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The wholebeing approach – Interview with Tal Ben-Shahar (E105)

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Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie this week as she interviews happiness advocate Tal Ben-Shahar who shares his insights on happiness and the wholebeing approach. 

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background] 

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t. 

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy. 

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life. 

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny. 

[Intro music fadeout] 

Marie: Welcome back to our show, I am so excited about our guest. Tal Ben-Shahar is an author and lecturer.  He taught two of the largest classes in Harvard University’s history, “Positive Psychology” and “The Psychology of Leadership.”  His books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have appeared on best-seller lists around the world.  His latest books are “Happiness Studies” and “Happier, No Matter What.” 

Tal consults and lectures to executives in multi-national corporations, the general public, and at-risk populations.  The topics he lectures on include leadership, education, ethics, politics, happiness, self-esteem, resilience, goal setting, and mindfulness.  He is the co-founder and chief learning officer of The Happiness Studies Academy and Potentialife. 

An avid sportsman, Tal won the U.S. Intercollegiate and Israeli National squash championships.  He obtained his PhD in Organizational Behaviour and BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Harvard. 

Tal Ben-Shahar: Hi.

Marie: Hello. How are you?

Tal Ben-Shahar: I’m doing okay, thank you. How are you?

Marie: Good. Thank you so much for joining us on the Happiness for Cynics podcast. We’ll get right into it. I’ve been a fan, a huge fan of your work, and you’ve definitely been instrumental in the positive psychology movement and all the way back in 2007 when you published Happier, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller. In the preface you wrote,

“People are sensing and have been sensing for a while that we’re in the midst of some sort of revolution, and they’re not sure why.” [Happier – Tal Ben-Shahar]

So that was almost 15 years ago. And unfortunately for many people, the study of positive psychology hasn’t revolutionised their lives, and it seems to have remained the world’s best kept secret. So, I’m wondering, why do you think the science of happiness and wellbeing hasn’t had a bigger impact on humanity yet?

Tal Ben-Shahar: Thank you, Marie. First of all, for having me here, and second for the question because it is an important one. You know, when you look at change, the way it happens is usually that it’s slow, slow, slow and then very fast. In other words, at some point there is… it tips, as, as Malcolm Gladwell puts it, it hasn’t tipped yet for the science of happiness.

However, I think we’ve gone through at least a few of the slow, slow, slow, which gets us closer to the very fast. And unfortunately, it seems like things need to get worse before they get better. And what the pandemic has done is it has made things worse in terms of mental health, whether it’s stress and anxiety, whether it’s depression and what we’re beginning to see. And I can certainly feel, there is much more interest, whether it’s from politicians or teachers, parents, businesses, much more interest in the field. So, I suspect that we’re getting a lot closer to that tipping point.

Marie: I hope so. As you can probably tell from the title of this podcast. I was a cynic for so many years. I saw the T-shirt slogans and I didn’t understand the science behind it, and it’s been revolutionary in my life, and I just I want to scream from the rooftops to everyone else. “This stuff matters and it makes a difference!”

So, what do you think, as we’re reaching this tipping point, will need to happen in the next few years for us to pick up the speed of adoption and buy in from people?

Tal Ben-Shahar: Yes. So, the key is really to connect this field to tie it to science. You know, the self-help or New Age movement has been around for a long time. People are talking about, preaching about, the good life. That’s been going on for millennia.

The difference now is that we have a… we really have a science of happiness. You know, it’s imperfect as every scientific endeavour is. But the nice thing or the important thing rather about science is that you get closer and closer to, to getting the results, the sought-after results, which, when it comes to positive psychology, it’s higher levels of wellbeing.

So, as long as we stay committed to the scientific pursuit of happiness, then the progress initially maybe a little bit slower than it could have been if we had reverted to the self-help, new age, relying on charisma and promises. So, we are going a little bit slower, but I think it’s a much healthier route to pursue.

Marie: So, what do you think needs to change apart from awareness of the science. Are we talking changes at schools in organisations, you know, the systemic ways that we organise our countries and our governments that needs to change next? What’s the future of this movement look like?

Tal Ben-Shahar: As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing is education and for that to change, universities need to recognise the importance of the science of happiness. Schools need to recognise it, and governments need to recognise it, [and] politicians, because most of the schools are public schools and the curriculum is determined often by politicians or their aides. So, it’s all about educational. You know, Janusz Korczak, the famed Polish educator, said almost 100 years ago,

“If you want to reform the world, you must first change education.” [– Janusz Korczak]

And it certainly applies to the science of happiness. Now how do we do that? I’ll share with you a quick anecdote when we created our program for schools and we tried to get schools to buy in and when I say buy in, I just meant they didn’t even have to pay for it, so it was just to give us the time, which was an hour or two to a week.

We had real difficulties doing that, because Principles said you know, we don’t have time, you know, we need every minute. We need it to do extra math classes or writing classes or… and so on. And it was really challenging. And then I ended up, you know, basically asking friends of mine to introduce it. You know, friends of mine who were school Principals. And there were three of them and they introduced it in their schools. You know more, I mean, they liked the content. They knew the content, but more as a favour to me than anything else.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben Shahar: But there was… This was enough for us to actually do research. And we did research on these on these three schools and over 1000 students. And what we found, the results we found were remarkable. So, we saw levels of resilience went up. Happiness, of course, went up. Anxiety and depression went down and interestingly, not surprisingly, I must add for us. But interestingly, grades went up.

Now as soon as we showed that grades went up and we published this in a couple of the top educational journals, as soon as people read that we had a long, we have still, a long line of schools vying for the program.

Marie: Mmm hmm. Yes.

Tal Ben-Shahar: So, you know, it wasn’t about anxiety, depression, happiness, resilience. It was mostly about grades. And frankly, I don’t care.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben-Shahar: If this is why schools come, then that’s fine. If organisations introduce a program in happiness because it increases profits, that’s great. Whatever it takes. Just introduce this program.

Marie: Sure. All right, I have to admit, I recently finished the Happiness practitioner certificate at the Happiness Studies Academy, and I am a huge fan and I particularly love how you teach modern Western hard science and fact, alongside philosophy, religion, history, Eastern thinking. And the whole time was taking your course, I was thinking, I’m really getting an arts degree here, not just a social science psychology degree. But in your course, everything is really anchored around what you call the SPIRE model.

So, I wonder if you could tell our listeners a little bit more about SPIRE? In particular, starting with what the acronym stands for, and maybe some examples of how to put it in practise.

Tal Ben Shahar: Yes. So, SPIRE, the acronym stands for the Five elements of happiness.

  • The first, S is the spiritual wellbeing.
  • P is physical wellbeing.
  • I stands for intellectual wellbeing.
  • The R is relational wellbeing.
  • And finally, the E is emotional wellbeing.

So, spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational and emotional. All of them are important for happiness but we don’t need to focus on all of them all of the time. In fact, it would be near impossible to do so. But at different times either throughout the day or throughout the week, we need to spend some time at least cultivating all five.

So, Spiritual wellbeing. Of course, it can come from religion, and it does for many people. But spiritual wellbeing is about a sense of meaning and purpose, first and foremost. And you can find that in a church, synagogue, or a mosque. Or you can find it in important work that you do or spending time with your loved ones or saving the world or enhancing the wellbeing of one person. You know, this is about finding meaning and purpose, which is important for spiritual wellbeing, which is important for happiness.

Another aspect of spiritual wellbeing is presence, being in the here and now. You know, if I pay attention to a tree that I walk by or to a person sitting across from me or to the fact that we’re alive and can, can hear or see or walk. These are all miracles if you think about it. You know, Albert Einstein once reportedly said that,

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” [– Albert Einstein]

And being present, uh, certainly brings out the miraculous in our in our life. So that spiritual wellbeing is about purpose and presence.

Physical wellbeing is about nutrition and about exercise and sleep, and recovery in general. For example, regular physical exercise has the same effect on our psychological wellbeing as our most powerful psychiatric medication. Working in the same way, releasing norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, the feel-good chemicals in the brain. So, physical wellbeing is a very important part of overall happiness.

Intellectual wellbeing is about curiosity, about learning. You know that people who learn who are constantly asking questions or curious; are not just happier, they’re not just more successful, they also live longer. So, curiosity may kill the cat, but it does the opposite for us humans.

Under intellectual wellbeing is about deep learning, spending time, whether it’s reading a book, engaging in a text or observing and studying a work of art or walking in nature. Again, being present to it and exercising our rational faculty, our intellectual faculty and really learning about the world around us. So, [that’s] intellectual wellbeing.

Then there is, under Relational wellbeing. Number one predictor of happiness, quality time we spend with people we care about and who care about us. And that can be a romantic partner, it can be family, it can be friends, it can be colleagues at work. It actually doesn’t matter, as long as we have close, intimate, supportive relationships. Number one predictor of happiness.

Under relational wellbeing is kindness and generosity. One of the best ways to help ourselves, is to help others. Two sides of the same coin. You know, there’s a lot of talk around, you know, selfishness or selflessness. One is bad, the other is good. Well, I don’t buy either. What we need is not selfishness or selflessness. What we need is self-fullness, because when we help, others were also helping ourselves. When we help ourselves, we’re also indirectly helping others more likely to help others. So that’s relational wellbeing.

And finally, Emotional wellbeing is about embracing painful emotions, accepting them, giving them, giving ourselves the permission to be human. And why, Because of a paradox that if we reject or when we reject painful emotions, they simply intensify and grow stronger. And then it’s about embracing pleasurable emotions like gratitude, like joy, like love, like excitement.

And happiness is about all of these. And as I said earlier, we don’t need to do it all, all the time. But we do need to pay attention to all of them at different times.

Marie: I love E [Emotional wellbeing]. It came late in the course because it’s the last one, but something that really stuck with me that you said, was that,

“There are no bad emotions, only bad behaviours.” [– Tal Ben-Shahar]

And I’ve said that too many people and discussed the learnings, which I think is part of the I [Intellectual] of SPIRE, is taking what you’ve learned and having those deep discussions with others is part of my joy of learning. And when I’ve mentioned that to people, it’s one thing that they really stop, and they take it in, and they think about it. And there were so many nuggets throughout the year and my friends have gone, “Oh, that’s really deep.” They have prompted some wonderful discussions as well.

So, there are lots of different life satisfaction or wellbeing or happiness models out there. And probably the most famous is Martin Seligman’s PERMA model. I’m interested to know when it comes to SPIRE versus PERMA or other models. Is it all just supporting the cause? Or are there differences in SPIRE and PERMA that you particularly wanted to focus in on that you think matter more or less?

Tal Ben Shahar: Yeah, the key with happiness and that I always, even, you know today in a in online weapons are with students. I emphasise with the students that how you define happiness is up to you, meaning there are many ways there isn’t one right way, and you need to find a definition that works for you. So, Seligman uses the PERMA model. You know, the P being Positive emotions, the E is for Engagement for being in the here and now for being in flow, R is for Relationships, M is for Meaning and A is for accomplishments or Achievements.

And the key is to… First of all, obviously, they’re all valid and important elements of happiness and the SPIRE model that I came up with, with my colleagues focuses on other things. For instance, PERMA doesn’t have the physical wellbeing element in it, which I think is critical for a happy life. You know, if I don’t exercise for more than two days. I feel it.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben-Shahar: I mean, I feel more anxious, you know, less calm. You know, I feel like I’m not my best self. Far from it. We know that physical exercise effects our wellbeing. And also, when it comes to accomplishments and achievements, which is part of PERMA. I don’t see it as that important. In fact, it’s one of the biggest myths that people believe that the path to happiness lies in the achievement. Now, if you if you’re working towards something that is personally meaningful to you, where you’re finding you’re exercising your best self and your path to your purpose, that’s a different story. That’s not about the accomplishment or the achievement itself.

So, you know, we differ. We disagree. We’re still friends and supporting one another’s work. And I point out to my, to my students, you know if PERMA is more suitable for your temperament, by all means. If you want to, you know, create another model which will be, you know your own, then by all means [do that]. The key is to identify what’s important for us and then, more importantly, to cultivate that element.

Marie: So, on that note, you taught hundreds of students at Harvard, so you’ve got firsthand experience with how people have implemented your teachings. Is there one thing that stands out above the rest that made the biggest impact in your student’s life? One intervention or area that you saw across the board came out on top more often. Even though everyone has a subjective understanding, and everyone is different. Is there something that stands above the rest?

Tal Ben-Shahar: There are a couple with your permission.

Marie: Mmm hmm. Of course.

Tal Ben Shahar: So probably if I had to choose one, it would be what you mentioned earlier, which is the notion of the permission to be human. In other words, there are no good or bad emotions. There can be good or bad behaviour, but not emotions. Emotions are amoral.

So, you know, feeling, experiencing envy towards my friend does not make me a bad or immoral person. If I act on that envy and hurt my friend, that’s a whole different story.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben-Shahar: And paradoxically, it’s when we accept and embrace painful emotions that we have most control over our behaviour. In other words, saying to myself, I should not experience envy not only intensifies that emotion, it’s also more likely to control me then similarly with fear. You know, experiencing fear doesn’t make me a coward. It simply makes me a human being. And courage is not about, not having fear, but about having the fear and then going ahead anyway. And then the paradox works in the same way here, when I reject fear when I say to myself, well, I shouldn’t be afraid, shouldn’t be anxious. The anxiety and the fear only intensify, and then they are more likely to impact my actions and rather induce lack of action.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben-Shahar: So, I think that’s the, that’s the main thing. Other big ones would be the importance of physical exercise and physical exercise certainly during challenging times. And I would always ask my students, so when is the time you’re least likely to exercise? And inevitably they would say exam period, and I would emphasise and that this is the most important time to explode. Just like today, people say, “well, I’m not exercising because of lock down or because my favourite gym is closed.” And my response is, now is the most important time when their stress levels are at an all-time high.

And I’ll just say one more thing, which is more general. I talk a lot about, as you know, about emotions and the importance of permission to be human and about the importance of cultivating gratitude and love and the pleasurable emotions. And yet, I also emphasis that behaviour is more important than feelings, that what we do matters more than what we feel. In other words, it’s okay to experience fear, not the end of the world. It’s natural. It’s okay to experience envy. It’s okay to experience sadness and anxiety. We can still choose to act in a way that is most appropriate or most moral or most helpful and beneficial to us and the world.

“So, behaviour trump’s emotions.”

Marie: I think what I love most about that is it also addresses what the naysayers say about the toxic positivity movement. We’re really saying it’s okay to feel anger and pain and sadness and all of those, and in fact, it is encouraged and human to do so. And this model addresses that.

Tal Ben-Shahar: And it’s one of the central myths around happiness, namely, that a happy life is a life devoid of pain or frustration or disappointments. And in fact, the first step towards happiness is allowing in unhappiness.

Marie: All right, so I think I know where this is going, but you might surprise me. So, I’ve asked what has been impactful in others. I’m interested to know what happiness habit you always personally prioritise in your week.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Yeah. You know, the happiness habit that I prioritise in my week is prioritising happiness. And what I mean by that is prioritising doing the things that contribute most to what I’ve come to call life’s ultimate currency, the currency of happiness. Specifically, it’s about, you know, first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, I meditate. I exercise three times a week during regular times and over the past year and a half have not been regular times. I do it five times a week. I put time aside for family and friends. And when I mean aside, it means that I disconnect from technology so that I can connect to people. You know, I keep a journal, regularly. You know, I do all the things that I teach, practise yoga, you know, three times a week. So, all these things I prioritise, and they help me then be a better version of myself, which is, you know, a kinder, more generous calmer version.

And, you know, I said that behaviours trump emotions. I don’t always feel great. Just like anyone, anyone else. I feel anxiety, I feel, you know, fear, frustration, anger like everyone else. The difference, though, between you know, where I was 20, 30 years ago and today is that I realised that I first need to accept these emotions and then second ask, “What is the kind of person that I would like to be in the world?” and then act accordingly.

Marie: I love that You said you practise what you teach. A lot of people don’t and again going back to this being a field where you’ve got to find what works for you. I think it was a real wake up moment when I read that Sonja Lyubomirsky doesn’t have her own gratitude journal, laugh, even though she teaches about the importance of gratitude.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Laugh.

Marie: I’m sure she practises gratitude in other ways.

Tal Ben-Shahar: She does it in other ways, and she’s very authentic about it. And she said, “Look, I saw the results in my studies. I personally cannot connect with it. I’ve tried.” And she has tried. I know that and she does other things, whether it’s meditation or she exercises regularly, she cultivates relationships in her life. Yeah, she gets an A for, for more than effort.

M: Laugh. Okay, so before we go, I want to acknowledge no one is perfect and new habits are not easy to form. So, I do want to. We normally end on what are your recommendations for introducing a new happiness habit? Or what’s the one piece of advice? But you do spend some time talking about forming new habits in your course and I’d love you to in part some final words of wisdom for someone who’s found a nugget in our discussion and would like to implement that in their lives for how they can successfully do that. What are your tips and helpful advice?

Tal Ben-Shahar: So, the first thing is to recognise that that many of the things that we know will make us happy, are right in front of us. They’re accessible, and yet we don’t do them. Why? It’s because what I’ve come to call the rhetorical choices in our life.

So, if I if I said to you Marie, tell me, you have a choice, do you want to be grateful and appreciative of all the good things and the good people in your life? or do you or would you like to take them all for granted? Now it’s a rhetorical choice, you know, you and eight billion other people around the world, of course, I want to appreciate rather than take things for granted. And yet, and yet most people, most of the time, take the good things in their lives for granted.

So, we have a rhetorical choice here, and yet we choose unwisely. Why? Not because we don’t think it’s important, but because we forget, because we neglect, because we’re distracted and therefore the first step in introducing change. Based on many of the changes that we know, we want to introduce many of the choices that we know we want to make.

The first thing we need to do is create reminders and reminders can come in the form of a bracelet that I wear that will remind me to be appreciative or to be present in the here and now, rather than always distracted. Or to be kind and because we all want to be kind and generous, it’s a rhetorical choice to be so. And yet we forget, so we need a reminder. It could be a bracelet. It could be a screen saver. It could be a picture on the wall that symbolises the value that we want to incorporate or whatever it is. The first is reminder.

Then we need to think about repetition. It’s not enough to do something once or twice. We need to do it over and over again. If we want to have it become part of who we are, quite literally second nature, just like in sports. You want to become a better tennis player. you have to hit that ball, repetitively. The Coach may need to remind you how to hit it, but after that you need to hit it over and over again. And after you repeat that action after you play that Piano sonata after you hit that ball after you exercise gratitude repeatedly, then comes the ritual.

Ritual is, quite literally, neural pathways that have been formed and that make an activity automatic, habitual. But in order to do that, we need many repetitions, you know, whether it’s 30 repetitions or 21 repetitions or 80 repetitions. But we need repetition before it becomes second nature, whether it’s repetition of brushing our teeth before it became second nature, a ritual in our life, whether it’s the repetition of hitting a tennis ball before it becomes second nature, or whether it’s repeating, expressing gratitude or being kind.

So, we have the three R’s of change, first Reminders, then Repetition and finally Rituals.

Marie: Thank you very much. Is there anything that you would like to add in that I haven’t asked you? I think we’ve covered quite a broad spectrum of happiness questions.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Yes, one thing. And that is to pick one thing or maximum two things from what you’ve heard, either in this podcast or elsewhere that you would like to introduce into your life, not more. Not over doing it. And pick that one or two things and create reminders around it. Repeat it often and much until it becomes a ritual. And only then you can move on to the second thing or the third thing that you want to introduce, gradually, slowly.

Marie: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time and for talking to our listeners. It’s been truly a pleasure. And I know that you have a very busy schedule full of happiness habits, so really appreciate. And I’m grateful for the time that you spent with us today.

T: Thank you, Marie.

M: Thank you.

[Happy exit music – background] 

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic. 

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out. 

M: Until next time. 

M & P: Choose happiness. 

[Exit music fadeout] 

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Why every neighbourhood needs a wellbeing hub (E100)

by

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie and Pete as they celebrate Happiness for Cynics’ 100th episode by looking at wellbeing hubs and why your neighbourhood needs one. 

Show notes

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) vs. Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) – Wellbeing index

The GDP in Australia was worth 1370.00 billion US dollars (1939.10 billion AU dollars) in 2021, according to official data from the World Bank. The gross domestic product (GDP) measures of national income and output for a given country’s economy. The gross domestic product (GDP) is equal to the total expenditures for all final goods and services produced within the country in a stipulated period of time. 

The Herald/Age Lateral Economics – Wellbeing index looks at changes in education, health, work-life, social inequality and environmental degradation. According to the HALE Wellbeing index Australians overall wellbeing has suffered a significant decline since the start of the pandemic and the financial value of this decline is estimated at 9.4 billion US dollars (13.3 billion AU dollars). That is approximately 0.7% of the GDP.

Thinker in Residence – Martin Seligman 2012-13 

Each Thinker is a world leader and exemplar in their field. They come and live and work in Adelaide for a period of time. The Thinker focuses on contemporary, complex challenges, recognised as important to the future of the state. 

Wellbeing hubs

Wellbeing SA is partnering with the City of Playford and Naracoorte Lucindale Council to co-invest in local Wellbeing Hubs, through which a range of targeted initiatives are being implemented to support community physical, mental and social wellbeing

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background] 

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t. 

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy. 

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life. 

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny. 

[Intro music fadeout] 

M: [Singing] Happy birthday to us,

P: Laugh!

M & P: [Both singing] Happy birthday to us,

P: Happy birthday, Happiness for Cynics,

M: Happy birthday to us!

P: We are on 100! Yay!

M: Whoop, 100 episodes.

P: Woo hoo, welcome, welcome, welcome! Who would have thought, gosh.

M: I know. It was really just, “want to do a podcast? On zoom?”

P: [Excited voice] “Sure!” Laugh. Does it mean I get to hang out with you? Sure, I’m in, laugh.

M: I was like, you’re kind of happy, this could be fun.

P: Laugh! Annoyingly so.

M: Happy and not a cynic. And now look at us.

P: I know.

M: I’m so not a cynic and you are.

P: Laugh. What have you done to me? Laugh.

M: I’d like to think that it is the act of going back to school that has made you appreciate sources and understanding quality information.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: I’d also like to think that the shit show that’s going on in America has made us all questions sources.

P: Laugh. I hope they’re questioning sources; I really do. Laugh.

M: Questioning the reliability of sources.

P: Yes, yes, it’s great explanation of social media induced news and information and we need to have those filters on. And be really mindful of what we’re putting in and filter out the crap from the stuff that’s worth investigating.

