re you’re deconstructing into a third. And the first is sort of structural, like, do I know what what the very first thing I should be doing is like, my tendency is I put something on the task list, like do taxes, which is like a 12 step process, right? So have I deconstructed this thing to a small enough thing that I know what the right thing to do is, is my environment set up and structure.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:58  You know, like there’s a lot of structural things that we can do. But then there’s the moment of doing. And in that moment, I’ve referred to it more as emotional, which is there’s something that’s happening in your I think you’re calling it mind and heart, right? There’s some thought process you’re having or doubt or fear or whatever that that is happening. And I think part of the benefit of at least trying the structural method is that it gets you to a point where you are at a choice point, because then if you’re at a choice point, you can explore what’s happening. If we never if we just if we stay out in vague civil right and things remain vague, we never get to really zone in on. We ask big questions like why do I procrastinate? Instead of why do I procrastinate this thing at this time?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:42:51  Yeah, and I love how you’re really focusing your attention on this thing at this time because you’re already in problem solving mode. When you do this, you’re also decoupling your sense of self-worth from the fact that you’re procrastinating.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:43:08  And this is really the most important part is really again, seeing that, yes, it’s almost as if, you know, instead of saying, I’m procrastinating, saying procrastination is happening. Why? I’m trying to figure out.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:21  Yeah, yeah. And you talk about the Buddhist parable, the second arrow, right where like the first arrow is, we’re procrastinating. And that has its own suite of problems that come along with it. The second arrow is that we now feel bad about procrastinating. And if we think about the discussion we just had, one of the things that I think that that self-blame and that self-criticism does is it stirs up the emotional energy and then breaks that connection that we’ve talked about or lessens, that connection. And so it’s why why Curiosity is so useful because it turns again, turns that emotional temperature down. And one of the things that I always think about this too, is like, I think about this stuff as like a puzzle. People tend to be like, I’m just the sort of person that procrastinates or I always procrastinate, or why do I always do this? Or I’m always going to be this way.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:16  And I look at it more as we just haven’t arranged the various pieces in the right way that works for you. And I just think that’s a much more optimistic and hopeful way to look at things.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:44:27  Absolutely. And just a kinder way as well. More self compassionate way.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:32  Yes, absolutely. You talk about a listening failure in that chapter. Is that what you mean about that disconnect between the the the prefrontal cortex and the more emotional parts of our brain? Is that the listening.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:44:42  Really.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:44  One of the parts of the book that I was telling you before we hit record that really caught my attention heavily is around acceptance. I mean, I write a lot about acceptance in the Wise Habits course that I’ve taught. We have a whole module on acceptance, but I’d never come across the framework that was in a in a study that labels it this clearly which is active versus resigning acceptance. Help me understand what those two terms mean.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:45:15  So you will hear a lot of people say that whatever happens, they they accept the situation.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:45:21  What scientists found is that there are actually different modes of acceptance that we have in difficult situations. One of them is the one that I think most of us think about when we say, oh, I’m just I’ll just accept whatever is happening, which is the resigned version of it, which is very passive and where you just, you know, you accept whatever is going on and you know, it’s going to have negative consequences and it might be a bit challenging and difficult and you’re just waiting for it to to go away. Hopefully whenever it does the active version of acceptance, active acceptance is where you actually accept that there is a problem. There is a challenge that’s completely fine. You’re not going to, you know, rude on it or the like, there’s anything wrong with with you or with the way you’ve done things, but you’re also going to try and shape what happens next so you can accept what is right now and also actively say, okay, that’s the current situation. This is fine. It doesn’t mean I don’t have any sense of agency in terms of shaping what might happen next.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:46:33  And so this is the active form of acceptance, which is linked to better mental health, better well-being in general. And so which is the one that you really want to practice whenever you’re facing a difficult situation?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:44  Yeah, I love that listeners will be probably we’ve heard this a thousand times, but how can we hear too much about this? A question that I think sits at the center of our lives, which is, you can call it the Serenity Prayer, you can call it Epictetus Doctrine or Control. You can call it Stephen Covey Circle of Concern and Influence. It’s all about recognizing what you can do something about and what you can’t. And it just occurred to me that engaging with that question in an honest and heartfelt way is active. I’m actually really thinking about, okay, what can I do here? Is there some influence? I may not be able to control the outcome, but I can have an influence, or I can work on how I’m going to respond or what I’m going to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:28  But even the process of getting into that, that framework of the Serenity Prayer is an active form of acceptance. Even if you come out the other side with the okay, I don’t think I have much choice here but to work on acceptance.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:47:44  Yes, exactly. And another step to this, which can be really interesting to explore and very empowering. Also is asking yourself what am I best placed to do in this situation? Me with my experience, my knowledge, my current situation. What is one thing that I could do and that might be more difficult for someone else to do, but that is something that is easier for me to do. And so not only you reconnect with your sense of agency, but again, it’s very empowering to think and to feel like you can actually do something very unique that only you maybe can do.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:22  Yeah, I mentioned I was in 12 step programs and and there used to be a page in the AA Big Book. It used to be page 449. It’s changed now because there’s multiple editions.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:32  This is 30 years ago, probably, but people used to say and people used to always say like for 49, man, you need to do for 49. They get bumper stickers with for 49. Well, on page four, 49 was the phrase acceptance is the answer to all my problems. And it used to drive me crazy because I was like, no, it’s not. No, it is not. It is the answer to some problems, but for many problems, the the actual answer is that there is something you can do and will be you will feel better when you do. So I’ve always been sort of, you know, against the active resistance, you know, and one of my core like life strategies is if I’m worried or upset about something, I try and just say instead of sitting here and being worried and upset, what what little thing can I do that makes that situation better? Like, what thing can I do now instead of spending the energy worry, and what thing can I just do this minute? And I always find that when I turn some amount of my energy and attention to, to solving the issue, if it’s if there’s something I can do, I feel better, you know, because I’m back in a place of agency to some degree.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:49:47  And it’s a very powerful question, too, especially if you decouple the outcome of what you do from what you actually do. Right. Yes. It’s the idea that you can just do something. And if it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t change the situation, you’ve at least done something. And very often, just as you said, doing something, going from being stuck in paralyzed to being in movement again is enough to feel better.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:13  Yeah. Like I remember in the past when I didn’t manage money well at all, and I would start to get stressed about it because my main problem was I just didn’t open any bills. I just let them pile up. This was back before electronic bills, right? And I’d let them pile up. But just going and opening the bills helped, right? It wasn’t that it solved the problem. I still owed the money, but it was a step. I did something right. And so I think that speaks to what you’re saying. You got to it’s not about the outcome.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:44  It’s about something in us as humans that feels good when we don’t avoid our problems. But we do something where we where we face them to the best of our ability in whatever little way we can.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:50:57  It goes back to that balance, that middle ground that you described earlier in the sense that human beings don’t really well with full stagnation when we do nothing. There’s also, on the other end of the spectrum, when we start having this kind of hectic mess running around because we’re anxious. And so having this intentional kind of, again, active acceptance where you do something not running around like a headless chicken, panicking because you’re really worried about what’s going on, but also not being completely stuck, paralyzed and doing nothing. This middle ground is the healthiest reaction you can have.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:37  Yes, I, I agree. Tell me about steering sheets.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:51:41  So when you’re done with an experiment. You’ll probably ask yourself, okay, what’s next? The steering sheet is a way to answer that question. So there are three different routes that you can take when you’re done with an experiment.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:51:56  The first one, which I think is quite interesting how a lot of people resist that option, is to just keep on going with your experiments the way you’ve been doing it, because if it’s working, why not keep going? And I call this option persist. And I chose this word very intentionally because I feel like it is persistent. It requires a little bit of courage in today’s society. You say, I’m not going to scale this up. I’m not going to go bigger. This is working for me. I’m just going to keep going as it is. So option one persist. Second option pivot. That is when things are kind of working. But you feel like it’s not perfect yet. So maybe you’ve been doing daily meditation in the morning, but you feel like it’s hard for you to do it in the morning. Do you want to go for another cycle of experimentation where you do it during your lunch break or in the evening? And so you tweak things, and this is where you can actually, if you want, scale up, scale down, change the parameters and try something slightly different.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:52:59  And the last option is pause. And I call it pause, not quit because you might want to come back to that experiment in the future, but it’s really just acknowledging the fact that based on your current circumstances, your current priorities, your levels of energy, your other commitment, whatever it is at this moment in time, this experiment is not working for you. And so you can just park it away, put it on the shelf, and perhaps go back to it in the future. But for now, you’re going to pause it.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:31  I love it, I love it. That’s a great way of thinking about it. And you made it alliterative to the three P’s.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:53:38  Oh yeah, I did work on that.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:40  Yes. I think his authors were always like, all right, I gotta I gotta tighten this idea up a little bit. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. As I told you before, I thought your book was outstanding, and it opened things in me that I hadn’t seen before, which is rare in my line of work.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:00  So thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:54:02  Thank you so much for your amazing questions.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:05  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.

In this episode, Taylor Jacobson discusses the hidden cause of procrastination and how to finally move forward in your life. He explores how transformation rarely feels graceful, how repressed emotions shape our behavior, and what it takes to live a life true to your inner compass. It’s a vulnerable, grounded conversation about fear, reinvention, and creating space for what you actually want to give to the world.

For the first time in over three years, I’ve got a couple open spots in my coaching practice. If you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader feeling stuck in scattered progress or simmering self-doubt, this might be the right moment. Through my Aligned Progress Method, I help people move toward real momentum with clarity, focus, and trust in themselves. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at oneyoufeed.net/align.

Key Takeaways:

• Importance of experiencing and releasing emotions for personal growth
• The concept of safety in productivity and its impact on focus
• Overview of Focusmate as a solution for procrastination and accountability
• The role of community support in overcoming distractions and enhancing productivity
• The significance of vulnerability in seeking help and building connections
• The principles of behavior change, including commitment and accountability
• The relationship between emotional well-being and productivity
• The challenges of transformation and the necessity of aligning with one’s true self
• The exploration of intuition and discernment in navigating emotions and decision-making

Taylor Jacobson is the CEO and Founder of Focusmate (www.focusmate.com), a virtual coworking community with a mission to help everyone do their best work. Thousands of people in 193 countries worldwide sit side-by-side, via video, to keep each other company, cheer each other on, and hold one another accountable. Taylor is a passionate voice on creating soulful work and workplaces and has been featured in The New Yorker, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, and more.

Connect with Taylor Jacobson:  Website | Twitter | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Taylor Jacobson, check out these other episodes:

How to Overcome Procrastination with Tim Pychyl

David Kadavy on Getting Started

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Episode Transcript:

Taylor Jacobson 00:00:00  We don’t want to be walking around, you know, getting pissed at every driver on the road. That’s a really unpleasant way to live. So the antidote to that is like learning how to really fully feel and release the depth of those emotions.

Chris Forbes 00:00:20  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 a 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 00:01:05  What happens when the thing you built no longer feels like it’s yours? For Taylor Jacobson, founder of focus, Mate.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:13  The answer wasn’t to push harder. It was to pause, reflect, and begin again. In this conversation, we talk about why transformation rarely feels graceful, how repressed emotions shape our behavior, and what it takes to live a life true to your inner compass. It’s a vulnerable, grounded conversation about fear, reinvention, and creating space for what you actually want to give to the world. I’m Erik Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Taylor. Welcome to the show.

Taylor Jacobson 00:01:47  Hey, Eric. Great to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:48  It’s a pleasure to have you on. We’re going to be talking about a variety of things today. We’ll be talking about your company that you’ve built called focus mate. We’re going to be talking about spirituality. We’re going to be talking about focusing routines, all kinds of different stuff. But before we get into all that, let’s start like we always do with 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 00:02:15  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 its grandparent and says, whoa! 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.

Taylor Jacobson 00:02:40  Well, I just got chills in my body listening to you tell that, even though I know it obviously thought about it. What it means to me, you know, is like, good and evil are not these abstractions. They are our experience of ourselves in every moment. And I think evil is just the expression of fear. And we all have fear. You know, it’s a it’s human nature. And then on the other side of fear. You know what is there? There’s different words for it. But you could say that’s.

Taylor Jacobson 00:03:15  Love or kindness or truth. I’m a fan of that is kind of the opposite of. Fear or the opposite of ego. So I think it’s just it is a moment to moment discernment and effort. For each of us to feel the kind of, reflexive or autonomous nature of our fears and the patterns that those have cultivated in us, and to just resist them, one tiny little choice at a time, and to find that what’s on the other side of that is this intrinsic goodness that wants to be expressed.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:53  I love that and I’m going to put a pin in coming back to truth, because I think it’s a big word for you, and I want to make sure we get to it. But let’s start by talking about focus, mate, the company that you’ve built. And I don’t want to spend a ton of time here, but I’d like to know a little bit. First, maybe you could describe for people what you do and then secondly, why you built it.

Taylor Jacobson 00:04:15  Yeah. Thanks for asking. So yeah, just really tangibly, what is focus made? Let’s start with what problem we solve. You know, a lot of us are, let’s say, distracted or have a hard time taking action on the things that we most want to be in action on. Very universal experience. So I started focus mate to help really myself first, but to help other people to be in action on the things that matter to them. And I can talk about how that’s evolved. But yeah, simply put, we create the opportunity for you to meet up with one person, one partner or group of people to keep each other company and hold each other accountable while you take action on whatever it is that you want to be in action on. And so after this, I could set up a focus mate session because I want to write a blog post and I could get matched up with you and you want to edit a podcast episode. And so we share our commitments to what we want to work on, and we might write those down actually, and post them in the chat interface.

Taylor Jacobson 00:05:16  And then we hang out there on video while we work quietly together. And, it’s really an experience of not just accountability but also camaraderie, you know, and I’ll say structure to like it really helps us to have some kind of definitive start point and also end point for things. And so it’s kind of this very light touch in all those ways. And I think people are surprised by how much those things can impact you. But it’s enough to have a very transformational and often life changing impact on just your ability to do the things you want to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:48  Yeah, I first heard of your organization through a coaching client of mine, and had used it as a way of. Kind of, like you said, procrastinating on things he could show up. Book a focus mate session and log in and, you know, have somebody there now. The first thing that a lot of people, when they hear that think is like, I’m just going to meet a complete stranger that I don’t know and feel anxious about that talk about why and how people get past that.

Taylor Jacobson 00:06:15  Yeah, so that’s totally the right question. In fact, because so much of the power of focus, mate, is actually in the experience of feeling safe and being with other people. It’s a facet of how our nervous system works, actually, that we can’t really reach optimal sense of embodied safety alone, or if we’re too isolated too often. And so one of the reflexive responses that our nervous system has to being around somebody that is not presenting a danger that feels safe to us, is it actually helps to calm us down, help us feel grounded and to help us focus. And it has an impact on even blood flow to the brain. And, you know, so a direct impact on our ability to focus. So all of that is to say feeling safe is really critical. And so having those thoughts go through your mind, you know, and to be evaluating, am I going to feel safe with this other person? And even the word stranger I think connotes danger. I think that’s kind of what we mean when we say stranger is like, I don’t know if this person is safe.

Taylor Jacobson 00:07:17  And so focus me. We just put a tremendous emphasis on our culture and on creating safety. So the culture of focus is really the opposite of kind of hustle culture or grind culture, which might seem counterintuitive for a quote unquote productivity company. But I believe in my experience, is that when we’re in that headspace, we don’t think as clearly. And the ways we work, even the things we work on, are not as true of expressions of ourselves, and our work isn’t as creative, so on and so forth. So there is a bit of a leap of faith when you try anything new. And I would say almost universally, what people find is it’s like this really magical soft landing of safety and warmth and acceptance, and it’s a declaration of vulnerability to join, focus, mate, to say, you know what? I’d rather admit that I might be better off getting somebody else’s help than continue to struggle, because it’s more important to me to to follow through on this thing, to be who I really want to be, than it is to try to muscle through or or tell myself the story that I can do it on my own.

Taylor Jacobson 00:08:26  And we really strongly reaffirm that in every touchpoint of your experience, so that when you experience other members of the focus make community, it really is a lot of encouragement, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of like wherever you’re at, wherever your starting point is, is okay, you know, and we’re also working on ways to give you preferences over who you get to work with as well. So, you know, one of the examples is gender based matching. You know, some people just would feel safer working with somebody of their own gender, for example. And if that’s you, that’s fine.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:58  And so when someone logs on, it’s not like you’re spending this time chatting with another person. There’s a little brief introduction and then it’s kind of to work. Right.

Taylor Jacobson 00:09:07  Yes. We say about 60s, you’re saying hi, you’re being friendly, but it’s really, you know, smile and then ask the other person, hey, what are you up to? What are you working on this hour? And then you get to work within 60s.

Taylor Jacobson 00:09:18  And then at the end, it’s similar, you know, a chime goes off and you’re just checking in. How’d it go, Eric? You know. Okay, I got distracted for a minute or so, but I got back to it, and I’m really psyched about my progress, how to go for you. And so it’s it’s very, focused.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:33  What led you to create this product?

Taylor Jacobson 00:09:36  It really came out of my own huge struggles. You know, I’m going to say, with being who I knew I could be or being who I wanted to be. And my whole life I’ve always been interested in, let’s say, personal development. But about ten years ago, I almost got fired from a job and I chose to leave that job instead of getting fired, basically. And it was just very demoralizing. And it was really a result of me not I was working from home and I just couldn’t I couldn’t hack it with that kind of isolation, lack of accountability. I just couldn’t do it.

