podcast

Why You Need to Develop Your Emotional Literacy (E42)

02/11/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete discuss Emotional literacy and how it’s a critical life skill for kids to allow them to grow into resilient well-balanced, emotionally intelligent adults.

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 holiday wannabe, a Corona free, filigree, apogee, pedigree, epogee. And if anyone can come up with a reference for that, I will send you a present.

[Laugh] Marie’s doing fist punches. Each week we will bring to you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: So you’re feeling low.

P: Or if you’re only satisfied with life but not truly happy with it.

M: Or maybe you just want more.

P: Then this is the police to be!

M: And take us one step further on our happiness journey. Today’s episode is all about emotional literacy.

[Happy Intro music]

M: So Pete, emotional literacy.

P: This is a big one. I’m going to take the cynic roll on this one.

M: Oh really!

P: [Laugh] Yeah, I think we flipped. I think I’ve become more of a cynic now, and you’ve become more of the Yogi practising meditative person.

M: No, I’m still not doing meditation.

P: Crap.

M: [Laugh] Not crossing that line.

P: [Laugh]

M: Not that I’m questioning the science.

P: No, no, no, no, but I need to actually get you meditating. It’s going to be a lifelong goal for me. [Laugh]

M: Can you meditate while you run on a treadmill?

P: Eh, you can… It’s very difficult though.

M: Can you do something competitive while meditating? Because then I’m in. [Laugh]

P: Yeah, no, I know your competitive nature, and it’s not gonna work.

Anyway moving on emotional literacy. So when I first heard about this term, emotional literacy, I turned into my mother. I started going ‘pfft, who wants to know about this shit ra, ra, ra.’ You know 1930’s woman. I was very much like, What is emotional literacy? I actually had to go and investigate what it was we were going to talk about this week. So I’m going to take the cynic role.

M: Ah.

P: So Marie, what is this emotional literacy that you speak of?

M: Sure. So I have worked in a corporate environment for too many years, a number of years, and as part of that we do a lot of understanding teams and how teams work together and understanding yourself and looking at neuroscience and psychology. And a lot of the teaming activities that you do in corporate environments rely heavily on decent emotional intelligence and emotional literacy. So for me –

P: -Well emotional intelligence I get, so emotional intelligence is being able to understand feelings and so forth. Let’s get specific about the literacy aspect of it.

M: Yeah.

P: I mean, is this something that I need to read about? Is this something that I need to go and do a two-day workshop on?

M: Not you.

P: [Laugh]

M: However, the thinking is, so words matter.

P: Yeah.

M: Well definitely is an ex journo/ corporate affairs person, So words matter.

P: [Laugh]

M: We’ve done episodes before on positive affirmations and mindset and all of that, and words definitely have an impact on our happiness and or, you know, emotional well-being.

P: Yes.

M: But in order to be able to move through tough times. So we’ve talked about how resilience is your ability bounce back from adverse events.

P: Yep.

M: And we’ve talked about the Kubler Ross change curve in the past-

P: Ooh, I remember that one, yes.

M: -and how you go through all of those emotions to come out the other side. While you’re processing, you need to be able to self assess, and so you have to have a certain amount of emotional intelligence to do that. But step one before you get to any of that stuff that we’ve talked about is simply having the words to describe what’s going on, because we can’t analyse-

P: Stephen Fry would be very proud of you right now.

[Laughter]

M: Why what did I do? It’s about words?

P: Yeah, well is. It’s all about having the vocabulary to be specific about words.

M: Mm hmm.

P: And when I came across the reading over this, it resonated really easily with me because of our vocabulary and our ability to describe what we’re feeling is really important. If you are very specific about the emotion that you’re feeling, it’s much easier to categorise that and look at the possible reasons around why you’re experiencing that emotion.

So frustration is different to anger and being able to differ between the two means you can pinpoint when you’re being frustrated, as opposed to when you’re being angry. And one of them involves a lot less heightened emotion. You can actually be a bit more logical with it, and so you can address those elements. And for me that was the real um… I want to say congruent. But that’s the wrong word. I’m getting too literal now.

[Laughter]

P: I’m getting fancy with my words.

M: It’s the important part.

P: I Think it resonated with me that words are important and that having at vocabulary is really necessary. And this is something that needs to happen as a child, right Muz?

M: Yeah. So the reason that we picked this topic for this episode is a great study that dropped only a couple of weeks ago, and I actually mentioned in our last episode as well. But it comes from the Centre for Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne.

P: Mm hmm.

M: And so they partnered-

P: My alumni am I now allowed to go [throat clearing noise]?

M: [Laugh] – so they partnered with a bunch of schools through Victoria to do positive psychology interventions focused on emotional literacy and developing kids emotional literacy. And –

P: Can we break that down a bit Muz in terms of positive psychology and emotional literacy? Can we talk just a little bit? Because I think that not all of our listeners may be aware of the link between the two.

M: Sure. What’d you have in mind?

[Laughter]

M: I’m not following where you’re taking me on this yet.

P: Okay, so what I came across when I was reading this report with the fact that they have this term PPI, so Positive Psychology Interventions. Is that correct?

M: It’s an activity. Let’s be really, really clear here.

P: Ok.

M: PPI or positive psychology intervention. It means we’re going to do an activity. And it’s based in the science behind, in psychology. Right?

P: [Laugh]

M: So what we know of positive psychology or the field of psychology that focuses on the positive rather than negative aspect? It’s an activity that is based in science.

P: Alright.

M: So again, this is just saying they did an activity with a whole bunch of kids about helping them to understand and develop their emotional literacy. And by that we mean be able to name and categorise feelings using words.

P: Mmm. There’s a great quote that I’ll grab here when I did some reading on this. And this comes from Claude Steiner, who was the first person to coin the term emotional interest in 1978 and he says that ‘Emotional literacy is the building block of emotional intelligence. When we develop our own emotional intelligence, we can access and develop information about ourselves and, more importantly, others. Without emotional intelligence, emotions remain confusing and misleading, ultimately impacting the relationship we have with ourselves as well as others.’

I really like that little sentence. It combines it all together in a really nice little package about what we’re talking about when we talk about [emotional] literacy, it’s about understanding what we’re feeling and how that affects how we relate to others.

M: Absolutely. And I think that we’ve grown up, particularly in Australia, with the older male generations being told from a very young age not to cry and not to show emotion and to man up. And don’t be a girl.

P: It’s a very British concept that one, may I add? [Laugh] Stiff upper lip.

M: Yes. As a result, not only have they not learned the words to use to name, to even name what they’re feeling

P: Exactly.

M: Because they push it all down deep. They also don’t process as a result, they don’t process those emotions, and you end up with really high rates of suicide in older men, particularly those whether you’ve got that rough culture like in northern Queensland. A lot of farming communities, country communities.

P: Yep, because they can’t deal with, they can’t name these emotions and it all becomes too overwhelming. And it it results in people not being able to cope. And this is why this work is so important.

M: Absolutely.

P: As an artistic lad in Dubbo New South Wales.

[Laughter]

M: You stood out like a sore thumb?

P: Yeah, just a little bit. [Laugh] But I think that’s the funny thing is that that’s why this does resonate with me. I read this and going, ‘Oh, yeah I’ve done this, I get this.’

M: Mm hmm.

P: Because having that understanding and delving into those personal emotions and being able to name them and target them and go ‘no, this is different to frustration versus anger and sadness versus despair. That is important stuff. And I think you’re right, Marie. I think that male, men in the old school world don’t have that ability, and they don’t have that intelligence because they’ve never been exposed to it. It’s like go out and beat the shit out of a punching bag. That’s how you deal with emotions.

M: Or you don’t even acknowledge them, even worse.

P: Exactly.

M: And we’re not talking about writing essays about how we’re feeling.

P: [derisive snort]

M: Exactly.

We’re talking about just simply understanding the difference between grumpy, tired, frustrated, angry and mad or sad, right?

P: Definitely, yeah.

M: Or overwhelmed. Or, on the flip side, how to actually identify good feelings, as well, and to celebrate those good feelings so feeling relaxed, relieved, proud and grateful, hopeful.

P: Yep

M: And being able to communicate that to people around us.

P: I love that love, that idea.

M: And sharing it.

P: And all the different things of positivity. It’s like there’s a whole cavalcade of experiences out there, it’s not just about being happy. It’s about all those things and I think that’s really important.

M: Yes, definitely. And the other thing that I find really fascinating. So a lot of schools nowadays are trying to help kids label their emotions and articulate what their feelings.

P: I like this direction I like this, fabulous. [Laugh]

M: And the great thing about that is when you’re overwhelmed with emotion, your brain switches to that old evolutionary part of the brain that is driven by needs and instinct. So you’re, you’re just reacting to the feelings you’re not thinking in a logical way. But by forcing someone who’s in that state to label the emotion they’re feeling it switches your, the part of the brain that you’re using into that logical analytical side.

P: Yes.

M: And by default, it actually makes you take more control over that emotion. That might have been overwhelming you before that point.

P: Mmm, mmm, can’t agree more.

M: So if you’re just really angry at something that somebody’s done to you and you feel slighted and you’re just so frustrated and angry and someone says, ‘Just help me out here what exactly are you feeling? The fact that you’ve got to process that and think about it switches you out of that anger.