M: Yep, and happiness is [worth investigating] as we know.

P: Laugh.

M: So, this is what really started as us exploring you know, what makes people happy, and noting that I tripped over a lot of this stuff because I never really believed in it.

P: Mmm, mmm.

M: And now look at us.

P: We’ve almost reversed. Laugh.

M: We talk about Amygdala’s.

P: Ha ha ha!

M: And what else have we talked about? We’ve talked about a lot of pretty scientific stuff.

P: We have. We brought the science.

M: Neuroscience.

P: Yes, yes. Even a little bit of vagal tone in vegus nerve stimulation.

M: Mmm hmm. That was the breathing stuff.

P: Yeah.

M: I still have no idea what you were on about that day.

P: Laugh! One day you will get there. One day I’ll explain it.

M: We were talking about the muscles and the ribs. Gotcha. That’s breathing right there.

P: Laugh.

M: And I was like, wha??? how does this all fit together?

P: Laugh.

M: But we got there. And I do ramble on about a whole lot of other stuff where you’re just like, “Mmm hmm, you just, you go girl.”

P: Laugh. I’m right behind you, cheer squad.

M: Laugh.

P: Right here. We all need our cheer squads.

M: We do, yes, we do. Build each other up.

P: Yes.

M: Not tear each other down.

P: And applaud the investigation. Applaud the moving forward and finding things out and going, “Sure there’s something to forest bathing. Sure, let’s investigate that.”

M: Mmm hmm. Unless you’re Josh Frydenberg (Treasurer of Australia) and then… I can’t say that on air.

P: Laugh!

M: But today, what we want to talk about is wellbeing hubs.

P: Now, this is a particular passion of yours, Marie. We’ve had many discussions about this. We’ve driven through industrial estates in the back of Sydney, looking at venues and these dilapidated housing places. And your first thought always goes, ‘that could be a happiness centre!’

M: Yes, yes! And you know it really is the next evolution out of the book that we wrote.

P: Mmm.

M: What was the name of the book we wrote?

P: Laugh!

M: Selfcare is Church for Non-Believers. You know, we used to all get together on a Sunday and create that community and talk about service and kindness to others.

P: Mmm mmm.

M: And really rally around the community that really brought people together.

P: Absolutely, yeah.

M: With fewer and fewer people going to church and believing in God. There isn’t that thing that brings people in a community together.

P: Yes.

M: I didn’t even know my neighbours. I live in a high rise, and the other day I got off on the lift and they were like, “Oh, no, this is our floor.” And I was like, “No, no, no, it’s mine, too.”

P: Laugh.

M: That’s a typical city persons story.

P: Yes, it is.

M: We need these wellbeing hubs to replace that community that we used to have.

P: Absolutely. These are the new churches. Is that what you’re saying?

M: Yep.

P: New old churches?

M: Yes.

P: Yeah. I like it.

M: The role the church played in society was so much more than just religion and bringing people together around religion.

P: Oh yeah, definitely. Community so much more important. And this is where the change happens as well, when you’ve got people bringing in new ideas and being supportive and creating those social connections.

M: So anyway, back to Josh Frydenberg, who I really want to trash on the show today.

P & M: Laugh!

P: Poor Josh.

M: So, this all came about out of a Sydney Morning Herald article, an opinion piece, which pretty much said a few weeks ago, our treasurer in Australia here, was patting himself on the back of the GDP growth in the midst of a pandemic.

P: Yeah. Mmm, well done you… whoo.

M: All the old white men standing around paying themselves on the back.

P: Laugh.

M: Anyway, went we’ve done our job as elected officials in this country. GDP went up a couple of percent. Wow we’re good, right.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: But what they didn’t take into account and what The Sydney Morning Herald was looking at. So, there’s an annual Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) wellbeing index.

P: That’s quite a mouthful.

M: It is. They need a better name. They really do.

P: They need an acronym or something, laugh.

M: So, you think the media would know –

P: The LEWI index? See there we go, I’m good.

M: There we go 😊

M: – about the index. So, this index, rather than just GDP, shows Australians have suffered negative impacts to the wellbeing during coronavirus.

P: Mmm.

M: So, unfortunately, these impacts are largely overlooked by traditional economic indicators like GDP, which is really singularly focused, right.

P: Very much so. Very narrow.

M: What I argue, and many other people argue around the world and many countries have already started implementing. Bhutan is probably the most famous.

P: Ahh.

M: So, they have G… Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH).

P: Oh my.

M: Yes, and there’s a range of measures that go into that. A couple of years ago, now, New Zealand launched their wellbeing plan.

P: Yeah, that was such a good thing, a defining moment.

M: Scotland, Germany, you know a few countries, [whispers] mostly women run countries –

P: Hmm, interesting.

M: – have realised that GDP is not the sole measure for whether or not you’re doing a good job when running a country.

P: It shouldn’t be the sole measure, no. The health and wellbeing of your people.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Uh-peoples as King George used to say.

M: Uh-peoples, yes, are the peoples happy?

P: Laugh, yeah. And that should be the focus that should be.

M: Yeah.

P: We should be putting measures in place where we can start to collect data around this sort of statistics so that we can then have measurable, quantifiable numbers that we can use in arguments.

M: Yes.

P: To say this approach is working, people’s happiness, people’s content. We’re getting better social commentaries or social engagement.

M: Health!

P: Oh, health is a huge one.

M: Mental health, and all of those measures have been going backwards over the last decade. And unless we do something differently, they’re going to continue getting worse. We’re going to have higher rates of suicides, higher rates of depression, anxiety, obesity, diabetes.

P: Yeah.

M: You name it, things are falling apart from the mental health perspective.

P: And they are linked. Like mental health is one of the biggest indicators for obesity in Australia.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And globally, it makes a big difference.

M: A lot of other countries are looking not only at GDP, but other measures to say whether or not… You know, on their report card at the end of the year when they pat themselves on the back.

P: Laugh, yeah.

M: It’s not only an A in economics, it’s an A in social sciences and all the other things.

P: Wealth distribution.

M: Yes, let’s not even talk about that.

P: Laugh!

M: This Herald/Age Lateral Economics Wellbeing Index looks at changes in education, health, work-life, social inequality and environmental degradation.

P: Mmm.

M: It doesn’t matter if you’re healthy and happy if you’ve got no world to live on.

P: Exactly.

M: And the results for overall Australian wellbeing are not good.

P: Mmm.

M: So, we’ve had a decline in the pandemic, and here’s… Let’s put some dollar values on it since we are talking GDP, a lot of time.

P: Ok, yep.

M: Worth $13.3 billion AU.

P: Sounds like a lot of money.

M: It’s a lot of money. You could fund a lot of wellbeing hubs with 13.3 billion dollars.

P: Yes, you could, definitely. Yeah.

M: Laugh.

P: Where does that sit, in terms of our, in terms of our GDP? As a percentage?

M: Oh, I should have looked into it.

P: Maybe I’ll look that one up. Leandra will look that up.

M & P: Laugh.

P: Thanks Lea.

M: So, 13.3 billion dollars is the value of the decline in our mental health since the pandemic started.

P: Mmm.

M: And we’re sitting around talking about how well we’re doing.

P: Yeah.

M: We’re not.

P: No.

M: We’re not. And look, to be fair, this is, this is kind of new. We’re a little behind the eight ball in Australia. As we’ve said, there’s other countries leading the way. But for the last 100 years there was a really good correlation between GDP, you know, in growth and financial security, and how prosperous and healthy population was.

P: Or contented the population was. The population was happy when we were earning money.

M: Not necessarily contentment, that didn’t factor in. But health measures and things like housing, water, electricity, etcetera go up as the country gets richer.

P: Yep.

M: And there’s a direct correlation to social impact and wellbeing impact when people start getting fresh water, right?

P: Yep.

M: When they have access to housing rather than living in slums.

P: Access to basic human rights.

M: So, there’s definitely a direct impact. When you’re talking poorer countries increase the GDP, you’ll increase your people’s basic access to what we think of basic human rights, right?

P: Well, they are. Water, sanitation, nutrition –

M: But we’re long past that in Australia, America, most European countries that haven’t been…

P: The developed nations.

M: Right? They have all been happily drinking water from a tap, pretty much getting their housing right, feeding their population in general etcetera.

P: Yep.

M: And so, for a while GDP has continued to grow, but we haven’t seen those increases in wellbeing in the population. And it’s because once you get to a certain point of development in your country, we need new measures then. So, I will give a little bit of slack to our government.

P: Laugh.

M: I think we’re very much a lucky country.

P: Sure.

M: But it’s time for change.

P: It’s time for new measures.

M: It’s time.

P: It’s time to look at other things. So, what are the other things that we do look at when we’re looking at wellbeing, Marie?

M: Well, maybe let’s talk about what is wellbeing? When we’re talking about wellbeing.

P: Ok.

M: So, wellbeing and happiness are a little bit different. So, it is definitely multifaceted, and it includes your mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.

P: Yep.

M: So, all three of those, and really it includes having meaning and purpose in your life. So that’s again, very closely tied to a sense of identity and self.

P: Yeah.

M: And factors into your emotional health.

P: Very clearly. If you can wake up and be excited for doing a job or a task or having something to wake up for huge amounts of physical impacts, with that.

M: Yep, and on top of that, if you can have autonomy and agency in those things, we talked about those before. It’s about also having something to get you out of bed in the morning again back to that lovely start that we always talk. About 40% of people who retire are depressed within a year.

P: Yes.

M: It’s something that gives you something to look forward to. Plan for, feel good about doing and achieving and accomplishing.

P: Yep.

M: So that’s the first one. Second, one community and connection again –

P: This is the social?

M: Yeah.

M: – and we’ve seen very much during Covid that a lot of people have been suffering from loneliness and social isolation.

P: Mmm.

M: The third, which I kind of bucket in with the fourth here as well, so physical health and mental health.

P: Mmm.

M: So, are you getting outside, exercising, eating well, sleeping well?

P: Yep.

M: And mental health? Do you prioritise mental health, are you practising kindness and gratitude? Do you manage your negative thoughts?

P: Mmm.

M: And do you actively work on your resilience, stress and positive mental health?

P: Yes.

M: Right, which is the bit that I didn’t know we had to do. I just thought happiness was a natural state.

P: Laugh! Well, I think this is what society has been prioritising a little bit more, and this has come from a lot of government led initiatives back in the 2000’s, with governments going we need to start thinking about wellbeing and having those ideas out there. New Zealand was the one that really jumped on top of it from my memory in terms of putting into policy. And that’s where Jacinda Ardern has been so proactive.

M: Mmm.

P: But these are the things that people of our mother’s generation didn’t consider. But we’re really lucky, as you said and we’re in the position where we don’t have to worry about clean running water and a roof over our heads, we can actually start considering things like resiliency, mental wellbeing, emotional intelligence.

M: Mmm hmm. What do we want out of life? Following your passions, not just trying to put food on the table.

P: Yeah.

M: Yeah, we are very privileged in that way.

P: Mmm.

M: So, that is what wellbeing encompasses. But it’s also about balance. It’s also about understanding that you need to put time into being happy and resilient and managing your mental health, your physical health, having meaning and purpose, contributing to community and connection with others. And the more that comes at you, redundancy, illness in the family, coronavirus.

P: Yep.

M: The more stresses that come at you, the more you gotta double down on those things, right?

P: Yeah, they’re more important.

M: To a certain point, when, unfortunately, your seesaw is going to get a bit out of balance. If, for instance, we have two years of Global Pandemic.

P: Mmm.

M: And maybe on top of that, if you’re in America two years of a global pandemic and a lot of political turmoil, right?

P: Yes.

M: And that will send anyone even if they’re doing the best they can to look after their physical and mental wellbeing and to reach out to people, etcetera, etcetera, that amount of change and…

P: Crises.

M: Crises will break even the most resilient person.

P: Absolutely.

M: So, wellbeing is about having the balance there and on any day we go through a lot of change and a lot of turmoil.

P: Yep.

M: And so, that’s why it’s so important nowadays compared to our parents’ generation to be putting the time in. But we’ve been through a tough couple of years, and another really good example of where you can’t help that balance is a war zone for instance.

P: Yeah.

M: When you’re just constantly in fright or flight.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: So, that’s wellbeing. It’s about putting all the work in on those three to four things. But then also understanding that at any one point in your life things might throw that balance out of whack. And it’s about balancing the challenges with the good stuff.

P: Yep. So then, in terms of putting that into practise, this is the idea of the wellbeing hubs which is a particular passion of yours. And there was an article by Martin Seligman, our friend Martin.

M: Oh, not an article. He was a Thinker in Residence in South Australia in 2013. I love that job title.

P: Laugh! Thinker in Residence.

M: “I’m a Thinker in Residence.” Laugh.

P: Go South Australia for taking the initiative on that, to have a Thinker in Residence, to have a philosophical person up there.

M: And to have someone from the positive psychology field come and be a Thinker in Residence.

P: Yeah.

M: So, he came up with the idea of wellbeing hubs and look for many, many, many years, we have known that people are more successful in life when they practise these positive psychology interventions.

P: Yep, mmm hmm.

M: And activities, when they do the things that we talked about.

P: Yes.

M: That is our wellbeing activities, right? People are more successful. They contribute more in their jobs and to the economy.

P: Yeah.

M: And so, you want your GDP to go up?

P: You want people to be happy.

M: Right. Yeah.

P: A happy worker is a good worker. That’s a Chinese thing.

M: Very true. They’re very smart, Chinese. So many years ago, we worked out that it’s better to have happy people and our schools went okay, this is great. And all over Australia we are really quite advanced in the world with how we’ve implemented positive psychology into our curricula.

P: Like in our education?

M: Yes, we’re doing some really good things. So, I was online, and obviously South Australia took the Wellbeing hubs concept and they’ve got their kids and wellbeing programmes they’ve got resources, the Australian federal government has a bunch of resources and information. Podcasts for teachers, teacher guides, classroom activities, all of that kind of that kind of stuff to bring it into the classrooms, these concepts and ideas and to help train kids.

P: Ok.

M: But no one’s really doing much out there for everyone else.

P: So once you get out of school, it kind of falls away a little bit.

M: Like, we’ve had to do all our research here, you and me.

P: Yep.

M: And if you’re under 18 [great]. Where are people getting their information about how to live a good life? We missed the boat, right?

P: These new kids coming through great, good on you. A wonderful idea, yeah.

M: And in New South Wales there is a wellbeing framework for school kids as well. So, a lot of our state governments are on top of this, But that’s only 0- to 18-year-olds.

P: Yeah.

M: What about the rest of us?

P: Where does the rest of the population go to?

M: I’m glad you asked, Pete.

P: Laugh! Was that a nice little feed there, laugh. There you go, off you go.

M: My solution.

P & M: Laugh.

M: And Martin, Dr Martin Seligman’s solution is these wellbeing hubs.

P: Ok.

M: And essentially, they will do a lot of the same things that churches do, right? It is a space, a physical space, but also a virtual space where you can run programs and get people involved in their community.

P: And any number of diverse programs as well. It can be more than just a sporting thing or a sporting association or a knitting class or an orchid club.

M: Yeah, yeah, you can have pregnant yoga in the mornings and book club at lunch for the… anyone, anyone really, let’s be honest and…

P: Creative contemporary dance in the afternoon.

M: Mmm hmm, and then gardening in the evenings. So, whatever it is and it’s just a way to pull together a variety of activities that are all based in positive psychology research.

P: Yeah.

M: And not only give meaning, so whether you’re learning a new skill or you’re giving back or contributing or volunteering at the centre.

P: Yep.

M: Or doing something more meaningful, like teaching a class right?

P: Yep.

M: Or doing it with a group of friends or meeting new friends as you learn these new skills and then also, you know, wherever possible, building in physical health activities and elements to that as well.

P: It’s also a great screening tool as well, getting people who maybe are in social isolation for whatever reason, sometimes my personal choice.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: These are the people that miss out on engaging with other people who go, “oh, are you OK today? You’re looking a little bit lacklustre?”

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And that, that’s really important for health and mental health as well. The possibility that someone may not be processing a death in the family very well or not reaching out might be suffering from something that’s ill health, and they haven’t realised it until someone makes a comment about it. “Are you losing a little bit of weight? Have you been eating okay?”

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Or, “Have you been sleeping well?” And these are all factors that build into us being able to recognise and look out for each other, which then results in better health outcomes and wellbeing outcomes.

M: It’s a community. When you see someone every week for an hour, that’s all it is.

P: Yeah.

M: Then you look out for that person, you know, you start to build a relationship, and it’s not necessarily super awkward, like networking. Where you go just to talk, you’ve got something to do, and you can build relationships as you’ve seen [or heard] through our episode on making friends as adults.

P: Yes.

M: Yeah, it really helps to deepen those bonds.

P: Yeah.

M: As we know through volleyball.

P: Hugely.

M: All right, so wellbeing hubs. That’s my thing.

P: Laugh.

M: So, the good news is South Australia have partnered with the Playford and Na-ruh-coot (Naracoorte) Lucindale Council to co invest in some local wellbeing hubs.

P: Na-ruh-kawt (Naracoorte) for our Adelaide listeners.

M: Sorry about that.

P: Laugh.

M: Na-ruh-coot, na-ruh-kawt.

P: In Canberra, they recently launched a wellbeing hub. They got the minister out there to plant some seedlings, good photo op.

P: There we go. Shake some hands.

M: Yep.

P: Kiss some babies.

M: So, they’re starting to pop up now. My challenge to you out there is how will you get involved and make it happen, because I think around the country every neighbourhood should have a wellbeing hub.

P: Yeah, yeah. I think that would be good.

M: That, I think is the future. So –

P: As common as a library. Every suburb should have a library. Every suburb should have a wellbeing hub.

M: Absolutely, with programs to bring people together.

P: There we go.

M: All right, that’s it, we’ve had our rant.

P: Laugh!

M: 100th episode! Again, thank you so much for listening everybody. And we really appreciate hearing from you and knowing that you’re out there. So, thank you for your support. And hopefully we can make the next 100 just as interesting.

P: And in the meantime, stay happy,

M: and cynical 😊

[Happy exit music – background] 

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic. 

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out. 

M: Until next time. 

M & P: Choose happiness. 

[Exit music fadeout] 

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Are You Getting Enough Sleep? (E54)

by

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete talk about how sleep affects your health and happiness. So, are you getting enough sleep?

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

P: Oh… We’re on? [Silly voice] Are we good to go? He he. Am I on? Hello?

M & P: Laughter.

M: You are on.

P: I shouldn’t be on, we should be sleeping. We need more sleep.

M: We do need more sleep.

P: Apparently we’re not sleeping enough.

M: Actually, I’m really good at sleep.

P: Laugh.

M: Ask anybody.

P: Me too. I don’t sleep [the same as] with everyone’s sleep patterns, but I like my sleep.

M: I love my sleep.

P: Laugh.

M: And I protect it and guard it. Obviously this is the one thing I’m not failing at in my life.

P: Laugh. Exhibit.

M: Absolutely. So why do we need more sleep, Pete?

P: Our sleep is so good for us. There’s so much that sleep does for us. It’s basically influences our physical and mental capacity and every aspect of our life. So if you’re not getting sleep, things don’t happen! Laugh.

M: Absolutely. And we’re increasingly not getting enough sleep.

P: We are, in the 1940’s, eight hours of sleep was the normal arrangement of sleep, and we were pretty good at getting that amount of sleep. That was the average amount that most Americans and Australians were getting. But in the contemporary 21st century, we’re getting less and less.

In 2016, 30% of U.S. citizens were not getting seven hours of sleep. And in Australia, according to a health line survey conducted in March 2019 32% of Australians are also not getting seven hours of sleep. So we’re losing, at least one hour there.

M: And there’s been over the last 10/20 years a whole lot of books by quacks, complete quacks that say you can operate on four hours or five hours a night.

P: No. It’s bullshit.

M: It is.

P: Do not believe it people. Laugh.

M: Just like the dieting fads, these sleep fads are really harmful for you.

P: Yep, they are.

M: And not only that, yet again, you will die!

P: Yeah, laugh. Pretty much and it won’t be pretty. There’s a, there’s a direct link between cardiovascular health and sleep, diabetes, pretension, asthma, flues and colds, cancers, heart attacks.

M: Heart attacks in women in particular and more weight issues, which then leads to diabetes.

P: That’s a pre morbidity indicator.

M: Yeah, absolutely. You get more cravings of sugars and fats because your energy levels drop if you’re not getting enough sleep. So what does your body do when it’s low on energy?

P: Go get more fuel.

M: Exactly, it craves all those bad foods.

M: Yes.

P: The sugars.

M: So if you are obese. One of the first things you should be looking at if you’re hoping to lose weight is your sleep.

P: Mmm. Make sure you get enough sleep.

M: Yep.

P: And that means eight hours, not seven.

M: For adults.

P: Yes.

M: And it is more for teenagers and more for children and even more for babies. And here’s the really scary thing, we’re not even letting our infants get the recommended amount of sleep a lot of the time.

P: Oh really?

M: Yes.

P: Oh, Ok.

M: So you would never, never, if you were told how much sleep your baby should get, want to deprive that child of sleep.

P: Very true.

M: Why do you do it to yourself? This is yet another example of where we’re so much harder on ourselves than we are on other people.

P: Yes.

M: You’d never deny someone else they’re asleep that they say they need.

P: No.

M: Then we do it to ourselves all the time.

P: And another myth about sleeping is, it’s not a bank.

M: Yeah.

P If you miss out on sleep. You can’t make it up by having a big sleep. That doesn’t work that way.

M: No, not at all.

P: So that myth debunked, laugh!

M: It’s a debunking episode today isn’t it?

P: Laugh.

M: The other thing is, it makes you look old. It’s like smoking or getting out in the sun. So, you know, you get the bags under your eyes it’s really bad for your skin.

P: Your cells don’t regenerate as much.

M: Yep.

P: Not getting enough sleep has a huge effect on our cellular damage and our organs. The ability for our organs to regenerate.

Dr. Pam Taub of the UC San Diego School of Medicine talks a lot about this. She’s been doing a lot of work with firefighters and people on shift work and working around why they are so prone to cardiovascular disease and cancer due to the disruption of their circadian rhythms and the interruption of natural sleeping patterns.

M: So moving toward 24/7 world is going to kill us.

P: And that’s one of things that has killed us, and that’s one of the big shifting factors is in the post industrialised era we have more ready access to food, and we are eating much longer during the day. Our ancestors used to eat when the sun was up. We’re now eating well into the evening and we’re eating first thing when we get up, we get up at six, we get a coffee, we grab some breakfast and then we go to the gym and then we’ll go to the work and we’ll have something at 11 o’clock so we’re eating for longer.