Taylor Jacobson 00:10:08  And leaving a job like that was very demoralizing and also humiliating for me. And so it just kind of cast me into this dark place. And I got a lot more serious about how do I get unstuck, you know, what do I need in order to bootstrap myself to a better place of being somebody I want to be? And so I just by and by, got more and more passionate about all the things I was learning and sort of realizing I could use all this struggle to help other people. And, and it was years later that I really stumbled on this technique. But when I did, it was just so life changing for me that it clicked really quickly, that there is an opportunity to help other people as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:51  Yeah, I mean, right off the top of my head, I see several core behavior change principles embedded right in focus. Me. Right. Like, no, when you’re going to do something, okay, you commit to a session that tells me I’m doing it at this time.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:06  Know what I’m going to work on? You know, knowing what I’m going to do. I talk about it with coaching clients as just basically like, we want to be specific. Like what, when, how, where any bit of ambiguity in those things is terrible for procrastinators, right? They can become roadblocks. And so with focus made immediately, I know when I know where I’m going to be in front of my computer, I know I’ve decided what I’m going to do in that period because I’m going to articulate it to someone else. The other big principle there is that we just tend to it’s just a facet of human nature. We’re often more accountable to others. You know, knowing that somebody is going to be sitting there without a partner if I don’t show up. You know, enables me to try and make it to the session. Although maybe they wouldn’t be without a partner because you’d rematch them. But the point being, I’ve got an accountability there, and I think you guys keep track of accountability also, right? And if you make sessions and you don’t show up, there is some penalty for that over time, right? Maybe penalty is not the word you would use.

Taylor Jacobson 00:12:08  Yeah. I mean, we’re really like a carrot, not a stick kind of culture. Yeah, that’s one way to put it. We’ll basically just say, hey, it looks like something came up. Yeah. That’s okay. We’re not judging it, but we just. If you have another session after that, we’ll kind of freeze your account so that the next person has a partner and sort of say, hey, just kind of wave your hand and say, hey, I’m back. I’m okay. Yeah, re-activate your account. And, you know, and we trust you. And that seems to work better than the stick approach. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:38  Got it. That makes sense. So let’s move on from the product and let’s talk about focus. So you know the goal of focus mate. And the problem you were solving was an inability to I would say it would be maybe an inability to get started and then actually focus. You know, you’re sort of solving two things there. But get started.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:02  Focus mates, a clunky name. Talk a little bit to me about how you think about a getting started on a task. You know, for people who procrastinate. Let’s start there and then we’ll move to focus after that.

Taylor Jacobson 00:13:13  How I think about getting started on a task.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:15  Yeah. Like if somebody’s a procrastinator. Obviously focus mate is sort of your best answer for, you know, how to work through that. But do you have any other suggestions or ideas?

Taylor Jacobson 00:13:25  Yeah. Well, just taking a step back. Like I think that procrastination is an expression of feeling unsafe. And I’ll explain that a little bit more. But like we are so perpetually stressed out and and from a nervous system standpoint, in fight or flight, you know, when we’re distracting ourselves, it’s kind of this expression of that constant low level agitation or anxiety or whatever you want to call it, but stress. And we might think of fight or flight as like, oh, I stepped into traffic and I like got a huge rush of adrenaline.

Taylor Jacobson 00:14:05  But actually a more common experience of fight flight is much more subtle. It’s just stress, basically. Or it’s rumination or, you know, like waking up early with thoughts about work or something, whatever it is. And when our body is in that state, we can’t focus because our body is is basically preparing to either fight or run. It’s optimizing for one of those functions. So there’s a lot of agitation. There’s a lot of energy to act, but it’s not focus. It’s not calm. Right. So we’re really bad at slowing down and being like, okay, what do I really want to do with my time? And then doing that thing because the blood flow is not even in your brain, you know? It’s just it’s just moving you and it’s kind of grabbing for things. It can help to really numb that unwanted feeling. But what we really need is to slow down and feel grounded. And from that embodied, safe place, what naturally is going to arise is, is a more authentic desire than Netflix or snacking or whatever myriad things we do from from a procrastinating place.

Taylor Jacobson 00:15:12  So that’s sort of indirectly speaks to what I’m talking about. But yeah, with getting started, I do think that addressing that experience in our bodies can be really important. So when why is a morning routine such a popular thing? It’s because when we say morning routine, we’re not doing things that stressed us out. We’re basically morning routine is doing things that ground us, and even things like just brushing our teeth or drinking a glass of water. It’s having a slowed down experience of ourselves that that actually signals to our body. I’m safe. And so from that place we’re able more easily to get started. And something like focus, mate. You might still feel a little bit of that agitated energy when you show up, but the commitment, as you said, like the accountability to show up, you’ve got to schedule a time that might be enough to get you over the hump as well. Right. And then once your butts in the chair, you’re already slowing down. Now there’s a person there. They’re helping you feel grounded to reflecting on what you want to do.

Taylor Jacobson 00:16:14  So it’s sort of easing you into a into a safer space. But it doesn’t have to be focused, mate. You know, it’s it’s really how do we ground ourselves? How do we slow down, how do we set the intention. And so it’s starting to feel slower and safer in our bodies. And then how do we just get ourselves over the starting line to start that thing as well?

Eric Zimmer 00:16:31  And so you’ve got a line that I heard recently. It was design a life that demands what you want to give. Say a little bit more about that.

Taylor Jacobson 00:16:39  Yeah. You know, that’s something we say internally on our team at focus, mate. And the way that we think about ourselves as a company and our mission is it’s actually not really about focus. It’s about being who you really want to be or being who you truly are. And that starts with our team. You know, we think about serving ourselves on our team before we think about serving our customers. And like how we interact with each other on our team is is kind of the energy that we’re putting out to our community.

Taylor Jacobson 00:17:11  And so we have this mantra internally of that’s what we’re helping each other do, is to design a life that demands what you want to give. That’s kind of one way of thinking about this. And so we don’t have a lot of hard and fast rules about how we work at focus at the starting point, you know, even in interviewing somebody. This really let’s let’s really learn about you and what works for you, and we’ll share about us as well and see if there’s some real alignment there, and see if this is a good environment to support you in designing the life that you want to live, and are the things that we need. The roles, the skills that we need in our team are those things that you really want to give, and it could be tactical stuff to, you know, the times of day that you want to be working. Do you want to be on a lot of calls or is that really not good for your energy? And you like to, you know, just kind of be asynchronous in whatever.

Taylor Jacobson 00:18:04  So that’s where it comes from, you know? And actually I’ll just share briefly like I’m in a very active like reinvention of my own role at the company. And it’s really been enabled by the strength of that conviction and commitment by the entire team, where I was very scared, honestly, to relinquish some of the responsibilities that I had. But I could also feel that I just no longer had the energy to keep like muscling through some of the things that I had been doing since we started the company and the team, and especially our head of operations, who has really taken a lot of this stuff off my plate, was just really adamant, like, we got you, we got this, let’s reinvent this. Let’s design a life that demands what you want to give. And we all have faith that when we do that and when I do that, it will serve the company as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:54  Yeah. I think what’s interesting about that line is two things. One is my experience is no matter what you design to get a life, you demand, there are still things that you don’t really want to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:06  You know, there’s just some measure of that. You know that at least the stage that our organization is right. There’s just things I do that need to be done, and I don’t love doing them. I outsource as much of that as possible. But as you know, you know, early on in a company’s state, you don’t have money to do all that. But I think the other thing that’s really interesting about that is that it changes, you know, we design a life that demands what we want to give and then what we want to give. At least my experience is it can morph over time. And that maybe was your experience with focus mate was early on. You were giving what you wanted to give and then it transformed and you had to, as you say, kind of be willing to try and reinvent. And that word reinvent always sounds lovely, but it’s rarely a lovely process.

Taylor Jacobson 00:19:53  Yeah, that’s such an important observation. Like or transformation. Like, God, I would never wish transformation on my worst enemy.

Taylor Jacobson 00:19:59  It’s like pain, you know? But, yeah, I mean, often the way we come to it is like burnout or something like this where you get in a groove and hopefully it starts out being, you know, you’re doing something that’s authentic, and then you just keep going and you may start feeling some dissonance and you know, the like, the thing starts to rattle a little bit and you maybe you start to get migraines or like chronic pain or like other signals that your body is like, no, this isn’t working for me anymore. For us anymore? Yeah. Unfortunately. Because of. Categorically, I guess we’ll say fear. Like, oh my God, if I stop doing this thing, it’s not going to get done. The company is going to fall apart. You know, for me, it was real. Like, if I tell my colleagues what’s going on for me and that I need rest, everyone’s going to stop working. If I need rest, our culture is suddenly going to become lazy.

Taylor Jacobson 00:20:47  And I’ll come back to that in a second. We have all these stories that keep us from just noticing, like the moment that thing changes, it’s like, whoa, I feel some strong resistance to doing this and like, can I make a shift? But instead we just kind of plow through and then we have burnout or other, you know, or injuries or other things that really force us to a halt and, and kind of force the reinvention on us. But the stories are rarely true, you know. So like in this case, the whole team was like really rallied around. They were like, oh my goodness. Like, you’ve worked so hard and let us take these things off your plate and find out, you know, what’s on the other side of this reinvention for you.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:01  Hey everyone. I haven’t had an open spot in my coaching practice in over three years, but right now I’ve got a couple. But I work best with a certain kind of person. So if you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader and you’re ready to move from scattered progress and simmering self-doubt to aligned action, strategic clarity and real momentum. This might be the right time through something I call the aligned progress method will turn inner alignment into real world r esults so you can grow your revenue, reclaim your time, and finally, trust yourself as much as others already do. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at www.oneyoufeed.net/align

Eric Zimmer 00:22:44 You’re in the startup world, which means you are trying to please a variety of people, right? I guess that’s not just a startup world, right? A companies in general are trying to please their investors, slash shareholders. They’re trying to please their customer. They’re trying to please their internal team. You know, it sounds like your internal team was 100% behind you sort of saying, all right, I’m going to slow down and get some rest. Did you find any pushback from any of your other constituents or stakeholders around that? Because startup culture is very much grind, hustle, macho like, you know, I can work more hours than you can work. Did you find any or have any issues there.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:22  And you’re welcome to say if your investor situations are ones you don’t want to talk about, I get it. So you’re welcome to say pass.

Taylor Jacobson 00:23:28  No. You know, for me, being able and willing to have one truth for all audiences is it’s really like, I think the ultimate aspiration in some ways, I think for like a human being is to feel that peace that comes with being true in all ways, with all people. There’s nothing to hide. So that’s an aspiration. But, I haven’t experienced any of that pushback or tension. And I think it’s because it’s always been a core aspect of our ethos, and even our mission is really about paradigm shift. Like creating a company in a different way and doing it at scale to really model that. It’s possible that you that hustle and grind isn’t necessary, and to show, To find out. Experiment with what happens when you do things this other way. And you know, I imagine that scares our investors sometimes. Just like it scares me sometimes.

Taylor Jacobson 00:24:30  But it’s just like, what are we here for? What is my life for? It’s not to make a lot of money. And so, yeah, the pursuit, it’s not. I really hope not. For me, it’s like the point is to, you know, find out as much as you can, experience as much as you can of your, your soul, your true nature to really, you know, experience that deeply. And so, yeah, how can our work and how can this company specifically for me, be kind of the vessel to further that experiment? And so it’s very authentic for me to say to an investor, yeah, we want to make this as big as possible. And we really believe we can reach, you know, tens, 100 million people or more. And so this can be a great place to put some money to work. but we’re going to do it our way. You know, and I also think we’re at a moment in time where that’s, you know, the kind of gestalt is, is shifting the collective consciousness.

Taylor Jacobson 00:25:27  You know, we’re all like the great resignation happening now. We’re all feeling that inner pull for something different. And so I think that’s also attractive to our customers and to our community. And, you know, when we have an outage or something like this, you know, we had a seven hour outage a few months back, and we were very vulnerable about it and very apologetic about it. We did everything we could to provide alternate resources to people who needed them, but people were also very understanding. And we’re kind of just like, you know, you got this. It’s okay because we’re so actively creating that narrative, you know, in all facets of what we do.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:08  Let’s go back to focus for a second and let’s go back to you said somewhere, our ability to focus is a function of our nervous system state period. And you hit that a little bit. I’d like to dive in a little bit deeper there. And I’m going to start by saying I sometimes feel like we have hit a point where we need a different way of describing nervous system function than fight flight freeze.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:36  I’ve I’ve heard recently flop, which crack cracks me up. I sometimes feel like those terms point towards. And you said it. It doesn’t have to be extreme, but they point towards an extreme. You know, they point towards a very heightened type of reaction. Whereas I think what’s happening with a lot of us is what’s happening nervous system wise is mild but chronic, I guess. First, your thoughts on that?

Taylor Jacobson 00:27:04  Oh yeah. That’s pretty interesting to unpack a little bit. Actually, I’m thinking about it as you say it. Like I do think there’s absolutely a need for a lexicon that resonates with people that, like, feels relevant to my life, right? Because what I would love to see happen is for what we’re talking about here, and what we’ll talk about more in a second. To become common knowledge, you know, for parents and teachers and just everyone, workers like to understand how your body works, how your nervous system works, and what’s really happening. And this extends far beyond focus.

Taylor Jacobson 00:27:40  I mean, the implications for relationships are profound. So yeah. Fight, flight. It’s like, yeah, no, I’m not like, I’m not about to have a fistfight with my colleague. And so you might just reject this as somehow irrelevant. On the other hand, I believe that part of why we are so stressed is that we repress the extent of the experience that we’re having as one of fight or flee. And so we’re trying to here’s a fun example. If you’re experiencing fight flight. Meditation might help you because you’re slowing down your breath. You’re sending signals to your body, basically, that I’m safe. Right. But you might actually have enough pent up fight flight energy that you really need to get it out in a more aggressive way. And I’m a little bit reticent to even use this language. But it’s the truth is that when we’re angry, it’s a kind of murderous experience. You know, the fight impulse is violent. And it’s so taboo in our culture to name that, let alone to allow ourselves to fully experience it.

Taylor Jacobson 00:29:02  And I don’t mean act it out, of course, at all, but to just experience the level of agitation like the directionality of that fight flight energy in us is immense. And I think why we have so much angst is that we’re collectively so repressed, and we don’t have the tools, and also don’t have the kind of shared understanding of what it actually means to release that fight flight energy in a healthy way, like something that I will often do is I’ll I’ll do like primal screaming, you know, and sometimes I’ll do it in a pillow if I’m in a place where that’s necessary. But there’s also a few things that are more liberating for me than, like going up on a hilltop and just like, you know, screaming and in a very literal way that’s vibrating your body and it’s unblocking this stuck energy that’s in your body, you know, if you’re not releasing that, you’re literally just holding tension in your body, you know? And that’s what we’re walking around with when we feel stress, when we feel anxiety, when we are procrastinating, whatever it might be.

Taylor Jacobson 00:30:05  So I’m with you in terms of how do we make this common knowledge through through more accessible lexicon. And on the other hand, part of that is we can’t nice it up and say we’re just going to do all these sweet, gentle practices. There’s actually a need to fully embrace and and feel our anger so that we’re not projecting it in all these sideways ways. And, you know, you can imagine, like the term snide remarks coming up or sarcasm or some of these really low key things that most of us are doing constantly. It’s just like these little pressure valve releases of anger, but it’s not actually a release. It’s a manifestation of this pent up, unexpressed, unfelt fight, flight, energy. And we don’t want to be walking around, you know, getting pissed at every driver on the road and all these. That’s a really unpleasant way to live. So, you know, the antidote to that is like learning how to really fully feel and release the depth of those emotions.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:02  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:02  As you’re talking about that, it brings me right to I feel like one of the fundamental questions we wrestle with here at The One you feed, because it’s a fundamental question I wrestle with, which is what do we do with negative emotion? What do we do with it? Do we experience it? Do we feel it? Do we just really go into it and let it be? Do we work to try and soothe it? Do we try and put it in perspective? I’ll give you an example. The other day I had a busy day. Lots of calls, calls, calls, calls, and I’d been having trouble with the prescription for like four days. The poor pharmacy is overworked. They don’t have enough people. It’s just been very difficult. So I had like 15 to 20 minutes and I was like, all right. It’s a three minute drive. I’m going to go to the pharmacy. I’m going to get there. I’m going to get it. I’m going to leave. Right. And so I’m sitting there and I’m waiting in line.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:55  And, you know, it was supposed to be ready like four hours earlier. I finally weighed in this whole line the whole time, you know. Talk about the sort of fight or flight. I’m like, oh, God, I’ve got a coaching call. I’ve got a client in seven minutes. You know, and and I’m not freaking out, but, you know, I’m feeling that energy build. And I get up there and the guy’s like, yeah, we’ll get that ready for you right now. They had not gotten it ready, even though I talked to somebody a few hours earlier. Then I just had to go, well, I can’t stay. I got to go and I wasn’t going to be able to get back there for another day because of my schedule. Anyway, long story short, I was leaving and I was feeling very angry, you know, anger out of proportion to the situation. Right? Right. So there’s a couple ways to go there, right? One way to go is to go and get in my car and bang on the steering wheel and scream for a while and let out a, you know, a bunch of curse words and just vomit that energy out.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:51  That’s one approach, another approach, and it’s the one that I chose to go with this time. But I don’t always was, I, I really went hang on a second, like, get this in perspective. Like you are an incredibly like privileged lucky person. And if this is the worst thing that’s happening in your life, you need to take it down a notch and recognize, like, hey, there’s nothing to be that upset about here. But that points to two directions, and sometimes they’re compatible. Sometimes there’s a way to do both those things, actually. But I think it does point to particularly as we look at spiritual literature. Right. And we look at spiritual traditions, both those ways and psychological traditions, both of those ways are stressed at different times by different people. And I’m just kind of curious how you think about that. And that was a long setup for that question, but hopefully it’s helpful.

Taylor Jacobson 00:33:43  Such an awesome illustration. Yeah, and I love the contrast between those two approaches.