P: Yep.

M: And already starts to make you feel better and less emotional and less at the mercy of that emotion, and I love that part of this labelling thing.

P: I agree.

M: So there is more science underneath this than just helping you to process it. And the other thing that I love is sharing that emotion in a positive, constructive way it doesn’t involve violence, it doesn’t involve lashing out. It is about sharing that with someone, and there is a… vulnerability to that. That means you’re actually in that moment, if you do it in the right way, bonding with that person as well, and there’s real value and support and connection that can come out of that.

P: And we’ve seen that in so many stories of the troubled kid. I remember teaching a boys dance class in Cornwall, in southern UK with a friend of mine. We were doing a boys only dance project and it was for years 7 to 9. We walked into this studio and we had this giant of the kid. He was 6 ft three and about 95 kg, and all the other kids were like, 5 ft and 26 kg. It was, this guy was a freak and Ben looked at me, and I looked at Ben and said, ‘Okay, what are we going to do with this kid?’ [Laugh]

We were doing partner improvisation, like he was gonna crush everybody and um Ben said, ‘OK, we’re going to throw him in with you.’ And I said ‘Ok, because I can handle 90 kg sure.

[Laughter]

P: And so we put this kid into, to working with me and using him as the demonstrator, and all of a sudden this proud, caring person came out and this kid was running around the entire workshop saying to his fellows, ‘No, no, you need to do it this way.’

And then after the first session, we kind of went into the teacher’s common room and we were sitting there and this person came up to me, said, ‘Oh, you’ve got Gerald in your class.’ And I said ‘Oh yeah, Gerald sure he’s the big kid. ‘We’re so glad he’s out of our class he’s so awkward. He is so difficult to deal with.’ And it was it was so amazing because then I was like ‘No, he’s amazing. He’s just, he’s so good. He’s so involved, is so connected.’ And it just took that change of emotional intelligence of understanding that, Yeah, he’s a big, awkward boy, let’s put him in a role that he can take charge. I’ll put him in a different situation and that changes his whole demeanour, changed his outlook and it changed the way that he interacted with the other kids. No longer was he being scary, man, he was the helper.

M: Yep, I think that shows your emotional intelligence.

P: Well, it does, but it shows the effects that what they’re talking about in the study is that if we can get this information out to kids at that level, when you’re dealing with these emotions and they’re able to identify their emotional states, put words to it and spend the time going ‘no, I’m not angry, I’m frustrated.’ As you said, that lessens the response.

M: Uh huh.

P: And you don’t get the kids who are being violent or lashing out because they’re able to, sit there with their emotions and go ‘no this is what I am and they’re being articulate about it. And that already dissipates the reaction by however many percentages you wanna label it, I would say you know, something like 50%. It makes someone so much more malleable. And so much more easy – not easier to deal with- more approachable you can come at the target together and that is a life lesson. When you go into adulthood having arguments with your spouse or something, being able to sit down and go ‘no, this is what I’m feeling.’

M: Mm hmm.

P: It’s a really important skill.

M: And it goes different ways. It enables people who struggle with saying ‘no’ to get over that as well, so people who have been silenced, who have grown up in families where Children were to be seen and not heard and have been told that achievement is everything and that there’s a certain type that comes out of that type of upbringing.

P: Yeah

M: There’s also a certain type who have never been taught how to label their emotions and work through their emotions because it’s girly or whatever.

P: Yes.

M: Or whatever, you know, insert weird reason here.

P: [Laugh]

M: And they’re the ones that turn to violence because they can’t express themselves any other way, and it bubbles up on boils over. And Australia has a huge problem with family domestic violence.

P: Absolutely. I can’t agree more. And I said that’s why this work is really important. And if we bring it back to the research group that’s in Victoria and they talk about building intentional emotional vocabulary. So we’re giving skills to children in this instance and using the interventions, which is activities as you are saying Muz, as evidence based informed activities to protect an increase our well-being by making us feel better so promoting feeling good and functioning well automatically puts us in a pathway to enhanced well-being. And that comes from the study that we were talking earlier.

M: Listen to you, ‘enhanced well-being’.

[Laughter]

P: It’s so scientific.

M: It make you happier, it makes you happier. Being able to work through your emotions quickly and process them and move forward is far better than staying in that dwelling weird space after a trauma or an adverse event. So it definitely helps to make you happier, which far better right?

P: That’s a brilliant point to end on, I love that. So it’s all good, good activities. Let’s, let’s, let’s finish on that one.

M: So well, we did discuss before we go that we wanted to provide a hint or tip for listeners and I think what we’re talking about here is how can we help kids cope with emotions and deal with emotions better? So, did you have anything you’d like to end with or any tips for parents to help their Children?

P: Talk about it. Talk with your kids about this sort of stuff and give them the vocabulary. So, use words like you would cue cards, give them seven options instead of two options to name their emotions and if you can do that, I think it involves a lot of what we’re talking about here with the positive psychology it’s being specific. They talk about being open minded to other people’s feelings and being aware of your effect on others. That, that emotional, emotional honesty practising emotional honesty is a really big point.

So if you can be specific on particular about your emotions, that means you’ve done the work yourself about what you’re feeling. And if you could encourage that as a parent and speak with your Children about that and be open to it. And if they come up with a word that makes you feel a little bit prickly, then maybe that’s something that really does need to be addressed and looked at.

M: Yep.

P: It’s a vulnerable state, but if you can have those frank conversations and really listen and be present, I think that that’s probably best tip.

M: Yeah, all right, Well on that note we will end today’s show, thank you 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.

P: If you like our little show, we’d love a review, so please leave a comment or a rating on our podcast app to help us out.

M: Yes, that would make us happy.

P: Until next time…

M&P: Choose Happiness.

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Read Happiness for Cynics article:

Words That Can Change Your Mindset

Fighting the Loneliness Epidemic (E41)

26/10/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete discuss the global rise in loneliness levels, what is contributing to the increase and what we can all do to build stronger relationships.

Site discussed during the podcast: Examining Emotional Literacy Development Using a Brief On-Line Positive Psychology Intervention with Primary School Children Jacqueline Francis *, Tan-Chyuan Chin and Dianne Vella-Brodrick Centre for Positive Psychology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia; tanchyuan.chin@unimelb.edu.au (T.-C.C.); dianne.Vella-Brodrick@unimelb.edu.au (D.V.-B.) * Correspondence: jacqui.francis@unimelb.edu.au Received: 14 September 2020; Accepted: 15 October 2020; Published: 19 October 2020

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 pop up cycle user, smartphone and techno abuser and generic loose cannon on a Sunday boozer. 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 if you’re 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, today’s episode is all about the loneliness epidemic.

[Happy Intro Music]

M: What is does Eeyore say?

P: I’m depressed?

M: Woe is me.

P: Oh well, oh well.

M: [Laugh]

P: I’ll just take another walk.

M: Someone like that. I feel like that’s what sums up my idea what our episode today should be about. [Laugh]

P: All right, let’s go with that. So we’re doing, we’re doing a Winnie the Pooh thing?

M: [Laugh]

P: Okay, so Marie the loneliness epidemic, is it all about Eeyore?

M: I think that’s a result of being lonely. And it is an epidemic, isn’t it, Pete?

P: Yes. Now I’ve got to admit, when I first heard about this, I was the cynical one my cynical hat went on. I was like ‘what, people aren’t lonely, how can they be lonely? Everything’s grand, everything’s wonderful and all this stuff about teenagers being lonely, oh pish posh, pish posh. But, turns out I was wrong.

M: Ha, ha. You’re wrong.

[Laughter]

P: No, There’s definitely a loneliness epidemic, definitely something that is becoming more important. And I think one of the one of the big indicators for me from the research that I did was that loneliness is actually a higher indicator of mortality than obesity and smoking right now.

M: What?

P: Yeah, according.

M: For real?

P: Yeah, according to a study done by the Australian Psychology Society in collaboration with Swinburne University in Victoria, the loneliness epidemic is becoming a bigger indicator of mortality than obesity and smoking in Australia as of 2018.

M: Wow. Well, I knew it was a problem. It’s really been, it’s been a hot topic. So burnout was big, loneliness just before that. This is a global problem, like many of the things that we talk about that crosses all demographics. There are some differences, though, right Pete?

P: Yeah, I’m finding with some of the studies that you’ve mentioned, Marie. I’ve got a couple of different figures and statistics down in here, and I do think, but I think the overall message is the same is that this’s a big indicator of what’s going on not only affects our mortality it affects our health, it affects our physical being as well as our mental well-being and the way that we live and the way that we interact. So this is all pre-pandemic Covid. Pandemic Covid has actually; I don’t know why I’m saying pandemic Covid, it should actually be Covid pandemic but anyway, we’re going reverse today.

[Laughter]

P: Pandemic Covid has changed the ball game a lot on brought this perhaps a little bit more to the floor. But we’re talking 2018 and 2017 and ‘15 in the UK they’ve been clocking the fact that loneliness isn’t big social problem and it’s causing a lot problems in terms of our health and the way that we work and who we are.