We’re not getting that downtime of 10 hours where we’re not putting food in our stomachs. That’s upsetting our circadian rhythms. And that, in turn, upsets our sleep patterns.

M: Mmm.

P: It’s one of the big indicators that I found in some of the reading that I’ve done and the other, the other issue that comes around with that is our access to light.

M: Yes.

P: And the fact that there’s light pollution. Professor Ian Hickey of the University of Sydney is a big critic of light pollution and its links to bipolar and mood disorders.

M: Interesting.

P: And he talks [about] cognitive disorders being much larger amongst the teenage population because of our addiction to devices. Kids are going to their rooms and they have their iPad and they have their phone and they’re staying up until two o’clock in the morning on Facebook, watching YouTube and things like that. That’s having a major issue and damaging effect to our brain retention and mood cognition. And he says that’s a big one for getting rid of the issues that make us not get enough sleep.

M: I have to say it is one of our ongoing marital arguments.

P: Aaahh.

M: That Francis and I have.

P: Laugh! I’m going to go out on a limb here, are you the one on the devices or is Francis?

M: No, no, no. Not devices, light. In the bedroom.

P: Oh, yes. Right.

M: So he wants absolute pitch black or he says he can’t sleep, whereas I want to wake naturally with light rather than in a pitch black room and I can’t tell whether it’s eight AM or two AM and wake to a blaring alarm in a pitch black room.

P: Yes.

M: That to me just gets me up and in the wrong frame of mind and, and often times waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle rather than coming out of a sleep cycle and waking naturally.

P: Yeah.

M: So there’s no, there’s no solution, for the two of us, right?

P: I’m on your bank there Marie, because the fact that sunlight coming in stimulates our body into melanin production and all those, those responses that need to happen it’s a, I’m a big one for waking up with the sunshine.

M: Yes. So I think for the rest of my life that I live with Francis, for better or worse, we will be arguing over how much light is in our room when we go to sleep in the evenings.

P: Laugh. Well, how much does light affect us? You’ve referenced a study in Germany here.

M: Oh, I love this study. I love all studies that I come across!

P: Laugh!

M: There’s something fascinating to me about studies in psychology. Most of them, some of them are just dry as anything and so boring.

P: Yeah, laugh.

M: But so many of them are just super cool.

P: Where do these people come up with these ideas?

M: I know, they’re great!

P: Laugh.

M: And another area that you have to look into if you find this stuff as fascinating as me is behavioural economics because that is some really trippy stuff.

P: Wow, Okay.

M: Where you think that people would do… So It’s stuff like you put a marshmallow in front of a kid and you say, “if you wait five minutes and don’t eat it I’ll give you another one.”

P: Laugh.

M: And then walk away. And a lot of kids will just go ‘meh’ and eat the marshmallow when if they’d only waited five minutes they could have had two.

P: Two!

M: But that’s not how human behaviour works, right?

P: Laugh!

M: That’s the really simple behavioural economics, kind of.

P: In a nut shell.

M: Yep.

P: It’s a marshmallow.

M & P: Laughter.

M: But we do some really whack things, humans, that just go against our self-interest –

P: Laugh!

M: – all the time! Anyway.

P: Like not getting enough sleep, laugh.

M: Yep. Yes, laugh, back to what we were talking about.

P: Laugh. Reverse! Come on, reel it in!

M & P: Laughter!

M: So this study in the late sixties and early seventies in Germany, where they put a bunch of people into a bunker and they had no idea of the time. So, there was no natural light, no radios, no TVs, no clocks, nothing for weeks.

P: For weeks!?

M: For weeks!

P: Oh my god, those poor people.

M: And they watched. I think they just found a bunch of students, to be honest. They were happy to do some quiet study, laugh.

P: And get paid for you it.

M: And get paid, yeah. Which is, you know, pretty much every study is just students.

P & M: Laughter!

P: We know one of those, laugh.

M: Poor students.

P: Laugh, that’s why she can come to dinner every now and then.

M & P: Laughter.

M: So they then watched all of these people and saw how their bodies realigned to some kind of rhythm. And they did.

P: Mmm.

M: They reverted to their natural rhythm, so free from any external indicators of what they should be doing, their bodies went back to a natural rhythm of wakefulness and sleep.

P: Mmm.

M: Now there were, just as a side note, a few crazies out there who went to a 48 hour rhythm with their awake hours.

P: Oh, wow.

M: So this isn’t when we talk about “normal” I’ve got a quotes going for people at home.

P: Laugh.

M: And when we talk about “normal”, there are always exceptions. And there were in this study, some exceptions of people who went to a 48 hour body clock, and that was normal for them.

P: So did that mean that they were sleeping for longer periods and staying awake for longer periods?

M: Yes.

P: But their average amount of sleep across seven days would be the same as someone on a 24 hour cycle?

M: I didn’t look that closely, laugh.

P: Maybe you should see?

M: Ah, look at our show notes, I’ll see if I can find that, laugh. [Please see full study on sleep cycles here.]

P: All the reading of the research that I have done says that that would be the case, even though sleeping is not a bank. Like you can’t have one big, long sleep and make up your sleep. But you do need regular intervals of sleep/ wakefulness to keep those circadian rhythms happening.

M: And to do things like commit things to memory, long term memory.

P: Yes.

M: It’s so critical for making those connections and banking all of your data the end of the day.

P: Yeah.

M: I don’t think that, again I’ll have to look into it, but I highly doubt people are awake for 24 hours and then sleeping for a full 24 hours.

P: Yeah.

M: I’d say they’re probably at 36 of awake and then a good 12 hours sleep or something.

P: That would be interesting.

M: Or they may have been having naps throughout that time.

P: Ah, so does napping work?

M: Well, according to science, it does.

P: Okay.

M: Yep, but anyway, most people in the bunker study, the bunker sleep study, reverted to a 25 hour body clock.

P: Interesting.

M: So we’re an hour out from the day.

P: Mmm.

M: And I find that a little bit interesting. So when we’re out not in bunkers, laugh.

P: Laugh!

M: And have access to daylight to guide our activities. We, we go and follow and force our bodies to follow a 24 hour clock, generally with some small exceptions when we party too much at university and things like that.

P: Laugh.

M: But we force up what is into a 24 hour cycle. And that might actually be, not great for anyone, either.

P: I’m wondering if whether the weather, seasons, make a difference as well?

M: Mmm.

P: We tend sleep more during winter because it is darker.

M: Earlier, yep.

P: Whereas in summer, we’re out and we can’t sleep because it’s hot sometimes and the sun is up a lot longer, so again, that might be the 25 hour rhythm.

M: Well, remember when we were in Sweden?

P: Yeah, that was weird way absolutely.

M: And we came out of the restaurant and it was 11 o’clock at night and it was still light.

P & M: Laugh.

M: Yeah, and that really messed with us for a while. We were all so jet lagged, I would say.

P: Laugh. Well, it’s interesting you touched on the types of sleep because Dr Laura Jacobson, who’s the head of the Sleep and Cognition Laboratory of the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, that’s a mouthful, –

M: Laugh.

P: – in Melbourne in Australia, she says that getting quality of sleep is important. Everyone talks about REM sleep and that REM sleep is so important for what we need.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: It is important for our invention and our problem-solving capability. I think it was Isaac Newton who said that his theories came to him in a dream. Composers talk about it all the time, ‘oh the melody came to me in a vision when I was asleep.’ And that’s because REM sleep accesses those inventive areas of our brain.

M: It makes, it allows you to make the connections between the different parts of your brain, and that is where you get true creativity. So, it’s when the math part of your brain talks to the psychology part of your brain, and you’d never put those two together. And that’s why some of the greatest inventions were from people who had broad education and understood a little bit about everything.

P: Yeah, ‘cause they could link things together.

M: They could make those links, and they guaranteed, would not have made those links without the freedom, free of devices and free of people to let their minds wander and make connections, but also without some really good sleep.

P: Yep, who was the apple on the head dude?

M: Newton.

P: Newton, him, Yeah!

M: Laugh.

P: Sitting under a tree, apple hits him on the head. ‘Ah, I’ve come up with the theory of…

M: Relativity.

P: I was thinking that.

M: No, gravity.

P: Right, relativity was Einstein. Oh, we’re going all over the place here, I need more sleep! Laugh!

M: Gravity.

P & M: Laugh!

P: But, getting back to Dr Jacobson, she also talks about the importance of non-REM sleep and that we equally need that because that’s good for our learning and our memory retention and organising our memories into long term memory and short term memory. So, which would explain why, if you’re not getting quality sleep, it’s constantly being broken, and you’re not getting that natural swing between REM and non-REM sleep. You’re befuddled the next day, you can’t recall things, you can’t remember what the article said that you were reading 5 minutes ago.

M: What the thing was?

P: The theory of relativity versus gravity?

M & P: Laugh!

M: You know that thing, dooby whacker.

P: Laugh. So students who are pulling all-nighters before exams. You’re doing yourself a disservice?

M: Well, it is important, you know, to say that you can sustain it for short amounts of time. So if you are pulling an all-nighter before an exam – Oh, sorry. If you’re pulling an all-nighter to get a paper in.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: Then you can do that and not see the decline straight away. But the next day, after you’ve handed your paper in, you know, you’re going to feel it, right?

P: Yeah, you will feel it.

M: You’ll feel it.

P: This is what I’m finding with a lot of the research they’re saying, don’t fool yourself if you’re denying yourself sleep, it will hit you.

M: Absolutely.

P: There’s a there’s a compensation that has to happen. Same as if you’re going to not eat for 24 hours, you can’t go and exercise when you’re not eating.

M: Yep.

P: But you can, not eat for 24 hours and you won’t die. It’s actually good for you.

M: Ooohhh! In some situations.

P: Well, that another episode right there. We’re going to get side-tracked in a minute.

M: Uh, huh. You’ve got to be –

P: Laugh, I’m pro-fasting.

M: – really, you’ve got to be really careful. Fasting is not for everyone.

P: Yep, another episode.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Laugh.

M: So, back to napping though,

P: Yes.

M: There are definitely revitalising effects that come with napping.

P: Ok. ‘Cause I’m not a napper.

M: And – no me neither, I get really groggy.

P: I find it really frustrating.

M: Oh I can, I can, I just want a nap for three to four or five hours, laugh.

P: Which they say isn’t good for you.

M: Which means I can’t sleep at night.

P: Yeah.

M: So the ideal amount of time is about 90 minutes.

P: Oh, really?

M: But as short as 20.

P: Oh, Okay.

M: And here’s why a lot of people don’t do it because they can wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle and feel groggy and therefore not feel like they got any benefit from it there feeling worse than when they had when they went for the nap.

P: Right.

M: So the trick here is splashing water on your face and take a few steps to get your heart rate up again.

P: Ok.

M: And your brain will actually have had the benefits from that nap.

P: Oh.

M: So, it is worthwhile if you can get a nap in because you feel you need it.

P: Yep the power nap idea.

M: Always worthwhile to do it, even if you do wake yourself up in the middle of a sleep cycle, you’ve still let your brain have some downtime to recover, to put all those things into long term memory, etcetera, etcetera.

P: Yes, mmm.

M: So 20 to 90 minutes. And also, if you can’t do it during the day, which there’s no way I could fit a nap into my corporate life.

P: Laugh!

M: It’s just not happening.

P: Yep.

M: If you can’t do that, then a nap on the weekend is better than no nap. So if you only do a nap on Sundays.

P: A lot of people do that.

M: Yep. Do it.

P: Understood?

M: Absolutely.

P: So before we wrap up, how do we get better sleep if we’re not getting enough sleep?

M: There’s so many things that go into this.

P: Mmm. There are.

M: And, so many different things you should talk to your doctor about. And I’m gonna bring it back to me again.

P: Laugh.

M: Because it’s all about me, laugh. I suffered with bad sleep for a number of years because of my diet.

P: Ah, yes.

M: And it wasn’t because I was eating late. It was purely because I’ve had food allergies and intolerances for so many years, and it impacts my ability to sleep and stay asleep.

P: Understandable.

M: And everyone would tell me ‘you need more sleep’. And I was getting plenty of sleep. It wasn’t light, it wasn’t devices, it wasn’t all the usual things. So absolutely talk to your doctor of you having troubles with sleep because there are so many different things that can impact your sleep. But I think you’ve got three here, Pete, that we might end on that are the usual culprits, right?

P: Yes. So eating late, we’ve talked about it.

Don’t eat late.

Try to give yourself 10 hours without food, so don’t eat [late], especially don’t do what I do, which is a big meal before going to bed, it just keeps you up.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: I’m really bad at it because I finish work late. So don’t eat late.

Put down the devices, no light pollution.

Now that can also come down to keeping lights on in the bedroom, reading just before you go to bed. Which again I’m guilty of, having lots of light around you upsets your circadian rhythms and won’t allow you to rest.

M: Or having poor curtains or outside light.

P: Yep.

M: We have an apartment once that had a big spotlight.

P: Urrgghh.

M: And it used just come in out bedroom window.

P: That’s rough.

M: Most annoying thing in the world.

P: Yep, you want to get a BB-gun and take that thing out.

M & P: Laughter!

P: Last one.

Establish a routine that naturally brings you down.

P: So for me, one of the best things that I can do is to turn all my lights to really low and do some yoga. 20 minutes of yoga, not the big arches and the standing series, nice gentle on the floor, a couple of stretches with some soft music, if you need it, or no music at all. Decrease all the sensitivity of the sympathetic nervous system and naturally you’ll drift off to sleep really well.

M: I personally try to read for 10 minutes every night before bed, at least.

P: Which is fine because you’re resting and it’s fine to do that as long as you.

M: So no device and no white light

P: Yeah, no white light.

M: Definitely, come in here, turn the main lights off. Put the reading light on. Get into bed. 10 minutes often becomes 30 minutes or an hour but I’ll read and it’s –

P: – It’s your way to come down. It’s a good way to do it.

M: Yep.

P: Then you’re not like my mother with the woman’s weekly on your chest at 4am in the morning with glasses on.

M: Laugh!

P: Such a funny sight. You walk past and you’re like ‘Yeah, that’s good.’

And on that happy image, get more sleep people, it’s important!

M: Good night.

[Happy exit music – background]

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic.

P: And if you like our little show we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

Please note that I get a small commission if you buy something from my site. Your support helps to keep this site going at no additional cost to you. Thanks!

Can Swearing Make You Happier? (E51)

by

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete discuss the myths behind swear words and how swearing can make you happier. No, really, it can!

Please be advised this podcast contains explicit language which may be offensive to some listeners. It is recommended for mature audiences only.

Transcript

M: Listeners should be advised that the following audio content contains explicit language which may be offensive to some people and is inappropriate for Children. The content within this podcast is intended for mature audiences only.

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

P: Twat Pirate!

M: Nob Jockey!

P: Piss Wizard!

M: Wanker!

P: Tit Mate.

M: I’m out. Twat what?

P: Laugh. Nob Head, Nob Head!

P & M: Laughter!

M: Ass Monkey!

P: Laugh.

M: Fuck-Nugget!

P: Douchebag.

P & M: Laughter.

M: Oh there’s so many good ones.

P & M: Laughter.

M: Only if you say them while laughing, I normally I think… What is the swear word Pete that you use the most?

P: The swear word of choice? Laugh. Actually, it’s a combination. It’s what my mother used to say.

P & M: Laughter.

P: I can’t say it without laughing. Bitch and Bastard Buggery!

M: Ooh.

P: Laugh, Oh yeah.

M: Look, Australians really do a good job.

P: Yeah, we do.

M: Wanker is very English and Australian both, but I think just stock standard Shit or Fuck for me.

P: Laugh. Shit!

M: Laugh.

P: I do use Bitch quite a bit. Especially used a term of endearment for me.

P & M: Laughter.

P: Oi Bitch! Laugh.

M: Ok, that’s fair too. It makes you feel better.

P: Oh I’m tingling, I’m literally tingling.

M: To get it out. Laugh.

P: There’s, there’s something to be said for the value of cursing.

M: Definitely and I think the curse words Shit and Fuck that I tend to say are indicative of the fact that I’m not using them at people. I’m using them because of the situation generally.

P: Laugh.

M: So I will throw that out there because I do not agree with any kind of verbal or physical abuse.

P & M: Laughter.

P: Well, usually my abuse is taken out on inanimate objects. My classic one is when I used to be able to change bike tyres. I can’t change by tyres… so screwdrivers would end up in the neighbour’s yard.

M: Laugh.

P: You know the wheel would be tossed casually at the back of the garage, which is about 20 metres away. And that’s usually when the expletives would fly because I just couldn’t get the bloody tube off! Laugh, let alone get the new one in, laugh.

M: So we’re here today to talk about the benefits of that horrible behaviour!

P: There is so much science and research supporting SWEARING. You have free licence to swear people, laugh.

M: And for those of you who don’t believe us, there is currently just released a Netflix show called The History of Swearing With Nicolas Cage.

P: The trailer will have you laughing.

M: Absolutely, just google the trailer, it’s hilarious. So today we’re going to talk about… We’ve got six different areas of research that proves beyond a doubt –

P: Laugh.

M: – that you should let fly and swear more often in your life.

P: I know, where do we start?

M: I need to get over it. I did actually put my layer of judgement on at some point, I caught myself.

P: Ooh, oh!

M: In this little encounter that we’ve already had there is an element of allowing yourself to do this, and being ok with it too.

P: Permission?

M: Yeah.

P: Giving yourself permission to express your emotions.

M: Definitely.

P: Now that’s a big one for a lot of people. A lot of different ways. But we won’t side track it.

M: Yeah well, to express your emotions using swear words, because I don’t know about you, but Mom used to say SHI-vers when she stubbed her toe or something.

P: Laugh.

M: So we grew up in a household where swearing was not allowed, and I got a walloping the one time I did swear. One time… One.

P: Laugh.

M: You learn your lesson pretty fast.

P: True.

M: And it was something that uneducated people did because they didn’t have the proper –

P: Vocabulary to express themselves in other ways. I’ll actually go along with that.

M: It’s total Bullshit.

P: Well?

M: Bullshit! I’m calling it.

P: Colloquialisms and language development because swear words are now included in the Oxford Dictionary and they’re constantly being added, and languages do develop as we know, and I think swearing has become a language norm to be honest.

M: I love the idea, and again go back and look at that Netflix show, but I love the idea that this judgement of using swear words, comes from a rich elite who want to keep the poor down. So again, who determines what a swear word is?

P: Yeah, definitely.

M: And if the rich own the dictionaries and the newspapers, then they can say what words that evolve are good and bad. And generally, it’s the words that the poorer classes use that have been deemed bad or crass.

P: Unworthy.

M: Yeah, exactly.

P: To be included in academic circles.

M: Yeah.

P: That no longer is the case. Thank goodness, because we’re all the richer for it.

M: Ahh. No. I’d say it’s still the case.

P: I’d challenge that, I think that, I think that especially the Oxford and the Webster dictionaries are very good at clocking colloquialisms and words that are developing and the cultural uses and actually including them in academic text.

M: I would never walk into my corporate career and say Tit bag, dick weasel, ass hat, douchebag.

P: Yeah, ok. I get what you’re saying.

M: Never use those words.

P: True, true.

M: Laugh.

P: My poor clients I swear at them all the time.

P & M: Laughter.

M: That’s alright, they’re swearing at you too.

P: Laugh, well we’ll come to that, pain tolerance.

M: Laugh.

P: Alright. Swearing is an effective way of communicating.

M: I love this idea. So we just talked about the judgement in a societal context that all of this is happening within. But the research shows that it is an effective way of communicating, and it can increase the effectiveness and persuasiveness of an argument.

P: Mmm.

M: So particularly if you’re in a corporate environment within the appropriate settings of course, adding a swear word in can show that you have feeling about a certain topic as well, rather than just a[n] unbiased argument that you’re putting forward to people that you actually care and that can be more persuasive.

P: Interesting, that it’s a care factor. I care about this so much that I’m going to swear in the use of it. It shows, it shows passion, it shows engagement, which is interesting because you couldn’t do that in a news conference. Could you imagine the Prime Minister saying ‘Yeah, piss off!’

P & M: Laughter.

P: You know that’s exactly what he wants to say to some people who are asking him questions.

M: Well, I think that was some of the draw of Trump.

P: Yeah.

M: As well as the horror of Trump is that a leader for the first time was using these words that had been taboo, had been again, not what a cultured person does.

P: Yes.

M: And I think this might actually be one of the good things that comes out of Trump’s presidency. Is that language wise we can be a bit more inclusive.

P: Yeah, that’d be good.

M: Oh, my goodness. I never thought I’d [say that!]

P: Laugh!

M: I’m showing my political stripes. I try not to be political on this show.

P&M: Laughter.

M: [Sigh] Anyway…

P: What I will pull up about the communication, though, is that by using swearing, sometimes we prevent resorting to a physical altercation.

M: Which is always what you want.

P: Yeah, exactly. And you can imagine this in certain circumstances of, say, two alpha males having an argument. And, you know, basically butting their chests and beating, beating their chest in a very primitive way by using swear words, you can actually have an engaging conversation without resorting to ‘I’m going to thump the living daylights out of you.’

M: Again, never appropriate. All right, so:

1. It’s an effective way of communicating.

2. Number two, it might mean you’re more honest.

P: Ooh, this is conjecture?

M: It is not conjecture; it is science.

P: Oh, sorry. Where’s the study? Where’s the research?

M: Laugh. The research is that a recent study found that people who swear often lie less and have higher levels of integrity.

P: Oh, do explain?

M: So it all comes down to being comfortable expressing the truth and, you know, ties into a person’s truthfulness. So the study found a positive relationship between those who curse and their honesty levels.

P: Wow.

M: And again, I think that if you’re comfortable swearing, you’re not putting on a mask. You are standing up in a society that often looks at swearing as a bad thing and saying, I don’t care about that judgement, perhaps know that it’s not appropriate, some might not know, and yet I’m going to say it because it’s my truth.

P: Ok, yeah.

M: And those people are more truthful. So this just kind of make sense to me. It’s logical.

P: Yeah, righto. I’ll go with that. I wouldn’t have made that jump, but definitely.

M: Look, it is a jump. That’s not what was written in this study, but that’s my assumption. So, there’s definitely a positive relationship, but we’ve taken it a little bit further.

P: Laugh. Alright, let’s move on to the next one:

3. Improving your pain tolerance.

M: Well this is a no brainer!

P: Laugh! Does it make… Does your pain tolerance increase when you swear? Science says yes, almost 50%.