Taylor Jacobson 00:33:47  So yeah, really glad you shared that. Yeah. You know, it’s an ongoing experiment for me. And I’ve I’ve learned a lot, as you’ve alluded to from like different viewpoints and different traditions. So like I read a book by David Hawkins called Letting Go that is profound. And, you know, his view is basically all emotion is projection. And so the experience that you had in the pharmacy was sort of the world helping to needle some anger that is repressed within you. Right? And you talked about the disproportionate magnitude of your anger. So, you know, perhaps David Hawkins would say that once you’ve released all the old repressed anger, you might not even feel any anger in that situation. It would just be kind of a ho hum. This is what is. At other times, there might be like a very small feeling in your body that you could label like the parts of your body that might heat up or feel tense or something. That’s anger, but it’s just so momentary that it kind of just guides you back to here’s my boundary.

Taylor Jacobson 00:34:49  Like something that didn’t work for me, you know? And then, like Peter Levine, whose body of work is somatic experiencing, right? He talks about how you see dogs that, like a dog will just come in from taking a walk. It’ll come indoors and it’ll just shake, right? It’s like we just went on this excursion. There was different stimuli happening. Now I’m back in my nest. I feel safe. Whatever stress, whatever tension or emotion that dog is holding in its body, it just immediately releases. And that’s the thing that all animals do except humans, is they immediately release that fight or flight energy or that stress, that tension. It’s all emotion. I think all of these things are synonymous in some ways. So the tricky thing for humans is that we have all this stored up tension. And so the technique that you chose in that moment, I would call that kind of a conscious dispersion of the anger. Right? Like, well, I just don’t need to be angry right now.

Taylor Jacobson 00:35:47  But you also experienced the disproportionate, you know, experience of anger, which points to, okay, I have repressed anger and I’d say this is universal, right. So I think the answer is really both. It’s. We don’t have to. We can choose to do the work to unearth these stuck, repressed, suppressed things in our body. And if we do that, then that situation will make you gradually less angry in the future.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:37  Oftentimes I say to people, if you’ve got to choose between taking a perspective and feeling an emotion, feel the emotion first. Let it happen. Let it be. Allow it to be there. Then move into taking a perspective on it right? Then move in to going, okay, you know what? Maybe it really isn’t that big of a deal. You know, like if you’re unsure that order of operations is probably best because then you’re not repressing or bypassing to the same extent. What I think is interesting with what David Hawkins is saying, and I’ve seen that theory a lot of different ways and a lot of different places.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:10  What I sometimes wonder is a couple of things is it bottomless? So I went through this at one point in my life when I was, I don’t know, 30, 30 years old, 32 years old, my marriage split up and I was separated from my son, and I certainly had a role in that happening. But my partner had left me for someone else and I was really angry. It’s interesting because that was a time that I expressed anger a lot. I took up boxing. I was so mad at her. I took up boxing and it was great. And I wrote hateful letters that I destroyed, and I allowed the anger to flow through. So I’ve had some experience with like. And now, you know, a couple of years later, I went from wanting her to, you know, burn in hell to being like, oh, yeah, sure, I’ll come over for Thanksgiving. That sounds nice, you know? Out, so I do. I do agree with that. But at the same time, I started working with a therapist and we started doing inner child work.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:01  Right? That phrase then and now still makes a certain part of me inside cringe. But the idea was, hey, look, the things that happened to you as a child impact who you are today, your emotional reactions today. The way to work through that is to go back if you can and express the emotions that come up from that. And so I spent some time doing that, and then I hit a point where I felt like maybe I had more or less sort of gotten all there was to get out of that. But there seemed to be from her perspective, like you just kept going. And in my perspective, I was like, it feels like I’ve done enough of that, that there’s not enough benefit. As I’m talking this through, I’m realizing that what was happening was I started to realize I didn’t have the emotions anymore. So I had, in essence, sort of worked through them. All right. That was a long way of answering my own question.

Taylor Jacobson 00:38:52  Well, I do think That.

Taylor Jacobson 00:38:54  Thanks so much for sharing that. And like, oh, like my heart goes out to you. But also just like pulling the thread through to where you are now and like going over Thanksgiving dinner. It’s like such a amazing illustration of this. Oh yeah. It’s just like it kind of is bottomless. Like, clearly you might be happy now, but the pharmacy still pisses you off. You know, so it’s like there’s no righteousness in, like, am I going to keep working with my anger, or am I going to just say, you know what, I have really a healthy enough relationship to my anger right now that I want to focus elsewhere. There’s no, like, right or wrong about that. But I think it’s just understanding, like cool. Like at that point in your life, it was getting in the way of everything that you wanted to do and who you wanted to be. And so that that was an urgent priority. And sometimes that’s what life serves us up. Is these like, unavoidable things to heal? Yes.

Taylor Jacobson 00:39:43  Right. Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:44  And then back to our point about transformation and reinvention. Like, yeah, I transformed a lot during that period. There’s no doubt about that. I don’t want to do it again.

Taylor Jacobson 00:39:55  Exactly. And. Yeah. And then it’s just like, I think for me, it’s. Have I reached a safe landing pad where I want to exert my effort elsewhere? Or even things like doing yoga? You know, like if you’re continuing to do. I don’t know if you do yoga, I do some yoga. I’m very aware that the yoga I do is tapping into stuck energy, stuck emotion in my body. So, like, I might be feeling really good, but at the same time, I’m like, I really want to keep feeling better and keep healing more and keep getting my deep seated. We could say inner child fears whatever healed and out of the way so I can experience more of my soul, or true self, or inner freedom, or inner peace or whatever these things are.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:35  So speaking of yoga, right? You are living on an ashram right now. That was, I’m assuming, part of your getting rest from focus, mate. Anything you want to share about what that is, what you’re doing there, what that’s like for you.

Taylor Jacobson 00:40:47  You know, I guess the first thing I’ll say is that it wasn’t just getting rest. It was really going through, in my case, also a breakup last year that just brought up a lot for me, you know? And really, I’ll say the trauma that came up through that experience forced itself to be handled. You know, I spent several months kind of muscling through or trying to do things the ways I knew how, but at some point I just I realized that I wanted to fully commit myself to, you know, we talked about the nervous system that really became my lens, like, what’s the optimal environment to do this kind of work? And, you know, nature is extremely nourishing. Living in community can be really nourishing.

Taylor Jacobson 00:41:34  There’s yoga classes every day here. There’s healthy vegetarian meals cooked every day here. There’s a shared commitment to personal growth here. There’s a lot of ancient teachings that are really profound that we talk about on a daily basis here. So it was really for me was I want to try and experiment in what’s the best. And I sort of joke, it’s like focus mate, for my whole life. Yeah. As opposed to just, you know, a one hour experience. I want to see what this is like, you know, and I’ll say it’s it’s been really a lifelong interest of mine to live in community and sort of experiment with what I feel are more intuitive, healthy ways of living that are just really hard to come by in modern society. So I guess I just I reached a tipping point within myself where I was like, screw it, I’m going to do this. I’m going to try this, you know, for my own sake. But it’s also it’s certainly inspired me and provided a lot of learning in terms of, you know, stuff I want to take out into the world to.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:30  And is it the sort of situation in which you can also continue to work to some extent, or is it one of the spiritual communities that sort of asks you to withdraw from all that?

Taylor Jacobson 00:42:39  Both.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:41  Yeah.

Taylor Jacobson 00:42:42  Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s actually been a really challenging and fun experiment in that regard, because I’ve been really playing with that edge of yeah, there’s a way that they’ve sort of asked me to show up here that adheres to their way of doing things, and yet my commitment to my own inner truth is higher than that. And so I’m really using this experience to try to thread that needle where I say, you know what? There’s been moments where, you know, I skipped satsang, which is, you know, like we all gather to meditate and chant and these things. And I skipped it and I got some pushback. And immediately where my mind goes to is, I’m going to get kicked out, you know? And then I kind of walk it back and I say, well, did they say anything about kicking me out? Or like, am I reacting to reality right now, or am I just creating a fear based story that I can’t live my truth and have it work here as well? And so, you know, this is a thing that we all do in relationships.

Taylor Jacobson 00:43:47  It’s like we’re so scared of abandonment or getting hurt. We’ve run away from the dynamic rather than just saying, oh, let me, let me like try to be true to myself, but in a very loving and gentle way. And so it’s helped that this is a short term residence for me with people I’ve never met before where I can say, all right, I’m really committed to that experiment. I’m not going to run away from this place. I want to be here, but I also want to skip satsang sometimes, or I want to, you know, I have work stuff that I that I want to do. And so how can I be very loving in communicating that rather than defiant or angry or pushing back against them? And honestly, it’s shocked me in some ways how well that’s gone where I, I will say, you know what the really loving thing to do here would be to communicate where I’m coming from and why I’m choosing this, not because I’m asking for permission to do this, but because I want this relationship to work.

Taylor Jacobson 00:44:42  Yeah. Yeah. And then to hear the responses back, that’s like, okay, cool. You know, like I never would have expected that. But so it’s been it’s been really eye opening for me in terms of this is healthy relating.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:54  When you’re there. Is it harder for you to put down work and go towards the spiritual, or is it harder to put down the spiritual and go towards work, or is it just go back and forth?

Taylor Jacobson 00:45:06  Well, to me that’s a false dichotomy.Because I think we have a lot of concepts about what spirituality is that we haven’t directly experienced. And so I think those are just ideas. But to me, the strongest access point that I have to spirituality is this thing that I will often call my inner truth. And to me, that is spiritual, because where does that come from? It’s not something I analyzed. It’s not rational, it’s intuitive. But like, what is intuition? Where does that come from? I don’t know. But to me, there’s a certain like What I would call divinity or kind of, like, inexplicable, higher power that’s at work in all of us.

Taylor Jacobson 00:45:53  That is that voice, your inner compass, you know, whatever it is. And so, to me, kind of the ultimate spiritual practice is I’m going to trust that inner GPS. I’m going to listen to that inner truth right now. And, you know, in spiritual communities, people use the word ego a lot, which I think ego is just it’s the collection of all of our fears and under one umbrella called ego. So when we choose our truth, the only reason it’s hard is because we’re scared to do it. There’s a fear that it’s coming up against, right? So for me, choosing to skip satsang because what’s authentic for me is I want to actually go take a hike up to the top of this hill and do you know, whatever. That’s the truth that’s coming up for me right now. and in order to choose that truth, I have to face this fear that people are going to be pissed that I skipped that song. I’m going to get kicked out. I’m going to get scolded, whatever.

Taylor Jacobson 00:46:49  I’m not going to have a home like all these, all these fears come up. And so how do you conquer your ego? Let’s say to me, the answer is you just choose your truth. Because in the process of choosing your truth over and over again, you’re going to experience fear. And maybe you’ll heal a little bit of it, or peel a little bit of it back, and you’ll see that it’s actually the thing that I was scared of isn’t so scary after all. And in the process, yeah, I think you get closer to ultimate truth. And to me that is spirit. That’s God. To me, the words aren’t so important.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:22  Boy, there’s a lot in there that we’re only going to get to a little bit of before we need to probably go into post-show conversation. I’m trying to pick which part of that I want to grab. Let’s start with this one. You talk about intuition, your inner GPS, that inner knowing. Do you believe that there’s inner characteristics that are true in you that are different than me at the most basic level?

Taylor Jacobson 00:47:48  Oh, yeah.

Taylor Jacobson 00:47:51  There’s a notion I’ve heard at times of the idea of the healthy ego, which is it’s sort of your individuality, your uniqueness. Right. And so one way that I think about this is like all of the experiences that we’ve had, and especially the trauma that we’ve had, deeply inform the gifts that we can give to the world. And when we are living from the fear, we are not giving those gifts. We’re basically just trying to protect ourselves. That’s kind of our full time job unconsciously. But as we heal those things and we tap into those gifts, now we’re tapping into what I would call, you know, your soul or your truth. And I think that true nature is intrinsically loving. Like, that’s just kind of what comes when you’re not scared is we just find that we want to love and serve and give and but the way that we do that sometimes it’s like has the same shape, the same outline as our trauma, same outline as our fears. So like, let’s say it’s, you know, the shape of your handprint.

Taylor Jacobson 00:48:56  It might start out being all fear and it’s an expression of fear. But as you heal those things, it’s like now the light is coming through, but the light is coming through in the same shape, because your unique gift is a function of your history with addiction or that traumatic breakup of your marriage, or or these other things that have helped you become who you are. I think of that the same way as like, you know, a fish and a dog are not the same thing. They’re occupying what Bill Plotkin calls their unique eco niche. They don’t have the same problems that we have in doing that. But yeah, it’s like when we’re really being true to ourselves, we’re occupying our kind of correct role within the oneness of all things.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:38  It’s a nice way to say it. And I would say, you know, our traumas and our fears may be one of the major shaping forces of that role, but I certainly think everything that happens to us shapes us. And I think obviously we’re clearly shaped by some genetic capability.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:57  There is a unique creation here that is Eric, and it is informed by everything that has ever happened to me, good and bad. It’s informed by the genes that I got. It’s informed by all those things. And then I do believe this is a Zen idea. Emptiness and form form an emptiness, right? That emptiness is pure potentiality. It’s the it’s the energy underneath everything. But then it pops into form based on all sorts of things, you know, echo niche, all these different things. So I think we’re kind of talking about the same thing, and that there are versions of me that are truer to essence the more I’m healed.

Taylor Jacobson 00:50:36  Yeah. Beautifully put. I hadn’t heard some of those kind of Zen concepts, but it really resonates.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:40  Yeah, you should look into, you know, the ideas of of form and emptiness, though I think they’ll really resonate. They resonate very much with what you just said before I started talking, which is that idea. All right. We’re going to wrap up.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:53  You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation because I want to talk about how do you know whether to trust your intuition? A former drug addict like me is hesitant to trust strong inner feelings because, you know, I had pretty strong feelings that were coming from inside me that destroyed me. And so I think, you know, how do we know what inner voice to listen to, which inner voice to trust, to think we’re going to pursue that in the post-show conversation, listeners. You can get access to that and add free episodes and all kinds of other great things by going to one you feed dot net join. Taylor, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s really been fun.

Taylor Jacobson 00:51:33  Oh, yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. This is awesome.

Chris Forbes 00:51:37  If you’re enjoying the podcast, check out our weekly bit of Wisdom newsletter. Every Wednesday, we send a short email with practical insights, reflections, and takeaways, often featuring past guests. It’s a great way to stay inspired and support the show  Sign up at one. Net.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:57  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.

In this episode, Sarah Gormley discusses the quiet pain of self-loathing and finding the courage to fac. it. Sarah had it all – a thriving corporate career, success, admiration. But beneath was a quiet, relentless self-loathing she couldn’t shake. In her memoir, The Order of Things, Sarah shares the profound turning point at 40 when she finally asked, is this how it’s going to feel forever? She unpacks why therapy isn’t linear, how grief can deepen gratitude, and the freedom that comes when we stop performing and start genuinely living.

Feeling stuck? It could be one of the six saboteurs of self-control—things like autopilot, self-doubt, or emotional escapism. But here’s the good news: you can outsmart them. Download the free Six Saboteurs of Self-Control ebook now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook and start taking back control today!

Key Takeaways:

• Journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance
• Importance of mental health and therapy
• Struggles with self-loathing and emotional challenges
• Impact of grief on personal growth and gratitude
• Relationship dynamics and self-worth
• Caregiving experiences and their emotional complexities
• Navigating grief while supporting others
• The role of compassion in healing
• Tools for managing negative self-talk and thought patterns
• The interplay of environment, genetics, and personal agency in shaping identity

Sarah Gormley is a writer and art gallery owner living in Columbus, Ohio. Her debut memoir is called The Order of Things. Sarah’s undergraduate degree from DePauw University reinforced an early love for literature and writing, while the heavy sprinkling of liberal-arts fairy dust taught her how to analyze and
articulate a clear point of view. She rounded out this foundation with concentrations in marketing and operations from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Today, Sarah owns a contemporary art gallery, Sarah Gormley Gallery, that operates from the belief that original art can be a source of joy for everyone and actively eschews pretense of any kind. She
opened the gallery in 2019, twenty-five years after her Grandma Cameron gifted Sarah with her first piece of original art.

Connect with Sarah Gormley:  Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Gormley, check out these other episodes:

How to Tame Your Inner Critic with Dr. Aziz Gazipura

How to Practice Self Compassion with Dr. Shauna Shapiro

By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!

If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon!  Click here to learn more!!

Episode Transcript:

Sarah Gormley 00:00:00  The relationship with yourself is the relationship that’s most important, and it informs everything else. Romantically, professionally. My siblings.

Chris Forbes 00:00:16  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 00:01:01  On the surface, Sarah Gormley had it all a thriving corporate career success. Admiration. But beneath was a quiet, relentless self-loathing she couldn’t shake. In her memoir, The Order of Things, Sarah shares the profound turning point at 40 when she finally asked, is this how it’s going to feel forever? In our conversation, we discussed why therapy isn’t linear, how grief can deepen gratitude, and the freedom that comes when we stop performing and start genuinely living.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:34  I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah Gormley 00:01:40  Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:42  Those of you that are watching will see that we are sitting together in person in the studio in Columbus, Ohio that we use. You’re also here in Columbus, Ohio, and they will also see this book, which is what we’re going to be talking about. It’s called The Order of Things, a memoir about chasing Joy. But before we get into that, we’ll start in the way that we always do with the parable. Okay. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two souls inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:32  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.