M: Yeah, and so the stereotype that it’s only in quotes “old people” is, is really false. It’s not just the elderly who are lonely. In fact, young Australians are reporting such a huge uptick in their loneliness, and it’s not necessarily that they don’t have people around them and that they don’t have family and they don’t have friends-

P: Yes.

M: -at school. It might just be that they’re not getting what they need or their relationships they have aren’t meeting their needs, and that could be because they’re too superficial, which is a another whole episode as well. But we have a lot of Facebook friends nowadays and social media friends that are very superficial, and you can feel that you’re connecting and you’re just not, right?

P: Yes.

M: And what that does is that it leaves a lot of people feeling unsupported and disconnected, and they feel lonely, even though they might have a lot of people around them. So I think that in particular really applies to the younger generations vs the older generations, who we’ve known for quite a while have a higher incidence of mobility issues and at times lose their licences and their ability to get out and into society and have those strong relationships.

P: I do agree, to a certain point. There’s some interesting stats in the study that I found though that are saying that in Australia in 2018 the over 65 were dealing really well. The two brackets that Swinburne University in the Australian Psychological Society clocked as the most lonely are the 18 to 26 year old’s and the 56 to 64 year old’s. The 65 year old’s and up are doing really well. [Laugh]

M: Well, they were until Covid, Yes.

P: Ah well that might be the changing.

M: Yeah, yeah. And then everything has just gotten really bad, social isolation says it all right? and social distancing. And I know there’s been a lot of discussion about terminology and being really clear that social distancing doesn’t mean not having relationships and connection. But the long and the short of the isolation is that we’re having to rely on technology to have relationships a lot more often, and that’s just nowhere near as good as face to face communication for a sense of connection.

P: And we’re not as good at it. Yeah, we’re not as good at it, apparently. So some of the things that have come out in terms of dealing with loneliness from some of the studies that I’ve done are talking about the way that we use social skills and this will apply definitely 18 to 25 year old age bracket is that we’re not developing our social skills sufficiently in our teenage years to take us through to that next stage where we get off the devices we get off the zoom calls on, and we actually interact on a one on one or a group basis on. And I think that that is where went falling short slightly for our young people and we’re not giving them the social skills to deal with going out there and making those true friendships that you talked about earlier Marie.

M: And it’s also about having a level of emotional maturity and understanding and an ability to reflect and to have tough conversations with people and to be uncomfortable.

P: Yeah.

M: And there’s a whole lot in there. And there’s research that came out today actually, in Victoria, I have to go find the study, and I’ll post it in our show notes. But they have done some research with some schools and Victoria to help kids with positive psychology interventions. And it was all focused around giving them the language to talk about their emotions and their well-being.

P: Aah, interesting.

M: And they’ve found that being able to vocalise what’s going on really helps people to- sorry – helps kids, to have better mental health outcomes. So it’s impacting their relationships, their connection with others. So I will put that in the show notes. But I think that if you’re spending all your time on social media in your teens, back to your point, in your, your younger years and you’re connecting with a device rather than a person, you can quite easily miss the lessons that we used to learn in the playground.

P: Very true, very true.

M: You know, if you don’t keep Sally’s secret, then you’ll be ostracised from the group for sharing, you know?

P: [Laugh]

M: That kind of thing, so you learned to keep secrets.

P: Good old Sally.

[Laughter]

P: All right, so one of the things that I found with the research that I did was that loneliness actually affects our health. And I guess this relates to regular what we’re talking to here in terms of the happiness. Loneliness, we know is not good for us, but it actually affects our physical health. And some of the points that have come up with the studies from big health that I saw and from the Australian Psychological Society is that loneliness affects our physical health.

Now there’s a lot of research out there about how it affects our mental health and how we have less social interaction, fewer positive emotions, we’re less likely to be resilient. But there’s a physical impact, things like headaches, stomach problems and one of the most interesting, we have a worsening sensation of physical pain if we’re lonely, that goes a lot back to our central nervous system and the way that our body and our brain interprets pain. But even things like greater difficulty with vision and communication. These are, these are real physical factors, these physical symptoms from an emotional condition.

M: Again going back to, you teaching me about these old Eastern philosophies and theories of mind and body.

P: [Laugh]

M: It is yet another example of how so intertwined our mind and bodies are. And I think you’re fooling yourself if you think-

P: That’s not very cynical today, Marie.

M: [Laugh] You’re fooling yourself if you think that they’re not connected nowadays, and there is centuries of Eastern thinking and research into this. But there is also Western science that now packs it up well for the cynics out there.

[Laughter]

P: Ok, so if we’re going to move on a little bit more about loneliness and how loneliness relates to us. I do want to talk about the ways the we can avoid loneliness. And if we’re talking about the kind of contacts that we have between relationships, we’ve got maybe three main ones.

One of them is:

The Family contact.

One of them is:

Our Friends.

And the other one that I want to talk about it is:

Our Neighbours.

P: Now Marie, as an Australian do you think Australians have good neighbour contact?

M: Our neighbour let us jump his fence the other day when we got locked out of our own home.

[Laughter]

P: Okay, now I like this. I like this idea. I want to ask what you were doing to be locked out?

M: No, we… I said have you got the keys? And he said yes. And he said, Have you got the keys? And I said yes. And this is what happens when you have been married and together for 15 years. You don’t actually listen to what your partner is saying to you. You just say yes.

[Laughter]

M: So we both left the house without keys. Just pulled the door shut behind us. So back to that relationship advice you’re about to give us Pete, listening is so important.

P: Contact between neighbours is a form of actually combating Loneliness and in Australia, our neighbour contact is not good. We have been shown to have less neighbour contact amongst our society than ever before and it depends on how many neighbours we do have. And the odd thing is that in the survey, the people who listed that they have no immediate neighbours actually have more contact with their neighbours than anybody. So if you live in the middle of the Outback and the nearest neighbour is 24 K’s away, you’ve got more contact with that neighbour than people in the city do.

M: Wow, I think the thing is though, that neighbour is also the closest possible friend that you could have. Whereas if you’re in the city, you’ve got thousands of people who could be friends in your immediate area.

P: Very true. This is fair, when we look at the big health study. It does talk about that in terms of proximity of people.

[Laughter]

M: I will say, though, having moved from Sydney to Tamworth recently that people in country towns are just that much friendlier and that much more open to new relationships, that much more welcoming and gracious of new people into their community. And I don’t know how to solve that because, having lived overseas, and I’m sure you’ve found it too coming from the country and living in many large cities Pete.

P: Mm, Hmm.

M: That cities are just so much harder to find a foothold in when it comes to friends and friendships and close relationships.

P: It is, and I think that the proximity of people to your living space makes you react in a certain way. Having lived in big cities and moved into smaller cities as well. In my time when you’ve got space around you, you’re more likely to reach out to the person that is closest to you. I think if you’re in a densely populated area, you’re more inclined to bunker down and hunker in and not necessarily connect with your neighbours because your space is private.

M: Hhmm. Maybe.

P: The science supports this Marie. I come back this up with figures. [Laugh]

M: It’s not the figures I’m doubting it’s your rationale for why.

P: Ok, all right. So if we look at the rates of how many neighbours you have, so people who list that they’ve got two neighbours or three to four or five to eight. The proportion of Australians with neighbours that they hear from at least once a month goes down after you list two neighbours, so if you’ve got three to four neighbours.

If you live in an apartment block, the figure is 15.9%. If you live with two neighbours, one on either side of you in a suburban house, 21. 1% if you have no neighbours, 30.4%. So that’s telling that living in an apartment doesn’t give you contact with your neighbours.

M: I agree but not because I want to hunker down. So having now, living in a house, I see my neighbours more often and I’ve had conversations with them and I’ve popped over the road to go say hi and introduce myself. Whereas I went an entire three years in my apartment block and only saw two of my neighbours on the floor so there’s ten apartments, I only saw two of them in that three year period, I only crossed paths with them twice.

And that’s the difference to me and both times I stopped and had a chat and actually with one of the people, they ended up looking after our cat when we went on holidays. But we had to have that crossing of paths in order for that relationship to start developing, and it just wasn’t happening. And I think that that is one of the downsides to the way that we live nowadays that has changed. That is leading to this loneliness epidemic. More and more people are living alone, but also more and more people are living in cities around the world, and there’s going to be a huge increase in mega cities over the next 20 to 30 years, so between now and 2050 and that means you’ve got to have high density housing.

And there’s been some really good work, again in the Scandinavian countries that they’ve got their xxxx together, where they’re designing different types of apartment buildings so that you have your personal space, your bedroom and a small receiving area like a small lounge room and then in the middle of the floor you’ve got big, open communal congregating and cooking spaces so you can sit and eat.

P: And I think this is the way forward it’s the design of our cities it’s the design of the way we live that is going to encourage the decrease in loneliness. And the stuff that I’ve come across as well talks about that in terms of the building of the community relationships. How to effectively manage loneliness to make people feel connected to their community. And this is where the big health study he talks about that in creating shared common interests and meaningful connections, walkable suburbs, community interaction and gardens and recreational parks, access to public transport, all those sorts of things. And that brings me back to my earlier point about apartment living faces more challenges for loneliness rather than those who live in suburban areas.

M: Mmm.