M: So let loose!

P: Laugh.

M: So next time you stub your toe, or you have to go get a massage from Pete.

P: Laugh!

M: Let rip!

P: I love it when my clients say, ‘oh d$^& f%$#!’ and I say you can make all the noises that you want, and they come out with the swear words and I’m like ‘there you go.’

P & M: Laughter.

P: So, Dr Richard Stephens at Keele University in the UK showed that swearing can help you become more persuasive and increase your pain tolerance. They do the ice water test of putting your hand in a bucket of ice water and seeing how long you can hold your hand in there. One control group weren’t allowed to swear one control group were allowed to swear and they saw results of up to 50% more time being able to be endured in the ice bath if you were allowed to swear.

M: I think we need to pass this on to Lamaze classes.

P: Laugh.

M: Breath and swear.

P: Laugh.

M: Big, deep breath in and swear.

P: Laugh. They say that it’s a very similar effect to drugs like morphine. It helps to calm your system down and has that effect of decreasing the stimulation in the nervous system.

M: I wonder if you can over swear so that your body becomes… you know just like with morphine.

P: Laugh.

M: If you take too much, you’ve got to have more.

P: Laugh.

M: So the science behind that is that it triggers the flight or fight stress response. So it is a trigger to your mind, to release all of those chemicals that help you deal with pain.

P: Yep, neurotransmitters and so forth.

M: Yeah, yeah, but I do wonder whether, if you do it all the time it kind of dampens the effect or something.

P: Well, that that would stand to reason because too much of the fight or flight response and too much of those neurochemicals does desensitise the nerve synapses so good point there.

M: So do swear, but selectively when it comes to pain.

P: Well, I think it’s like anything. If you use something too much, it loses its potency. So if you’re using Shit in every sentence, then when you’re really when you’re really emotional Shit just doesn’t cut it anymore, you’ve got to go to another level or you get a different word.

M: Such as?

P: Fuck!

P & M: Laughter.

P: Pussy!

M: I love that that’s the word you go for.

P: Mole! Laugh, that’s one of my favourites actually.

M: Laugh, which reminds me for all those Australians out there of the comedy company and Kylie Mole.

P: Yeah, Kylie Mole.

M: She goes, she goes, she just goes.

P & M: Laughter.

P: Alright, moving on.

4. Does it make you perform better during exercise?

M: This is really topical because so many of our sports stars in Australia have been receiving fines for swearing.

P: Yep.

M: Because everything’s miked up and you can see every angle of everything.

P: Yeah.

M: We’re asking them to, again, apply standards that swearing is not appropriate and to not swear.

P: But that’s shown to be ineffective. Research in 2017 suggests that swearing could affect the outcome of your workout. So if you’re in a long tennis match and you see those people, you know, those tennis stars, think of the Nick Kyrgios’s and the explosions. We’ve always had that John McEnroe, Andre Agassi before he did his mindfulness work was a huge lout on the tennis court, but it was effective.

M: It was effective, or ineffective?

P: Yeah, it was. It can sustain, sustain their workouts and sustain their levels of intensity.

M: And look, let’s be honest when it comes to elite athletes, you’re not there to play in a mindful, meditative state. You’re there to compete, and that takes a whole different compeTitive mindset. That is not about being nice.

P: No.

M: And curbing your language. It is –

P: It is bringing your passion.

M: – just short of kill or be killed, right? You are there to win.

P: Yeah.

M: And I think swearing is a natural extension of that if you’re really in that frame of mind.

P: Yeah, I agree. Taking on a slightly different stance, I really like this. A Yoga instructor and movement facilitator, Lindsey Istace who’s 24 in Canada invented Rage Yoga.

M: Yes!

P: Laugh. I love this!

M: I love the juxtaposition of  that.

P: Laugh, and it’s this whole idea of being in the yoga class and being all meditative and quiet and finding your breath inside the [angry voice] ‘downward dogs three-legged extension!’ Laugh, and its hard yakka (work).

So Lindsay found that she was in a really bad break up and she went in to do a work out and she started swearing and she had an awesome response and her whole body was tingling. Said it really helped her overcome the issues that she was facing and get her emotions out.

So she started introducing a class encouraging people post work to come into a yoga class, do the yoga workout, but within that to swear and to swear loudly to curse and it took on a real momentum and that even has become now a thing of come in, do some swear yoga and then have a beer afterwards.

M: Oh, I love it.

P: So it’s that whole social connection in bonding and it’s allowing you to, if you’ve had a Shit day at work, come in yell and scream and get it out and then talk about it afterwards because your emotions are out for everyone to see and you’re exposed and you’re vulnerable, which the perfect time to be open and honest about how you’re feeling.

M: And also what I love about this is that you’re doing it with others. So you’re never alone.

P: Exactly, you’re supported.

M: Yep.

P: And if you’ve got a class situation, then usually you’ve got people [you know] within that class. Who doesn’t go to the same gym class because the people there make it fun.

M: I love it.

P: Yep, brilliant stuff.

M: So the moral of that is, we need to find some new words maybe that people don’t think of as swear words?

P: Laugh!

M: Because words are just words because humans say their words, so you can let that level of energy come out of your mouth and be vocalised without getting fined thousands of dollars.

P: True.

M: Laugh.

P: Yes, that’s one technique. I’ll agree with that. Fire truck works well for me, laugh.

M: Yeah okay, I like it.

P: Firetruck!

M: I have to say frustration is part of volleyball, that we both play.

P: Oh yeah.

M: It’s a game that’s built on errors, right?

P: Laugh.

M: And you know how good it can be. And even after 20 years of playing the sport, it’s like woah.

P: Laugh.

M: Even after years and years of playing sport. Things still just don’t happen the way they’re meant to.

P: Laugh. We’ve all had those moments play with Laurent or Claire swearing in French all the time.

M: Laugh.

P: That wasn’t just one word, that was a whole sentence of profanities in French, laugh!

M: So I played at George Mason University and we had a no swearing policy on our team. Except for Zuma, I’ll call her out, she was from Puerto Rico and she used to swear like a sailor!

P: Laugh.

M: But because it was all in Portuguese. No one said anything. No one said anything. And it was like ‘that is so unfair’!

P: Laugh.

M: Why does she get to swear and I don’t?

P: Laugh. Oh dear… Alright-  

M: Alright.

P: – moving on to the next one.

5. Swearing may give you a sense of calm.

Don’t meditate, swear.

M: I’m down with that.

P: Laugh.

M: Meditation does nothing for me.

P: Ahh, you haven’t given it a good shot.

M: Yeah, okay. I don’t want to.

P: Laugh.

M: That’s the cynic in me. We all know this. I’d prefer to go swear.

P: Okay, so what does swearing do for us?

M: What does swearing do for us?

P: Laugh! Increases our circulation. It elevates our endorphins and via this creates an overall sense of calm and control.

M: And well-being.

P: So it’s that post swearing state that you’re getting to, really.

M: And if you want to look into the benefits of swearing on your sense of calm so if you have stress, anxiety, etcetera. And let’s be honest in today’s world, who doesn’t? There is a writer and psychiatrist based in Oxford, England, called Neel Burton, who wrote Heaven and Hell: The Psychology the of Emotions.

P: Hmm.

M: So check out that book as well, if you don’t want to take our word for it.

P: Laugh. There’s another one that I came across Jason Headley, who’s a writer and director who lives in San Francisco and he’s created, Fuck that: An Honest Meditation.

M: I love that we’re getting more and more into just saying Fuck and Shit and damn and everything else.

P: Laugh.

M: As we go along in this podcast.

P & M: Laugh.

M: We’ve opened the doors Pete.

P: [Singing] Let it go, let it go.

M: Laugh, and we’re back with Disney.

P: I always go back to Disney.

M: Laugh, always. Alright in the last couple of minutes, we’re going to talk about my favourite research.

P: Laugh!

M: Which says that:

6. Swearing is a sign of intelligence.

P: Which totally is against everything that has been perceived about swearing since Victorian England.

M: Absolutely, absolutely so. Studies have suggested that fluency in swear words is associated with possessing a larger vocabulary in general, not a smaller vocabulary.

P: That’s really interesting.

M: So researchers who’ve studied swearing also say that the habit may be linked with a higher IQ.

P: Well, we should have an Olympics of swearing.

M: I struggle, the second I go outside my comfort zone of Shit and Fuck I’m out of words.

P: Laugh!

M: And for those of you who listened, well obviously, if you’re here with us right now and you listen to the beginning of this podcast, those words were all written on paper.

P: Laugh!

M: They weren’t coming, freely flowing out of  my brain.

P & M: Laughter!

P: Which I think comes back to that ability to be able to use different words and have power behind them on them or tools you have in your toolbox that the more fun you can have with it and the more effective it becomes.

M: Mmm.

P: So again if Mole just isn’t cutting it and you need to go to Tit Bag or Cheese Nozzle.

M: Laugh.

P: You’re assigning power to those words and having that vocabulary. You might not pull out Cheese Nozzle quite as much as you pull out Mole. But when you do, you know that it’s an elevated sense of expression, so you’re giving it more power, which allows you to tap into that. All those neurochemicals and all those effects that we’ve just mentioned because you have a selection of different levels of swear that you can employ.

M: And you’ll be smarter for it.

P & M: Laughter!

P: Fair enough, so if nothing else, you’ve got the IQ. All right, we’ll wrap up on that one. So aah…

M: What are we going to leave you with?

P: Laugh!

M: Have a Fucking great day.

P: Laugh! Piss off! Laugh!

[Happy exit music – background]

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic.

P: And if you like our little show we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

The Happiness Paradox (E50)

by

Happiness for Cynics podcast

In this week’s episode Marie and Pete discuss the Happiness Paradox and why so many of us struggle in the pursuit of happiness. 

Transcript

Show notes: At ~ 10 minutes Pete references a 2010 study, Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior Through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense, conducted at the University of Illinois, the authors of this study are: Senay, Albarracin and Noguchi.

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

M: And we’re back.

P: Hi… Laugh.

M: Hey, I love that we start every episode by laughing at each other, pretty much.

P&M: Laughter.

P: Well we found out very early in the episodes really, because we did the first one and it was… so bad.

M: I know, we need to go back and rerecord the first one.

P: I knew we would…

M: Laugh.

P: And then you were like ‘we need to make each other laugh somehow.’

M: We need to be less robotic, eeuggh. Live and learn. So today we’re talking about:

P: The Happiness Paradox.

M: [Singing] Ta da.

P: [Singing] Ta da. Explain what that is Marie.

M: Okay, so.

P: Strap yourselves in people.

P & M: Laughter.

P: Get comfy.

M: So, research suggests-

P: Oh! Research, laugh.

M: – research suggests a surprising, paradoxical effect.

P: Ooh.

M: A happiness paradox.

P: Mmm.

M: And it is that the more people pursue positive emotions, the less likely they are to experience positive outcomes.

P: [Singing] So true.

M: So the more you chase happiness, the less likely you are to get it.

P: The further away you are.

M: Yes, so the happiness paradox is something that a lot of people in positive psychology would know about and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

P: Ok.

M: So let’s dig into maybe what that is and how it presents a little bit more.

P: Yeah, sure.

M: So it is saying or thinking things like, I’ll be happier when.

P: Mmm.

M: I’ll be happier when I have a red sports car.

P: Laugh …Well.

Laughter

P: I was very happy when I got my red sports car.

P & M: Laughter.

M: Or I’ll be happier when I have a better place to live in when I can get a place of my own or have a newer a car or a promotion or a better job, or more money. Or insert something you want, normally a consumerist driven, capitalist society-

P: Laugh, wow, just wow.

M: -inspired thing, rather than state of being or anything like that.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: So insert that here and the problem is that what we’re really saying when we say ‘I’ll be happier when’ what we’re really saying is that I’m not going to be happy now, but when that happens, I will be happy.

P: Mmm.

M: And so, we’re delaying our opportunities for happiness in the moment and it doesn’t give us permission to be happy now. It’s always you want to do that and then you’ll be happy.

P: Yes.

M: And lo and behold, you get a promotion or a fancy house, and you might be happy for a short amount of time, because that’s cool, right?

P: Yep.

M: But often. Well always you won’t be happy forever. Because it’s just a thing, right? So and then you set another goal and you work towards that because surely you’ll be happy then?

P: Laugh.

M: Right?

P: [Pretend yelling voice] ‘But when I get there, I’m not happy!’

M: Pretty much. So you might have a small spike [in happiness] I’m not saying that getting a promotion won’t make you happy.

P: No, no, no.

M: If you wanted it.

P: It makes you feel glad, excited, positive.

M: Yeah, definitely. But it’s not a sustained happiness.

P: It’s not a key to a long term happiness.

M: Absolutely.

P: It’s a peak and a trough.

M: Yep, absolutely.

P: I love the graphic example of this is where you’ve got peaks and troughs and then you’ve got a hyperbolic curve. So the investment in exercises of long term happiness, so doing some daily meditation on doing is an act of kindness or gratitude and so forth that creates that hyperbolic curve, which is constant. So the peaks and the troughs can come within that, but that curvature of doing those long term happiness exercises helps to balance that out. So you don’t have the emotional swings, and you’ve got this underlying current that drives through at a more median level.

M: You have no idea how I’m representing that in my head right now.

P: Laugh. It’s a visual representation.

M: I think I just drew a picture of a cat.

P: [Laugh]

M: With spikey ears.

P: Ok. Laugh. I’ll try that again sometime. Moving on…

[Laughter]

M: But, I think I know where you’re going.

P: Yes.

M: Laugh.

P: So if you’re going up and down all the time, it’s hard work. If you’re constantly going up a mountain, down a mountain, up the mountain, down the mountain, it’s hard work.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Now, if you’ve got a bridge that goes between those mountain peaks, the climb is more sustained and it creates a longer, more balance effect. A measurement of happiness or exertion.

M: Nah..

P: Still not there? Ok. Alright I give up, laugh!

M: No, I see what you’re saying.

P: Laugh.

M: I guess where I’m at is I believe that sustained long term happiness keeps you above neutral.

P: Yeah.

M: You know, above… If you have happiness is on a scale of 0 to 10. You’re going to have shit, things that happen in you’re life.

P: Oh, yeah.

M: And you’re going to have good things. And they’re your spikes.

P: Yes.

M: And some of them you can avoid through your own behaviour and some of them just happen, good and bad.

P: And you’ve got to deal with them.

M: Yep. But you want to be. You want your engine revving above neutral and that’s your long term sustained.

P: I should have done the engine rev example.

M: Yes!

P: Laugh.

M: You want, you want your… So you don’t want to be sitting at zero and having peaks up to 10 and troughs down to zero, every now and then, you want to be sitting at two or three, which is a really good quality high level of… Sorry I said up to 10 didn’t I?

P: Yes.

M: So I’ve stuffed that up already.

P: Laugh!

M: If 0 is neutral then 5 is excellent and minus 5 is bad. You want to be sitting at two or three on a regular constant basis.

P: Yes, there we go.

M: And that’s your starting point for peaks that go up to five and troughs that at times might go to minus 5. But if you’re in a good mental state, are more likely to only go to zero.

P: It also makes you a bit more resilient.

M: Oh, absolutely.

P: So when those troughs do happen, you bounce back a little bit more because you’ve got the tools.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And I’m stopping clicking, sorry. I get it looked at when I click, laugh.

M: And the weird this is you probably hear this every second episode.

P: Laugh!

M: Yet I’ve listened back to our podcasts and half the time you can’t even hear the clicks.

P: See!

M: So it’s an imaginary thing that we are talking about.

P: Laugh! Anyway, getting back to the podcast.

Laughter.

P: It’s that resiliency that comes from having that base level of happiness and that base level, which you’ve  got to work hard to get.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Don’t get me wrong people. You’ve got to do the work people all the time. That allows you to bounce back from those troughs, really well and possibly or maybe a little bit quicker than someone who isn’t on that 2,3 level.

M: Yep, definitely. And that’s really the definition of resiliency it’s how quickly you bounce back. So this lays the foundation and the groundwork for bouncing back quickly when things so to shit.

P: Yes, I like it.

M: Which is my word of the day, obviously. Shit, shit, shit.

P: Laugh.

M: So what is the problem with this happiness paradox and chasing happiness? There’s kind of three things that we’re talking about here.

1. So the problem, the first one is that we’re often not good at predicting what will make us happy.

P: Yes, laugh.

M: So the car, the house, the bigger house.

P: Mmm.

M: You might get the bigger house and then spend all you Saturday mornings cleaning it.

P: [Exasperated voice] Oh Yes…

P & M: Laughter.

M: Right? Or that car just very quickly becomes yet another car.

P: Or you have to tune it up, send it to the mechanic every six months because you want it to be maintained.

M: Absolutely. Or the big house comes with a really long commute.

P: Mmm, yes.

M: So we are really bad at predicting the things that will make us happy. So that’s the first thing.

2. Secondly, we are really good at setting super high standards that we just can’t achieve.

P: Hmm.

M: And so we say ‘I want to be a general manager of my company by the time I’m 30.’ A lot of millennials –

P: Yep, yep.

M: – are saying this and realising the harsh reality that we’re looking at and going ‘no, it takes 30 years to get there. Anyway I’m not going to dis millennials…

P: Laugh. [Whispers] They’ll come for you.

M: Laugh. [Panicked voice] Ok, I take it back, I take it back.

P & M: Laughter

P: They’re all around us, laugh.

M: But we set goals like I wanna be GM by 30. And then when it doesn’t happen instead of actually being something that you can be happy about. Proud of [what you have achieved], it actually becomes a source of negative emotion.

P: Discontent, yeah.

M: Yeah.

3. And then the third thing is that when we’re focused on getting to a goal, we can often forget to enjoy the journey.

P: Absolutely, oh sooo normal.

M: Absolutely. So that’s why the happiness paradox exists and sort of what it’s made up of. And we’re all so guilty of doing this.

P: Laugh! Very much, laugh.

M: So, I’ll throw to you now Pete. What can people do to get off that… treadmill? I’ll call it a treadmill.

P: I’ll bring in some research here.

M: Ooh!

P: A 2010 study conducted by Senay, Alvarez [Albarracin] and Noguchi from the University of Illinois.

M: Are you sure you said that right?

P: No, but I went with it, and I was confident!

M: Laugh!

P: So therefore, in my brain I’m telling myself I said it right and I’m just blasting on through. Laugh!

M: We will make sure the spelling is right in our show notes.

P & M: Laughter.

P: They talk about interrogative self-talk and how we can put ourselves into a hole by the sorts of thoughts that are going through our head. And when that comes down to being goal oriented, when you don’t get the promotion or you don’t achieve that goal, it’s this negative internalisation that just goes [whispers] ‘I’m not good enough. I’m not good enough’ and it eats away at you. And that doesn’t allow you to celebrate the small victories that you might have had along the way.

M: Yes.

P: So you didn’t get the GM role. But you developed a whole heap of skills which are going to make you much more employable to another industry. And you might change industries in five years time and find that you’ve already skilled up. But you forget to celebrate those small moments.

M: Yep.

P: And having that ability to recognise things that contribute to our change and advance us further along the path and those micro celebrations are really important.

M: Mmm.

P: That’s that base level of happiness.

M: It’s what we’re saying about enjoying the journey, not waiting to be happy at the end, but enjoying the process of learning on your path to may or may not be a GM by 30.

P: Yeah. One of my favourite monks Gelong Thubten from the UK talks about a saying ‘happiness is not a destination, it is a journey.’

M: Yeah, I’ve seen that on a T-Shirt somewhere, I’m sure.

P: It’s so true. A lot of people go, ‘oh it’s all new age crap.’

M: [Laugh]

P: It’s not new age crap. It’s, it’s a fundamental truth. When you start looking into this stuff, it becomes so prevalent and just believable.

M: Yep.

P: I think we mentioned him in our first episode when we first with our whole paradigm around what is happiness?

M: Mmm hmm, yep.

P: All these sorts of thoughts came out.

M: Well talking about this, again it’s like going back to that first episode when we first started looking into all of this research and before my blog and before the accident, I had followed life’s script. I was doing what society expected of me, which was to succeed at life.

P: Yep.

M: And I look back now and I feel like I’ve come out of a fog for 30… 20 something years –

P: Laugh.

M: – of my life.

P & M: Laughter.

M: I was following the script and I was succeeding and I wasn’t happy. And I did get happiness from the successes along the way from the promotions and the good grades at school and the extracurricular activities and the marriage and all of that stuff that your meant to do.

P: Yep.

M: But they were tick boxes and there were very superficial levels of happiness that were gained from that.

P: We are tick box oriented, especially in western society.

M: Absolutely.

P: It’s reinforced on us. We’re taught to be goal oriented, which is positive.

M: Right from the first day you went to school.

P: Yeah, yeah absolutely. And that’s fine but It’s not the be all and end all.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: So sometimes it’s about the process of learning and understanding of what you experience along the way, and I think that that’s the change that’s going in the world at the moment. I feel with positive psychology we’re much more aware of enjoying the journey, taking part in the fun things as well as not just being ‘I’m gonna sit in my room and study for 20 years so that I get this accolade.’

M: Or be that single focused and as we’ve discussed many times before, the way to get your engine revving at a 2 or a 3 is cultivating those strong social relationships.

P: Definitely.

M: And that’s really undervalued in our society, spending time with family and friends.

P: Yep, older generations.

M: It’s the first things you cut when things get busy and to make sure you’re looking after your mental and physical well-being. And again those are the things that get cut when things get busy and three, finding meaning and purpose in your life. And a lot of people are really disillusioned with their jobs because they assume that would give them meaning and purpose.

P: Yes. Goal oriented.

M: And they don’t. Yeah exactly.

P: I’ve got the job that I have my dreams. Why am I not happy?

M: Yep.

P: You’ve got to have some fundamental beliefs in there too people.

M: Yep.

P: You’ve got to have some other things running through the river. Oh, that was a good one!

P & M: Laughter!

M: Are you peeing in the river?

P: No, I was thinking of the fishies!

P & M: Laughter!

P: Oh, I was on a good one there!

P & M: Laughter!

P: Shut down again.

M: Love it. So, really what we’re saying is you’ve got to get off the treadmill by making a decision. I have decided to become happier now.

P: This happened to me in London. I think I’ve mentioned it before, it’s the journal moment where I was journaling all my worries and my ‘I’m frustrated with this blah, blah, blah.’ And then I read it back one year and I went ‘Oh my God, I’m depressed!’

M: Laugh.

P: This is horrible! I started using journaling-  

M: Stressed or melodramatic?

P: I! …yeah.

M: Laugh.