Sarah Gormley 00:02:38  You would think I’d be more prepared after watching some of the others on listening. I think it’s all of our story. I’m hesitating because I’m already getting a little bit emotional. I think probably the most surprising lesson of my life, which I try to capture in the book, is how much we can be in charge of our emotional selves. It takes work, but you can choose to feed the part of you that’s healthy. And I love the parable. And before I even knew you existed, I saw the parable online somewhere, and I sent it to my boyfriend and partner, Camillus, because I thought it was so beautiful and I hadn’t. I’m sure I’d heard it before, but I saw one of those, you know, images online, the perfect quote. And I’d sent it to him, and that was, I don’t know, six years ago. So it’s, it’s incredibly poignant and relevant to all of us.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:46  I love that idea about thinking of having the power to work with our emotional selves more skillfully. Right. I don’t think we can control our emotional self, but we can certainly relate to it and work with it far more skillfully. Before we dive into all of that, why don’t you just give us a brief overview of kind of the heart of the book, what it’s about.

Sarah Gormley 00:04:09  Okay. it’s a memoir. As you mentioned in the subhead, is a memoir about chasing Joy. And so the narrative arc of the book is about my experience when I came home to Ohio after a career in New York and San Francisco. I came home to be with my dying mother. her cancer came back. We knew what was likely going to happen, and I took a year break to kind of, well, a to be with her but be sought some things out for myself, I had been struggling in my corporate career and that sort of the narrative arc, the story beneath the story Is an emotional journey, and I had been a person who my entire adult life, starting in childhood, was, full of self-loathing.

Sarah Gormley 00:05:03  And it wasn’t depression. It wasn’t anxiety. It was just I hated myself. And how that manifested was I was an overachiever, you know, it wasn’t debilitating. Excuse me? It wasn’t debilitating self-loathing. It was motivating self-loathing. So I became a gold star chaser, you know, needed to be smart, skinny, successful. And so I just kept achieving. And what a shock. The more I achieved, the less fulfilled I was. And that’s a pretty frustrating place to find yourself. So at age 40, finally, I found a therapist who’s still my therapist today and my work with him and work on myself. pretty radically transformed my life. So that’s the story beneath the story. And the book includes scenes with my therapist, David, because I wanted to show people what actually happens in therapy sessions.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:04  It’s funny that you say at 40, because I was having a conversation yesterday with a woman who’s an executive coach, and she was saying what she saw consistently in her work was that when people got into their 40s, all of a sudden what had been working for them to get them to the point in their career that they were suddenly started to not work.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:30  It started to be a problem. And I think a lot of it is what we’re talking about here is that I think we can be motivated by striving because we don’t think we’re good enough. And that can be a really powerful fuel. And it’s a fuel that I think over time really starts to gunk up the engine. And when you hit your 40s, you know you may still, career wise, be doing okay. But inside it’s like, I think it’s this critical point habits. It must be maybe some combination of years of that and, you know, the realities of getting older. And I’ve seen that in the coaching work that I’ve done with people. It’s somewhere in that range that, you know, maybe you’ve had enough success at that point that you’re like, oh, that didn’t fit, that didn’t fix the problem. And and instead of thinking, oh, it’s just more success, more success, I think certain people wise up a little bit and go, oh, hang on, let me question the whole paradigm of what I’m doing here, the strategy I’m going after to deal with these internal emotions.

Sarah Gormley 00:07:30  Yes, I think so. I mean, for me, it was 40 sort of a big number. And you think maybe a midpoint of life. And I really just asked myself like, what are we doing? What? And I was in a huge amount of pain. I mean, pain can be a pretty big motivator.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:50  Yeah. Pain is an outstanding motivator, and it’s clear that that pain is still, or the experience of it is still close at hand.

Sarah Gormley 00:07:57  You can laugh at me. I cry all the time and I think, you know, the body remembers. And so I think my body physically recalls how I felt for so long and nobody knew. I didn’t even know. I didn’t know what to call it. I just when I turned 40, I thought, I can’t do this for 40 more years, something. Yeah. And I was terrified to try therapy because I thought, what if a therapist says, oh, Sarah, this is just life. This is how you’re going to feel.

Sarah Gormley 00:08:31  Because I thought, well, then what do I do? Yeah. You know, I was so nervous. And fortunately, I didn’t have to feel that way about myself for the rest of my life. And part of writing the book was yes, to share the story, but boy, I can get myself. I can get in my head a little bit of I probably should have started at 30. What if? And it’s not. It’s not productive to say what if, but my life. I’m so fortunate. I have a blessed, full, lovely life. But if I had not been as terrified to start therapy and started at 25 or 30, who knows? You know who knows, but who knows? It’s okay, but I don’t spend too much time there. But I think if someone reads the book and recognizes themselves and the story, several people have already told me they’ve reached out and started therapy after they read the book, because I took out some of the the scariness of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:33  Yeah. That’s wonderful. Yeah. I think that ability to pivot from internal self-loathing to some form of internal kindness is about the biggest upgrade you can give your life, right? Because the person we spend the most time with by far, of course, is ourselves. And if that self-loathing voice is just constantly kind of going, it’s really lousy in there. Now, I think that becoming kind to ourselves actually allows us to get better at everything that we do. But even if that were not the case, that upgrade inside is so. And it’s so weird because I think, I mean, I did in many ways start this sort of journey at at 25 as a recovering heroin addict. And, and I can say that one of the things that has happened is that that self-loathing is pretty much gone now. But here’s what’s weird is my brain will still fire up this phrase. I hate myself like it just arises. And I’m like, what? What on earth is that? And I recognize what tends to cause it.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:37  Also, I can recognize the situations I’m in, and it’s usually a situation in which I don’t know the answer. Okay. When I find myself in a like, I don’t know what to do or I’m going to make somebody unhappy or something like that, that voice just rises up. Even though at this point it doesn’t have any energy underneath it. It just shows that our patterns get so deeply wired.

Sarah Gormley 00:11:01  Oh my God, the patterns are so strong. They’re so powerful. And I still have the voice. I named the voice Scott Kennedy after the bully in elementary school. And it’s still there, same like. And I say I’m like, no, not today. And yeah, but it creeps up, you know, whether it’s about body or success or, you know, and then I just sort of, I guess now I have the tools to like, I don’t tolerate the voice much longer than like a few seconds at a time, but it’s not totally gone. Yeah. You know, it’s not.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:33  All well, my experience is it won’t it won’t totally go, but it’s a completely different experience. Mostly when I say something like that, or occasionally the other one that’ll fire up will be like, I want to die, or and I’ll be. I just kind of tend to laugh at it now because I’m like, that is an extremely overdramatic that is way too dramatic for the fact that you’re not sure which shampoo to use today, right? Like, we can just we can relax a little here.

Sarah Gormley 00:12:04  Yes. my therapist, David, who I will reference multiple times, but he once said to me, you don’t have to make a pageant out of it. Like, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:13  Like, yeah, that’s funny.

Sarah Gormley 00:12:14  You can just kind of.

Sarah Gormley 00:12:16  Have a conversation. It doesn’t have to be this full blown up thing. It’s just this. I’m like, oh, right. It doesn’t have to be a pageant.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:23  Yeah. The book very early on paints a poignant picture of you sitting in your apartment. I think you’re in New York at this time, and you’re reading books like The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, who’s been on the show a couple times and I think is one of the best writers alive, and a book about depression, which I resonate with very deeply. But you were reading it going, no, not me. So you were reading these books about depression, anxiety, all of this, but none of it was resonating with what you had and what you were able to finally put your finger on was it was this thing.

Sarah Gormley 00:12:58  The self-loathing? Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:13:01  And I consider myself a fairly bright individual. And so I was trying to do the research, you know, because I thought if I could find a book or an article that resonated with me, I would know what to do. Yeah. And I couldn’t find myself in any of those pages. And I still today think that when we talk about mental health, if you say certain words, people are like, yes, that’s a mental health issue.

Sarah Gormley 00:13:30  Suicide, depression, sexual trauma, sexual assault. Yeah. These there are these big categories that are connected to something pretty extreme. And what I’ve found is that there are a lot of us, women in particular, who are carrying around this sort of quiet suffering, often disguised by success, and it’s just not necessary. So, you know, that to me, is one of the reasons. It’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. But it’s one of the reasons I am talking to you today and writing essays for national media because so many people, women in particular, again, when they’ve read the book, approach me and say. Me too. Yeah. Me too. So many, you know. And so again, I think there is help. And I used to think, oh, you just have to ask for help. That’s the key. Now, I think, no, the key is to admit that you’re hurting. And I think a lot of people. Their lives look great on paper.

Sarah Gormley 00:14:38  They’ve got a great job, healthy kids, a supportive family, a great friend group. This is how I felt. What the hell am I bitching about? Who am I to complain?

Sarah Gormley 00:14:49  You have this gratitude.

Sarah Gormley 00:14:51  Spoiled white girl from Ohio. What’s she bitching about?

Sarah Gormley 00:14:53  Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:14:54  And that’s why I couldn’t reconcile that there was, quote unquote, something wrong or something I needed to fix. And when I reframed it and said, I can’t live this way for the next 40 years, I’m in too much pain. Then it became more acceptable to me in my head to ask for help.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:13  Yeah, I think I was, you know, I was fortunate enough at an early age to see a lot of people who are in real pain, particularly in 12 step, like, you know. But as time went on and the main thing I got really interested in have gone really deep in is Buddhism. And Buddhism starts from the place of saying Everybody’s got some of this suffering going on.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:34  It’s the human condition. And and I find that a helpful view of the world because a, I think it allows me to approach everybody. Well, I try, I try to approach everybody from a place of more compassion. And I think it also allows me when something is going wrong or I’m struggling to say like, that’s totally normal. And so of course you’re hurting and the next thing to do is seek some help. So I think that you’re right. For a lot of people it’s I think there are so many. They called it like a journey of healing. And I think that on one hand, I hate that phrase journey. You’re you’re on your journey. I know, you know.

Sarah Gormley 00:16:14  I cringe when I say emotional journey, but it’s what.

Sarah Gormley 00:16:16  It is. But yeah, it’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:18  Apt because there’s I was talking with a friend yesterday who’s a therapist, and he’s been a social worker for years, and we talked about how for many people they think like, if you just ask for help, it just all gets better.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:30  You know, I thought the first time, like, if I just, you know, it was my like, yeah, I’m dying from addiction, but someday I’ll pull a pin, I’ll go to rehab and it’ll be solved. And of course, it didn’t work that way. Eventually worked that way eventually, but I think so. There’s that first part of like, the journey to get to the place where you can ask for help.

Sarah Gormley 00:16:47  Yes, yes

Eric Zimmer 00:16:49  Then there’s everything that kind of happens after. And you make a great metaphor in the book that I’d like to turn to for a second here. And you say therapy is not like hiking the Appalachian Trail. It’s like being a duck paddling around the same pond in random circles. So say more.

Sarah Gormley 00:17:07  Well, there’s an anecdote in the book about going to the therapist when I was in my 20s. Right. And it didn’t go well, but because I went, I also went in with a list of things I wanted to work on. And even with David, who I’m still with 12 years after starting at age 40, I had some, you know, categories of things I wanted to work on.

Sarah Gormley 00:17:24  I’m a very goal oriented, problem solving type of person. Yep. And it doesn’t work that way in therapy. And I wanted readers to know that, like, you don’t get to go in and say, well, I would like to fix my self-loathing. How long is that going to take?

Sarah Gormley 00:17:41  Yes, I know.

Sarah Gormley 00:17:42  And so the right therapist for you will lead you into conversations, revisit topics, ideas, and it’s slow and messy. And oftentimes you leave an hour long session thinking, what in the hell did we just talk about? You know, I don’t know. But over time, you realize that this is what happened for me. I realized I was seeing myself differently. I was treating myself more kindly. And I’m not. I don’t sit and reference specific things about Jungian therapy and archetypes. I mean, we’ve talked about all of those things, and he teaches me. But it’s it’s more of the awareness and subtle shifts throughout the day of how I’m talking to myself and how I relate to other people.

Sarah Gormley 00:18:32  And that’s when I say it’s like swimming around in the pond. Like you don’t know where the little nuggets of nutrients are coming from. It’s just it’s happening because you asked for help, because you’re committed to the emotional work.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:09  So 12 years you’ve been in therapy? Yes. What makes you think you should still go? Like what sustains your commitment to continuing to do it? Intense pain. Intense motivation? Yes. What I see over and over and over with people, and I see it in my own life. When I’m in a lot of pain, I’m very motivated to change it. Things get better and it’s like, all right, good. Now let me go play, you know, wiffle ball or I don’t actually play wiffle ball. I would like to play wiffle ball. If you want to play wiffle ball after Joe, we could get a game going. You get my.

Sarah Gormley 00:19:42  Point?

Sarah Gormley 00:19:42  Yes, yes. Well, two things. And this isn’t in the book, but I did stop therapy for a spell when I moved from New York to San Francisco, because I still had this idea of, like, checklist, fix that.

Sarah Gormley 00:19:56  And so I move out to San Francisco, my father passes away, and I’m kind of in one of the lowest points of my life emotionally. And I emailed David and we got on the phone. He said, I thought I might hear from you again. But the reason I continue with David now is that I still struggle. You know, I still struggle with how kind I am to myself. I’m interested in relationships and how I behave in relationships, and frankly, I want to be a better version of myself. Yeah, and I have found that therapy has helped me. The relationship with yourself is the relationship that’s most important, and it informs everything else romantically, professionally, my siblings and. Yeah, that’s that’s why. Because I think I’ve come I’ve come this far in 12 years. And I’d like to see what else, what else there is, and it really does. You know, I still have my I still make some pageants out of things that don’t need to be pageants, and it really does.

Sarah Gormley 00:21:13  You know, when I speak with him about it, I’m not beating up my boyfriend or, you know, like, I’m not I’m not dumping it on somebody else. So I kind of save certain topics, if you will. Yes. For David.

Sarah Gormley 00:21:24  Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:21:26  We also have something called trickle down therapy. So my friends know about David. Camillus knows about David. And so if I have an idea, I pass on my little nuggets sometimes.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:35  So let’s change directions for a second. The book is, I think, primarily about, at least from my perspective, two core things. One is this idea of self-loathing and how we work with it. And the second is about the death of and the relationship with your mother. Yes. So so tell us a little bit about what brought you back to Ohio and and where in Ohio? You weren’t in Columbus. You were in a small town.

Sarah Gormley 00:22:00  Chandlers ville outside of Zanesville, Ohio, which is where I grew up. Grew up in a family farm.

Sarah Gormley 00:22:06  It’s absolutely beautiful. And so my father passed away in 16. I was in San Francisco at that point, and his death was sad and terrible, but not a huge surprise. He had had, you know, litany of health challenges for the last 15 years of his life. And so then he died in 16 so November of 17. I was at an event in New York speaking. And my sister calls from the emergency room and said, mom has tumors up and down her spine. I was like, first of all, I was like, are they allowed to tell you that? The air like that seemed a little. So yeah. And we didn’t know how bad it was. I think mom knew. And what happened is after my dad died, I think we were confusing some of her symptoms with grief which I’ve heard has happened a lot before.

Sarah Gormley 00:23:00  And so she just didn’t feel well and had no energy. But we thought, well, you know, her husband of 38, 45, I don’t know how many years a long, healthy marriage.

Sarah Gormley 00:23:11  So there I was in San Francisco. My job was not going well because I shouldn’t have been in the role. I left a big job in New York to take a big job in San Francisco. Really? Because I didn’t know what else to do. So I flew. Rather than flying back to San Francisco from New York. I flew home to Ohio and, you know, had a conversation with mom and said, you know, I’ll come home. I think I volunteered. I’ll come home to be here with you. And she said, oh, I’d like that. Which was shocking because, you know, she knew about my big career. Maybe there was some vicarious enjoyment of my big career. You know, and and she knew the job was a little bit in trouble. And so I thought for sure she would say no, no, no. You go back and take care of what you need to take care of in San Francisco. And when she said, I’d like it if you would come home.

Sarah Gormley 00:24:05  I knew I had to do it. It was the right thing to do. Yeah. So? So I packed up and just came home. And in that transition, I committed to myself that regardless of what happened with her, I was taking a full year off of work to reset, regroup, figure out another way to be with myself professionally. And so I came home in November. She passed in February, and I did not work at all for a full year, which it takes a long time to get some of that corporate persona off of you. At least it did for me. Yeah, I had confused my identity with my profession and, yeah, it took a little time.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:56  Which is not surprising if you see getting things right and gold stars is the way you feel good about yourself, right? Like, of course you’re married. You know, you’re taking your career as your identity. Yeah. How long was it after you sort of arrived back home and your mother passing?

Sarah Gormley 00:25:12  was it four months? December? Oh, I got home at the end of November and she died at the end of February.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:19  So you had four months of being sort of in the scrum of caretaking?

Sarah Gormley 00:25:23  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:24  And then that ended.

Sarah Gormley 00:25:27  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:28  I’m curious about that, that latter transition, because I think when you go from like a job like that to another role that keeps you relatively busy, focused and occupied, that’s one transition. But there’s a deeper transition, at least. Maybe it wasn’t for you. But I’ve seen with a lot of people where when that ends, the caregiving ends. Now you’re truly like, yeah, I’m not working. I’m not like, what am I doing with my life?

Sarah Gormley 00:25:56  Well, two things I think I anticipated that. So I’m a little I’m a control freak even when I’m trying not to be. But I anticipated that that could happen. That’s why I set the year timeline.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:08  Yep.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:09  And I said, Sarah, you can’t.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:11  You can’t.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:12  You are doing nothing but be at this farm. Falling in love. Visiting friends. Traveling. This is what you’re doing? You are not working until January of 19.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:27  So I was prepared for it. Yeah, because there is another version of the story. I get asked this a lot at book clubs. Is there another version? Like what would have happened if. And I think the answer is it’s very possible had I not done what I needed to do in therapy and fallen in love with a man in Columbus. To be fair, yes.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:50  That’s a pretty big that’s a pretty big weight.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:53  On that side.