P: So if you live in an apartment block, you actually have to do a little bit more work to make sure that that loneliness endemic-epidemic doesn’t affect you in the same way. I think it’s, I think you’re right, it’s easier to make those connections in the country where you don’t have the density of population. A walk across the road does happen. You see your neighbour’s a little bit more because you might be in the backyard together. In the apartment buildings that doesn’t happen because they don’t have that structure of communal gathering or proximity that allows that private/public space. I’m getting a little bit confused there with my, um, with my references. So that might be another episode.

M: [Laugh] Another really cute story and I think that there’s so much negativity out there in the news, so I’m always really keen to share lovely positive news stories. There’s a great story from the UK from, from Frome in the UK, whether they connected an old folks home with a primary school and each group is getting ready to exchange happiness boxes and they’re going to come and share what makes them happy. So they’ve partnered on elderly person with a young person and they’re preparing their stuff. So they’re preparing little boxes and they’ll all meet and exchange boxes with their assigned person and share what makes them happy. And so one of the ladies has actually knitted a garment for every single kid in the class.

P: [Laugh]

M: And she said she loves knitting, but she loves it more when she can actually knit for someone else. But again, this is making those connections and they’re going to be solid connections. So these types the projects I just love, love this news story. [Laugh]

P: It’s great. I’ve got a similar one that’s actually a bit more local in Australia. It’s an Australian initiative called the Men’s Shed.

M: Yes.

P: It was a. You heard about this?

M: So my grandfather did Man Shed until he unfortunately, had dementia. So until it was just too much for him. Dementia and heavy machinery don’t go well together, sidebar for you kids. So he used to go with his brother every Tuesday morning and it is such a great Mental Health resource for older men.

P: Yes.

M: And also, the local Tamworth Men’s Shed were having a sale, their annual sale to raise money when we moved out here to Tamworth. So we went out there and they got me. I bought a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t need. But they were so lovely.

[Laughter]

P: The CEO David Helmers talks about this and saying that whilst they’re repairing items for the community and having sales, I’ll quote in here. “The most important thing is the men getting together, building those relationships, that brotherhood that exists in the sheds. They’re finding new friendships, but most importantly they’re finding meaningful purpose.”

M: Yes, friendship and purpose, two things that we’ve discussed many times.

P: The two really important aspects of that [quote].

M: Yes. Well, I think on that note we are over time again. We finish every episode with the same sentence of me saying “we’re over time again Pete.”

[Laughter]

M: But we might wrap it up on that beautiful quote. But Men Shed. If you do have some elderly man in your family and you’re worried about their loneliness levels, it is a great initiative, and I’m glad you brought it up Pete. So it might be worth checking it out. They’re all around Australia.

P: Excellent. That’s a good indicator for all of us to get out there and find that kind of community groups that might foster that sort of relationship building and it’s hard when you’re feeling lonely, I think, to drag yourself out and put yourself in the in the non, non comfort space. If I have one tip for listeners, I would say ‘say yes’ and follow up with action.

M: I’m going to add one tip in there, too, because I always have to have the last word.

[Laughter]

M: I will say if you’re not feeling particularly social because you are feeling lonely, then one of the best ways to get yourself out there and develop friendships coincidentally, is to put yourself at the service of others. So go spend a couple of hours a week volunteering.

P: Yes.

M: And there’s so many organisations that could use your, your time right now if you’ve got two hours; and you’ll be surprised how much giving others comes back to you.

P: Can’t agree more, can’t agree more. I would never have found you Marie if I hadn’t volunteered at the Volleyball Club, look at that.

M: [Laugh] It sucks you in doesn’t it?

P: Yeah [Laugh]

M: Anyway, thank you for joining us today if you want to hear more please subscribe and like this podcast as always, you can find us at marieskelton.com and you can send in questions or proposed topics there if you’d like.

P: If you like our tiny little show, Happiness for Cynics Podcast, we’d love a comment or a rating to helps us out.

M: Yes, that would make us happy.

P: [Laugh] Until next time.

M & P: Choose Happiness

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Read Happiness for Cynics article How To Make Friends As An Adult, listen to our Podcast The Importance of Being Social (E14)

Why you Need to Play More (E39)

12/10/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Pete and Marie talk about why we need to stop structuring all our time and start playing more.

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, BBC drama lover, sofa shopper, Jungle Gym partaker. 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 if you’re 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 take us one step further on our happiness journey, today’s episode is all about play.

[Happy Intro Music]

P: Play play play play, play play play play-

M: – Doodley do, do, doooo. Charge!

[Laughter]

P: It’s all about being a kid again isn’t it?

M: Oh, it so is.

P: Yeah, yeah. You need to play.

M: We just need more playing in our lives.

P: It’s good to play. It has so many benefits.

M: Absolutely, So there is again, all of science about how more playfulness in adults brings greater well-being. And so that’s what we’re talking about today. How to bring more playfulness into your life.

P: Lovely, so define play for us Marie?

M: OK.

P: According to the science.

M: According the science. Well is definition science?

P: I don’t know, we might have to consult the Collins dictionary for that one.

[Laughter]

M: Ok, so according to Jeff Harry, who has a super cool job, he is a Positive Play Coach.

P: I want that title.

M: Right.

P: “I’m a Play Coach”, imagine being at a party. “I’m an Accountant”, “I’m a Lawyer”, “I’m a Play Coach.” What? [Laugh]

M: “Should we talk about it at the dinner table?”

P: [Laugh]

M: So anyway, Jeff Harry teaches corporates how to bring more play into corporate world. And again well-being. All of it’s tied together. Everything that we talk about is all interrelated and interlinked. So you get better employees outcomes and better returns and better…

P: KPI’s?

M: No.

P: That’s the generic term. I’m going with the generic term, you’re the corporate here.

[Laughter]

M: You make more money. That’s what I’m getting at. Happy employees, happy bottom line.

P: OK, So what does Jeff say?

M: Okay, so he says one way to think about play is an action you do that brings you a significant amount of joy without offering a specific result.

P: I like that because again it’s again the buy in mentality. Just go in and let’s see what comes out.

M: Also, I think going back to the title of our Podcast Happiness for Cynics. I think a lot of adults see play as a waste of time.

P: Ooh, yes, yes, they do. I agree with you there.

M: And in today’s really busy and stressful world, it’s really hard to justify doing things that don’t feel productive.

P: Or don’t have a specific outcome.

M: And that’s such a shame, because play does have such a solid, tangible outcome. It leaves you feeling better and happier in your life and leads to better well-being.

P: Mmm. Completely.

M: But there’s this perception with play that it’s a waste. It’s something only kids do.

P: Wow, I’ve got such a different experience from that. [Laugh]

M: Me too, me too. Absolutely. But having said that, I think only because we’ve started looking into all of this stuff. Not because pre my accident and pre this happiness journey I would have ever thought about dedicating time to play.

P: Oh it’s been through my life from primary school. We had a wonderful primary school teacher, Mr. Burns (Bernasconi) and we were the envy of every other class because at a moments notice, he would say, “right books down, we’re going outside for a game of rounders. And all the other kids were like “why does Mr. Bernasconi’s class always get to go outside for rounders?” And he was a big believer in playing and that what that did for cognition and for behavioural development and all that sort of stuff, and also for being able to stay motivated and engaged with class work is by doing something physical and going out and having a play.

M: Absolutely. So the physical part of that, definitely.

P: Definitely.

M: There’s a lot of research. And again the Scandinavian countries are really good at integrating physical exercise with breaks during the day, with flow and deep thinking and learning and breaking up the day into short, sharp, deep exercises, whether that is swinging on the swings or learning math and breaking up your day that way.

P: Mmm.

M: But definitely it’s really good for your head and for your mind.

P: I also feel really lucky because with my theatre experience, acting, dancing, anything in the creative process, so much of it is just play. And I remember being in a studio once with a very well-known choreographer who would pursue these periods of indulgent play and it wasn’t to call-

M: -Oh, you said indulgent, which means you do think that it is not necessarily constructive.

P: No, in terms of the creative process. When you’re working with some choreographers, they’re like “This is the step, this is a step, let’s perfect it.” I say indulgent because it’s the way that the creative director would.. Oh, what’s the link here? It’s where the creative director would garner content so to create content. It’s not necessarily about ‘that bit there we want that’, there was this view of creating play and allowing people to go off and discover new things. It may not end up on the floor or in the performance at all, but it brought you to a different place that was able to bring forth other content.

M: So in no way was it indulgent, it was part of the creative process.

P: Well, no. Yeah, you’re right. I said a bad word.

M: Bad word, take it back. Take it back!

[Laughter]

M: I think it’s really important to take that to the corporate setting where a lot of organisations have realised that despite their intent to have every person in the organisation be innovative and to continuously improve the way that they do whatever it is they do, but also to come up with new ideas. It rarely leads to any big, ground-breaking, new innovative ideas. What does help though is putting people in that different mindset.

P: Mmm.

M: Breaking them away from their day to day and throwing weird and uncomfortable and all kinds of different experiences at them to put them in a different headspace.

P: I saw a lot of transference in the latter part of my performing career of people that I knew, colleagues of mine who have gone into the corporate workspace exactly for that purpose. They were brought in as theatre coaches as drama coaches to create new ways of thinking and result.