P: Clutch my pearls ‘How dare you!’

P & M: Laughter!

P: So I made a conscious choice to start writing down positive stuff. What happened today that was good.

M: Yeah.

P: And that was the switch that flipped, and then all of a sudden, my brain was starting to notice things that were good, and I started looking for them. It’s the red car principle. You’re going to buy a red car. Then all of a sudden, all you see are red cars. It’s the same thing.

M: Absolutely. For me, as you know, it was nearly dying.

P: Yeah.

M: Nearly dying made me go ‘surely there’s more to this life.’

P: Yeah, Laugh.

M: And I stumbled across all of this research and was just baffled that no one had taught me any of this before. I’d been missing all these life lessons and by blogging and podcasting. It has become such an integral part of my life, and I’m happy.

P: Yeah, it’s good.

M: It makes such a big difference.

P: I agree, I agree.

M: So these podcasts, and I know that we’ve had people write to me and mention these podcasts are a great way for them to keep in mind weekly all of the positive psychology activities and thinking that can positively impact their weeks and their lives as well.

P: Yeah. Keeps you honest.

M: Definitely. So you’ve got to take the jump.

P: Ha ha, buy in!

M: Take the happiness jump!

P: Laugh.

M: So by being in that old paradigm that so many western societies, still! It’s western capitalist societies still push, you’re delaying your happiness.

P: Yeah.

M: And the last thing you want to do is be on your death bed and think ‘I succeeded, ticked all the boxes.’

P: ‘Is that the entire journey?’ Yeah.

M: ‘But really is that it?’

P: And it can be as simple as celebrating dinner with your family.

M: Yep.

P: It’s ‘Oh the family’s home, let’s have a dinner together. Let’s sit down and be next to each other.’ And those small activities that you do do, catching up with your mates once a week on a Sunday for a pub lunch. They’re important connections to keep going.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: So, when you do get busy or you are pushing for a goal-oriented task, don’t forget the small stuff.

M: Yeah, give yourself permission to prioritise that stuff, and as we mentioned before it’s stuff that you cancel first, but it’s the stuff you need the most when you are under the pump at work, you need to make sure you make time for the gym and that you still see your friends; Because that will make you stronger and more resilient to make it through that tough time at work.

P: It takes your focus away from the thing that’s causing you grief.

M: Yep.

P: It separates your… We know the saying. ‘volleyball is its own bubble.’

M: Oh, absolutely.

P: Laugh. Have a crap day? Go and play some sport.

M: Yeah.

P: Go and do something that’s motor skill oriented. It will take your mind off your concern at the moment.

M: Particularly if you can hit things hard.

P: Laugh! Preferably not the other players.

M: We do not condone violence, laugh.

P: Hey, a good 6 pack is a good 6 pack.

M: Laugh. Ok we only condone sport endorsed violence.

P: Laugh!

M: So, another couple of things that are really good for getting off that treadmill and that ‘I’ll be happier when’ way of thinking is gratitude. So as we’ve mentioned on other shows, gratitude is about retraining your brain to notice the positive.

P: Mmm.

M: And a really simple, simple way is, to particularly if you’ve got a partner or significant other or a housemate every night just swap stories of what went well today.

P: Hmm. It’s huge, I understand as well with my husband, we do that. How was your day? Grunt. What was good about it?

M: Exactly and I love the way you say ‘what was good?’ Because if you say what are you grateful for? We run out of ideas.

P: Laugh.

M: [sarcastic tone] I’m grateful for the clean air.

P: Laugh.

M: And like it becomes really a tick box exercise, right?

P: Yeah, yes.

M: But if you say what went well? It’s easy to always find something that went well.

P: Absolutely.

M: And that’s, that’s practising gratitude. And the other one is mindfulness.

P: [Softly singing] Aaaahhhh.

M: Stopping to turn your phone off or to enjoy the moment you’re in, whether you’re standing at a bus stop, having dinner with your family or catching up with a friend or just taking some time before your workday to enjoy the sun on your face.A

P: Watering the herb garden.

M: Yep.

P: Standing in the garden, watering in the sunshine and go ‘Oh, it’s going to be a nice day.’

M: But actively, actively committing to being there in the moment.

P: Yep.

M: Definitely. All right, well, that was the happiness paradox.

P: Hope that was interesting for everyone, Laugh.

M: I’m still picturing the cat with the spikey ears.

P: Laugh! It was an image! I still like my river reference, I thought that was more, more pertinent anyway, I’ll come up with better analogies next time I promise.

M: I’m seeing people upstream peeing into the river.

P: Laugh.

M: And merging and melding into one…

P: And on that note!

P & M: Laughter.

M: Thanks for joining us.

P: Laugh!

[Happy exit music – background]

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic.

P: And if you like our little show we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

How The Mind Affects The Body (E49)

by

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete discuss the how the mind affects the body and look at a study by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer.

Transcript & Show Notes

In this episode, Marie mentions a book by Dr. Helena Popovic, called NeuroSlimming: Let your brain change your body. Also, Pete mentioned someone and accidentally mis-identified him, his name is Ian Hickey.

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

M: So Pete, today we’re talking about how the mind affects the body.

P: Ooohh [Twilight Zone noises]

M: And maybe how the body affects the mind?

P: Oh, yes, It’s a very intrinsic relationship,.

M: Definitely, it’s so linked, and I think throughout western culture in particular we’re really coming late to the party on this one.

P: [Laugh] We may be, but we’re definitely there. There’s so much more research out there now that tells us why physical and mental work is good and how the two are very..  have a very symbolic relationship. And I think that’s where the positive psychology movement has made a lot of advances for people. People have definitely felt that in my workplace, people are much more aware of their mental health and how being physical and moving has power over that, and also how much your mental state has power over your physicality.

M: For me, I’m fascinated with the Gut Mind research.

P: Microbiomes!

M: Yes!

P: [Laugh] See how excited we get over science, oh my god I feel like I’m on ‘The Bing Bang Theory’.

M: [Laugh]

P: I Am Not Sheldon!

M: You are so far from Sheldon.

P: [Laugh] Please don’t let me be Wolowitz. I’m not Jewish! Oy vey..

M: [Laugh] Who’s ahhh..

P: Rajesh?

M: Penny.

[Laughter]

P: We have a Penny in our group, I’m not going to say his name. [Laugh]

M: All good. So anyway, for those of you who haven’t seen the latest research and books and shows and everything that’s exploding around this topic of gut-brain-health; The long and the short of it is the latest research is showing that the health of your gut, so your belly, where you’re food goes –

P: Mmm hmm.

M: – is directly linked to the health of your brain. And having imbalances in your belly or poor diet can lead to things like depression.

P: Definitely and a million other issues as well, such as Parkinson’s disease, degenerative diseases, inflammatory diseases, crone’s disease, celiac disease that sort of stuff all can be linked back to the Microbiome. It’s a really interesting… There’s a great show called ‘Searching for Super Human’ on the ABC channel in Australia, you can download all of that stuff still on ABC ivew, a little plug for ABC there. It’s a really good introduction to the concept of Microbiomes and also how much power our brain has over us. And I think we’re going to probably ref – I’ll probably reference that today as we talk this through. [Laugh]

M: We’ve also got some leading world leading researchers in particular over at UNSW and I saw a talk last year on this, and I will put in the show notes because it’s escaping me right now. The book that I got [‘NeuroSlimming: Let your brain change your body’] and leave the author [Dr. Helena Popovic], the researchers name in the show notes as well.

P: There’s a lot of stuff down at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Ian Richie… [Ian Hickey] I think that’s the right professor?

M: We’ll make sure it’s right in the show notes as well.

[Laughter]

P: Really exciting stuff.

M: A big call out to our show producer, Lea.

[Laughter]

P: Who does a marvellous job of-  

M: Of cleaning up our mistakes.

[Laughter]

P: [Singsong voice] Thanks Lea.

M: So what started us on discussing how the mind affects the body was, of course, a research study.

P: [Sarcastic tone] Of course, gotta love research studies..

M: [Laugh] Called the Hotel Maid study.

P: [Laugh]

M: Well, that’s what I named it.

P: [Laugh]

M: I’m sure it’s got some really…

P: Artistic licence there Muz?

M: Yeah. There is a really long, boring, hard to understand research appropriate title but I’m calling it the Hotel Maid study.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And it’s by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, and she has done so much good work in researching in positive psychology over the years.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And this is just one of many supercool studies.

P: [Laugh]

M: I think she did the coolest ones to be quite frank.

P: Okay.

M: There’s some really um, really funky and fun studies out there, and Ellen’s done two that I’m aware of.

P: [Laugh]

M: But this one the Hotel Maid study, I’ll set it up for you.

So she went to a bunch of hotels and divided employees, maids of those employees into group one and group two.

In group one, she came in and told the maids and the cleaners all about the importance of exercise, how it contributes to lowering your heart rate and your blood pressure and makes you healthier and all of the raft off positive physical and mental benefits that you get from doing its exercize.

P: Ok.

M: We all know.

P: Sounds like my life coach.

M: [Laugh] We all know it. So she went and told them how to such eggs, right.

P: [Laugh]

M: And then she did, ran a bunch of tests on them and left.

P: And just walked out the door?

M: Yep.

P: Thanks and bye.

M: Yep, pretty much.

With group two. She did exactly the same thing.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: Importance of exercise, how it contributes to physical and mental health. And then she drew the connection to what the maids do day in and day out.

P: Mmm.

M: And said, you know, when you’re lifting your arms up and shaking the sheets that’s actually using your muscles, and when you’re vacuuming and all of the things that you do day in, day out and a lot of you may not realise, because I can see here on your reports were that you filled in on the way in, a lot of you say that you don’t do any exercise, but I can tell you for eight hours a day when you’re doing your shift. That is all exercise.

P: I’m a big believer in that.

M: And so she then did the tests and left.

P: Thanks and bye.

M: [Laugh] So a month later, she came back and redid all the tests. And lo and behold, when you tell people to suck eggs, nothing changes, right?

P: [Laugh]

M: So there was no change in behaviour in either group. No one did anything differently. [whispers] I think a lot of doctors could learn from this.

P: Ok.

M: And my friend Kelly exercise physiologist. Physios, a lot of people could learn from this. You tell people go away and do three times 10 reps of this calf raising exercise.

P: [Laugh]

M: And you’ll get better. And people go ‘uh huh.’ And then they forget it –

P: – as soon as they walk out the door.

[Laughter]

M: So lo and behold, all the maids went, ‘uh huh’ and then did nothing, right?

P: [Laugh]

M: But, but, but!

P: [Laugh]

M: Otherwise this would be the most boring story in the world.

P: [Laugh] Get on with it, keep going.

M: [Laugh] But group two believed they were getting more exercise than before.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And this belief led to a radical change.

P: What happened Marie?

M: [Whisper] Radical change.

P: Tell us Marie.

M: So Group two had less depression, less anxiety, more positive moods and higher self-esteem and confidence and greater job satisfaction.

P: That’s the big one.

M: So all of that is positive mental health impacts. Physically, their weight decreased significantly.

P: [Gasp] Hear that all you housewives of wherever you are?

M: [Laugh]

P: Go out and do some domestics [laugh].

M: As did their BMI, their Body Mass Index, and their blood pressure went down. So they got all the benefits from during exercise simply because they believed that what they’d always been doing was now exercise. Not just a boring job.

P: [Laugh] I’m ticking the boxes, yay!

M: [Laugh]

P: I think it’s so true. There’s such a benefit to the placebo effect. Now, being in therapy myself and someone that works with people day in, day out, and trying to get them better in whatever way, shape or form. One of the first things I talk about with my new clients is, if you don’t think I have achieved anything, don’t come back. There’s no point if you don’t trust the people that are working with you and trying to help you and giving you these exercises, that you don’t do. Or at least if you’re trying to do them. If you don’t believe they’re actually of benefit to you, it’s not gonna have the right effect. The brain has a lot to do with keeping us motivated than keeping things happening and working through, and that flow on effect to actual physical recovery is definitely linked as we’re seeing with the research.

M: So the fact that I didn’t buy into all this positive psychology BS.

[Laughter]

M: For so long, actually means that I was never going to benefit from it until I started buying into it anyway.

P: I agree.

M: That is a weird mind… I can’t say the F word.

P: It’s kind of like the emperor’s new clothes.

M: [Laughter]

P: It is. You’re just walking around naked until you actually believe what’s going on.

M: Yeah, the question is what do other people think?

P: [Laugh]

M: What are you wearing?

P: [Laugh] Better go put your clothes on… I get that all the time.

M: You so do, girl put some clothes on.

P: [Laugh] Anyway, we digress.

M: Yes. So look, this is, and I read this study and loved it, love, love, loved it. The fact that these people thought that what they’d always been doing was exercise, and they’ve reframed how they saw what they were doing, [and it] led to huge benefits.

P: Yep

M: And for me, the take home of all of this is to actually, take some time to look at my week and the small amounts of incidental exercise I do. And believe me, they’re small because I work from home.

P: [Laugh]

M: So I walk five steps to get from my desk to the toilet and maybe eight steps to get from my desk to the kitchen. There’s not much else going on for a lot of days and I spend during Covid a lot of time in my home. So it’s about when I do go out shopping, making sure that I park at the back of the parking lot.

P: Yep.

M: Or take the stairs if I do go out, things like that.

P: It’s those small things that do accumulate and as we’ve realised with the Covid experience, incidental exercise has decreased greatly.

M: Yeah.

P: And a lot of people aren’t moving as much and it’s the movement that helps to stimulate a lot of that brain activity that goes towards positive thinking, feeling all those good [hormones] dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin levels, all that sort of contribution.

M: Yep. So my challenge to myself is to look at all those little incidental things and to now call them exercise. And to tick that off.

[Laughter]

P: I like it. You’re sounding like my mom.

M: [Laugh]

P: I’ll tell this story though, this is a personal story. I have these visions of when I was a little boy, you know ages 5 to 8 of my mother doing domestics. Now mum was 5 ft four. She’s no longer 5 foot 4, she’s a lot shorter that that now. But mum would get her shoulder behind a bookcase full of books and move it so that every week she could clean the skirting board. This was every week. Mum was diligent about it.

M: That’s dedication.

P: Oh yeah. And that happened in the entire houses. So she would shift every wardrobe, every cupboard. She would pull it out and clean.

M: Now that’s exercise.

P: Huge exercise. Now Mom has never been an exerciser. We have one photo of mum in a netball team when she was maybe 20, it was really funny.

M: [Snort laugh]

P: My mother on a netball court. Wow, that’s really weird. But Mom has even an exercise that Mom is now 85 and she’s still getting around her own home. And she’s still doing her gardening and so forth. Admittedly, she’s got some health issues because she hasn’t maybe exercised as much as what she should have. But what has saved her, I think a lot, is that she was so determined of her housework. That was weightlifting. I mean, a bookcase full of –

M: But did she see it is weight lifting?

P: No, she just saw it as work.

M: Because what we’re saying now is if she’d seen it has weight lifting. She wouldn’t have those even small health issues you were talking about, right?

P: Maybe, quite possibly. But it is about clocking what you do throughout the day. And just because you’re not going to the gym doesn’t mean that you can’t be doing some movement and doing some loading and doing some resistance work.

M: Yes. Now moving back to how that relates to mind and body.

P: Did I go on a tangent?

M: Yes, you did.

P: [Laughter]

M: But I know that you’re really passionate about stuff and we should all do exercise. I’m just saying think about all the little things you do as exercise and then you can get off the hook.

P: [Laugh] I don’t need to go to the gym I did vacuuming.

M: What? Look that’ll get your heartrate up if you do it properly.

P: Absolutely, it does.

M: [Laughter]

P: So the power of the brain in that, that’s what matters?

M: Yes, absolutely.

P: [Laugh] I’ve got some research here from some of the journals from post-traumatic stress disorder and some really big advancements that have been going on in Australia with Mirjana Askovic a Psychologist with service for treatment and rehabilitation of torture and trauma survivors.

M: Say that ten times fast?

P: Yeah.

Now she has been doing a lot of work with traumatic stress disorder people about retraining brain activity and trying to not focus on reliving trauma but advancing positive mood thoughts with the brain, which actually helps with depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, all these secondary benefits and its using video games.

M: Oh!

P: It’s getting a person, instead of talking about the trauma of being a refugee and having to get a boat and come to Australia, she sits in front of a television, and they have to power a plane with good thoughts, positive thoughts and there’s two other planes on either side of them and if those planes start to take over, they have to work harder with their positivity and recalling happy memories, good thoughts, things that make you laugh, to power that plane along and that training is helping to promote levels of serotonin, oxytocin and those lovely neurotransmitters, which helps with the secondary incidences of depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, really amazing stuff.

M: I love a few things there. So first thing is that a lot of the science that you’re talking about there is really similar when we talk about gratitude about training your brain to recognise the positive.

P: Absolutely.

M: And you need to train it just like a muscle, right?

P: Yep.

M: It is a muscle.

P: [Laugh]

M: In that sense.

P: [Laugh] I’m going to leave that one alone…

M: In that sense it is like a muscle.

P: [Laugh]

M: We’ll leave it there and we might get angry emails.

P: [Laugh]

M: You’ve got to train it. You’ve got to train your brain to not focus only on negative, and get it to focus on positive.

P: Yeah, absolutely. For sure, and it works. The success rate of this program at the moment is 80%. That’s huge.

M: That’s crazy.

P: It’s great.

M: And then the other thing that I’ll chime in off the back of that is personally after I had my motorbike accident. I absolutely do think that you need to talk about it first. But there does come a point we’re talking about it is only reinforcing the negative. It’s not helping you to move forward.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: So when I first used to tell the story of what happened, I would shake uncontrollably and I noticed probably after like the 20th time I told it, you know countless doctors, my family, my close friends would ask you what happened and probably a good 20 times in two weeks later, I noticed I wasn’t shaking as much and I wasn’t so tense when I was telling the story there was definitely a physiological impact to me, reliving that.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And telling the story. And the other one was that probably a good six weeks after the accident, the doctor was in one day and reached for my knee and I flinched.

P: Mmm.

M: He hadn’t even touched me and I flinched. I was again just so protective of that leg that I’d nearly lost. And he says to me, ‘You’re going to have to do something about that or it’ll become a thing.

P: [Laugh]

M: He finished up his consult and he walked out and I looked up at my husband and I was like ‘do what?’

P: [Laugh]

M: How do I not flinch?

[Laughter]

M: But you know, good old Google helped us out and we spent a lot of hours trying to untrain that flinch reaction.

P: Oh yeah, it’s huge, I’ve worked with some amazing people with that. I’ve had a woman with Parkinson’s and I worked with her and she had major traumatic stress from incidences in her previous life and it took us a good 18 months, but we’ve got to the point where she could handle me touching her rib. And I remember the treatment and I remember the day and it was a massive celebration for both of us because she didn’t flinch. She didn’t lock up, she didn’t respond in that typical fashion.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: 18 months. It’s a big trust exercise, but it shows that you can actually train that response and those emotional triggers to a better place.

M: Absolutely. So our conclusion then is that the mind affects of body and the body affects the mind.

P: [Laugh] The link is there. Definitely, there’s countless things you could pull out [of the research].

M: So I do you want to leave us with one last story. And it is from the same researcher at Harvard, Ellen Langer, and in 1979 she got a bunch of elderly men and put them into an environment that looked like 1959.

P: Aahhh.

M: And she asked them for the whole week to wear clothes that they would have worn in 1959, to eat what they would have eaten for breakfast, to pretend they’re back in their jobs at that time that their kids were young and from that time. And to pretend for the entire week that they were 20 years younger than what they were, and off the back of that, they had random people look at photos before and after and on average strangers thought that these people were three years younger after they came out.

P: Wow.

M: And not only that, these men saw a huge range of positive physical and mental impacts from just spending a week pretending to be 20 years younger. [Laugh]

P: Put yourself in that position. Put yourself around that idea of going. I’m gonna act like I am 50.

M: It’s not even that it’s tricking your mind.

P: Yeah.

M: Actively tricking your mind into impacting your body. So their eyesight got better, their hearing go better, the arthritis was less pronounced. The physical impact from them pretending for a week to me 20 years younger were amazing.

P: The power of brain activity.

M: Yeah.

P: There’s other stories of that with Parkinson’s disease and dementia and so forth that’s come out as well that’s lovely. I’ll just very quicky throw this in.

M: Yep.

P: This lovely lady, they were doing sound therapy, so music therapy.

M: Ohh.

P: Finding the music that applies to that person’s life from when they were younger.

M: Yep.

P: And these people who do not recognise anyone, sitting in a vegetable state. They put this old lady with the headphones on, and she started swinging her arms and clapping and being so mobile with this lovely music that made her feel like she was 20. And then she turned and looked at the man sitting next to her and went ‘Oh! I know you. You’re my son.’

M: [Gasp]

P: It’s the first time that she recognised him in two years.

M: Awe.

P: It’s such an advertisement for training your brain and doing things that link your brain activity to positive outcomes.

M: Absolutely.

I know we’ve spoken about positive affirmations before, but there is so much to explore in this. And I think we’re only just tapping into the potential of our minds to help us live happy and healthier lives.

P: Yeah.

M: And I think we’ll end it there.

P: End it there. What a lovely line to end on. [Laugh]

[Happy exit music – background]

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic.

P: And if you like our little show we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

How to Have a Happy Covid Christmas (E47)

by

This week Marie and Pete discuss how to make the most of a socially isolated Christmas with great ideas for a Happy Holiday. 

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast Happiness for Cynics I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and speaker on change and resilience.

P: And I’m Peter Furness a spreadsheet devotee, injury preventee and team-sport celebratory. That kind of worked. Each week we will bring to you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: So if you’re feeling the pinch…

P: Of the yuletide Grinch…

M: Or maybe you just need some extra added Christmas fix…

P: Then this is the place to be!

M: And to take us one step further on our happiness journey –

P: [Laugh]

M: – not that Pete needs it I don’t think.

P: You didn’t realise what you were reading there did you?

M: No. I had no idea.

P: [Laugh!]

M: You changed it all!

[Laughter]

M: To take us one step further on our happiness journey today’s episode is all about how have a Happy Covid Christmas.

[Happy Intro Music]

P: [Humming out a Christmas Carol]

M: I don’t get it.

P: [Laugh] Really? I have to go into the second stanza? [Laugh]

M: Okay, so there are a lot of people, we have a lot of listeners from around the world, definitely quite a few in Australia, who I think are feeling a bit optimistic right now.

P: Oh we are. We’re ready to go. The borders are opening for Christmas, for us, which is a big thing.