Sarah Gormley 00:26:54  That is a big one. But I could have gone back to New York and gotten another big job. You know, of course, it’s sort of that was in my makeup and the desire to do that because it’s what I knew and felt comfortable doing. So part of the year timeline was also to prevent that. Prevent myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:14  From jumping.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:15  Back in to falling back.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:16  Into the pattern. Right? The patterns are super strong.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:20  Yes, they they are for sure. You mentioned you’re a control freak.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:24  Well, not as bad as some people, maybe, but I have my moments.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:28  Or let’s say that you are.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:29  A control freak who’s getting better.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:31  Can we? Yes. A recovering.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:32  Recovering control freak. I mean, we may get to this at some point, but I think a salient detail in here is that you had anorexia at one point, and the little I know about it is that’s very much a disease of control.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:46  It is.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:47  And so let’s just say you’re well established in control. And now you come up against the uncontrollable. Yes. Which is your mother’s illness which she at a certain point says I don’t want to treat.

Sarah Gormley 00:27:59  She stop treatment.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:00  She stop treatment. So talk to me about the emotional process of coming in with a control mindset and being faced with the uncontrollable.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:11  I’m hesitating because.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:13  It’s a poorly formed.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:14  Question. No, no.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:15  No, because I think there’s like a like there’s a nice, probably pithy way to answer, but the real answer is about mom. I mean she choreographed her death. Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:27  For us I mean for her too. My father died in a hospice facility which is so fucking awful. And she died at her favorite place on earth at the family farm, surrounded by people who loved her. She was pretty lucid until the day she died. And that’s how I could handle it. Yeah. She gave us this gift of dying so gracefully.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:57  Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:28:58  Doesn’t mean it wasn’t excruciatingly painful. Right. But it wasn’t about control. It was about grace.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:06  And so you learned that through the process, you sort of learn that you can’t control.

Sarah Gormley 00:29:10  You can’t control it. And that is for anybody, any of your listeners who have gone through it. And most of us will go through it. The relationship between grief and gratitude is something that fascinates me, and it starts happening when you’re a caregiver before the end. Yeah, and I think it’s one of the things that makes you able to survive it with the person who’s dying. And that was so beautiful. And also in a way that was not at all like what we experienced with my father.

Sarah Gormley 00:29:43  So it really it really was a gift. And mom made it easier for us.

Sarah Gormley 00:29:48  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:49  It’s amazing how different death experiences can be. I mean, we were primary caregiver for Ginny’s mom, who had, dementia. That is a bad way to go. I mean, it’s terrible. And then my dad died. The same thing in a memory care facility.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:07  For I’m sorry.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:08  For Alzheimer’s. And so there’s just these different ways. but I’m glad that you got to have that sort of thing with your mother where she got to. She got to sort of do it her way in that in that sense, which is really beautiful.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:23  It really was. And, you know, I think I got some of my control tendencies from her.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:28  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:28  So she was trying.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:30  She was she was orchestrating.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:31  She was. Yeah.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:32  Yeah. Yeah. No doubt.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:35  The you know, the other part of the book that I think is really interesting is this inheritance of emotional pain.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:45  Of starting to see in your mother some of what you saw in yourself. Talk us through when you started to notice that and what it was like.

Sarah Gormley 00:30:57  first of all, I think to know my mom, to have a little picture of her, I mean, to say she was iconic is almost an understatement. People come up to me who met her 35 years ago for ten minutes and tell me about my mom. She just was a force. She was bright and funny and beautiful and and she had this ability to connect with other people and just love them and make them feel seen and special. And sometimes she was better at giving it away to other people than her own children. So I’ll say that. And I did not know that she was suffering until I graduated from college, and she admitted to me that she had been depressed and was taking Prozac. But before then, I never would have thought that she was someone who was depressed. And there’s a scene in the book where I go have a glass of wine with the psychiatrist who prescribed her Prozac, and I shared with him my experience with talk therapy, and he sort of said to me, Sara, you shouldn’t ever have to suffer like that.

Sarah Gormley 00:32:14  In fact, if you, you know, let me know. I can get you some medicine. And I was a little bit offended, not offended, but I wanted him to understand that I had started healing through the process of therapy. And so when I think about mom and me, mom was hurting and suffering and medicine helped her suffer less. I was hurting and suffering, and working with a therapist helped me suffer less. So there is absolutely no judgment about what helps and what works. but I think, mom, I think she was really hard on herself. She doubted herself as a mother, which she admitted to me. And, I hate that for her, you know? it’s there’s a line in the book. Is it weird to wish something for your dead mother? Right. But I kind of. I wish she had been kinder to herself. Yeah, and we didn’t talk about it a lot. She knew I had started therapy, and she hated that I was hurting. But that’s just kind of as far as we went.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:44  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. 

You mentioned that your mom doubted her abilities as a mother in some ways, and that maybe connecting with people on the outside was easier for her. And I think that’s a not tremendously uncommon thing for people who struggle emotionally. In that it’s just much easier to just have relatively surface level. Now, I’m not saying your mom didn’t care about these people and see them, and but you play a role for a very short period of time, and then you go off versus the day in and day out emotional labor.

Sarah Gormley 00:35:12  And emotional intimacy.

Sarah Gormley 00:35:14  Romantically. But, you know, we were of her. Yeah, right. We are a part of her.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:19  I mean, I continue to notice how much easier it is for me to be emotionally intimate with other people versus compared to my siblings.

Sarah Gormley 00:35:30  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:30  Like it bothers me on some level. I don’t I don’t fault myself. I totally get why it makes complete sense to me. And I’ve remained sort of even after having noticed it, even after having shared it with my siblings. We talk about these patterns that run deep. It’s there’s this thing, there was a code of the way you are with your family.

Sarah Gormley 00:35:51  Yes. The code. Yeah, that’s a great word for it. And some of the relationship with my mom was speculating with my therapist. And so I was cautious, especially in the book, not to draw conclusions that I didn’t ever have the chance to talk with her about. Yep, yep. but I will say that once I started looking at her just as a human being and not as my mother strictly.

Sarah Gormley 00:36:25  It’s like once you start to understand why somebody may be the way they are, you don’t have this need for blame. And she was a complex, incredible woman, and she had some flaws. And she had amazing gifts, you know. And so I used up all of my blame on myself. My whole life, you know. And so I don’t have much blame for anyone anymore. It’s like. No. I feel like everyone should write a memoir. And with the power of I. When we meet someone, your memoir should sink in to my brain. How much nicer would we all be to each other if we really knew each other’s stories?

Sarah Gormley 00:37:08  Right. That’s a great.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:09  Great use of AI

Sarah Gormley 00:37:10  Like we would be overflowing with empathy. Yes. And it’s like, I don’t know, it’s. I’m just trying to be nicer to myself and other people.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:21  I agree. And I think those were sort of your mother’s, Yes. Deathbed advice?

Sarah Gormley 00:37:26  Yes. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:27  Be nice.

Sarah Gormley 00:37:28  Yeah. Just be fucking nice.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:30  Now, my mother would say there’s a difference between kindness and niceness and blah, blah, blah.

Sarah Gormley 00:37:34  But yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:34  The point being, kindness goes a long way towards ourselves and others.

Sarah Gormley 00:37:40  And I think once you learn, learn it with yourself. When you learn some self-compassion, I think it just helps you be more compassionate to other people. It really does.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:50  I think it’s a bidirectional sort of thing. That’s been my experience, because I can think back to early in my recovery, and I would see people who had basically done the sort of things that I had done that I felt really bad about myself and I shamed myself for, and I could have compassion towards them, which then allowed me to see. But then that also as it developed in me, you know. So for me, it’s been this sort of bidirectional thing is that, you know, knowing my own self and being kind to myself, but also and it’s one of the things when you study the research on self-compassion, at least the key thing I have taken away from it, if I were to take one line from a whole lot of thousands of studies, it would be treat yourself like you would a friend.

Sarah Gormley 00:38:39  Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:39  Because we intuitively sort of or a child or a small child, because we intuitively have compassion for the people we care about, and we intuitively We can see what they’re not seeing. Yes. And we can’t do it for we can’t do it for ourselves. So that imaginative exercise actually is a way.

Sarah Gormley 00:38:58  It’s a training.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:59  And for a lot of people, I think it’s a back door in when the self-loathing is so strong. It’s a imagine what I would do if it were someone else. Allows me to at least envision a world in which kindness could be a response to.

Sarah Gormley 00:39:16  Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I like the bidirectional.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:19  As we talk about your mother and we talked about meeting the uncontrollable with control type tendencies and how that changes. There’s another theme that I see in the book, and I just sort of noted it down as sort of the the myth of the neat ending. And I think of a scene where people in your town would come up to you consolingly and say, she’s going to a better place, or.

Sarah Gormley 00:39:44  And she’s going to be with the judge. My dad.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:46  And and how frustrated that made you. And I’m always drawn to the thing places where we’re sort of called to hold two things. You know, and and what you’re being held to there and you make it is, you know. How do we navigate the tension there of saying what I want to say, being myself and also letting other people have the thing that comforts them?

Sarah Gormley 00:40:11  Yes. Because they were grieving. They could be right. One of my oldest and dearest friends. The scene in the book. And she calls the night. The night mom decides to stop treatment. And di calls and says, you know, she’s ready. She’s ready to be with your dad again. And I was so pissed. And you know I’m like her body is riddled with cancer right. And she’s dying. So this is why she’s ready to die? Because she’s dying. But I felt this need to be right. And to your point. Whatever people needed to tell themselves to make themselves feel better in the moment. Because she adored mom. Yeah. So it. You know, it wasn’t me at my best. But you know what? I forgave myself because my mom was dying, so I.

Sarah Gormley 00:41:12  You get a lot of love. You get.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:13  A lot of latitude in those circumstances.

Sarah Gormley 00:41:15  Yeah. You can use it for, like, six months after two. Yeah. My mom just died.

Sarah aGormley 00:41:19  Yeah. Fuck off.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:20  It’s a good one. I don’t think I took enough advantage of that after my father passed.

Sarah Gormley 00:41:24  I’d be like, well.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:24  I could, but now I’m. I’m. You know, one of the things that people do is they love to tell neat, tidy stories. And I recognize that I have a very strong bias against that.

That’s not me. And yet I don’t want to disabuse anybody of their neat, tidy story because again, on one level, they could be right and I could be wrong.

Sarah Gormley 00:41:51  No, of course not.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:55  Well, this is a particularly interesting to me because it’s a journey I’ve gone through, and I’ve watched a lot of people in our community go through, which is one where you have a belief in a neat, tidy. Everything happens for a reason universe, and then you lose it. And how hard that can be?

Eric Zimmer 00:42:15  Because if I could believe certain things, I think I would, because I’m a big believer in usefulness. Like. And I think there are certain beliefs that are actually very useful. And I would, I would actually sign up for a couple of them, but I can’t because you can’t believe something you don’t believe.

Sarah Gormley 00:42:31  Correct.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:31  And so how to make sense of a world in which things don’t happen for a reason. That your mother’s death is just what it is. It’s a it’s a painful, sad thing.

Sarah Gormley 00:42:44  Yeah. And painful, sad things happen in life. And we, fortunately, our creatures who have tools to deal with hard, painful things.

Sarah Gormley 00:42:59  And we should be better in this country about talking about death and grief. And I think we’re getting there. I think we’re getting closer. But, you know, I have a group of friends that are now four of us in the club, adult orphans. We’ve all lost both parents. And I was the first to lose both parents. And it is it’s so disorienting. But there are these moments until you experience it. It sounds absurd, but there are moments of the beauty and gratitude, and you also have an opportunity to look at yourself and be proud of yourself, you know, for being a caregiver and being resilient. So I had my experience with it and everybody else will have theirs.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:43  One of the things that also happens in the book, and you alluded to it, is you fell in love when you came back.

Sarah Gormley 00:43:50  Yes. How does that happen? In what universe does that happen except hallmark?

Eric Zimmer 00:43:54  I was going to say, you know, is this The Bridges of Madison County? I don’t actually know that story. I just know it’s some love story that takes place in a small town.

Sarah Gormley 00:44:02  And that’s Indiana.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:03  What happened with you is in a love story in a small town. I’m less interested in all the specifics of that, but I am interested in how you learn to relate to another human being in relationship. As you began to think about working on your self loathing and particularly working on because right along with self-loathing, we’ve sort of talked about it is this I’m as good as what I do.

Sarah Gormley 00:44:33  Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:33  And that can be very problematic in a relationship. So so how did the the work in therapy sort of, you know, trying to untangle some of this self-loathing. How did that help you in this relationship?

Sarah Gormley 00:44:50  I’ll say a couple of things. So I had done five years of the emotional work before I came home. There was still more work to do, but I had come pretty far in untangling myself from my job is my identity. The pattern was there, but I recognized it.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:10  Enough that you saw taking a year off was really important. Right. Like you have to have some degree of clarity to understand that, that for you you couldn’t heal that. And while being in it.

Sarah Gormley 00:45:19  And the way that happened was that I started to be kinder to myself. I mean, I’d still struggle to say that I love myself, but I certainly was being kinder to myself and recognizing that I was a person with qualities. And so I back at the farm. I have no job, no home, no car. I had lost one parent about to lose another. I mean, there was for a person who was goal oriented and identified by achievement. I was sort of at the lowest low. Yeah, it was just me. This is what you get. And so unlike every other relationship that I had attempted and failed, in which I ignorantly believed that the right person would make me feel better about myself, I did not have that expectation. I already felt better about myself, which meant that I was probably at least 80% closer to being ready for a relationship than I had been before in my life. And then the timing of it was just crazy. So, so does that answer your question?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:37 It does.  And I assume, you know, as we as we begin to disentangle our worth from what we do, we also, I think, are better able to actually be ourselves. And that happens to be a really, happens to be a really key thing in any good relationship is that you enter it as yourself, which, I mean, it took me a long time to figure that one out. I thought I had to enter as a certain type of person.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:06  Posturing, and then then it’s really problematic. So. Oh, yeah. You know, entering as yourself is a pretty big prerequisite for things going well. It’s been my experience.

Sarah Gormley 00:47:16  Right. I entered fully and truly as myself, even what I would have considered one of my lowest points of my life. And to this day, seven and a half years later, I still feel the most comfortable I’ve ever felt in my life with him.

Sarah Gormley 00:47:32  Yeah, and he knows that. And so it’s not it just works. You know, love is funny.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:38  So what I’d like to do now is go deeper into the process of healing self-loathing.

Sarah Gormley 00:47:47  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:48  Like what sort of things happened in therapy? What things did you learn or what what did what were you taught or what were moments along the way, like, how did this actually happen? To the extent you’re able to put any of it into words?

Sarah Gormley 00:48:02  Okay, well, I’m going to tell you two different things that happen, both of which are scenes in the book, because, again, I included the therapy scene so that people could actually see and feel what, what it’s like. So when I started with David, I told him about the voice, the running voice. I referenced a cassette tape. They don’t exist anymore. But imagine the loop of tape that just never stops running. And the voice, no matter what I did, told me that I was a piece of shit. Not good enough.

Sarah Gormley 00:48:34  Not worthy. Not smart, not funny. Not cute. Not pretty. All day long. No matter what I was doing, I could be in a boardroom, presenting to a CEO. And the voice was still there. You suck. You fucked that up. You screwed that up.

Sarah Gormley 00:48:48  Which is exhausting. Yes. Okay, so one of the things that David recommended is that we give this voice a name so that I could approach it, and he asked me to give it a name, and I was frustrated. I was like, I’m not gonna do so woo, I’m not going to give this voice a name. And then I remembered a kid who had bullied me on the playground, and I said, how did Scott Kennedy, who probably had a crush on me in elementary school, but I didn’t. I beat him up. I held him down and started punching him because he wouldn’t leave me alone, even though I’d asked him. So Scott Kennedy became the name of the voice of the self-loathing.

Sarah Gormley 00:49:26  That was one tool. Yeah, and I still think about it when we have those moments where the voice pops up, I’m like, not today, Scott Kennedy. You know, like it is.

Sarah Gormley 00:49:34  Yep.

Sarah Gormley 00:49:34  And it works. And so that was an example of David getting me to recognize that it’s not my whole who. That it’s this voice and that you can resist. And you can you can challenge the voice. So you pay attention. What does it want? What’s it trying to get from you? And then put him in his place. So that was really useful. The other thing which we hinted at this when we were talking about, how you treat other people versus how you treat yourself. And so David was trying to push me to understand that I am not, in fact, a loathsome piece of shit. And he said, well, how would your friends, how would your friends describe you? And just like I am now, I started crying and he was like, why are you crying? And I have this that amazing friend group from college, and I thought about each of them walking into my apartment, and you know how they would describe me and how they felt about me.

Sarah Gormley 00:50:41  And oh, and it was a very effective way, clearly, to get me to see myself in a different light. And I had to I had to view myself through their eyes. And so again, that was that was an exercise in one of our sessions. And it freed up space in my mind and frankly, my heart for myself to to perceive myself differently. So manage the voice and view yourself more kindly. Yeah, again, none of that sounds like really radical, but those are the types of conversations that I had in the first year of working with him. That started a shift.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:28  Yeah. Well, it sounds, you know, on the surface, simple. And it’s anything but. Right. I mean, it’s extremely it’s extremely hard because I can think of all the hurdles that could come up with that. Like one of them for me used to be so-and-so thinks you’re great, so-and-so thinks you’re great, so-and-so thinks you’re great. And it was like the simple one is, well, they just don’t know me.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:51  But even when I went beyond that and I were like, they do know me, then I all of a sudden start questioning whether they’re really good people, whether they’re interesting people.

Sarah Gormley 00:51:59  What, like, I’m going to trust the guy that thinks I suck. That’s who I’m going to trust.