M: Absolutely. And creativity doesn’t happen when you are doing the same thing you do every day.

P: Yes, neuroplasticity. Which brings me to my point on play.

M: Yes, tell me about the link between neuroplasticity and play.

P: My take on play is that it creates a neuroplasticity of the brain, and this is all about offsetting the factors of life, such as cognitive diseases such as Parkinson’s and Dementia. So this is probably more in the latter stages of life for many people. But the value of play is that we’re asking our brain to constantly find new pathways and constantly find new reactions to stimulus that keep our brains active and offset that development of cognitive disease.

M: Absolutely. And look, it’s not just in the elderly. I think that for too long people have hated school so much often that it’s about trying to get through it, and then you never have to look back. And what we’re finding is that, that was fine when we thought that you couldn’t grow past your teens that you couldn’t make new neural pathways.

P: Yes.

M: But now we know growth mindset is a thing. We understand that you can continue growing and learning and changing through your entire life, and that with just a little bit of curiosity, you can make those new neural pathways, and you can stretch your mind so much further than we ever thought possible before. You can change careers to 2, 3, 4 times in your life and retrain, and you can teach an old dog new tricks.

P: Definitely, yeah.

M: And whether it’s sudoku and cross words or play or any number of other things. Keeping your mind active is the moral to this story Pete, when it comes to staving off mental decline in your older years.

P: And that’s where play can actually have a great avenue for change. Playing with different stimuli. I’m talking about sports. I’m talking about action flat rock climbing, one of the jokes a rock climber never does the same climb twice. You always end up in a different position, so you have to solve the problem of finding a new foothold or a new arm hold even if you’ve gone up that stretch of climb before and I like that analogy…

M: Sure.

P: [Laugh] I guess for me that relates to constantly finding new stimulus on that relates back to the neuro plasticity. Playing will often bring about new things and new aspects when you’re playing with someone especially, I talk about this in a movement concept because for much of my university, when I was doing a degree in dance performance I couldn’t play.

M: Why?

P: I was so nervous, I was too scared to play and I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine about it, Robert Gryphon, he was the big playful bloke. So Robbie and I were the two of the larger men in the class and so Robbie was always in there, rolling and playing. I was always standing on the side and he said, Why don’t you? I said “I’m too scared.” You’ve just got to jump in.

M: Mmm Hmm.

P: And I took that and eventually one day during I do remember jumping in and the rolling around, instead of going off in the corner and being quiet and [doing] yoga in the corner and it was great. It was fun and then that became a professional development later on, when I was working in a company in Adelaide and we were doing improvisational work and I remember working with Aiden an amazing dancer, break-dancer/ classical ballet guy. And we were in an improv session and the whole, the idea was you had rules and you just kept on moving. The idea was to have the rules so my armpit had to touch his knee, and my head was only allowed to go to the left. But you kept moving with that principle and I remember Aiden being underneath my feet and I jumped and I thought, I’m gonna land on his neck.

M: [Laugh]

P: And I landed and I’m gonna have to drop down here to not put my body weight on his neck and my leg crossed his neck and we both rolled we rolled out of it and we stood up and looked at each other and went “Holy crap! Was that alright?” He said “that was amazing. I said “Can we do it again?” And he said “Absolutely not.”

[Laughter]

P: But that all came about through play. Were we able to re-create it. No. Was it a specific outcome? No, but it gave us the confidence to stay in that playful space. And from there came many other things.

M: I think the great thing about your stories here is they’re showing that to truly play you have to let your guard down, you have to be vulnerable.

P: Yes, oh yes.

M: You’ve got to let the ego go.

P: Yes.

M: Because if you go into play, whether it’s with your kids or with a romantic partner or with your colleagues in a corporate environment, you’ve got to be okay with being silly.

P: Oh, yes, definitely.

M: And you’ve got to be okay with letting go that feeling of being judged because let’s be really, really honest, they’re not judging you.

P: [Laugh]

M: People participating, they’re not judging. They’re in it too, right? But you’ve got to get to that point and you’ve got to feel okay and safe. Psychologically safe with the people you’re around to let go and fully participate and partake in whatever fun play.

P: Fully participate is the key word there.

M: Yeah, so it kind of sounds like you maybe at the beginning weren’t ready to be vulnerable?

P: Well, yeah. I don’t know how, I was too scared to jump in.

M: And when you did, did the world end?

P: [Laugh] Definitely not but infinitely better.

M: Yeah, exactly. So I think one of the other great things of our talking about play in the current environment because we can’t go through a single episode without talking about Corona virus, of course, is that a lot of people around the world are just insanely bored right now.

P: Mmm.

M: They’ve been through their Netflix and Stan and Disney+ and they’ve re-watched all their favourites and they’ve seen all the cat videos. And what do you do when you’re stuck at home and I would challenge you to play.

P: It’s difficult sometimes to play in an environment that you know very well. It’s very easy to think ‘well, I know that room, I know that space, I know that chair.

M: For adults.

P: Yeah. Oh, yes, completely.

M: But you put two kids in a room together that they’ve been in their entire lives, entire lives, they’ll find a way and let them be bored.

P: Very important to be bored. We talked about this a couple times.

M: Yeah, let them be bored. They’ll find a way to play, right?

P: Yeah, there’s a creative way out.

M: If you don’t give them the technology as a way out, they will find a way. And for Adults it’s the same. We just don’t challenge ourselves to do it because we’re the ones that have the say on whether or not we pick up the technology.

P: Well it’s also there is ‘I’m the responsible parent. You know, I’m the leader of the pack, I’ll make the decisions and I’ll, I’ll make the facility happen. But I’m not going to get myself buck naked and roll around in the mud. Maybe we should.

M: Well, I think earlier rolling around in the mud you don’t need to be naked.

P: [Laugh]

M: But go roll around in the mud. You’re not going to catch weird diseases.

P: Well, see there. You’re putting a limit on it, you’re putting a limit on it.

M: I mean there’s… go build a fort then, or have a dance off.

P: There was a whole report about what forts do for child development, it creates havens, creates safe spaces.

M: Well, there you go. You don’t need to make yourself sick is what I’m saying, to play.

P: Yeah.

M: Find some clean mud and then go to town, fine.

P: [Laugh]

M: So look I think that it is easier to bring play into your life than you might realise. You can go Google a lot of different ways to bring more play into life. One of the ones I love is a dance off.

P: [Laugh]

M: A generational dance off.

P: Oh dear.

M: This is a great one to do with your family. If you can all name some different types of dances, so from 60’s, 70’s, there have been some classic dances through the decades and you’ll put them down on a piece of paper, pop them into a hat, and you have to do the dance and your friends and family have to guess what decade it’s from.

P: [Laugh]

M: It’s really simple, so you get up and you do the, you know, the swimming and the jiving and the Gangnam style there’s so many good things.

P: The Macarena.

M: Yep.

P: [Laugh]

M: And not only are you having a bit of fun, you know, it’s like a Pictionary night or something. Not only are you having a bit of fun, but you’re also doing a bit of exercise. So there’s a great research that backs all this up from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg [MLU] in Germany, and they did a study with 533 participants where they did a week of exercises to boost their playfulness. And they found that you can actually stimulate and train people to be more playful, and this, in turn improves their mood.

P: Training someone to be playful, ooh I like the sound of that.

M: Again, we’re not going there Pete.

P: [Laugh] Hey I’m going along with what was his name, Jack? Jeffrey? Jeff? [Laugh] Jeffrey Harry. I’m a playful coach.

M: Play Coach?

P: Play Coach.

M: I Love it. So I guess what I’m saying is, if you don’t feel like you’re particularly playful, you can train it so you’re not stuck where you are again back to that growth mindset and neuro plasticity, you can grow and become more playful.

P: Yes

M: It is like so many other things we talk about. It’s just about being more mindful. So the way that this study worked is before going to bed the participants either had to write down three situations from the day in which they behaved particularly playfully, or, they were asked to be more playful in their professional life and write down what happened.

P: That’s a dangerous sport isn’t it?

M: Well being more playful can just be being cheeky in a conversation.

P: Ok.

M: Right.

P: That’s a good example.

M: So and again, you don’t want to cross a line, cheekiness can very easily become inappropriate conversation.

P: That’s what I mean it’s difficult to take that kind of attitude into your workplace for a lot of people.

M: And I think, but it’s where we spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week.

P: Oh, I agree, it’s valuable.

M: So important.

P: I think it would be very confronting for a lot of people, ‘oh, I’ve got to bring this new concept into my workplace with all the people in suits and ties.

M: I think it’s a shame if you think that way. And that’s, I guess what I’m saying, I’ve had some great teams in corporate environments that have allowed me to be playful and have a laugh. And those were the teams with the highest performing team.

P: Oh, I have no doubt.

M: Absolutely we had a diverse group of people who all came together for a common goal. I sound like a textbook HR ad or something.

P: [Laugh]

M: We all came together, but we had a lot of fun doing it, and they were the best teams, and there were the highest productivity teams as well. Where as the ones where the teams were solely focused on the work really lacked that team environment, and they were the ones where you know, five o’clock hit and I’d be like, ‘I’m outta here.’