M: Very big thing, but there are a lot of listeners out there who are still in isolation or lock down, or, you know any permutation of that, depending on they’re in.

P: Preparing for a second lockdown.

M: Yeah, and for Christmas, it’s kind of looking a bit depressing.

P: It’s not going to be easy.

M: Yeah. I know that when I was in States one year, a friend and I were travelling around and were in New York for Christmas and you forget that everything’s closed on Christmas day cause everyone’s doing stuff with their family.

P: [Laugh] Yes.

M: It’s probably most depressing Christmas I’ve ever had.

P: I had the same thing. I was in Dundee in Scotland, thinking ‘oh this will be great, I’m going to have a winter Christmas, it will be really nice’. Bloody awful! [Laugh!]

M: It really is. So a lot of people are looking at the possibility or the reality of spending Christmas, completely by themselves.

P: Hhmm.

M: Or with just them and one loved one or whoever is in their house, for the first time ever.

P: Which can be exciting and can be different if you choose to celebrate it. And I think that’s something that is really important. You have to choose to buy in on this one.

M: Yes, however, if you’re living by yourself, it’s tough.

P: It’s going to be tough.

M: Let’s acknowledge that.

P: Because you’re not going to be able to have people coming over, and I think that’s the fundamental one. I remember having a couple of Christmases in London, where the weather is terrible, let’s face it, it’s Christmas time, but we actually had a lovely [day]. We planned to be at home the whole day, actually for two days because London shuts down on Christmas Eve and it actually ended up being a really fun affair.

I mean, I was in the kitchen cooking, so I wasn’t happy space.

M: [Laugh]

P: We had four people in the house, and it was actually really lovely. So it was nice to have that experience on the back of my Dundee experience, which was me sitting in a red telephone box, ringing my family and crying because I wasn’t home for Christmas.

M: Aww..

P: I know I thought it was going to be wonderful, it really wasn’t.

[Laughter]

M: Yep, I know that feeling.

[Laughter]

M: So I think what I’m hearing from you is there is definitely a mindset thing to this. We need to go into Christmas this year knowing that it might not be what we’re used to.

P: Mmm.

M: That we’re going to make the best of it. But also, I think, allow yourself a bit of a cry, or allow yourself to feel lonely if… it is not what you want it to be and to feel disappointed and to acknowledge that change and potentially the pain or the crappiness of it.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: The point is not to dwell too long in it.

P: No.

M: And this episode is about talking about things that are able to help you maybe balance out those sad feelings that you might be feeling because Christmas this year won’t be what you would [have] hoped it would be.

P: Absolutely. Trying to find the positive way out of that negative encounter.

M: Yeah, balancing it a bit.

P: Mmm. There we go.

M: And so we were talking about quite a few things that you can do to bring yourself joy and happiness during the holidays.

P: Mmm.

M: And recently it was World Kindness Day and I wrote an article and did some research for that; and the research, we’ve definitely covered in previous episodes with the research about doing kind things for others and being generous to others is… [laugh]

P: There was a cat hair on my microphone!

[Laughter]

M: It kept tickling you.

P: I was like ‘what is going on?!’

[Laughter]

P: I couldn’t see it, I haven’t got my glasses on.

[Laughter]

M: Alright, so the research in to helping others and doing kind things for others is extensive and just a couple of pieces of research to point to.

So there was one study which looked at the effects of kindness based on performing acts of kindness for others or for yourself. And the study, looked at how to measure the levels of psychological flourishing, including social well-being and emotional well-being of the participants.

And when the study was over, researchers found that those performing acts of kindness for others achieved higher levels of psychological flourishing than the group doing acts of kindness for themselves. So while it’s important to be compassionate to yourself and forgiving of yourself and to have those moments of sadness.

P: Mmm.

M: If you’re, you’re disappointed at what Christmas might look like this year. A great way to get out of that and to move forward from an emotional point of view is to focus on doing something kind for someone else.

P: I just can’t get over the fact that you have a psychological flourishing.

M: [Laugh]

P: [Misty voice] I’m seeing a flower opening as if it were extending itself into the springtime sunshine.

M: Maybe we can take this episode and make it about visualisation as well. [Misty voice] Visualise yourself opening like a flower.

P: [Misty voice] Psychological flourishing.

[Laughter]

P: I love it. It’s a new win term for me.

[Laughter]

P: But yes. I think you’re definitely right there Muz, it’s about trying to find some positive avenues to explore, and one of those is definitely with the kindness and how you can unlock, unlock the double doors of the horizon. That’s an opera reference. Not many of our listeners would get that but anyway. [Laugh]

M: Yeah, I get that.

[Laughter]

M: So I guess what we’re saying is be kind to yourself, absolutely particularly this Christmas. It’s going to be very different from what a lot of us had hoped for and a lot of us had expected or wanted.

P: Yep.

M: And that brings disappointment. So be nice to yourself and understand that a lot of people will be feeling disappointment and sadness at that and not being able to spend Christmas overseas or with their family.

P: Definitely.

M: Or any… whatever you see as a good Christmas.

P: Mmm.

M: But also a great way to move forward, and to make it something, make something… make lemons? Make lemonade out of lemons, is to take some time to think through some things that you could do for others. There are definitely a lot of people in need, this year. People who have lost their jobs. So food banks are a great way to give back.

P: Yes.

M: You can get your friends together and get some canned goods together and donate them or deliver them.

P: Yeah.

M: Or if you don’t want to leave home, there are some great ways you can crochet socks.

P: [Laugh]

M: And learn to knit, and knit teddy bears for kids in hospitals.

P: Mmm.

M: There’s all kinds of things you can do just need to jump on the internet and look for activities that you can do from home that can give to others. And another great one I just got a phone call today, actually, from the Red Cross in Australia here, saying that they’re short on plasma, so I’ll be going into donate this Friday.

P: I think in terms of Googling, Google ‘things my grandmother would do.’

M: [Laugh]

P: That’ll give you something that you could do, which would be an act of kindness. I throw this out as a challenge.

Google ‘What would my grandmother do?’ Find an act of kindness in there and see if you can perform it so it could be that you need to learn how to crochet.

M: Love it.

P: That’ll be interesting, [laugh].

M: I think one of the great things about Covid is that a lot of us have gone back to things that our grandparents would have done. We’re gardening, we’re playing puzzles.

P: Mmm, mm.

M: We’re really exploring a simpler life, and a quieter life.

P: I think, I think it’s the life of connection, so there’s a way of connecting with someone over a board game, for example, because you’re, you’re involved in action, which takes your concentration and your focus and that in itself we know takes your focus away from being self-reflective in a negative aspect. So if you are feeling a little bit precious and vulnerable then taking your focus and putting it somewhere else can help.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: With way laying those sorts of emotions. But it also does help to connect you with someone on the other side of the chess board, for example, because you’re spending, you can spend two hours on a chess game.

M: Absolutely. And the one I was talking about you this afternoon actually is gratitude. Practising gratitude is about teaching your mind to scan for the positive things in your day and in your life and it’s teaching your brain to recognise the good not only the bad, which we’re wired to do.

P: Yes, absolutely that’s a really important one that we’ve talked about before.

M: Yeah

P: And whether that’s writing it down in a journal or talking to someone that you have in your life on a daily basis and going. Let’s talk about what we’ve achieved today. What was the good thing that happened today?

M: Yes. So, as we were talking about earlier, for me and my husband we’re now doing that every evening, and it’s really strengthened our bond.

P: Mmm.

M: It’s taken us away from talking about what groceries need to be picked up.

P: [Laugh]

M: What chores need to be done.

P: Nag, nag, nag woman!

M: [Laugh]

P: That’s all I’m hearing from Francis right now [laugh].

M: So, not cool.

P: [Laugh]

M: So, so not cool. [Laugh]

P: Can I just say for the record that Francis and I do have a relationship outside of Marie and my relationship. [Laugh]

M: But ours is number one, just so we’re clear.

P: Yes.

[Laughter]

M: Yeah, so again it is a great thing that you can do with a friend or a family member is to ask ‘what went well today?’ It gets really tough, and there’s a million articles out there about things that you can be grateful for because people end up saying the same things over and over and over again. But if you reframe the question to ‘what went well today?’, then you’ll never run out of things.

P: Mmm.

M: [Be]cause there’s always something that is a positive and that you can, or would be grateful for.

P: Mmm.

M: And when you talk about that with someone else, it’s really amazing how it opens up the conversation again. You end up bonding more, and it’s not about the chores and the to do list.

P: Mmm.

M: It’s about things that happened in your day that you can share with other people.

P: Yeah right.

M: And again, if you’re looking at a Christmas where you won’t be around the people you love or you can’t be close to the people you love physically, this is a great way to start doing something once a week, where you can bond virtually, from the phone or through What’s App and messenger and all the rest of it, to have a deeper level conversation with the people you love.

P: Mmm. One thing that I’m gonna throw out there as well is what you’re planning to do for Christmas? So if you don’t have a plan, this Christmas make one.

M: Absolutely.

P: Plan to have a day, even if it is cooking a meal for yourself that you eat whilst you’re zooming with someone else, one of your family members or the person that you want to be with. But plan that lunch plan that dinner plan that morning connection that you’re going to give and get the supplies, cook yourself a little backed ham or something, something small and invest some time into the doings that you would normally do -the doings? Is that good English? Yeah that’s good English.

[Laughter]

P: The actions you might normally partake in if [it were a non-Covid Christmas]. For me and my family it’s always a shared lunch. So if I’m in isolation in this year, I would zoom, but I would make sure I had a glass of wine in front of me with a table that was half full of three different meats.

M: [Laugh].

P: Thank you my darling sister. [Laugh] And a little bit of dessert, whether that be a piece of ice cream or an icy pole or something, and I’m going to zoom my family whilst I enjoy that meal.

M: Treat yourself, make it special.

P: Yeah.

M: So again, we did mention the study before, which said that treating others or being kind of others brings more emotional ..flourishing

P: [Laugh]

M: than treating yourself. But that’s not to say that having self-compassion and looking after yourself and being kind to yourself doesn’t bring many, many benefits.

P: Mmm.

M: So there’s a great study from University of Texas at Austin. Shout out, cause that’s my husbands university.

P: Aww.

M: Yep. And it shows that when you’re kind to yourself, some of the benefits, a better life satisfaction, greater interconnectedness with other people, more curiosity and higher levels of happiness.

P: Hmm.

M: So definitely over that period, make sure that you’re eating well, getting enough sleep and getting some exercise. But treat yourself to something a little bit special on Christmas Day. Give yourself something to look forward to.

P: Mmm. Plan it, that’s the thing.

M: Plan something to look forward to that’s a bit special.

P: Yeah.

M: And just because you’re doing it only for yourself doesn’t mean you can’t spoil yourself.

P: Too many people take that in, like I have this rather fabulous friend and we were talking about glassware. You’ve got your posh silver and you’ve got your good crockery and you’ve got your glassware.

M: Do you?

P: Well, maybe.

M: Maybe in the 18th century yeah.

P: [Laugh] This’s a recollection maybe of an older generation they put in the cupboard and they save it for that special time. Bugger it! Get it out now! Get it out for yourself!

M: Mmm.

P: Get that for you on your solo date with yourself and get out the good crockery, or get out the good crystal and have that glass of wine in your best crystal glass and celebrate the fact that you’re looking after and cherishing yourself by having the good stuff.

M: Yeah, some nice bath salts.

P: OK.

M: Or whatever it is that you enjoy doing, put some time aside to read a book or to watch your favourite movie, whatever it is that you want to do, that is a bit of a treat and plan it now, so you can look forward to it until it comes on the 25th.

P: Yep.

M: Yes, and that is something that I think a lot of people also again have been struggling with during Covid is all of our holidays and plans all of a sudden just got wiped off our calendars and we didn’t have something to look forward to.

P: We didn’t replace it with something else.

M: Exactly. So there is still a lot that you can do that isn’t a holiday overseas.

P: Mmm, yep.

M: It could be going for a walk in the park. It could be planting a garden. It could be.. there are so many things you could do at home. Or that you’re allowed to do in isolation, depending on the country you’re in, that you can look forward to doing. And that don’t need you to go to a tropical island somewhere or on a plane.

P: Yeah.

M: So there are some things, some ideas that we do have to be kind to others.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: If that’s the way you want to go and the best one after the year that America has had.

P: Mmm. Gosh.

M: Is to spread some kindness and positivity on social media.

P: Oh, do a positive post.

M: More than that. Jump on. And instead of just liking your friends posts actually comment on them.

P: Okay, that’s a simple thing.

M: Congratulations. What a great achievement. I love this photo. You’re looking hot, babe.

[Laughter]

M: Get on there and actually spend an hour just spreading some love and joy and kindness.

P: And then check in with yourself and note how good you feel,

M: Absolutely.

P: If you spend an hour on that, that’s going to give you some amazing crazy positive neurochemicals going around.

M: Yep.

P: [Laugh]

M: Definitely. So that’s something really simple and free that you can do.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: Another great one if you’re in a country that tips is, leave a larger than normal tip or even if you’re in a country that doesn’t tip.

P: Exactly.

M: It’s Christmas time. And a lot of the people who work in retail and restaurant hospitality there on minimum wage and an extra five or ten dollars can go a really long way.

P: Yep.

M: I like this one as well, I used to do this when I’d go on holidays away from my husband I’d leave post it notes around, that he’d discover.

P: [Laugh]

M: Fold them up in his underwear.

[Laughter]

M: Or in the bathroom, behind the mirror or something.

P: [Laugh]

M: Just little things.

P: Yeah.

M: Just little things to bring a smile to someone’s day.

P: I like it.

M: Definitely.

P: The one that I think is really great is writing a letter.

M: Yes.

P: Spend fifteen minutes writing an actual physical letter, get a note card or a blank card and actually write out to someone. To one person that you really appreciate in your life or has given you some really positive vibes or positive experiences in your life and write to them saying how much they’re appreciated. You don’t need to put it in a Christmas card. It doesn’t need to be a festive thing and then challenge them to pass that on to one other person, the pay it forward principle.

M: I like it. On the pay it forward principle. If you’re ever going to a drive through, another great one is to pay for the people behind your order.

P: Oh, wow, that’s cool.

M: Yeah.

P: I like that. [Laugh]

M: So you can do that in the States. They have a lot of coffee shops that [do] drive through so you can just buy a coffee for someone. But wouldn’t it be great to rock up and hear someone had paid for your meal?

P: That’s, that’s very nice. Yeah, that’s good.

M: Yeah, so there’s a whole range of little things you can do, some of them free, some of them cheap.

P: Mmm.

M: And some of them are just donating your time, and you can do a lot of them from your home. So if you’re worried about getting out of your home and catching Covid, then there’s a lot of things that you can do to take control of the your mental well-being and balance out the bad with the good.

P: Mmm.

M: And it’s just a case of putting aside time to do it.

P: Yeah, I’d agree with that.

M: And a lot of the time, that’s what we don’t do.

P: Yeah, mmm.

M: That’s what we don’t do. So I’m challenging anyone out there who is seeing the train coming their way.

P: [Laugh]

M: I know that if I was in a country right now, where we were in isolation and lock down over Christmas, I would be banging my head against a wall.

P: Yeah.

M: I would be having to combat that with some positive things. So, it, it’s just about planning for it.

P: Yep.

M: Planning to look after your own mental well-being and to balance out the bad with the good.

P: Yep.

M: ‘Cause we all go through bad things sometimes.

P: Definitely, yep.

M: Everybody hurts, sometimes.

P: [Laugh] And on that note.

M: R.E.M.

[Laughter]

P: Have you been listening to 80’s classics all day?

[Laughter]

P: I think there we’ll wrap it up for that one. That sounds like a good finishing point.

M: I do however want to wish for anyone who celebrates Christmas a Merry Christmas.

P: Of course.

M: And a Happy New Year and a Happy Holidays for anyone who is not celebrating Christmas.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And hoping that everyone out there who is dealing with isolation and lock down is looking after themselves and finding ways to bring joy and positive experiences into their lives to balance out what has been a really tough year.

P: Absolutely. Celebrate your little achievements no matter how small they are.

M: Yes.

P: Ok, thanks for joining us today. For more information, please remember to subscribe and like our podcast, you can find all our information on www.marieskelton.com a site about balance, happiness and resilience. You could also leave questions or propose a topic.

M: And if you like our show, we would love it if you could leave a comment or rating to help us out.

P: That would be our Christmas present from you.

M: Aww. Until next time…

P: Choose happiness.

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Read Happiness for Cynics article 5 Ways to Overcome the COVID Blues, listen to our Podcast Is it Even Possible to be Happy During COVID? (E34)

How Forgiveness Can Make You Happier (E46)

by

This week, Marie and Pete discuss the power of forgiveness and how it can rewire your brain to be more positive.

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast Happiness for Cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and speaker on change and resilience.

P: And I’m Peter Furness, a studious reader, appropriate perceiver and at times, administer of stress reliever. Each week we will be to you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology otherwise known as happiness.

M: So if you’re feeling low…

P: because you’re not in the show…

M: Or just a little bit out of limbo.

P: Then this is the place to be!

M: And take this one step further on our happiness journey, today’s episode is all about forgiveness.

P: Mmm.

[Happy Intro Music]

P: This is going to be a big one. This is a heavy one Marie.

M: It sure is. And it’s surprising that the feedback we’ve had on our book that we launched in October this year available on Amazon.

P: Self-Care is Church for Non-believers.

M: [Laugh] The feedback is that the forgiveness chapter is the one that has resonated the most.

P: Oh Really, oh wow.

M: Definitely. We’ve had some great reviews on Amazon, which has been lovely, and some friends have reached out to me going we’ve picked up the book, and for a lot of people, the chapter on forgiveness is the one that’s really resonated.

P: Mmm. I think we all have to go through a stage of figuring ourselves out at some point in our lives.

M: Yeah, we’re not perfect. We all make mistakes. That’s where the self-compassion comes in. This chapter is more about forgiving others. And I think with that you have to, at times, acknowledge your part in whatever has happened.

P: Take responsibility.

M: Yeah.. But, not necessarily take responsibility, but just acknowledge that there are two people. It takes two to tango.

P: Yep.

M: But this this one is really about How do we move on when someone has hurt us?

P: Mmm, it’s not easy. It’s not an easy path to go through.

M: Definitely not. And especially the younger you are, the more that can really shape the life that you have afterwards.

P: Yeah.

M: You really carry the scars, that the baggage of poor interactions in your childhood and teen years, well through your adult life.

P: Mmm.

M: And all way through life at times. So really, one of the main points that I want to get across in this episode is that just like a lot of other things that we talk about the show forgiveness is not about someone else.

Forgiveness is for you and about you.

P: I love that.

M: [Whispers] I do to.

P: It comes from a personal space I think. The ability to forgive comes from a really personal space I think.

M: Absolutely, and really when we say it’s for you and about you. It is not about making someone else feel better for wronging you.

P: Mmm. Yes.

M: It’s about letting go of grudges and blame and negative feelings that are stopping you from moving on.

So, understanding what happened;

Processing how that made you feel;

Acknowledging the pain or the anger or the betrayal.

P: Mmm.

M: And finding a way to move forward with that knowledge and understanding. You don’t have to hug it out.

P: [Laugh]

M: You don’t have to tell someone I forgive you.

P: No.

M: You don’t even have to ever talk to them again.

P: But…

M: It’s not about them. It’s about you, being able to leave that baggage behind so that you can have a positive life moving forward.

P: Mmm.

M: And for a lot of people who’ve felt that pain and that betrayal of a parent not living up to your expectations, a sibling doing wrong by you, stealing from you, a partner cheating on you, a friend betraying your confidences.

P: Yep.

M: There are so many ways that we get hurt, really hurt by people around us, whether deliberately or not, and for some people they can hold on to that, and it really impacts how they interact with new people as they progress through life.

P: Mmm. It also has a lot to do with the neuro-chemicals that get released into our brain when we’re having these horrible negative emotions, all that cortisol and adrenaline actually gets released into our system. So, we have to combat that with these other thought processes, so that we can stop… WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!?

[Laughter]

M: I’m not it’s just, I’ve got this cat sitting on my shoulder.

P: [Laugh] I’m trying to be all serious and scientific, and you’re ridiculing me with a cat underneath your mouth.

M: I’m not ridiculing you.

P: [Laugh!]

M: Just appreciating the situation.

P: There we go, [laugh]… Right, so the art of forgiveness helps us to undo some of that negative neuro-chemical release that does happen in our brain, when we’re holding on to grudges or past trauma.

M: More than, more than undo. Because you can’t undo that. It stops the brain from producing those negative chemicals, all those chemicals that having negative impacts on you and might even allow for positive feelings and positive chemicals to be released through other activities.

P: It does. I have a bit more science on that, it actually does. There’s a little bit of work that’s being done by a programme in Sydney University, where they’re actually looking at brain wave activity and getting the brain waves to coordinate well, and part of that is training your brain and training those brain waves to reactivate in a coordinated fashion. We might come to that later in the episode.

M: Ok. Um… and not now?

P: [Laugh] We can, we can talk about it now.

M: You always do that to me.

P: [Laugh] I throw to you and you’re not ready?

M: “There’s a really juicy bit of information, and… we’ll talk about that later.”

P: [Laugh]

M: Right? So what are we doing now? Why not now?

P: [Hysterical Laughter!]

M: What’s going on later?

P: We can talk about it now, [laugh] I don’t mind. There is a way that they’re working with, these are asylum seekers and refugees, people that experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. And the way that they’re actually looking at it [is] instead of going to the psychological evaluations and reliving the trauma, the way of dealing with that now is to start training the brainwave activity; Which means virtual reality, using computer generated games to reinforce positive brain associations rather than reliving the trauma and this in a way it comes back to our discussion about forgiveness because you’re letting go of that stimulus by being able to forgive and move on you’re letting go of that continual little peanut that sits in your gut that is going ‘ggrrr’, being negative and angry.

M: Absolutely. And to back that up the Mayo Clinic in the US. They’re a huge organisation and health network in the US. They have done a lot of studies on forgiveness and shown that it definitely leads to improved health and peace of mind and so being able to let go of that negativity, and that stress, and all the negative chemicals you’re talking about Pete and make room for the positive.

P: Hmm.

M: [It] has huge impact to your relationships, it leads to healthy relationships, better mental health, reduces anxiety, stress, hostility, it lowers blood pressure.

P: Mmm.

M: And it also can help with depression and self-esteem.

P: Mmm.

M: On the flip side, just like with many of the things we talk about in the positive psychology area, it can lead to a stronger immune system and improved heart health. So it’s no wonder that letting go of all of that leads to greater feelings of happiness, hopefulness and optimism.