Sarah Gormley 00:52:03  Yeah, yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:03  It’s this crazy cascading. And that’s why I’m really interested in how this sort of shifts over time, because some of it is working to catch the thought patterns, restructure them, and there’s just an awful lot of that, you know, and endlessly, you know, I always say the good news is you can retrain the way you think. The bad news is, it does take a while, a lot of repetition.

Sarah Gormley 00:52:28  It does.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:29  You know, the book that I’ve got coming out, how a little becomes a lot. That’s how it happens. But there’s another element in there in which you can’t out argue your inner critic. Once a certain debate mode gets engaged, it seems like it’s capable of countering every well, I’m good enough because I’m look, I’m presenting to SEOs.  Look how far I’ve come. And then The Voice just has a perfectly good defense to why that doesn’t matter. Yes. And so there’s another element that happens. And I don’t I don’t know exactly how to put my finger on what it is, but I’m curious, as I say, that if anything comes up in you.

Sarah Gormley 00:53:06  Well, my immediate thought is it’s something about it’s a will, a will to experience a day differently or, you know, you have to have those things can happen. The voices can be they’re doing what they might do, but there has to be a bigger element of this is how I want to experience my life right now. Yeah. And so this is how much room I give you to the noise. I don’t know if that makes sense, but David would probably have a better term for it. You know, and I still have moments. I always say like, look, it’s not like I’m skipping through every day of my life. It’s all rainbows and birds chirping.

Sarah Gormley 00:53:45  You know, just last week, I got hit with something and I was down a little bit down on myself for about two days. But that’s all I can take anymore. I’m like you can get your two days. You got, you got your two days. And now let’s get back to the truth which is you’re capable and you’re bright and you’ll figure it out. Let’s go with that. We’re not going to go into the paralysis and anxiety and fear. Yeah. You can you can feel poorly for a couple of days and that’s about it. And so that is when I say there’s the will and the want to to experience life differently. and that’s been important to me. I don’t know if that’s a clinical expression. I know it’s not, but it is. It’s what you’re trying to answer in your book.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:33  A little bit, but I honestly don’t understand it to be to be completely honest. Like one of the things that, you know, I’ve said before, if I, you know, if I got to meet God, assuming there was one which we’ve sort of covered, but assuming, let’s say I did. The creator of the universe. And I got some I got a lot of basic questions out of the way, like what the hell’s going on? And, you know, one of the questions I would really that has been a personal question is why is it that some people get sober and others don’t? Because I watched people show up in the same treatment centers that I did. I watched them go to the same meetings and I saw them put the effort in. They, you know, it wasn’t, they were just going through the motions. They were trying. Now I have some answers, I have I mean I could give you some answers. Oh it’s about how much support they had or there’s a lot of different factors, but underneath it, there’s this intangible that I don’t understand, which is that. And I think addiction just paints a starker picture of I think it’s a nice analogy for a lot of things in life. It’s just because it’s so intensely focused. And in it there is a certain amount of loss of choice. That’s how it’s defined to a certain degree. And yet the path out is defined by a certain amount of agency and how those things combine. And I think any of us in our healing journeys can there’s that word again, but can look at that and see like, oh.

Sarah Gormley 00:56:01  So in the book, there’s something that David and I talk about quite a bit, and we think of a Venn diagram and we talk about that. People are made up for three components. There is heredity, environment. So there’s the circles cross over, and the third circle is something that’s just uniquely you. Yeah. And all three of those things contribute to who you are and how you show up in the world. So I’m wondering if the third circle, the uniquely you part, is the will I was talking about. And for you, it’s what makes the difference between some people recovering and some people not. And that’s just unfortunately, maybe luck of the draw in terms of what we can do.

Sarah Gormley 00:56:44  And David and I talk about the Venn diagram when I’m still being really hard on myself. He was like, you don’t. Why aren’t you giving yourself the credit for who you are? This. That third circle. And so I can’t answer that, but it might be a little bit closer to what you’re asking.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:03  Yeah. I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of of whether what that third circle is and how does it exist. But I had a conversation last week with a guy who wrote a book about the victim mindset, and he’s talking about something very similar. He’s saying like, there is your environment, there is your DNA, your genetics is the hand that you were dealt, which is a big part of what life is. But there’s another element which is your agency. And the more that we believe in that agency, I believe the stronger it gets. So it’s it’s useful to recognize the ways that the things that have happened in our lives have shaped us into who we are. Up to the point that I think that that begins to feel like I have to be that way, because then agency disappears, agency has to have some belief.

Sarah Gormley 00:57:55  And you’re giving too much power.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:58  Too much. Yeah. You’re not you’re not honoring that that other part. Right. And so it’s the recognition of like, okay, I’m, I’m the way I am based on a lot, you know, like I, you know, I think I come from a family of. It’s very emotionally repressed, depressive. Like, I can look back a couple generations and I think, yep, it’s there. Genetically. Environmentally, all the above. And I have an agency in how much that dictates my overall experience. It dictates some of it for sure. Yes, but it doesn’t all. And that’s part of the reason I also love this idea of little by little, is because we may only have a little bit of that agency at a time, right? We just have enough to keep sort of inching along as, you know, bigger shifts start to reveal themselves.

Sarah Gormley 00:58:52  And the other thing as you were talking that I think about is like bringing stuff up and looking it over. Right. You know, what you inherited, you know, if you take it out and look at it and examine it, you’re like, yeah. Got some of that. Yeah. Got some of that too. Okay. I’m aware of it. And I think just there’s so much to me that awareness and understanding Standing, frees  up acceptance and, then move it along. Right?

Sarah Gormley 00:59:17  Like, yeah, check.

Sarah Gormley 00:59:19  But then I do the thing where it’s like, yeah, not today. You’re not. We’re not doing that. Scott Kennedy today.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:24  Yes. Good old Scott Kennedy.

Sarah Gormley 00:59:26  Scott Kennedy.

Sarah Gormley 00:59:28  Scott Scott, if you’re either Scott.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:30  If you’re listening to this and you lived in Chandlersville a long time ago and used to beat up a blonde girl. We’d like to hear from you.

Sarah Gormley 00:59:42  I got sent home from school. It was bad.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:44  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 once. Let’s make those shifts happen. Starting today, when you feed a book. 

So if you could speak directly to that woman sitting on the couch in New York all those years ago reading The Noonday Demon, what would you say to her?

Sarah Gormley 01:00:36  I would hand her the book. I would say, look, you need to learn to be kinder to yourself. So maybe find find a group, group therapy or find a therapist. Don’t wait until you think your pain is enough.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:52  That’s a beautiful way to wrap up. You and I are going to continue for a few minutes in a post-show conversation, which is available to people who support the show. So listeners, if you’d like access to those post-show conversations.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:03  We also have ad free episodes and all kinds of other goodies. And the really important thing is you get to support a show that needs your help. Go to one feed. Join. You and I are going to be talking about a thing in the book that I really love, which is you talking about how hard it was to be who you were to your parents because you didn’t want them to hurt. And I think that’s a really there’s a lot there. So you and I are going to discuss that. But thank you so much for coming on.

Sarah Gormley 01:01:30  Thank you for having me. It was a real treat to be here in person.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:33  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it.Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

In this episode, Tali Sharot explains why we stop noticing what matters and how to start feeling alive again.  She describes what habituation is and how our minds normalize what once moved us. Tali also explores ways that we can reawaken joy, purpose, and even moral clarity. It’s an eye opening look at the subtle ways we lose and then can reclaim our aliveness.

Feeling stuck? It could be one of the six saboteurs of self-control—things like autopilot, self-doubt, or emotional escapism. But here’s the good news: you can outsmart them. Download the free Six Saboteurs of Self-Control ebook now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook and start taking back control today!

Key Takeaways:

• Concept of habituation and its effects on emotional responses
• Importance of noticing the extraordinary in everyday life
• Strategies for counteracting habituation, such as taking breaks and diversifying experiences
• Relationship between habituation and creativity
• Impact of social media on emotional well-being and habituation
• Exploration of habits and addiction, particularly in relation to social media
• Discussion on the nature of lying and habituation to dishonesty
• The balance between exploration and exploitation in personal experiences
• The complexities of human emotions and expectations, particularly regarding women’s rights and happiness
• Encouragement to experiment with life choices to enhance well-being and fulfillment

Professor Tali Sharot is a leading expert on decision-making and emotion. Sharot combines research in behavioural economics, psychology, and neuroscience to reveal the forces that shape our decisions and beliefs. Her award winning books – The Influential Mind, The Optimism Bias and Look Again – have been widely praised, including by the New York Times, Forbes and more. Her speaking audiences also include Google, Microsoft, The European Parliament, NATO, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, the World Economic Forum, among many others. She has written for top publications including TIME magazine, The Guardian, and the New York Times. Professor Sharot has been a guest multiple times on CNN, MSNBC among others and co-presented BBC’s Science Club. She held prestigious fellowships from the British Academy and Wellcome Trust. Professor Sharot currently divides her time between MIT and University College London where she directs the Affective Brain Lab. Her TED talks have been viewed over 17 million times.

Connect with Tali Sharot:  Website | X | Facebook

If you enjoyed this conversation with Tali Sharot, check out these other episodes:

How to Stop Losing Your Mind (Literally): The Surprising Science of Attention with Amishi Jha
How to Create Elastic Habits that Adapt to Your Day with Stephen Guise

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If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon!  Click here to learn more!!

Episode Transcript:

Tali Sharot 00:00:00  If we weren’t the kind of creatures that habituate to these negative things, we wouldn’t be able to function. Not as an individual, not as a species. Right? We all have had these experience of things that happen to us that are sometimes really tragic, sometimes just feel tragic, perhaps are not that tragic, but over time we bounce back. That’s what people do.

Chris Forbes 00:00:26  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.

Chris Forbes 00:01:06  How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:10  In Zen, we’re taught to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. And for a while I tried to live entirely that way. But eventually I had to admit novelty matters to me. I need newness to feel alive. That inner tug is exactly what neuroscientist Tali Sharot names in her new book. Look again. In this episode, we talk about habituation, how our minds normalize, what once moved us, and how we can reawaken joy, purpose, even moral clarity. It’s an eye opening look at the subtle ways we lose and then can reclaim our aliveness. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, tally. Welcome to the show.

1:53 – preroll

Tali Sharot 00:01:54  Hi. Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:55  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, which is called look again the Power of Noticing. What was always there? 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 a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look down 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.

Tali Sharot 00:02:40  Okay. Well, I mean, I think feeding the good wolf and not feeding the bad wolf requires some kind of like, conscious decision and some kind of reflection and control about regarding what you decide to do, but also what you decide should fill your mind. What kind of information you let in, both from the outside, and also what kind of information you focus on coming from the inside. I think from the outside, it’s a very relevant task because there’s a lot of different opinions and information and use, and it’s super easy to just go online and feed the bad wolf, and that is probably the easiest thing to do nowadays.

Tali Sharot 00:03:33  You go on social media, you just go on on any news website and there you go. Lots of food for the bad wolf. So I think that that requires some kind of like conscious control of making sure that you’re making decisions about how much time to spend online on different platforms. and you know, when when is probably enough and how to evaluate the information that’s coming in.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:00  Yeah. I think that so much of what you talk about in this book around looking again and about habituation speaks to how we engage online. And we may get to social media, which is a chapter in the book. But before we jump there, let’s talk about the core idea in this book, which is that we as humans habituate. Explain to us what that means.

Tali Sharot 00:04:27  Sure. So habituation means that we respond less and less emotionally and physiologically to things around us that are constant or that are very frequent or that change, but very, very, very slowly. So let’s start with a really simple example. You walk into a room full of cigarette smoke.

Tali Sharot 00:04:47  At first the smoke is quite salient, but studies show that within 20 minutes you cannot detect the smell of the smoke or, you know, you’re there’s there might be an AC in the background at the moment, but because it’s been there all day, you don’t notice it anymore. So that’s physiological habituation. And just as you habituate to a smell or a sound or even the temperature, we also habituate to more complex things in our life, from maybe the view outside your window to even more complex things like, a new relationship or a new job. So it could be good things like those things, right? It could be good things in your life. But because they’ve been there for so long, they don’t bring you as much joy on a daily basis as they probably should. and also, you might have actuate to the not so great things in your life, perhaps, cracks in your personal relationship, inefficiencies in the workplace because they’ve been there all the time. You don’t notice, and if you don’t notice, then you might not be likely to change.

Tali Sharot 00:05:51  So that’s basically the idea of habituation.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:54  Yeah, I think a lot of us have heard about the idea of the hedonic treadmill, meaning, you know, something that once brought you pleasure doesn’t so much over time, and you need more to give you pleasure. But I also love the idea that you’re framing it in the reverse, in which that we habituate to bad things, which on one hand is a good thing. If we’ve got a circumstance in our life that is difficult, we don’t want it to be like a constantly open wound. And yet there’s a downside to that.

Tali Sharot 00:06:21  Yeah. So there are things that happen to you and there’s not much you can do. Right. Loss of a loved one, for example. Sometimes you lose your job. So there could be quite difficult things that happen. And the best you can do is just adapt. Right. We need to move on. And in fact, if we weren’t the kind of creatures that habituate to these negative things, we wouldn’t be able to function.

Tali Sharot 00:06:45  Not as an individual, not as a species. Right? We all have had these experience of things that happen to us that are sometimes really tragic, sometimes just feel tragic, perhaps are not that tragic, but over time we bounce back. That’s what people do. That’s a good thing. It’s a really good thing. And in fact, people with, depression, for example, aren’t able to do it, effectively. So people with depression don’t bounce back as easily from negative things that happen to them in their life. However, on the other side, there are negative things around us that we can change, right? And so in those cases where it is changeable, that in that case habituation may be not a good thing. and again, it could be in your private life. It can also be in society. Right. There might be negative suboptimal things in society that’s been there all the time. And so we don’t even think about them. Right. It could be racism, sexism. It could be just as I said, inefficiencies in the workplace, that we kind of don’t notice because it’s always been there.

Tali Sharot 00:07:48  So it doesn’t really attract our attention. There isn’t much of a reaction to it.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:52  Yeah, you’ve got a great line about how what’s thrilling on Monday becomes boring by Friday. And conversely, you say something like, what was a horror on Sunday is, you know, by Wednesday, is it this isn’t what you said, but something like an inconvenience. And so this habituation being a good and a bad thing. Are there ways or what are the ways that we can start to adjust how we habituate to, to become a little bit more active in the process of habituation or habituation, I guess would be the opposite of habituation that you call it.

Tali Sharot 00:08:27  Yeah. So, you know, as you said, habituation is a good thing or a bad thing. the thing is it’s a natural thing. So we all habituate. I mean, all of us habituate maybe to different degrees. And as I said, you know, some individuals actually have problems habituation. But most of us habituate. And so we don’t necessarily usually need to learn how to habituate.

Tali Sharot 00:08:49  What we need is to figure out how to disappear. In many of the circumstances where it will be advantageous to us to disappear. Not because habituation is bad in general, but because it also leads to this, as we said, less joy, right? And less noticing and changing. And so and so it is helpful to, first of all, know about what habituation is, right? So we can recognize it in our life, but then also know about ways by which we can disambiguate. And disambiguate simply means noticing and feeling again. Right. So reacting to things again. And so really there are two main ways to disappear. And they’re somewhat related to each other. The first is taking a break. So if you take a break from something, if you’re not around it for some time, you will disambiguate by definition. And then when you come back to that thing, you feel again. So you can imagine, you know, there’s like the view outside my window. Perhaps it’s a nice view and I don’t really notice it because I’m sitting here every single day.

Tali Sharot 00:09:52  But if I leave for a week and then I come back, I’ll be more likely to notice that’s this habituation. Or let’s take an easy example, food. Right. So some people are, you know, you really like a certain dish, right. There was a nice experiment they did with mac and cheese. People love mac and cheese. They ate it every day three times a day. Of course, after a few days, they they didn’t love the mac and cheese as much. But if they then had a little break from the mac and cheese and came back a few days later, a week later, well, then they had a positive reaction. We can, you know, you probably have that feeling with with friends and family members, even if you see them every, every day, you might have less of an appreciation. But if you don’t see them for a while, I mean, we all know this is part of life. Then we see them again. We have more of a reaction.

Tali Sharot 00:10:36  This is this habituation. So breaking, having breaks is is one way in which we can go. And sorry you’re about to to ask a question. Go ahead.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:45  Oh I was just going to say my editor is my best friend, and I’m just letting him know now that I don’t plan to see him for about the next six months just to try and rekindle some fondness.

Tali Sharot 00:10:54  Yeah. And you know what? It doesn’t even have to be six months. We habituate and disappear so fast. Yeah. And, you know, you may have had this experience that if you just go away for a business trip, not even a very long business trip, you go away for a weekend, and then you come back and suddenly you’re kind of normal. Everyday world seems to sparkle. You’re able to see things, the good things again.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:17  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 Eufy e-book and take the first step towards getting back on track. 

Do we habituate quickly to something we’ve already habituated to? So, meaning, let’s take your example of I come home after a business trip. I get three days away. I get home the first 30 minutes. It’s kind of novel, and then before I know it, it’s like, oh, all right, I might as well not have been gone. Is that because I was already sort of habituated to it, and it would take a longer break for that, that sparkle to last longer? Yeah. Or there are ways in which I approach it that could.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:34  Well, I guess you said there was a second way. So breaks were one.

Tali Sharot 00:12:37  Right? Right. And although I can’t think of a study specifically, I’m sure you’re right that if we’ve already encountered something. We’ve habituated to it. Sure, we go away. We just habituate, we come back and it lasts for a certain amount of time, but not a very long time. You know, and I know this, like in my own life, I live in two places. I live in Boston and I live in London. and when I’m in one place, I really there’s things that I really miss in the other place, and I. And then I go back to the other place, and it feels wonderful for exactly like 2 or 3 days, right? Sometimes a little longer. 