P: Yeah, ‘I’m gone.’

M: Yeah, exactly.

P: So what happened with this ah, with the results of this study.

M: So again, it’s down to being more mindful about playfulness. If you want to bring more playfulness into your workplace or if you want to bring into your life at home, if you want to play with the kids more.

P: Absolutely.

M: Yeah, but so many parents just so driven by the checklist. This is another thing you need to add to your checklist, but you have to deconstruct it and make sure that it is not being driven by a need to have a result. You just need to play.

P: It’s funny I tell some of my clients, get on the floor with kids, or get on the floor with the cat. Play with the cat, play with the kids. Use the kids as the weight, as the resistance band.

M: [Laugh]

P: You’ll do things that you never thought you would have done before. The kids will love it.

M: Yep, absolutely. So the fact is, they journaled on this for a while.

P: The group in Germany?

M: They wrote it down, yeah the group in Germany. And they got so many more improvements to their positive emotions, which in turn affected their wellbeing. It worked, so it increased their playfulness and they also saw improvement in participants Wellbeing.

P: I just know this from the inside. [Laugh]

M: You do, which is why you’re here. I have to learn it.

P: [Laugh]

M: And I’m bringing our listeners along with us.

P: [Laugh]

M: Our cynics. You just do it. [Laugh]

P: I was very lucky. I was very lucky to have been involved in the profession that I was in that completely encourages this and it is that wonderful space of seeing colleagues of mine having gone after the corporate world. It’s not challenging. ‘What do you mean you don’t hang upside down with your underwear around your head?’ It’s completely normal to do… Yeah.

M: And on that note.

[Laughter]

P: Thanks for joining us today.

[More laughter]

P: If you do want to hear more about hang upside down and wearing underwear on your head, please remember to subscribe and like this podcast, you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, a site about how to find balance, happiness and resilience in your life. You can also send in questions will propose a topic for us.

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

P: That would make us very happy.

M: Until next time.

P: Choose happiness.

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Listen to our Podcast The Importance of Having Fun In Your Life with Dr Mike Rucker (E27)

Self-Care is Church for Non-Believers Pt 2 (E38)

05/10/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

In this episode, we revisit the popular episode that was the inspiration for our new book: Self-Care is Church For Non-Believers. We explain how a decline in church attendance and an increase in overall scepticism mean that many of us no longer prioritise self-care activities. Yet, we need to prioritise strong self-care habits more than ever.

As the Dalai Lama said, “I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in that religion or this religion, we are all seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness…”

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast Happiness for Cynics, I’m Marie Skelton.

P: And I’m Peter Furness. And

M&P: We wrote a book!

P: [Laugh] But back to the Podcast. 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 if you are 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, today’s episode is all about the premise behind our new book, Self-Care.

P: Aww.

[Happy Intro Music]

M: So Pete, it’s time to ditch the cynicism and buy in the Self-Care.

P: Woof.

M: [Laugh]

P: I love it when you’re aggressive.

M: [Laugh] So, this is the whole idea behind the podcast but also our book, which was a spin-off of one of our earlier episodes where we looked at Self-Care. And in the end we kind of came to the conclusion that it was something that a lot of people, who were following religions and going to church, were actually already being taught and doing but without knowing it. And a lot of people have been practicing the types of interventions that are scientifically proven to make them happier simply by going to church.

P: There we go. The church people had it right.

M: Now there’s a problem, because less and less people are going to church nowadays.

P: Oh, yes, yes. The decline in church attendance, the decay of our moral fibre’s, the politicians are weeping.

M: The Ministers, Priests.

P: Oh, I thought the politicians were, oh well.

[Laughter]

M: So that was conundrum number one. One thing that’s changing our society. And the second thing is, particularly in Australia, we’re all cynics.

P: Ah, I like this concept. Are Australians truly cynical.

M: We tend to be.

P: Mmm.

M: Australians, we’re a cynical bunch.

P: Yeah, we are cynical, it’s part of our humour. Part of our sarcasm and wit is to be a little bit cynical and not take anything too seriously.

M: Yep, absolutely and we’re well known for it as well.

P: Yep, yep. Very true. But are we cynical to the point of being detrimental to our own happiness?

M: I think that around the world, all people are. So whether or not you buy into Self-Care, a lot of people aren’t practising Self-Care, whether it’s because of cynicism or because life just gets in the way.

P: Mmm.

M: We are seeing a huge rise in loneliness, anxiety, stress and depression. And it’s getting even worse during Corona virus. So we need to do something. We need an intervention here.

P: Interesting. So we all need to be a little bit more aware of Self-Care and it may be a little bit more, shall we use the “I word”, indulgent?

M: No, don’t use the “I word”!

P: [Laugh]

M: And this is the second conundrum that we discuss in our book. So the first one is we’re not going to church as often, and that’s due to people not believing in God as much so that that makes sense, right? We’re not saying here at all that you need to believe in God or that you don’t. We’re completely agnostic on the religious front.

P: If God works for you, you go there.

M: Yep, absolutely.

P: Definitely.

M: What we are saying, though, is that if you’re not going to church and therefore doing a lot of these interventions that bring a more positive mindset and more happiness and Well-Being, then you need to do something else.

P: I think it comes down to being spiritual and again. This is a.. This is the cynical viewpoint that comes back about the minute you mentioned Spirituality in a conversation over this dinner table. A lot of people roll their eyes, and go ‘Oh, here we go, here come the angel stories and the crystals and all the dream catchers and all that sort of stuff. There’s this kind of assumption that Spirituality is an indulgence. [Silly voice] “It’s a cosmic energetic transference and trans-mutation.”

M: You might call it that. I would not call it that.

P: I’m not saying I call it that but this is the impression that you get and I’m usually the person at the dinner table starting to quote the Spirituality conversation, or lead the conversation in that direction. And I get this push back a lot from different people and the cynics of the world to come forth and go ‘Oh, that’s just bull shit.’

M: Yeah, I think it is. Yes.

P: [Laugh] And yet, and yet-

M: So back to Self-Care, which I do not call Spirituality.

P: No, I think there’s a link here. I think that if we look at, look at the fact of church attendance and the link between church attendance and what it does to all the Self-Care elements that we clocked.

M: Yep.

P: If you replace that church attendance with Spirituality, Spirituality has a huge factor of the same concept of giving you meditation, making you gracious, making you aware of these Self-Care elements that you put into your life doesn’t necessarily have to be religion.

M: Does it? Again, I’m not spiritual in anyway. So when you say spiritually, what do you replacing God with?

P: Oh, we’re taking, we’re taking religion out of the equation. We’re going with something a little bit more left of field. So we’re going with the people that might be pagans, for example, or practise energetic Healing Arts, those kind of, maybe even more Eastern practises that have gone into that realm of Crystal Reading and Tea Leaf Predicting, those sorts of things.

M: Well each to their own.

P: Exactly.

M: But I wouldn’t say that they cover off Awe, Gratitude, Service to Others, Meditation all of the things that a traditional church does.

P: I’m going to challenge you on that, Marie.

M: So Tea Leaf Reading is an activity in and of enough itself and I wouldn’t say that it teaches you all of those things that a traditional church would cover off.

P: Okay, I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that one, because I think it does. There’s a lot of, there’s giving of the self. There’s an investment of another person in Tea Leaf Reading for example, if you read your tea leaves, I’m offering you a space that is more reflective, I’m being gracious towards you. I’m giving you my energy.

M: Is that part of the teaching of a Tea Leaf Reader.

P: Well, I’m not a Tea Leaf Reader so I couldn’t necessarily say that.

M: Well there is the problem with your argument.

P: [Laugh] Well, I hope we get some Tea Leaf Readers writing in, right now.

[Laughter]

M: So, I guess what I’m calling out here is that the particular Spiritual vocations or activities that you’re calling out are very distinct and activities that don’t span the full spectrum that a normal church environment would. So you’re not being given morals and activities and that societal responsibility that comes with a traditional Christian or Muslim church type environment or, or any of the major religions which ask you to not only consider yourself and your own behaviours, but to consider society. Tea Leaf Reading doesn’t have that larger, holistic, life style impact, I would argue, and again back to the whole reason why we’re talking about all of this stuff. Religious or Spirituality, Religion or Spirituality aside, we need to stop calling these things indulgences. Or –

P: That’s what I meant.

M: –crazy crackpot religious ideas, they’re not. They are science backed.

P: So, Self-Care is not an indulgence.

M: It’s not an indulgence, and it’s not for the weird spiritual or religious people. It is so important. And this year we’ve seen such a huge rise in mental health issues across the board, across every demographic all around the world, we’ve had changes to our society, and people aren’t coping.

P: You’ve got a couple of quotes there Marie from the Pew Research Centre and the Edelman Trust Barometer.

M: Or research, yeah definitely.

P: This is about the rise of employees losing their jobs, working mothers find it difficult to balance work and family life. In the World Health Organisation, noting that depression anxiety have an estimated cost to the global economy of $1 trillion a year in lost productivity.

M: It’s becoming an epidemic. Sorry lets, it is an epidemic.

P: Mmm.

M: World Economic Forum has done a lot of work on loneliness.