P: It allows the good stuff in. If you’re making less room with the bad stuff, you’re allowing more space for the good stuff.

M: Absolutely. And I think the reason I love this, talking about this episode in December is that a lot of us are heading into a holiday period, and the period with more anxiety, more stress. We’re seeing families, and for a lot of us families aren’t what they’re portrayed as in Hollywood.

P: Mmm.

M: Or maybe they are, it depends on what genre you’re watching.

[Laughter]

P: Not everyone has happy family time at Christmas.

M: Exactly. And for a lot of people, that is a high stress, high anxiety period. Because of how broken some of those relationships are with people that they’re spending time with. So this practising forgiveness is something that I highly encourage people to look into as they head into holiday periods. And if you know that you’re going to be spending time with someone who has wronged you or hurt you and it comes with anxiety and stress, seeing them and being in the same space.

P: That association. Yes

M: Then just going through the steps of practising forgiveness can be a really beneficial exercise to help, you not only cope with the upcoming holidays, but also to cope in a far more positive and better mental health space. With all of those dinners and periods.

P: It puts you in a better position.

M: Exactly.

P: It puts you in control rather than being reactive. You’re in control so that you can choose to steer the interaction in a different direction should it need to occur.

M: Also, if you’re filled with greater self-esteem and less anxiety, you can put up with someone else’s bad behaviour, if they keep doing it. And if you’ve just got a crazy u ncle, who loves to slap you on the ass and you’ve always felt bad.

P: Yeah. [Laugh]

M: About yourself. But all of a sudden, you rock up and your power woman, right? Crazy uncle has no impact on you. Right?

P: Mmm.

M: So it’s about being… Okay that, that’s a weird thing. And crazy uncle should not be allowed to slap anyone on the ass. Let’s be really.. [Laugh]

P: I’m taking notes here.

[Laughter]

M: That is called sexual harassment people.

[Laughter]

M: And it is not okay and it is not funny. And it is definitely not, something we’re abdicating for here.

P: Mmm.

M: What I am trying to say, though, is that if you’re in a strong space from a mental well-being and a mental health perspective, you don’t let a lot of the other people’s poor behaviour impact you in the same way as if you’re not in a good mental health space.

P: So how do we look at forgiveness, Marie? What is the first thing that we start to look at? [When] we’re going to look at getting into a forgiveness space?

M: What are the steps? Yeah. The first thing is, are you ready, and willing?

P: Ooh. Is this the hardest step?

M: Absolutely.

P: Recognising?

M: Yep, well.

P: A little bit of acceptance?

M: It’s, It’s taking the leap of faith.

P: Mmm. That’s-

M: -It’s the buying in!

P: Buying in! [Laugh]

M: It’s the cynics!

[Laughter]

P: Never easy.

M: Yep. And some pain has just cut too deep and has been going on for too long to be easily wiped away.

P: And there’s a real fear of opening that back up again.

M: Yep.

P: I mean we can understand that, we don’t want to go and reopen old scars. There is this period where you’ve got to accept that ‘Ok I’m going to address this.’

M: Yep, and it can take a lot of time. It is not an easy, ‘I’m going to forgive.’ And then you know, an hour later, everything’s all great.

P: Hunky Dory.

M: Yeah exactly. It is a time consuming practise that takes commitment, so the first step is committing to the process, and making that choice means you have to want to do it. You have to commit to do it, and you have to know that it’s not always going to be easy and sometimes you’ll carry scars with you for life.

P: Yep.

M: But you have to make the choice to forgive and be open to the process, for it to work.

P: And maybe not expecting stuff to come instantly.

M: Absolutely, to know that it will not only be painful, but it will take time.

P: Yep.

M: And the deeper those scars run, the more painful it will be, and the more time it will take. And you might need someone to help you through.

P: Definitely. Hmm.

M: So that’s step one.

Are you ready? Willing? And going to commit to the process?

Step two, if you’re going to go through the process.

Find somewhere quiet for some self-reflection.

So if you’re going to do this by yourself rather than with a professional. The next step is to give yourself the space to process the loss or the grief.

P: So does mean if you have to throw things down the corridor, you’ve got space to do that.

M: Yes, be angry, be hurt, grieve, be vulnerable and feel the pain.

P: And be expressive with that pain.

M: Absolutely. And a great way to do that is to write down what happened.

Write done what happened.

P: Yep. Externalise it. Get around the side that’s not inside you and eating away at you.

M: Yep.

P: That’s where throwing, throwing screwdrivers is really good.

M: Screwdrivers?

P: Screwdrivers, forks. It’s really good.

[Laughter]

P: Just make sure there’s no one around when you do it.

M: Don’t hurt other people, yes.

P: No, no, no, no.

M: And make sure it can’t bounce back at you.

[Laughter]

P: We’ve all seen that on funniest home videos.

M: Youtube?

P: [Laugh]

M: Yep.

Write down what happened, and write down then the behaviour that you want to forgive.

P: Get specific.

M: Not the person, the behaviour. So what was it that was done to you that you want to release and move on from.

P: In that way, it’s possibly more about identifying the issue rather than making it personal about the person.

M: Yep.

P: And if you have to change the name of that person, if you have to change the name of that person, that would change the way that you reference them. That could be a really good tool to unlocking that personal attachment to the grief.

M: Yep. Then, once you’ve written down what was done, the behaviour that impacted you;

Write down how it has impacted you.

So what were the repercussions of what happened so look at how you have changed, how you trust others, how you behave, how your life has been impacted because of the thing that happened and also how it has made you feel.

P: Mmm.

M: I want you to take the time here to really explore that, particularly if you’re talking [about] things that happen in your teens that you’ve been sitting with a decade or for a long period of time. Really explore and take the time to explore how you’ve been impacted and how it’s made you feel and name those emotions.

P: That’s going to be tough for some people, to be specific and named those.

M: Yeah, Fred.

P: Yep

[Laughter]

P: Fred, Jasper, Horace.

[Laughter]

M: Yep, So;

Name your emotions and name the impacts of those emotions.

How they impacted your life and take as long as you need in this step, don’t “under bake” this step.

P: Mmm.

M: So it’s about really feeling that pain, acknowledging it. And you might need to do this over a few hours or days or months, and you might want to actually revisit this step for years to come.

P: Hhmm.

M: [Be]cause it’s only with hindsight that we often really get clarity over how these things have impacted us.

P: Definitely, yes.

M: So, firstly commit to it. Secondly, reflect. Thirdly, and this is the hard part, understand?

P: Mmm.

M: So without judgement, you want to try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, not so that you can forgive them, but so you can hopefully try to understand what they might have been thinking, feeling and doing that led to that behaviour.

P: And I don’t think you’re trying to justify their actions here.

M: No.

P: You are just putting yourself in their position. To understand where that action has come from.

M: Absolutely. And you might come to the realisation that they’re just a mean person, and they’ve got no reason or why you might not get a why. Don’t expect a why, some people behave in ways that we will never understand. Some people are cruel and horrible and mean period. Some people have had experiences of their own that shape their behaviour, and you might end up feeling sympathy or sadness for what led that person to behave the way they do.

P: Yep.

M: But you might not get that why.

P: Mmm. Yep.

M: So this is purely about trying to understand what might have led to their behaviour.

P: Mm hmm.

M: It’s not about condoning their behaviour or agreeing with it. It’s about trying to understand why they might have acted the way they did.

P: Ok.

M: And lastly;

Letting go and moving on.

So then, in the end it’s about choosing forgiveness, so it’s about being able to honestly, say to yourself I understand why this happened. It was painful. But now I choose to move forward with my life, and I’ll work to make sure this no longer shapes me, my decisions or my behaviour.

P: You could do this externally as well, and this is where you can get creative with this part of the process. The pagans used to have a yule log that they used to put their grievances or issues or concerns into, on a piece of paper that was put inside the log on. Then it was a lit, and it was burned and that was a physical way of being able to let go off something that maybe had been an issue or a negative emotion or a negative experience on releasing that out. So, you know, you can be a filthy barefooted hippie running through the fields naked and screaming to release whatever demon is inside of you and this is where it can be creative. And if that works for you, go for it.

M: I’d love to see you do that.

[Laughter]

P: A wailing Banshee with ribbons in my hair. [Laugh!] Visualise it people.

M: Oh, I am. The thing is you’re bald, so it’s not a great visualisation.

[Laughter]

P: I can put on a wig.

[Laughter]

M: All right, so this last step… and look, we’re talking about these four steps like they’re easy and they’re not.

P: Oh, definitely.

M: Their absolutely not. They take time. They take commitment in the end just like we were talking about the beginning of the episode it is purely for you to be able to release the negative energy and negative emotions and the hold that someone else’s behaviour is having on your current life so that you can move forward.

P: Yep. I agree, love it.

M: So before we go, then, Pete, do you have any one that you need to forgive?

P: Yes, I’ve got someone in mind. Definitely.

M: You do.

P: Betrayed the friendship, didn’t trust the friendship.

M: Oh.

P: Yeah, so it ended in a very public display of aggression, which was not warranted and yeah, didn’t trust in the friendship that was there. So that was, and that to me is very deeply hurting when you’ve spent time developing a friendship. Yeah, that was that was tough and I had to understand why that was and I had to let time do its work and give myself time and space where I actually had to remove myself from the situation and that took a few weeks and then slowly reinvest and slowly get back in touch but perhaps doing that forgiveness exercise really helped with allowing me to be free from the hurt that I experienced in that situation that occurred.

M: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

P: And I think giving the time is the really important part.

M: Yep.

P And take as much time as you need.

M: Absolutely, throw things, go out into the bush and yell and scream.

P: That’s a really good one. That’s a brilliant one. Go where no one can hear you. Caves are wonderful.

M: Yes. The echo, [laugh].

P: Really helpful.

[Laughter]

P: Go and sing a really big rock song or something at the top of your lungs.

M: Or just find a punching bag.

P: Some people can do that. Definitely. [Laugh]

M: All right, Well, on that note, we are out of time. So thank you for joining us today. If you want to hear more. Please remember to subscribe and, like this podcast and you an find us and ask us questions at www.marieskelton.com.

P: And if you like this little show, please leave us a review, we would really like that.

M: Yes, that would make us happy. Until next time.

P: Choose happiness.

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Read Happiness for Cynics article Resiliency Is About Recharging And Self-Care, But Are You Doing It Wrong? , listen to our Podcast When it’s OK to not be OK (E25)

Getting in Touch with Your Feelings (E45)

by

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete discuss getting in touch with your feelings and why it’s so important that you express them. 

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast happiness for cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and speaker on change and resilience.

P: And I’m Peter Furness a toga wearing, butt baring exhibitionist of joy filled indulgences. Each week we will bring to you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: So if you’re feeling low.

P: Or only satisfied with life but not truly happy with it.

M: Or maybe you just want more.

P: Then this is the place to be!

M: And to take us one step further on our happiness journey on today’s episode, we are going to talk about feelings.

P: [Singing] Nothing more than feelings… [Laugh, de, de, de, du, du]

[Happy intro Music]

P: Right Muz, this is your episode. This is just for you.

M: Oh it is SO not for me.

P: [Laugh]

M: Before we do jump in though. I do want to talk about a great little news article. A school in Ireland has swapped homework for acts of kindness. Pupils at a primary school in County Cork were told they didn’t have to submit any homework, instead they’re asked to record acts of kindness they had carried out for friends and family.

P: Can you imagine being a kid in this school? You would be like “Yeah, I’m so gonna do this, I’m not doing any homework.”

M: Absolutely.

P: So this is very much like the schools that are replacing detention with meditation.

M: Oh, yes. Look at us softies.

P: [Laugh]

M: I thought you were meant to get more hard-lined as you get older.

P: I think a little bit of the science based approach to life has rubbed off on me Marie in doing this podcast.

[Laughter]

M: Absolutely. And this one I’m going back to my cynical roots.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And when we were talking about during this episode talking about feelings, you know, I said “[euch] I’m really not good at talking about feelings” and you said, “That’s great because I am.”

P: [Laugh]

M: But we’re really not only going back to our roots here, but we’re taking different, stereotypical gender roles here.

P: We are.

M: Because normally it’s the other way around.

P: In line with that, talking about feelings is very, it’s documented science backs it up, that men do not express their feelings as easily as women, and that’s become a socially conditioned premise that was instilled by our fathers and everybody’s fathers before them. It was push it down, suck it up.

M: It was society.

P: It was, the men were supposed to be strong and not be affected by emotion and look after the women that was our societal conditioning and this has changed dramatically in the last 60 years I think and we’re really seeing that totally being stripped away and men now are being encouraged to talk about their feelings and I think the thing is, if you’ve never had the opportunity to have the language or have those discussions at a younger age, which many men around my generation or a little bit older than I am, didn’t they weren’t encouraged to have those conversations. All of a sudden, it’s very difficult to talk about your feelings and come up with words or come up with the concept of describing your emotions.

M: For a long time I struggled to communicate feelings and because we were just told to suck it up and shove it down and move on.

P: Yeah.

M: Yeah it can have, ah, huge implications for your mental well-being, and I definitely felt the repercussions of not being able to communicate or even have the language or understanding or self-awareness as a teen to understand what I was going through, and I went through quite a rough period in my teens. My sister was very, very ill, and I didn’t know how to cope with that will deal with that, so it definitely can have very serious implications if you can’t talk about your feelings.

P: And we’re going to get to that further when we actually to talk about some of the research that is out there. Not talking about your emotions has a physical effect on your body, and we’ll come to that maybe later on in the episode. But I hear what you’re saying Muz, and I think it’s really important that we learn those lessons young because otherwise you do… People can go through half of their lives without expressing their emotions and not dealing with conversations that are difficult to have and not being able to be happy or be happier or find some sort of calmness or quietness in the crazy world that we all live in.

M: Yep, absolutely. So, what is some of the research that you found?

P: One of the articles that I was reading was on ‘The Conversation’, which is a fabulous website –

M: Mmm.

P: – that does a lot of research-based articles, and it talks about how we are socially conditioned to judge emotions. So as a society having negative and positive emotions is normal, but many of us in a social setting are taught, we instantly judge people who are having hyper emotions so we’re going to accept some emotions and reject others and unfortunately, a lot of those hard to have conversations that involved people speaking honestly and openly and saying things that aren’t comfortable fall into that latter aspect of being rejected emotions.

Having that permission to feel and to express your feelings is something that not everybody gets to develop in their teenage years exactly as you’ve nominated Marie with your example and it comes to us later in life. When you are having very intense feelings of fear, aggression or anxiety. Your amygdala is running the show so the amygdala is part of the limbic system in the brain. This is the part that handles your fight or flight response. So it has a lot to do with adrenalin.

M: It’s the elephant.

P: [Laugh]

M: If anyone’s ever done the neuro psychology of the Elephant and the Rider.

P: Talk about that Muz.

[Laughter]

M: Um… When your emotions are running the show, in the corporate that I’m in right now, they’ve done a lot of neuroscience and psychology based work to help teams perform at their best and we talk about the elephant and the rider. And even though you’re the rider sitting on top of your elephant, sometimes that bugger of an elephant just takes off and does its own thing.

P: [Laugh]

M: And it could take a while to get control of it again.

P: Exactly.

M: And that’s your amygdala, and that is the root of all evolutionary, deep, deep feelings of fight and flight and all that stuff.

P: Yep.

M: All that fabulous stuff that kept us alive and led to us being the top of the food chain.

P: Exactly, absolutely. And the effect of this is shown it’s that fight or flight response. Your amygdala will rule the show and say, “OK, we’re going to be in a fearful situation here, so we need to enact actions, so we need to pump blood to our brains, [we need] to pump blood into our muscles so we can run away. These kind effacts are all ruled by emotions, not only by emotions, but they have that physical response. So it’s really important to be aware of that.

And if you look at some of the research that’s come out of the UCLA, they talk about this limbic system and diminishing the response of the amygdala when you encounter distressing or upsetting emotions, call it ‘affect labelling’. So this is being able to identify issues and give them names. Be specific about the name. So this comes back to a previous episode that we talked about in terms-

M: Fred.

P: What?

M: Like Fred or Mark?

P: Aah.. what?

M: [Laugh]

P: What???

M: You said I was going to name them?

P: [Laugh]

M: I’m naming them.

P: [Laugh] Well that’s a curve ball, Marie.

[Laughter]

P: I’m thinking more about nominating emotions [laugh].

M: Ohhh, like anger.

P: You’ve gone with Fred [Laugh].

M: I’m feeling Fred right now.

P: Horatio?

[Laughter]

P: Okay. So, Lieberman, Eisenberg and Crockett from UCLA talk about affect labelling and how we can diminish this fight or flight response when it comes to experiencing emotions. So being able to be specific with your language helps to downgrade that neuroscience response.

M: Yep, being able to say I’m feeling angry because you took my red car starts to move you out of that ‘elephant zone’ where the –

P: Yep, exactly.

M: – elephant is running the show and into the rider zone and giving you control.

P: It’s that whole thing of being specific with your language it’s like I’m angry, I’m frustrated, I’m wild with rage, I’m slightly inconvenienced gay man, you know?

[Laughter]

P: But having that ability is really important because it does, as you said, move you out of the elephants space. You start to get more control over the specifics of that anger, and you start to unpack it. And that’s, that’s affect labelling.

M: Yep.

P: And the Southern Methodist University talks about this, Kouros and Papp undertook a study that looked at the effects of holding back thoughts and emotions and what that did to the body.

M: Ooh.

P: The negative feelings became repressions and what they found was that taxes the brain and body and makes you more susceptible to being ill or [having a] downgraded immune system or just feeling bad. Holding onto those negative emotions allows the body to internalise, and it has a physical effect of downgrading immune response and makes you more susceptible to disease and illness.

M: I would love to do a cultural study on this because I, when I went to George Mason University in the States, I lived with a Yugoslavian, well she was Yugoslavian way back then, a Puerto Rican and an Argentinean.

P: [Laugh] Wow.

M: And you could not get more fiery personalities. And I am a descendant from England and we do not talk about health. We do not talk about money. We bottle. We do not confront. We hide and I was, you know very good at all of that. And I remember coming home from class one evening and they were throwing plates and each other in the lounge room.

P: [Laugh]

M: They were that angry. They were going “Blah blah blah!” “Blah blah!” I didn’t know what they were talking about, but they were yelling, and they were throwing, and I just turned right back around and went to the library, I was like, ‘I cannot do this.’

P: [Laugh]

M: And the next day, they were best friends again. We have no crockery anymore [laugh]. But they were good friends. Whereas, you know, looking at that and trying to understand it with an outsider’s view I was completely baffled. If that had happened in my household or with any of my friends that I’d grown up with, we would never have spoken to each other ever again in their lives.

P: Yeah. Well, that’s it because sometimes you need to get it out and there are some people who respond to that. When you’ve got that externalisation of emotions like ‘I just have to stand here and scream!’ and then I’ll be okay.

M: Yeah, well, I think it’s something that Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, anyone who really was colonised.

P: From the English perspective.

M: He he, yeah.

P: Definitely, I think you’re absolutely right.

M: We hide or shy from confrontation as a rule, not always.

P: Yep, definitely.

M: And I think it’s well, as you’ve just shown, it’s to our detriment.

P: Absolutely, yeah it has a physical detriment to us.

M: How do you change that? Because I hate confrontation. Hate it.

P: Well, I think that again if you’ve been brought up in that environment, say, a French environment where you have a mother and father yelling and screaming, and then the next minute they’re making love on the kitchen table [laugh]. Generalising here.

[Laughter]

P: That might lead you to have an –

M: That might scar you too.

P: [Laugh] – understanding that nothing is held on to. So it’s okay to yell and scream because at the end of the day, you come back to that loving space or to that space where everything is accepted.

M: It’s also a far more psychologically safe environment for a child to grow up in.

P: Yeah.

M: Knowing that you can lose your shit and still be loved. And sometimes you might cross a line when you lose your shit.

P: Yep.

M: And sometimes you might need to apologise for not having control over your emotions or things that was said in the heat of the moment.

P: Taking responsibility for your actions, definitely.

M: Yeah, but you’ll still always be loved the next day. Whereas when you come from a family where you don’t talk about these things, the implication is, if you do, you’re not really following the script.

P: Uh huh.

M: And that you don’t know what will happen off the back of that, it’s not a psychologically safe place to be.

P: No. Interestingly enough, I had the same experience as a teenager. I was encouraged not to express my emotions or talk about my emotions and there was a lot of repression that went on and I was a very socially awkward teenager.

M: Oh, I can’t see that, I can’t see it at all!

P: Oh, it was very real. Someone sent me a photo a couple of years ago. My old dance teacher, Judy Joy, sent  me a photo going ‘I found this Peter, looking through my, my archives.’ And there’s this sully, horrible teenager staring at the camera going ‘what are you doing taking a photo of me!?’ I was like ‘Oh my goodness, is that me?’ [Laugh]  What and unhappy child. [Laugh] An unhappy 16 year old. Getting to the point of getting into university. Getting into an arts environment where it was much more expressive.

M: Mm hmm.

P: All of a sudden, I did have to start talking about my feelings and opening up. And I remember having conversations with people and saying “how do you just come out with stuff like that?” and them saying “You’ve just got to share sometimes.” And I said “but you shouldn’t do that.” “Well, you’ve got to trust the right people.” And I think this comes down to some of that hints and tips that we’ll come to in a second. It is trusting who you share with and finding the right person to share with. But once I started, oh it came out like a flood of torrent.

M: [Laugh]

P: Everybody started knowing everything about me because I was sharing all the time.

M: And now there are no filters.

[Laughter]

P: And that as well is not great because again creates difficulty in social environments [laugh].

M: Yes.

P: And that’s where we do, we start to judge the emotions before they come out. So if we can find a happy medium.

[Laughter]

P: I think you’re right that it teaches us that it is okay to express those emotions and to come out with them at the right time and take responsibility for them when you have lost your shit for example, because at the end of the day there will be in a loving environment. There will be support. There will be ‘it’s okay to have said that. Let’s now, let’s look at it and let’s dissipate the intensity of the emotion, the fight or flight response and let’s get you more calm shall we say.’ [Laughter]

M: And I think… Look there’s an initiative in Australia called R U Okay? where people are encouraged to talk about mental health and I fully support that.

P: Mmm same. The mission statement starts, it’s something simple like this, ‘It’s so important to get people talking.’

M: Absolutely. So, I’m not at all criticising the initiative, and I think it’s done great things for opening up the dialogue in Australia.

P: Mmm.