Tali Sharot 00:13:09  Okay. So that’s one way. Now the other way is to make changes and diversify your life. So to do things differently. And it could be simple things. It could be things like, just take a different route to work.

Tali Sharot 00:13:25  Right. Or it could be something a little bit bigger, like try a new sport, take a class online in something that is away from your regular job. talk to the type of people that that you don’t usually talk to. it could be big things. It could be like working on different projects or living in different places. But if we diversify our life, we are in constant kind of changing, right? And change means less habituation, but change also means learning. So every time you do something a little bit different, you put yourself in a in a state of learning. You have to learn the new rules. And there’s many studies showing that learning in and of itself brings people joy. So that’s one way to actually kind of enhance well-being just by the change in and of itself.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:18  I think about this a lot because I have been a Zen Buddhism student in the past, and there’s a lot in Zen about learning to look at the ordinary so that it becomes less ordinary. And at one point, I think I went a little too deep into that, and I began to not recognize the need that I seem to have for more novelty maybe than the average person.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:48  So it seems to me there’s the strategy of doing different things, which I think is we can go more into. But then there’s also is there a strategy around how I learn to look at the things that I’m still around in new ways or fresher ways?

Tali Sharot 00:15:04  Okay, so as we said, one way is just to actually take yourself out of that. Right. Yep. And then when you come back, you will see it differently. You could also use your imagination, right. So if you kind of close your eyes and imagine yourself. And this is something that, I saw Lawrie Sanchez talk about, you imagine yourself without whatever it is that your home, your comfortable home. Right. Without the people who are close to you. Imagine it vividly. And that actually creates quite an emotional reaction. When you open your eyes, you have the same kind of feeling of like gratitude. It’s a bit like you have this, you know, a nightmare when you’re you suddenly don’t have your close ones or somebody, something that you care about taking.

Tali Sharot 00:15:47  And when you wake up, you’re really kind of startled. Yeah. And that’s a little bit that’s similar. And then you see things differently. Again, none of this, none of it I find lasts for very, very long. Yeah. And this is why it’s really a combination of all of these things. that is really needed to be able to kind of see things a little bit more vividly, even though, they’re just routine.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:12  Yeah. I have a nightmare like that, relatively common, where I lose my, my partner and I don’t know why I have it. And I used to think of it as a bad thing. And now I think it’s a great thing to have happen to me from time to time, because it does exactly what you say. It gives me that that visceral feeling of what it would actually be like. And in the dream, it’s horrible. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s a it’s a, it’s definitely a nightmare. And when I wake up, I’m grateful.  But I try and try and harvest that in a positive way to help me be less habituated. And that’s one of the points you make early in the book, is that many couples mistake adaptation for relationship failure. Say more about that.

Tali Sharot 00:16:53  Yeah. And so this actually came about. So my co-author, Cass Sunstein, was he went to a wedding and he was seated at the wedding next to Esther Perel, the relationship expert, while we were writing the book. So it was quite good, good timing. And of course, they’re in a wedding, so they talk about relationship. Well, she’s a relationship expert. So it’s I imagine everyone talks to her.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:15  I was going to say that’s probably her constant stream of, of of conversation.

Tali Sharot 00:17:20  Yeah. That kind of took us into into her work. And when we kind of read and saw her talks and so on, we found that what she says is that she surveyed many, many, many individuals. And when she asked them, hey, when are you most attracted to your partner? They say it’s one of two instances. Either I’ve been away from my partner and then I come back. Right. So this is like the break. or I see my partner in a new situation. So maybe they are talking to strangers. Maybe they are on the stage doing something right. So a novel kind of situation. And so this is variety diversity. So it’s exactly the two, ways in which people dishabituate a break. and, and diversity. So it’s a novelty. It’s having it’s having the same thing. but in a, in a kind of a novel way. But also, you know, I think we all say this in a book that we have this sense that we know our partner very well. I think many people do like, oh, you know, we know who they are. But in fact, you don’t, you don’t really know everything about them. They don’t really understand what it is to be them. And so in some ways they are always would be a sort of a stranger to you. But that is not a bad thing, because that is exactly the type of thing that Esther Perel suggests will actually enhance attraction.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:05  In that section in the book. You’re also talking about ways to enhance or to habituate, but also not to mistake habituation for a bad relationship necessarily.

Tali Sharot 00:19:19  Yeah. I mean, I think you it’s kind of a tricky thing. It’s it’s a natural thing that would happen. So it’s not necessarily an indicator of something specifically wrong I would say in a relationship. But it also is something that needs to be addressed, I think to the extent that one can, because you do want to feel the joy, right? of of being with someone and you know, the ways to do it, I think are the same ways that we’ve talked about. So take a break. And what I mean to break it doesn’t mean like a break from the relationship. It could be just like, okay, an evening away, a weekend away. You come back. Right? So having some kind of like space is as helpful because every time you have a break and they come back, you disappear. But there is a wonderful study.

Tali Sharot 00:20:04  It will sound very unrelated, but it is related. So they had people, ask them, hey, what is like a song that you really, really like? Okay. And then they ask, hey, would you rather listen to the song beginning to end without any breaks? Or would you rather listen to the song with little breaks in between? Every 32nd you’ll have a little break. And so 99% of the people said, I don’t want any breaks. I want to listen to the song beginning to end. Right. But then they did the experiment and they had one group of people listening to the song beginning to end. No breaks in. Another group listened to the song with little breaks in between. And they found that those people who took the breaks actually enjoyed the song more. And the reason is that if you when you start listening to a song that you really like, you’re really enjoying it, right? So joy is really high and then joy starts going down. You’re still enjoying the song, but not as much over time because you are habituated.

Tali Sharot 00:20:57  But then if I break it and then you come back, you dishabituate. So when you come back, the joy goes back up. Right. I think there’s an analogy here, where, you know, there’s something that you love or you want to be you want to be at near those things all the time. You don’t want these breaks. You don’t want to come and go. but in fact, by doing these things that are counterintuitive, that can actually, be something that that’s positive, that’s helpful.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:24  Right. You talk about chopping up the good but swallowing the bad whole.

Tali Sharot 00:21:29  So the idea of swelling up the bad whole is that, it goes to these things that we said we can’t really, control or we can’t change, and we mean mostly things that are, like, just like annoying jobs. You have like, admin work or tax or you need to clean the toilet or, I don’t know, you need to travel somewhere. So the idea here is that habituation is actually your friend because the habituation to negative things, let’s say you have to clean.

Tali Sharot 00:21:59  Right. So you have like this negative feeling but like you will habituate so will go. The negative will go down over time. But if you take a break and then you come back, then the negative feelings go back up. So so this is why we suggest you know the good stuff. You want to break into bits and the negative stuff, the bad stuff that things that you just need to do. I’m not I’m not talking about things that I can actually control and change, but those things that are just, they need to be done with and, swallowing it in one go could be a good thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:28  So a long dental procedure versus going back three separate times?

Tali Sharot 00:22:31  Yes. Yes. There are, of course, limits, you know, to these, to this. Of course.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:37  Is there anything that controls or what causes some people to habituate more than other people, or some people to need more novelty than other people? And I’m thinking a little bit about you talk about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s reading styles as, as an example of different ways of approaching this.

Tali Sharot 00:22:58  Yeah. So in psychology, the idea that there are different there, individual differences in people’s tendency to explore, to try new things is well known. there are people who are more of explorers and there are people who are more in kind of psychology. You call it exploits. There’s nothing bad in it. And it just means that you kind of like, do the thing that you like over and over rather than try different things. Right. So they explore, we’ll try different restaurants and they exploit. We’ll find the one that they like and they’ll go back again and again. So that’s the exploit. neither exploring all the time or exploiting all the time is probably the best way to go, because if you are exploiting, you’re probably missing a lot of other things, right? Just because you don’t know they even exist. So you think it’s your favorite restaurant, but you haven’t tried other things. And also you’re missing the challenge of change and learning and variety. But if you’re on the kind of extreme of exploring, then you might never actually progress because you’re like moving from place to place, just looking around, right? So probably some something in the middle is a good idea.

Tali Sharot 00:24:10  And what we have kind of, non empirically observed is that it’s often the case that one individual in a couple tends to be more of the explorer, and one tends to be more of the exploiter. And it probably, we guess maybe it is not, a coincidence that couples end up being when one is explored by the exploiter. Right. It’s probably like maybe we’re attracted to what we actually need, right? If you’re a explorer, you need someone to, like, take you in. Okay, this is a good thing. Let’s do this. And if you’re like the exploiter, you need someone to take you out of your comfort zone.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:43  yeah. My relationship is definitely that way. I am the explorer, and she is more the, you know, exploiter, meaning she’s. She’s far more comfortable, like in a comfortable area. Just settling down, relaxing, enjoying. And I’m, you know, I’m all over the place. And so I do think we are good for each other because she helps me realize, like, okay, just you can just sit on the couch for a few hours and relax. It’s really not a big deal. And and then I can help encourage her to do more. And I think we it’s a it turns out to be a good good blend.

Tali Sharot 00:25:16  Yeah. And we suggest that exploration exploitation. it could be in the stuff that you’re actually physically doing. But it could also just be there. You mentioned Warren Buffett and Bill gates. the reason we mentioned them is because we think it’s also the type of things, information that you collect into your mind. Right? So the the Warren Buffett so we looked at like the books that they recommend. Right. And Warren Buffett’s all the books that he recommends. I mean, I would say 97% is all about investment, right. Investing like this way or that way. It’s like write 100 books, all investment, while Bill gates, it’s all over the place. Yeah. it could be about tennis. Sure. It could be about business. It could be about there’s there’s Aspergers symptoms. There’s like syndromes. There’s all sorts of things in that list.

Tali Sharot 00:26:03  Very, very different history. All sorts. so we think he’s probably within the domain of knowledge. He’s probably more of an explorer, and Warren Buffett is more of an exploiter. Both of them are hugely successful. Maybe they’re both hugely successful, partially because of those traits.

Tali Sharot 00:26:20  Right. I mean, there is studies showing that at least when it comes to creativity, actually the kind of the change is an advantage. So the more I would say more towards the explorer, if you will. I mean, what the studies show is that there’s two things that they show. But the first thing perhaps is people who habituate, slower are actually tend to be more creative. So, there’s many ways to test how you to, to measure how fast you habituate. You could be. The what they did is just had the same sound. They had the same sound they introduced to people like, and they can measure their skin conductance response. So if you hear for the first time, you have a lot like a physiological response, quite large, and then the next time is like less and so on.

Tali Sharot 00:27:10  So they can measure that. And they found that those individuals who didn’t have this typical reduction in their response, they kind of like remained kind of aroused high. They tended to be more creative in the sense that they were more likely to be people who had a patent under their name, wrote a book. Had art displayed in galleries, and so on. And the suggestion was that people who habituate slower, they kind of have more information, I would say, like, you know, floating around inside their mind. They the information stays there from longer. It could be like visual, olfactory like pieces of knowledge. And because they’re kind of a mishmash of soup in your mind, it could be quite, confusing and sorts. Right? Distracting. But it also means that different pieces of information that seems like they’re not really related to each other suddenly, like, if you will collide and create this new idea so that that is the relationship between habituation and creativity. They also found in a different study that if you just change your immediate environment.

Tali Sharot 00:28:12  So let’s say I’m in my office, I go out, I go for a walk outside, then I come back, then I go sit in the kitchen. You know, every time I’m changing my media environment. They saw that creativity was enhanced. Now, it wasn’t only enhanced for about six minutes on average, so not very long, but so six minutes could be your eureka moment, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:28:32  But six minutes multiple times a day actually adds up to something useful. I mean, it’s one one strategy that I try and use is just I’m working at first from my porch and then I go to the co-working space. Then I take a walk and think about, you know, like I just find that that for me. And again, I think I’m a I’m higher on the openness to experience need. Right. So I think it it serves me, serves me well to, to do more of that.

Tali Sharot 00:28:59  Yeah. Because every time you do that, that information coming in your mind is different, right? It’s not like now you’re sitting and you have the same colors and the same things coming in and the same time of like maybe smell and, but then you go into a different room and it’s completely different.

Tali Sharot 00:29:14  So your, your mind kind of like opens up and takes in, it starts processing again and that boost. What they found is, is helpful.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:23  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 newsfeed. Let’s make those shifts happen. Starting today, one you feed e-book. So let’s talk a little bit about social media, because I think social media is one of those things we hear all the time about how it gives us these quick little hits of dopamine, which is in essence, a way of us feeling something new.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:21  And yet, for a lot of people, it ends up being an overall deadening experience. Talk to me about how those two things combine.

Tali Sharot 00:30:30  Yeah. so I think the the problem that we talk about, about social media in the book is that it’s a little bit like that AC in the background, but maybe you have some like there’s TV in the background and you don’t really notice it because it’s been there so long. But then someone turns it off and suddenly like, oh, it’s a relief. You’re just like the silence. You know that feeling? And you didn’t even realize that it was annoying you until someone turned it off. I think social media is like that to some extent, which is we mostly probably think that it has some negative effect on us, or we think it probably has maybe stresses you out to some extent, but we don’t really know because it’s constantly there. It’s there every single day. But you know, when you do the experiments, it was found that people who go off social media have a positive enhancement and they don’t choose to.

Tali Sharot 00:31:23  So it’s like they actually manipulate. They take one group of people, pay them money to get over social media. Another group of people pay the money to just continue doing what they’re doing, right. So it’s not self-selection or anything like that. But when they come back at the end of the month, they do find that the people who went off social media are doing better on every single measure. They’re happier, they’re less stressed, they’re meeting people in person. They’re playing on the piano. So they’re much they’re much better. And I think what’s interesting is they are often surprised by the impact. They may be some suspect, oh, there probably has some impact on me, but they don’t really predict the actual magnitude that that going off social media has. Now, all that being said, it’s also was found in that study that they went off social media. They felt better. But then at the end of the month, they just went back on social media. Yeah. So there’s this kind of pull, right? That is very hard to overcome.

Tali Sharot 00:32:19  I mean, it is reminiscent of addiction where we know, like if someone is addicted, they know it’s not good for them. You know, they want to get off. And when they get if they manage to get off for a while, it’s like positive. But then there’s this like pull that takes you back in. And it’s a combination of a few things like why and I think screens in general. But it does matter what you do on, you know, it’s not just screens. It does matter what you’re doing and what kind of like things you’re bringing in. there’s a lot of reasons why it can have a negative effect. I think one is just this kind of continuous, like it’s easy, but the information is not very. It doesn’t enhance your knowledge or deeply enhance your knowledge to a degree. So it’s kind of nothingness. Yeah. It’s like, you know, it doesn’t make sense. It’s like watching TV. Although I really love a lot of shows, I absolutely love and and it’s in the sense that you don’t need to do much, but it doesn’t teach you even as much as like maybe a TV show does, right? I think a lot of TV shows, there’s a really careful thought behind them.

Tali Sharot 00:33:23  Not all TV shows, but many are careful. There’s a careful thought about what are we trying to express? What are what is a message like, what are you learning about different characters and different cultures? It can go deeper because for it’s a longer time when it’s like literally seconds that you’re like people with random opinions about random things, you don’t really gain much. I mean, some sometimes I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. Someone I put in an article that I was like, oh, that’s interesting piece of information. But mostly it’s just like goes in and out and doesn’t really stay. So sort of a waste of time. And I think that relates to this idea that, you know, it’s so important for humans to feel like they’re progressing and learning. Even if we’re not conscious, that is as important. It’s important for every single person. And on social media, you don’t get that. You’re not getting the feeling of progressing and learning. If anything, you might be getting the opposite, which is like the obvious other problem with social media, which is it’s not real.

Tali Sharot 00:34:20  You know, a lot of it is not real. You’re seeing other people doing things which is like, well, that’s not even reality. It may make you feel bad about your own life for no real reason. So those are all the problems. But I think, you know, it’s both a habit which a habit is not quite like. Habituation. Habituation is feeling less in response to two things. Habit is like doing, just doing the same thing again and again and again.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:45  Automaticity.

Tali Sharot 00:34:46  Exactly. without any kind of like real conscious desire, I would say.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:53  Yeah. I’m curious about this. People going back to social media, even after reporting it being better while they’re off of it, because I spent a lot of time thinking about how people change. And we see this over and over in all sorts of different domains. I mean, addiction is one I now, I’ve been in recovery for a long time. So somehow that that pull back. I’ve managed to, to get beyond. But we see people go on diets and feel better and then, you know, they do it for six months, and then the next thing you know, they slide all the way back.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:25  So there’s there’s some element of that pull back. And I’m always curious as to, to what the different pieces of that are, how much of that is, you know, how long it takes to to erase a bad habit, not a habituation, but an actual bad habit, which seems to have an energy to itself.

Tali Sharot 00:35:45  Yeah. So there’s habits and there are addiction. I mean, addiction is a habit, but most habits are not an addiction. so it’s not quite the same thing. I mean, everything is biological. Everything starts in your brain. But but addiction, does have this kind of biological elements to it that make it really hard to overcome. Meaning the actual substance is, is addictive. which is a little bit different. There’s a lot of habits that we do. it’s, you know, it’s just like I wake up in the morning, I do this, I do that. It’s like I was it’s like, as you say, it’s not an addiction per se. So an addiction is mostly.

Tali Sharot 00:36:27  And I’m not an expert in addiction. It’s a whole different field, you know, medical field. but it’s often would be to a substance, that often it’s things that you consume. But it could be, also a behavior that elicits that biological response. Right. So things that we consume, we know it’s like, okay, whether it’s cigarettes or it’s food or it’s alcohol, but it could also be like, could be sex or it could be social media gambling.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:55  yeah.