P: Mmm Hmm.

M: Burnout, last year was a hot topic. Stress and anxiety have been going up for years. Trending upwards we’re just not coping.

P: So we need to invest in Self-Care more on a personal level, everyone needs to address their own Self-Care.

M: Absolutely and we’ve got to stop thinking or isn’t as indulgent.

P: It’s necessary.

M: Why don’t we have an ability for kids who are feeling too stressed out to take a mental health day? Why can’t we give them control to go into a space at their school and say “I’m sorry, Nurse Smith, I just need to take a mental health day today.” Whatever you had on that day, you’ve got to catch it up later. Don’t get me wrong, you’re going to skip out on exams.

P: [Laugh]

M: Because kids can be.. [Laugh] .. a bit crafty.

P: [Laugh] I’m just imaging the line up around the block of the nurses office going ‘Yeah, I want a day off.’

[Laughter]

M: We have a maths test today.

P: You know they’d coordinate that, wouldn’t they? Like you’d be with you fellow classmates like ‘let’s have a mental health day here, the test won’t happen.’ [Laugh]

M: It will happen the next day, right. But again, it’s about giving them control and in particular, teenagers who treading that line between being told what to do 100% of their time and breaking free of that and doing everything as their own decisions and they’re learning to become independent. They need to be given some control over their mental health.

P: Yeah.

M: And kids as we mentioned last episode are really struggling with mental health and having control and understanding the feelings that they’re feeling, we just haven’t equipped them to deal with Corona virus or the world very well.

P: You were discussing with someone today in a private conversation we were having who’s been rolling out of programme of awareness and the GEM Principal to Educational institutions across Australia.

M: Yeah, absolutely so a great book called The Resilience Project from a guy called Hugh [van Cuylenburg] and his partner now who go around the country, but mostly they’re Melbourne based, go around the country and have been focusing primarily on schools but he’s also worked with Rugby… can’t remember if it’s League or Union.

P: [Laugh]

M: He even gave a talk to Cricket Australia. So he’s been working with elite athletes as well as students and their parents to help them understand three principles.

That’s the GEM Principle:

Gratitude;
Empathy; and
Mindfulness.

And he has done thousands of talks over the last few years and has a great book, really good storyteller. So if you’re kind of not into this, you know, airy fairy, wishy washy,-

P: [Laugh]

M: -spiritual, religious, mumbo jumbo BS, whatever you want to call it, have a look at this book because he’s been teaching halfbacks and you know, these big, burly men about the importance of Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness and how to weave them into your day to day life. And he’s got some great stories about how he has really changed the trajectory of some of these guys lives from contemplating suicide to a year or two later truly understanding the value of life and how to be happy.

P: Mm. And that has a social implication as well, because when the individual is feeling empowered and centred and understanding and empathetic, that has a flow on affect to the rest of society. I mean, I’m thinking particularly in terms of sports stars. They have a huge influence over kids. Kids look up to them.

M: Mm hmm.

P: So if you’ve got a child that is looking up to their Rugby/Sports star and he comes out with ‘Yeah I practise Empathy, I practice Mindfulness’, the kids are going to lap that up and that really has a kick in effect in terms of getting children and getting school students to be aware of their emotional Well-Being and their Self-Care on. Maybe that’s where we need to be focusing more of this education is employing these ideas into daily interactions in schools so that it starts to permeate into society on a general level and so you know, we could be looking at 10 to 20 years from now, we’ll be having Mindfulness symposiums that are booked out; And everybody is aware of their 15 minutes of Self-Care per day.

M: I think that we’ve started that journey. So the great news is, we missed it, I missed the bandwagon.

P: [Laugh]

M: I think that a lot of kids today are hearing these messages. So I’ve got a really good friend whose kids do meditation in their school in Canberra. Obviously, Hugh has been doing a lot of work down in Melbourne, but he has also been travelling the country and talking to teachers and students all around the country and a lot of Australian education… Sorry schools got together back in 2012 I think and they started coming together. So I was just reading about Knox Grammar was one of the founding members.

P: That’s being a Sydney private school.

M: Yes, very prestigious, elite, Sydney Boys School and way back in 2012 they got together with a range of other schools around the country to start talking about positive education, which is positive psychology for kids. And they’ve found a drop in bullying and an increase in resiliency in these kids. And ultimately, when you’re talking about mental health, these are the skills we need to give our kids.

P: Absolutely. There’s that flow on effect, of directly, of what we’re talking about trying to get kids to understand it so that has that flow on effect.

M: So the kids are getting it, nowadays. They’re starting to. It’s not across every school in every state, and it’s not part of the curriculum. It is definitely an add on for a lot of schools. However, a lot of people have left school, the majority of the population aren’t in school and so people that are your age and my age, without mentioning age. We’ve missed the boat and a lot of us need to catch up on this stuff and change our mindset about it.

P: I think changing our mindset is the important message here. Self-Care is not indulgence.

M: Quite simply, we have to a better job of looking after ourselves and the Self-Care activities that we used to practise at church like Kindness, Service to Others and Gratitude are proven, scientifically proven to help.

P: There’s that science. [Laugh]

M: This book is not about religion. It is about saying that those activities that we used to do a church, if you’re no longer going to church, again no judgement, what are you doing to bring them into your life? And what habits?

P: What’s your process? Where’s your ceremony with your 10 minutes of each day or one hour of each week? What do you do that is Self-Care for you? That is conscious Self-Care. Not just going to the gym, not just spending some time on your own in the park.

M: Mm, Hmm.

P: It’s got to be dedicated real time that actually informs your conscious and subconscious mind.

M: Absolutely. And I think Stephen Covey talked about if you don’t prioritise it, then it’s not a priority. So this is about making Self-Care a priority, so schedule it in.

P: Yep.

M: If you put your work into, like if you’re holding 9 to 5 or 8 to 6 or whatever it is that you’re holding for work or whatever your work schedule is nights and weekends, et cetera, and you’re setting aside time to pick up groceries, you’re sitting aside time to commute, you’re setting aside time hopefully to exercise, hopefully getting your eight hours of sleep.

P: Yep, [laugh].

M: You know, look at your calendar and take a look at where you’re spending your time because a lot of people say ‘I don’t have time.’

P: Mmm, make time.

M: Don’t even make time. Look at where you’re spending your time, so I will challenge you. Anyone who says they don’t have time.

P: Ok, that’s fair.

M: And I would say that nine times out of ten you are still spending time in front of the TV, you’re spending time on social media and on your phone, and there are times where you could redirect 20 minutes here or there, 40 minutes in your week, away from another activity that you think is actually helping you to regenerate and to relax and whole other topic on social media detoxing and the rest of it, because it doesn’t. Mindlessly tuning out in from the TV and social media as we’ve seen, actually adds more cognitive load to brain. Where as going for a 20 minute walk in the sun at lunchtime is so good for you for a variety of reasons, and that is true Self-Care.

P: True.

M: So what this boils down to is, you know, habit making. So being aware of where you’re spending your time and making sure that you’re setting aside time to look after yourself and again a lot of this starts with just being aware of your own feelings. And if you have a morning routine of getting in some exercise and then you shower and have a good breakfast and off you go and you commute and have a salad for lunch and you come home and… Like if that’s your routine, but you wake up that day feeling like crap, you might decide that it’s okay not to go the gym that day.

P: Yep.

M: Be nice to yourself, or that evening might be take out night instead of Friday.

P: Yes.

M: Alright, because you’re just not feeling up to cooking. So be nice to yourself or the flip side of that is have a salad instead of something greasy.

P: [Laugh]

M: Be nice to yourself.

P: It’s all about the interpretation.

[Laughter]

M: Yeah, but whatever it is that you feel you need in the moment, find a way to give yourself what you need as well and Self-Care again is about being forgiving and flexible and understanding yourself better and giving your body and your mind what they need.

P: Mmm. I like that. It’s a nice point to wrap it up on.

M: I think so.

P: [Laugh]

M: Shall we wrap it up? Well, our book! It is now available on amazon.

P: Yay!!

M: We didn’t even talk about the book.

P: This covers a lot of what the book is about though.

M: Yep.

P: It’s our little handy, very small little book, Marie.

M: It is, it’s a pocket book.

P: You could read a book in an hour, talked about all this sort of stuff. And the little things that you can do and the elements to be considerate of when putting together your own Self-Care package.

M: Absolutely. And we’ve got some great tips in the back of every section. So do you remember what we cover in the book, Pete?

P: Yes, I do…

M: Can you open the book? [Laugh]

So we cover social Connection, practising Kindness, practising Gratitude, Service to Others, practising Mindfulness, practising Forgiveness and Experiencing Awe and amongst those things we talked about the science, we talk about easy things that you could do in any of those categories to bring them into your life. And all you need to do is pick one or two out of the book and just add them into your month add them into your calendar and plan for them.

P: Do a 10 minute session on Mindfulness.

M: Yep, absolutely.

P: Ten minute session on Awe, which is really easy.

M: Absolutely. So our book is available on Amazon. It is called Self-Care is Church for Non-Believers.

P: The little book of happiness. [Giggle]

M: And help us out if you can, and give us a review on Amazon or Good Reads, that would be a great help. All right, well, that’s it for today.