M: What I do caution against is opening up to people who are just going through the motions on that day.

P: Yes.

M: You need to just, you know, reiterating what you were saying there, you need to open up to the right people.

P: Mmm.

M: If you are going to our someone is they’re Okay, I think you’ve got to take a little bit of responsibility to be there for them if they’re not.

P: Mmm. That comes into one of the tips that I’ve got here is:

Allowing space and time without interruptions.

M: For the conversation?

P: For the conversation, yeah. It’s not just a question, and then ‘oh that’s great bye.’ It is about allowing space and time without interruptions, without distractions, locking yourself away if need be, to have the confronting conversations; And give yourself a time limit like it’s going to 30 minutes and we’re going to talk it out. And if we don’t get to the resolution in 30 minutes, that’s fine. We’ve started the conversation.

M: Yeah.

P: And having that consistent 30 minutes every week. Will tease out those little things every now and then, and that can be a really valuable way, especially for people-

M: [Gasp] Every week?

P: Yeah, it’s confronting, but this is, this is the commitment. You’ve actually got to commit to the process.

M: Why? How long are we talking about? Oh my goodness, Pete!

P: [Laughter]

M: You want to talk about feelings for 30 minutes every week?

P: Yep. It’s just like training the more you do it, the better you get at it.

M: Like, if there’s a problem, right? Not just ‘let’s talk about our feelings.’

P: Well, I will give you an example there. I know some French friends of mine who have a monthly meeting where they discuss their emotions within the context of the relationship.

M: I think I know who you’re talking about.

P: Yeah [laugh].

M: They’re talking about a relationship, so that’s a bit different. So there’s not necessarily something negative they’re trying to, to use your words solve or to get over. I think that’s a little bit of, that’s a relationship chicken, and I love that. I think that’s great. But talking about your feelings, for half an hour every week… oohh.

P: Until you find a point of resolution, if there’s an issue –

M: If there’s an issue? Yep.

P: – that you’re not expressing your emotions and if this emotion is eating you up and causing your physical distress.

M: Ok, I’m on board with that.

P: If you’re wondering why your stomach doing back flips and you’re getting acid reflux every, every time you eat a meal. Maybe look at what’s going on mentally, and these are the kind of signals that I think warn us to be having these conversations and that’s what, you would, you commit to something for a month of 30 minutes a week.

M: I would say, though, just to be careful with that word resolution.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: I don’t think that everything can have a resolution, and sometimes the resolution is that we agree not to talk about this or not to engage on this because we are on opposite sides.

P: Sure.

M: So there’s some great examples of families in America who were pro and against an anti-Trump and it’s torn their families apart because if they couldn’t not talk about that. So I think there are situations where it’s OK to not talk.

P: Uh huh.

M: And maybe if you’ve got lingering feelings or issues that it’s okay to instead of laying it all on a loved one, talk to someone who’s not part of the problem or the issue and go talk to a professional.

P: Absolutely, yeah. This comes up in some of the other tips that I’ve got here is:

Finding a method of communication that works for you.

Now that could be chatting. It could be writing. It could be a person to person, or it could be external. So it is about sharing that burden, and it doesn’t always have to be the same person. But if you’re not getting the right venting that you need from having it with the person that’s affected, then maybe you do need to go on seek external help, such as seeking a counsellor or psychiatrist that could walk you through those places because sometimes for people it’s .. much easier to open up to a complete stranger –

M: Mmm hmm.

P: – Where there is no judgement.

M: Yep, and sometimes that stranger is far better equipped to actually get you through a bad period.

P: Absolutely, definitely, yep. A couple of other things I’ll just throw out here because we are getting to the end of the episode.

Planning your disclosure.

So you don’t have to disclose absolutely everything. Make a list of things that you do not want to discuss and things that you’re willing to discuss in terms of having this conversation about your emotions. If they’re emotions that you… violence or abuse and maybe you’re not ready to disclose those. Put them aside. You don’t have to bring that all to the table.

Come out with a wide vocabulary.

Again we’ve talked about this previously on an episode, getting specific about the feelings and labelling them coming into that concept of affect labelling.

Talk with not about.

I like this one. Keeping about you and your feelings don’t get torn away talking about what so and so did to me and how that what they must be feeling about that bring it back to what’s about you so that you can really think about how your reactions are and how that conversation made you feel, rather than postulating about somebody else’s feelings and the last one.

Letting go of outcomes.

Don’t expect to all come straightaway or easily and that’s where the regular scheduling, sometimes the really important. As you begin to open up, you can start to maybe open up more and disclose a little bit more if you feel it in that safe environment.

M: Yep, I think let go of outcomes is important. But also be clear about what it is you want from the conversation so if you’re going to talk about feelings. Have a idea; Sometimes you just need to talk.

P: Yeah.

M: You don’t need a resolution.

P: No.

M: You don’t need someone to fix things.

P: Yeah.

M: You just need to process it yourself, and having someone to bounce the conversation off is really helpful and useful. But if you find yourself talking through the same thing, we can week out with no outcome, no way forward. It can be really damaging to be reliving this on a regular basis. Whatever it is that you’re coping with and sometimes you need a circuit breaker and something to move on from. You need to call it and say ‘I’m going to leave this here now.’

P: Yep.

M: ‘And I’m going to move forward with my life.’

P: Yep, definitely. I think moving forward is really important. But if that if that element keeps coming back to haunt you, then maybe there’s something you need to address. Maybe that is where you do need to seek professional help.

M: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for joining us today. If you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe. And like this podcast on Remember, you find us at http://www.marieskelton.com. A site about how to find balance, happiness and resilience in your life.

P: And please if you feel up to it, leave a comment or a message we’d love to hear from you. And a rating will help us out.

M: Yes. That would make us happy.

P: OK, until next time, Choose Happiness

[Happy exit Music]

Related content: Read Happiness for Cynics article Words That Can Change Your Mindset, listen to our Podcast Why You Need to Develop Your Emotional Literacy (E42)

How Job Insecurity Is Impacting Your Happiness (E44)

by

Happiness for Cynics Podcast

This week, Marie and Pete discuss why workers around the world no longer have job security, how that can impact happiness levels and what you can do about it.

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast Happiness for Cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and speaker on change and resilience.

P: And I’m Peter Furness, a road tripper, trashy pop listening, bed loving zealot. Each week we will bring to you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: So if you’re feeling low.

P: Or only satisfied with life, but not truly happy.

M: Or maybe you just want more.

P: Then this is the place to be.

M: And to take us one step further on our happiness journey. Today’s episode is all about how job insecurity is impacting your happiness.

[Happy Intro Music]

M: I think this is a big one.

P: Yes, this is a big one, I think you might be taking this one Marie. This is right up your alley.

M: Yeah, definitely. So I spent a lot of time in a previous life working with an innovation and emerging technology team and looking at macro changes in our society and lives. And job insecurity is really the result of a lot of large changes that are happening around the world right now that are impacting individuals. So it’s easy to talk about these big changes, but the, the result and the impact is that we’re a lot less secure in our jobs nowadays than previous generations.

P: That’s a fact that. That’s what I was getting when I was doing a lot of research about this. Is it that job security, is it a thing of the past? Have we lost job security or is it just low at the moment and it will resurface?

M: No.

P: It will rise like the phoenix.

M: [Laugh] No, it’s a thing of the past. Look, there are a few people out there who might be deluding themselves into thinking that they have job security and it is, it is just the smoke and mirrors of companies who are holding on to [a] past that no longer exists.

P: So this is a change in format for corporate, especially in that job security no longer is offered on the table. You could be gone in a moments, notice with redundancies or change in circumstances. We can’t expect job security anymore.

M: Absolutely, and it’s not that the corporate’s have all of a sudden gotten mean.

P: [Laugh] What do you mean gotten mean?

M: [Laugh]

P: I thought they already were.

M: I mean if you want to take a positive capitalist view of what’s going on from a corporate perspective, the original life expectancy of a corporate has dropped significantly. I think it’s about 15 years, and it’s just a reflection of how quickly the times are changing now. So the Fortune 500 companies used to quite often last for 100 years, or more. That just doesn’t happen today. And there’s a few companies that still have that long history, and they’re the ones that have been able to innovate and stave off all of the new competitors in their markets.

P: Right.

M: But it’s getting increasingly hard to be one of those big behemoth companies that lasts a hundred years and those companies now need to not only innovate but change at a really rapid pace, and in order to do that, they’re constantly needing to do new things and to move on from the old.

P: Right.

M: Which means no, no one person’s role is ever the same two, three, four years later.

P: So the days of staying with the company for 30 years are gone?

M: Unless you can re-imagine your role. And the problem we have right now in corporates is that they’ve stopped investing in their employees as much in general is a rule because they know that employees are, rightly so, they’re less loyal back.

P: Yep.

M: Because corporates are being less loyal to them.

P: [Laugh]

M: And what we haven’t yet solved in this space is who is going to train employees so that they can roll with the changes rather than just be kicked out every time there’s a change.

P: Right.

M: And how are we going to re-imagine our HR functions so that we can prepare our employees to take the next job, and the next job, and the next job, rather than firing them or making them redundant every time there is a shift, which happens more and more often nowadays.

P: Hhmm.

M: So from a corporate employees perspective, right now is a constant revolving door of people in and out of an organisation. And there is just this never-ending uncertainty and fear in the corporate person’s life just like a storm cloud over them. You never know when the next restructure’s going to happen, and they’re all really disruptive as well. It just takes time to get through them.

So there’s that constant change, and it can feel really unsettling as a baseline in your life. You go to your work, you work your 40, 50, 60 hours a week, whatever it is, and there’s that constant knowledge that you might not have a job next week or that there is just more change and you don’t have any control over that.

P: Right OK, so the big thing that I’m getting from that hole, that change and that emotion is there’s a fear. Would that be fair to say that there is now a fear of the job security? And so do we look at how to deal with fear? Is that going to negate the effects of job security on our lives?

M: I think there is fear, but it’s uncertainty. What we can do is a lot of the things that we talk about on the podcast, and we’ll get to some team tips later.

P: OK.

M: But before we do that, I also want to talk about low wage workers or blue collar workers. Or um.

P: That was my next question.

M: [Laugh]

P: We’ve talked about Corporate. How do we talk about the, the family greengrocer who’s had the shop on the road for the last 60 years?

M: Have they? Do they still exist Pete?

P: Well, I go to one. Yes, [Laugh].

M: They’re few and far between though to be honest.

P: They are, that’s a fair point. Sometimes I feel like there is a little bit of a, a push back to those days of supporting local.

M: Mm hmm.

P: And especially now, supporting local businesses and the small fry in the, in the big palette of workplace options. You know, dealing with your local people. You’re local barman and your local restaurant, your local butcher, for example. Let’s take that example. So, if we’re talking about blue collar work, how do we negotiate this environment for them?

M: Yeah, Look I think there has been a snap back to supporting fresh food and produce in Australia in particular.

P: Yep.

M: Having said that, there is still very much a, almost a duopoly you know, the Coles and Woolworths, big supermarket chains, definitely still have a huge share of the market, so.

P: Oh, completely.

M: Yeah, yes. So that still exists. But having said that, for a lot of low wage workers, the problem is not only the insecurity of jobs because entire industries are arriving, bubbling, collapsing. So if you look at the dot com bubble, designers, Web writers, all the rest of it, all of that came and went really quickly. And that’s moved on to something else and a million other things. So that is happening for small businesses. Not so much your green grocers and your butchers, but.

P: Not so much the service industries either, I imagine, as well.

M: Depending on the service.

P: There’s still a need for their service.  

M: Depending on the service. So you look at a mechanic. Nowadays, a car will tell the mechanic what’s wrong before they person pulls in right, because it’s done It’s diagnostics cheque.

P: True.

M: And the mechanic knows that he/she’s got to have a certain amount of electronic, engineering kind of skills to deal with the car. So even that industry is changing very rapidly, so there’s a lot of change going on. But more than that, what I want to get to with low wage workers is that most of them are not earning a liveable income.

P: This is appalling.

M: So, we’re talking about students, young people and part time parents who are not earning a lot of money.

P: Yep.

M: But more than that, we’re talking about primary wage earners, not earning a liveable income for them and their families.

P: Yep.

M: So they’re at work, full time and what they earn puts them below the poverty line.

P: Yes.

M: So in Australia, research by the Centre for Social Impact, conducted for NAB National Australia Bank, found that two million Australians experience severe or high financial stress. So that’s about 8% of the population.

P: Wow.

M: And more to that, so about 40% are living with some level of financial worry. So these are people who don’t know what to say that their kids at Christmas.

P: Yeah.

M: They’re worried that the car might break down and they’ll have to put a payment on a credit card that they won’t know how to pay back. They’re worried that the next dental visit is not going to be payable right?

P: Yep.

M: And they’re working full time jobs and a great example of this, and this is happening all around the world. A great example is a story that I found about a family called, Ross Timmins and his family. And they were on the popular TV show ‘Rich House, Poor House’ and it lets rich families and poor families swap lives for a week. Have you seen it?

P: Oh wow, No. [Laugh] I don’t know what that is.

[Laughter]

M: So it grabs a rich family and a poor family.

P: [Talking over Marie] ?

M: Yeah, absolutely. And they switch. They switch lives for a week. And despite,

P: Wow.

M: despite Ross working six days a week and up to 90 hours a week on a shipyard.

P: Woah.

M: And his wife working part time while looking after the kids, the Timmins family is in the poorest 10% of the country.

P: Mmm…

M: And during the week they lived in the rich family life, Sarah, the wife, said it was just so nice not to worry about the cost of everything. When we got to the middle of the week, I realised I hadn’t worried about money at all over the previous few days. It was a real mental break. We call the holiday for the Children, but in one way it was for us as well.

P: Yeah, yeah. That constant worry, it does have an impact on your on your whole mental state and that has a direct physical impact on your stress levels, your cortisol levels, how much inflammation is in your body, acidity in the stomach, all that sort of stuff. There’s a real, there’s so much documentary evidence out there that supports how much stress-

M: Mm hmm.

P: -and constant stress in terms of concern and worry impacts on our physicality.

M: Yes, absolutely. And that’s why I wanted to say, for corporate workers, generally, they’re, they’re just dealing with that uncertainty. For low wage workers, for blue collar workers, for up to 40% of our population, they’re not only dealing with the insecurity, but they live week to week financially, and they’ve got that cloud of financial worry hanging over as well.

P: Yeah, it’s the wealth gap issue we’re seeing in other countries around the world, which hasn’t necessarily hit us here in Australia. I, I assume, you might have a different opinion on that Marie.

M: No, we’re just the same as America and the U. K. A lot of developed countries have got the same the same issue,

P: Yeah, right.

M: So the 1% exist in all these countries. And the distribution of wealth has not been particularly equal over the last few decades.

P: Yeah, right.

M: And so I guess this is why we’ve been arguing for a while now or looking into what’s happening in their happiness and positive psychology space when it comes to countries that are looking at well-being as a measure instead of GDP.

P: And putting social structures in place to support that as well. So at least you can enjoy the space from which you are living, a little bit more easily.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Yeah.

M: Definitely. And then the last group before we move into what you could do about this, the last group to call out and the last macro trend to talk about is self-employed workers and the gig economy.

P: Ooh, that’s me!

M: Yes, valid point.

P: [Laugh]

M: And a lot more right now we’re seeing people you know, these are the mompreneurs.

P: Ooh.

M: Or you know, IT workers who jump from.

P: I haven’t heard that one before.

M: So it’s the mum, mum bloggers who are selling training courses on their blog, or the, the more traditional IT workers who jump from contract to contract or temp workers, small business owners, uber drivers and students who make jewellery and sell it on eBay.

P: Yeah.

M: Designers who sell editing services through new marketplaces online that have been enabled, like fibre and air tasker and all of those great places where you sell services.

P: Yep.

M: So this is a new and booming area and way back in 2001, Dan Pink, Daniel H. Pink wrote a book which is still so relevant, called Free Agent Nation, which started talking about this. And the reason that this is good is that people get their flexibility. They have ownership, they have agency, and they can really create a career that works for them. If they want to work at midnight because they look after the kids in the morning, they can do that.

P: Yep

M: And it looks very much like a lot of corporate people right now. They’re all working from home with track pants on and kids running around in the background.

P: Grabbing an hour after they’ve put the kids in for tea, having an hour on the computer to do some work. Yeah, definitely.

M: Yeah, looks like that. The problem, though that we’re finding is that there comes a whole lot of insecurity there because we don’t have the social structures, the government support and safety nets in place with these employees.

P: Yeah, mmm.

M: And corporate employees come from a long and proud unionised –

P: Yes.

M: – background in history that ensures that they get certain rights that have been built into law in a lot of countries.

P: Mm hmm.

M: Gig economy workers are so new that a lot of governments haven’t worked out how to give from the same safety nets and rights that corporate or full time employees tend to enjoy.

P: Definitely.

M: So again, you can be fired or just not paid. And how do you go chase someone in the World Wide Web?

P: Mmm.

M: To get paid for things, so there’s a lot of uncertainty that comes out of that way of working as well.

P: Yeah absolutely, there’s a lot more risk involved in terms of having to negotiate the fear in the field. And I know that companies that you do use online I mean, I use Stripe and I use PayPal. Paypal I feel is a very strong one in that they are there to protect the consumer so that if, if, if goods don’t arrive or that if funds aren’t received, you can actually prevent payments or there’s a recompense. And so I think that those kind of companies actually do provide an important service in this new gig economy, as it were.

M: Yep, but there is so much more. So a corporation can’t fire you without giving you notice. But if you’re a gig economy worker, people could just-

P: Not pay you.

M: -pull your contract, exactly. Yeah, pull your contract within 24 hours.

P: Yeah.

M: So there’s, there’s still a bit of work to be done with most governments around the world. I don’t know that anyone’s really nailed this to give the gig economy and self-employed workers similar or enough of a safety net.

P: Yep.

M: So that they can go do what they do.

P: Sure.

M: And to give them a bit more certainty and security.

P: Mmm, mm. So in the last few minutes, let’s look at what things that we might be able to do to try and way lay this uncertainty that surrounds us in the new economy. Marie, you’ve got some, you’ve got a little pre-empt that you wanted to say on this one.

[Laughter]

M: Sure, look, I think it’s worth acknowledging that some people are doing it tough and it is not about us minimising that at all and the advice is if you’re struggling, please talk to a professional. Same –

P: Reach out.

M: – if we’ve triggered anything in this discussion and you’re not, you’re not coping again please do reach out to a professional and.

P: I think that’s really important because that’s actually taking a little bit of control. And in place of fear and in place of the uncertainty. I feel like the most important thing is, is that you do trying to find something that you can control, find one element that you can control and target that on by reaching out to someone and going up to someone say I’m not coping and I need assistance that’s actually taking control It’s a really positive, proactive step towards being, a step towards getting away from that uncertainty.

M: Absolutely. And then I think the second thing before we get into your broader tips is just remember to not overextend yourself financially. There’s a great book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad that talks about what rich people do and they don’t buy mansions and they don’t buy flashy cars.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: And they don’t buy a lot of the things that society pressures us –

P: Yeah.

M: – into feeling we need to be a happy and successful.

P: Yeah, definitely. The whole. what would you buy if you won the lottery thing. Actually not much, don’t change.

M: Exactly, and a lot of happy people would buy nothing, so I think it’s just a really good general lesson. It is not financial advice. I have not taken your particular circumstances into account, just so we’re clear here.

P: [Laughter]

M: But I think it’s a really good point because there is so much uncertainty nowadays that having a really overstretched-

P: -financial situation is difficult at times.

M: Exactly. Yeah. Aside from that, Pete, there are some things you wanted to talk about for how we can maybe balance some of the negative with some positive-

P: Yeah.

M: – things that can help to maybe give you an umbrella as you’re standing underneath that financial entropic security cloud.

P: Yeah, absolutely. Look, this is, this comes from the mind tools website skills for [careers] and they really do talk about what’s the, the best way to respond it’s rather general advice, really, But it talks about controlling how you respond so in your circumstances where you are finding yourself feeling very uncertain. Try to get a hold on that emotional responsibility. Taking proactive steps like [those] we’ve already mentioned.

Getting value [for] yourself and giving value to your company or to your employer so that, that in turn, would reciprocate good feelings and a little bit more investment in parts of your employer or your company as such in going ‘well, this person’s really trying here. So let’s try and find a, a situation that we can either transfer them into or develop them further so that they stay with us.’

Looking for lateral transfers within your organisation, department transfers or even a different branch sometimes a change is as good as a holiday, as they say, so that helps to also up skill your communications and keep you relevant across more, more elements of the industry or the organisation with which you work, but within that as well, it’s also about valuing yourself and not allowing yourself to be taken advantage of.

Setting strong personal boundaries is a really important point, and in the same vein of being flexible and being broadly minded, assert yourself. Make sure that you’re not taken advantage of or manipulated for a bad negative outcome for yourself. Your outcome is just as important as the company’s outcome.

And keeping your technical skills up, making sure that the technical skills are there but also your communication and interpersonal skills, which I believe are called soft skills Marie.

M: [Laugh] Yes, we all know about soft skills in the corporate world.

P: I didn’t know about any. I mean, I don’t speak to client’s I stick them on a bed and they shut up.

[Laughter]

P: My interpersonal skills are probably through my elbows, more than anything, so [laugh] I need to look at that a little more laterally.

M: So I think a lot of those tips are really valuable. Show your value in an organisation is just a no brainer. But the one that I do want to reiterate here is to be taking control of your career and constantly looking for what’s next and how you can expand your skills and your interests and keep looking for the next opportunity. So keeping an open mind when things come along.

P: Yes.

M: And, they say nowadays, every 18 months you should be moving to a new team and growing and learning through that. So don’t move just because we say you should move. It’s about seeing things that interest you and taking a leap of faith and following the work. Yep, and that way it’s in your hands and your control.

P: Yeah.

M: You’re constantly updating your skills with new activities, and it makes you far more employable if not if, but when you’re made redundant.

P: Mmm.

M: Because it will happen.

P: Sure, yeah. I guess that’s the one thing we can rely on, that certainty is out there, it’s going to happen at one point.

M: Yep.

P: On that note. Let’s wind that up for this week. Thanks for joining us today. If you’d like to hear more please remember to subscribe and like our podcast. You can find us at www.marieskelton.com, a site about change, balance, happiness and resilience. You can also send in questions or propose a topic.

M: And if you like our little show, we would love for you to leave comment or a rating to help us out.

P: It would make us super happy.

M: Until next time…

P: Choose happiness 😊

[Happy Exit Music]

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