Tali Sharot 00:36:55  Gambling. Right. Exactly. So so it could be could be behaviors. But they, they elicit a very particular biological response, that I guess, you know, one distinction Function that people talk about in kind of the field is there’s stuff that you like and there’s stuff that you want and like means I experience this thing and I have a hedonic reaction. I know consciously and also like physiologically, I like this, right. But wanting doesn’t necessarily have to come with liking. You can like, I want to do this, I’m doing it.

Tali Sharot 00:37:33  I have like an action even if I don’t have any conscious or even like physiological like response, hedonic response to that, to that action. So the two things can be dissociated. In that sense, it’s more like something’s overcome you.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:02  I think there’s a lot of debate around whether social media is something that you could consider an addiction or or not and or whether you just consider it a really strong habit pattern. And I think the jury sort of seems seems out. And I think we have a tendency to use addiction as a phrase, perhaps more often than we should. You know, if we like a piece of cake, we’re suddenly addicted to it. Yeah, it’s just an interesting crossover area between when does something go from being something I do habitually that I feel sort of driven to do to versus feeling fully addicted. But we don’t we don’t need to fully take that apart here, because I would like to move on to lying. You’ve got a chapter in the book about, Pinocchio and long noses and lying. Tell me what you found about lying in relation to the rest of this.

Tali Sharot 00:38:53  Yeah. So the study about lying is actually what started the whole book. The whole the whole book started from this this study that I conducted with colleagues. it was published in 2016. 16. And what we found is that people adapt to their own dishonesty. So if people have an opportunity to lie, for their own gain at the expense of someone else, they tend to just live a tiny little bit. Right. And we had a little game. You could lie and get a little a little money. So they just lied a little bit. But then the next time around, they liked a little bit more and then a little bit more and a little bit more. So their dishonesty escalated over time. and while they were doing this, we actually had them in the brain imaging scanner so we could look at what’s going on in the brain. And what we found is at the beginning when they lied, even if there was a lie a little bit, they had a strong reaction in the emotional center in the brain called the amygdala.

Tali Sharot 00:39:51  but over time, the amygdala, just habituated as it does. It’s well known our emotional reactions to anything, even if it’s our own behavior, we’ll just go on a go down over time, just pure habituation. Situation. And so the amygdala response, the emotional response just went down over time. And because you no longer had this kind of negative arousal response to your own lying, there was nothing that was curbing your dishonesty. So the more the amygdala went down, the more likely we were to lie more and more and more. The next opportunity that that you got, and this study was actually published just, weeks before the 2016 presidential election. So it got quite a lot of press at the time. And people were very interested in this idea that this physiological thing of habituation can really impact our behavior to such an extent. And I thought, well, that’s you know, we know that habituation goes beyond just dishonesty. It really impacts almost every element of your life. The way you behave, the way you observe the world, your relationships, society.

Tali Sharot 00:41:00  And so I thought, well, that that would be a really interesting book to have, you know, with a different chapters on all the ways that habituation is impacting us in ways that we don’t realize.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:12  There was an interesting section in that part of the book where you make a distinction between selfish and selfless lies. A selfish lie is one that is intended to make me feel better at somebody else’s. An expense and a selfless lie is one where we’re trying to make somebody feel better. So, for example, I’m telling Chris he’s a good editor as an example of a selfless lie. I can’t resist, it’s just too much fun. He he actually rarely is sitting in the other room and he’s there right now, which is making it harder for me to resist. But in what ways do we habituate differently to selfless lies?

Tali Sharot 00:41:46  So the thing with selfless lies is that it doesn’t elicit as much of an emotional negative response. You really, when you’re lying and it’s for your own good and it hurts someone else. That’s where you really have a strong negative reaction. And that strong negative reaction is what’s curbing your dishonesty mostly, right? That’s one of the main reasons you’re not doing it. So people say that they believe that strong. Now although people do believe that lying is wrong like you know, full point, they it’s a bit of a gray area when it comes to like lying for to help someone. And we did have a condition where you could lie and it would cost you money, but it will help the other person. and there was no habituation there because there’s nothing to habituate to. Right. There wasn’t much of a negative feeling. and even when we had a condition where you could lie for your own benefit and the benefit of the other person, like, win win situation again, we didn’t see we didn’t see habituation. I’m assuming there’s some. Maybe you have a little bit of a negative reaction to just the lie itself, but it wasn’t like a strong enough thing to change people’s behavior to cause them to escalate over time.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:00  So in the book, you, you talk about lying being something that we habituate to line. We do it for the first time. It’s hard. The second time it’s a little bit easier. And by the 20th time it’s it’s pretty easy. You talk in the book about how we adapt to our own behavior, and we suddenly think something that was bad before becomes pretty normal. And society across the board. Lots of places in society where we habituate in a negative way, meaning we suddenly now don’t think something that normally would be a problem is a problem, because we’ve just gotten used to it. What are ways of habituation? In this case, we talked about ways of habituated to make something fresh again for us. How do we habituate with something that is negative to make it salient again, or essentially to make it, in essence, hurt again, which is a counterintuitive thing to do, but kind of what you need in order to to do it, it has to suddenly hurt again?

Tali Sharot 00:43:59  Yeah.

Tali Sharot 00:44:00  So, okay. So first of all, the both both strategies work, right? Okay. So if you take a break from your everyday life, when you come back, you would not only be able to see the good stuff again, but you’ll see the bad stuff a little bit more clearly. So if you were away and then you come back. And so those annoying things may or may be like more salient. We actually wrote a piece about it. There was an op ed and and there was a lot of comments to those piece to that piece. And a lot of people talked about how, for example, when they lived in a different place, a different country, you know, and they came back to their country. So some a person was talking about they’re living in the US, they went to Sweden, they come back. Well, now they saw things completely differently, right? Sure. They saw the good stuff that they missed and now they react. But also they suddenly realize how things can be different.

Tali Sharot 00:44:51  in terms of whether it’s the way society works or policy or whatever it is. Sweden in the US are very different in many different ways and they could could really observe these things. So living in different cultures, living in different places is one way, you know, it’s very common in the workplace to have employees rotate through different departments. The benefit of this is, first of all, it’s change is diversity, which we know is important for a psychologically rich life, but also when they come back to their own division, sure, they could see the great stuff, but they’ll be able to see the not so great stuff, because as long as they’re different in other divisions, right? As long as something is not a norm in other places, you can see it again, then you can evaluate it whether it’s good or it’s bad, it would be it would be more salient. And so you could do that physically. you know, I think this is what art is for, partially, you know, you can take yourself and put yourself in a different time and place, not by going there or not getting into a time machine.

Tali Sharot 00:45:57  But reading books, you know, movies, talking to different people who are living in different places and periods of time. it’s quite effective, actually, if you’re watching a movie and it’s so clear. I mean, now this is the opposite of what we’re saying. But when you watch the old some of the old movies who are wonderful old movies, but, you know, people are kind of smoking indoors, smoking on the plane. You know, it’s clear it’s very clear that that’s very different or, the way that, you know, the role of women in these, these films, it’s very clear that there is there is a change. Yeah. but I mean, perhaps if you are watching movies or reading reading books about places where things are better, then, you know, you could observe more clearly what needs to be changed and where you are.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:49  You mentioned the role of women, and you have a chapter on progress. And you talk about how that there was this strange phenomenon where as their societal conditions became better, that they actually seem to report lower life satisfaction for a while.Can you explain what was happening there?

Tali Sharot 00:47:11  Yeah. So the the data shows that women were actually happier on average in the 50s and 60s and actually happier than men, actually. And then it started kind of switching around the same time where when women rights were gaining momentum. So in the 70s and up until today, and I think now maybe the the difference is becoming smaller. But there was an advantage for, for men. So men’s well-being and happiness was over that that of women. It was just a new paper coming out. And I think maybe things are getting better now, but, I don’t really remember that. But, and not not only over time, it’s not only over time that as women were gaining, rights and equality. Their happiness was plummeting, but also over places. So you can even see at present time women who in, in in countries that have less rights are not necessarily less happy and sometimes report higher happiness. So what’s going on here? Absolutely not. The suggestion is not that having rights is not good for us and should be taken away.

Tali Sharot 00:48:22  I think what we are seeing is that in places or times where women were not expecting certain rights and not expecting to have certain jobs and positions, there was less of, a gap between their expectations and what was happening. But as as women’s rights were getting, better and equality was was getting better. women’s expectation was far exceeding the reality because women were told, you are equal, you can get any job that you want. You are equal to men. Your salary should be equal, right? But in reality, that is not the case. Even today, that is certainly not the case. And so now there’s a gap of what women expect they should have and what they actually have, which wasn’t as salient before. Now, I think this is a phase that we have to go through because as things change. I mean, so expectations were simply higher. And as things change, yes, it could lead to a decline in well-being. But we have to go for this phase in order to get to the situation where actually there is equality.

Tali Sharot 00:49:33  And hopefully when we get to the situation, maybe not in our lifetime, but maybe soon after, then well-being of women will be equal to that of men, at least equal.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:45  There’s an equation that gets thrown around around happiness, which is basically happiness is your expectations divided by reality, which is a way of sort of saying the similar thing that you’re doing, right. You you have this expectation, and then your reality comes in down here that that creates, as you call in the book, is that a negative prediction error or a positive?

Tali Sharot 00:50:05  Yeah, a negative prediction error. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We have to be careful here because there’s a few elements that happen at the same time. And it’s confusing and I think it’s important. I’ll tell you while he’s confused and all these conflicting things going on. But it’s important in general to realize that this is kind of obvious, but people overlook it. Humans are complicated. The brain is complicated, right? It’s not one thing you can’t say, oh, you’ll be happy if you have this and this thing makes you unhappy.

Tali Sharot 00:50:32  And often this is what people want. They’re like, well, but this causes that. So like, no, it’s a lot of things together. Okay. So on one hand it is the case that what we call we call negative prediction errors, that that means that reality is not as good as expected. A positive prediction error will be like reality is better than expected. So there’s certainly studies and that’s and it’s certainly true. And I think it’s it’s intuitive that if you have a negative prediction error you expected like something great and it didn’t turn out that great, they will have a negative impact on your mood. And if you like, didn’t expect it. And it was like, oh, I got this huge award. I got this like bonus money that will have a positive impact on you, a positive prediction, errors, you can measure them in the brain. There’s studies doing this. You can look at the part of the brain that’s called the reward center in the brain. And you can see like you can measure people’s predictions and their outcomes, the difference between them.

Tali Sharot 00:51:23  And you can see the brain signaling that. Right. And you can see there’s a nice tight relationship between that and how people feel on a moment to moment basis. Okay. So that all works with this idea of women’s well-being. We’re going down because they had high expectations, because legally, I mean, they should have equality, but in practice they didn’t. On the other hand, there is a lot of research. And I think this is absolutely true. That shows Just having a positive expectation is good for you, right? Right. It brings you happiness. It is important for motivation, right? I have this whole my first book is called The Optimism Bias. and really a huge part of that book. And the message is it is important to have optimism and to have positive expectations. It’s really what keeps us going. plenty of research showing optimists are happier. and on average, of course, there are extremes in all of that. So you have to kind of live with these two things at the same time.

Tali Sharot 00:52:22  And they’re not real. I mean, they work together because anticipation is, is longer in terms of time relative to this, to these prediction errors. Like, so if I think, like I’m interviewing for a job, you know, and I think I’m going to get it. So it’s like it has a positive impact on my, my happiness at the time. it also probably makes me perform better. So therefore more likely to get it. When I don’t get it. Sure, there’s a negative prediction error and has a negative impact on me. But then if I then kind of like think about it as oh well, okay, well next time will be better then I’m back on the horse. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:01  Right, right I do I do think you’re absolutely right that it’s a tricky balance of, you know, the answer isn’t set your expectations to zero because as you say, I think we we know that motivation in general tends to go up when we feel confident in our abilities, when we feel like we have a chance.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:17  Right. That causes more motivation, whereas we feel like it can’t happen or we can’t do it. Motivation tends to to be, you know, pushed downwards. So there’s this balance between these these two different things. Makes me think a little bit I’m pivoting here a little bit where you talk about a psychologically rich life, talk about what that means and how how you use it in this book.

Tali Sharot 00:53:40  Yeah. So when you ask people, hey, what what makes a good life? The first answer that they usually give is happiness. I want to feel good. I want to be happy. The second answer that they usually give is I want to have my life have meaning. purpose. But the problem is that a lot of the things that bring you happiness and meaning tend to do so less over time because of habituation, right? Even if you have a really meaningful job, you’re researching cancer. what once may have felt as kind of awe inspiring, may actually feel as routine over the years. But there is a third ingredients to a good life that counters that, which is variety.

Tali Sharot 00:54:21  And so if you have a more varied life, we talked about this a little bit before you go and live in different places, you work in different projects, you interact with different types of people, then you have a more psychologically rich life. And by putting in variety and diversity, you’re actually enhancing both a feeling of happiness and a feeling of meaning. Right? Because you’re constantly introducing Inducing change. You’re introducing disambiguation. You’re introducing learning, which is very much related to people’s happiness and also a sense of progression. Hopefully as long, you know, as long as the changes are not downhill, most mostly change means like I learned something new and if I learn something new, there’s progression. And and that is something that is important for individuals.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:07  One of the things that we know is that a lot of things in life that end up being worthwhile happen over a long period of time. They they they take time. Things accumulate. You could just take exercise as an example. Right. Little by little it builds up and it becomes a good thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:25  The problem is that along the way you often habituate. So for example, I start exercising and for the first couple months I’m like, wow, I feel really amazing. But then I just get used to feeling amazing. And yet I in order to to sort of stay on the journey, I need to continue to take these little steps that are in many ways routine. And yet I’m also trying to not fully habituate. Do you have any thoughts on in the midst of something that takes a while to do, or that you’re going to be doing sort of in perpetuity? Any other additional thoughts beyond what we’ve always already covered about how to fight habituation in those circumstances?

Tali Sharot 00:56:12  Yeah. So I think you’re raising a few things. One is there’s often, we’re doing things because of a goal, right? Maybe sport partially is a goal to to be healthy in the future. Maybe you want to lose some weight or you’re working on on a project writing a book. Right? And the goal is to finish the book, and it’s like it’s far away.

Tali Sharot 00:56:32  and the problem is how to keep you motivated throughout this. And so I think it’s important to think about what are the immediate rewards that I can get? Not only. So let’s take physical exercise. As you mentioned, not only am I, exercising because it’s good for me in the future, what is the thing that immediately I can get that is worthwhile? And so often, like people would say, well, I anytime I go to the gym and I go on the treadmill, for example, I let myself watch a trashy thing on TV that I don’t usually let myself. So what I’m running, you know, or maybe not even trashy. I can listen to podcasts, right? I mean, I enjoy that I when I go running, I sometimes listen to a podcast. And so that is motivating for me to do the exercise. a woman once told me, she when her he, she really wanted her husband to go to the gym. And finally he went to the gym. And when she caught when he got back, she was like, ooh, your muscles are much like, you know, larger now.

Tali Sharot 00:57:31  So now he’s like, super motivated to go to the gym every time because he comes back and he’s like, gets this like reward. So whether it is rewarding other people for these, like, little steps, right? or whether it’s rewarding ourselves, like figuring out what can I give myself, that, you know, for doing this thing? You know, a lot of it is also just we do get naturally, an emotional reward. So if I work on a book and I’m done with a chapter, well, that feels great. You know, I’ve even. I did, like, five pages. That feels great. Even though it’s, you know, because it’s just a little step towards, like, the final goal.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:10  Yeah, I think about that a lot about this idea of paying attention to the very they’re very subtle signals. But when I am doing the things that I think are important to do, there’s an internal feeling of being. I call it like being lined up in alignment.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:26  That feels good. It’s subtle, but it’s there. And the same way as we talked about before, when I don’t, there is a subtle feeling of not not greatness that can also be helpful as a way of saying, oh, I don’t really like that. And again, they’re not big things. There’s a I think some of what you’re pointing to with habituation is we have to sort of start to tune in to the nuances a little bit more.

Tali Sharot 00:58:52  Yeah, yeah. The more you know, the better.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:53  So let’s end with you talking about something that I think you got the phrase from John Stuart Mill, which is experiments in living.

Tali Sharot 00:59:02  Experiment in living. Yeah. So this this go back to the idea. I mean we talked a little bit about social media and taking a break and how if you, you don’t really know the impact it has on you until you take a break. The idea is here that you are experimenting, right. We don’t really know for sure the impact on things in our life if those things have been there all the time.

Tali Sharot 00:59:25  So we don’t really know the magnitude that either the positive or the the magnitude that these things can have on us until we do the experiment. Just like in science, I need to do the experiment to figure out how A is impacting B in our life? Do we need to take things out for a while? See what happens. Bring new things in. Take things that are already there. But do them in a different way. and, and, you know, be attuned to, to the impact, whether it’s on your emotions, whether it is perhaps on your curiosity. you can even, like, literally like, you know, make little notes and rate, but do the experiments, because if we just do the same thing in the same way all the time, we don’t really know. There might be some things that you’re doing the same way all the time, and really, they’re really bad for you and you don’t really realize it or could be the really great, so great continue. Or they could be, well, if I do it a little bit differently, I gain a lot myself.

Tali Sharot 01:00:22  Or maybe someone else that I’m related to or around me is gaining out of that changes. So. So that’s the idea of doing experiments, trying things out. almost always it’s not permanent. Right. There are things that we can do that are permanent, but almost always we could do experiments and then we can go back to our own ways if that’s what we wanted. Which is what happened to these people went off. It went off social media. And then most of them went back. Okay. That’s that’s their choice. They were informed at least.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:52  Well, Tali, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and I really enjoyed the book.

Tali Sharot 01:00:58  My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:00  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.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:17  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.