P: If you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe and like our podcast. You can find us at www.marieskelton.com, which is a site about balance, happiness and resilience, also send in questions and proposed topics for discussion.

M: And, if you like our little show, we would love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out or a comment or rating on our book would be helpful too.

P: Until next time.

M & P: Choose Happiness!

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Read Moving On article It’s Time to Ditch the Cynicism and buy Into Self-Care, listen to our podcast Self-Care is Church for Non-Believers (E17)

Happy Teens (E37)

28/09/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics

This week, Marie and Pete discuss The Children’s Society “The Good Childhood Report 2020” and the troubling decline in teens’ happiness levels over the past few years.

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 bouncy castle lover, a naked swims partaker and an exuberant celebrator of sunsets. 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: But if your 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 today’s episode is about happy teens.

[Happy Intro Music]

P: Ok, so this is an interesting one, happy teens?

M: Yes.

P: When you proposed this topic, my mind instantly went to the cynical side of my brain. Going ‘Oh bloody millennials, they’re so boring and everything and you know –

M: Boring? [Laugh]

P: Everything’s a trial. Get over it, get a life. But-

M: You’re showing your age, Peter.

P: Yes, yes, I am definitely. But the sad thing is that when you actually start looking at the science, it’s tough for a young person out there these days. And I didn’t realise how tough it was going to quite a serious episode.

M: Ooh! You’ve done a flip?

P: Yeah, yeah.

M: All right. So what prompted this episode is a report from The Children’s Society over in Europe called the Good Childhood Report 2020 and they recently put out their findings and it’s, it’s really troubling and look, it’s to be expected during Covid.

P: I think this goes beyond Covid this is-

M: Absolutely.

P: -a much broader perspective in terms of the world and our society and what teens now have to deal with. And I think the.. sorry I cut you off completely there Marie. [Laugh]

M: It’s ok, keep going.

P: Damnit I’m standing up. I’m shocked thinking about the rates of information that are coming at us the way that we can be hounded by so much social media, devices. The Internet makes it so much easier for people to reach us, for example. You can’t escape. I’m thinking, particularly in terms of things like bullying and on social media pressuring us to look a certain way and I know you’re going to talk about that. When you actually take the time to sit and think about it, it is tougher these days to be a kid.

M: And expectations have changed. So when we were young, we used to do sports because it was fun. If you did sports or you did drama or you did volunteering at the local pound or whatever it was. Your parents might push you a little bit to do some kind of extracurricular activity, normally just to get you out of the house.

P: “You’re in Mum’s way in the kitchen.”

[Laughter]

P: [Woman’s voice] “I’ve just done the floor!” [Laugh]

M: Get out of the house, make sure you’re back before the lights are on in the street.

P: Yeah, there we go. [Laugh]

M: Nowadays, though, there is a checklist of things that young adults need to do in order to be well rounded adults and even in the States to get accepted into university. Your life is determined by the sheer volume of tick box activities you can do between 11 to 17 in order to round out your personality and yourself. And so playing sport is about how much can you excel, playing… Having a job is about what type of skills can you gain. Doing any other type of extra correct curricular activity is about rounding out your resume so that you can be positioned-

P: Prepared, ready, yeah.

M: Yeah, exactly. And that’s taken all the joy.

P: Mmm. I was shocked the other day, talking to a client who has an eight year old son who was doing mountain biking. No, not mountain biking he was doing swimming and he was telling me that the other kids were doing better times because they were training six times a week, at eight years of age these kids are doing six days of training to be the best swimmer. I was shocked.

M: Yep, yep.

P: Where’s the playtime? Where’s the time to run around trees, scrape your knees, climb the.. run away from mum and jump off the bridge into the river?

M: Yes, absolutely. So that pressure and stress on today’s teens is huge. And that’s just one, one small thing. So the pressure and stress to do stuff rather than.. So it’s the extrinsic motivation rather than the intrinsic motivation that we talked about rather than enjoying the activity. For me playing volleyball, I didn’t do it so that I could tick a box and get into a better university.

P: Yeah.

M: I loved volleyball, loved it, right?

P: Yes.

M: So they’ve lost all of that. Then you’ve got what you mentioned before the social media and that pressure there. Can you imagine having someone constantly following you around telling you I don’t like your outfit today? I don’t think you’re very good looking. I don’t think you’re funny at all. What’s that big pimple on your forehead, Pete?

P: Yeah, yeah.

M: Really, if you put on some weight, should you really be eating that?

P: Yes, mm, mm.

M: The constant pressure of having someone there watching you all the time. That is social media.

P: Yep, pretty much.

M: That’s what social media is. And if you don’t partake in the social media, the social ostracize you.

P: Yes, pretty much.

M: So there’s that. So this report, let’s go into the report. So pre-Covid there was a really troubling trend and decline in a lot of kids happiness. And so we’re talking between 10 to 15 year olds in general, there was a decline in happiness with friends, with schools with a lot of the different elements of kids lives. The one thing that did remain constant was happiness with families so that is actually nice.

P: Yes.

M: But as we know, when kids reach teen years, they’re trying to pull away from family and find themselves and create their own identity. And that’s very heavily tied to friends. So their decrease in happiness with friends can be a really deep impacting factor in their happiness.

P: Yeah, right.

M: And then, of course, this report’s come out and been surveying people this year, so 2020 in the middle of Covid and everything is just jumbled. Everything has gone even worse for people.

P: Yes.

M: So 15 year olds in the UK were amongst the saddest and least satisfied with their lives through Europe, and worries about relationships with friends, appearance and school were the three worst impacted areas for kids that are impacting their happiness. Not good times for kids.

P: No. So I actually went for the Australian experience with this and went into The Australian Loneliness Report, which was published in 2018 and it says that younger adults compared to adults over 35 are reporting more social interaction anxiety (slightly higher [than teens]). That’s among 18 to 35 year olds.

But also more depressive symptoms were coming through in the 18 to 25 year old bracket and that’s feeding in directly from what you’re talking about Marie in terms of the teens. So is this an epidemic and a problem that we can cut off in the teenage years?

M: I think that loneliness.. So World Health Organisation has said that loneliness is an epidemic. They’ve got a lot of research into this, and I think most of us immediately think of Grandma and Grandpa, who are isolated at home and perhaps have mobility issues that can’t get out and of course that’s going to be a lonely time for them. We don’t realise that this is an epidemic that is hitting every generation right now, it is hitting our teens, and I think that technology has a lot to do with this.

P: Definitely.

M: And it’s training us to have a back up, which is ‘Oh, I don’t know anyone here. I’m going to look at my phone’, right? Rather than working through the discomfort and growing as a person to better your social skills.

P: Yes.

M: So you go to a party and you feel awkward and you don’t have a phone. You find a way to make a friend.

P: Yep, exactly.

M: Yeah, and we’re not doing that. We’re not doing that anymore as kids, we can hide behind the technology, so we’re more awkward as a society I think. [Laugh]

P: Interesting.

M: Also, if you look into a lot of it the way that our cities are structured nowadays, there are more people living by themselves than ever before in human history, and it is seen as something to strive towards. Living in a share home is not normal as you get older. It is not common [or] as common as it used to be, because our standards of living have gotten better.

P: [Yeah]

M: We can afford now as a single adult to get a small apartment by ourselves, and you might come in and out from the garage up to your apartment back and never see your neighbours.

P: Yep, exactly.

M: And that is the way that our world, the mega cities, and increased density of housing all of that is impacting our loneliness levels as well.

P: Mm. And that’s a big one for kids playing in the neighbour’s backyard. Getting the ball from across Mr. Biggs’s backyard because went over in a cricket match that was six and out, that’s not happening.

M: All the kids playing on the street, doesn’t happen.

P: No, that interacting is not happening as much so this is one of the reasons behind why kids are finding it harder and the cynics like me need to take a little bit of a chill pill and be more understanding. [Laugh]

M: Definitely so, one of the big things that this research found was that fear of failure is really impacting kids nowadays. So teenagers again, we’re talking about teens, so exam stress, bullying, school culture. All of it’s just adding up. But there are high levels of fear of failure amongst our teens, so this is kind of 15 [up] older teens, and a lot of them are just, they’re just struggling with the academic achievement and the pressures that are being placed on them.

P: Yep, right.

M: And they’re worried about failing. And failure nowadays happens in a public forum. You can’t fail and hide anymore because everything is out in the open for people.

P: Yeah. Right.

M: So really, really sad.

I did want to talk a bit about education now for teens, since it is such a big part of their lives.

P: It’s also where, a lot of social interaction occurs for the teens is at school.

M: Yeah.

P: That’s where you are. You’re away from the home you’re away from Mom and Dad and you’re forced to interact with a bunch of other kids that you don’t necessarily like and that’s where you learn life skills. It’s where you learn how to deal with projection and bullying and all that sort of stuff that does happen and naturally happens in an environment where you put the kids together, Lord of the Flies stuff.

[Laughter]

P: A book everyone should read.

M: Yeah, good book, definitely.

P: So what do we need to think up in our education systems? What other things did the report say?

M: Well I think back to that intrinsic connect, extrinsic motivation and what, what drives us and what makes us happy. So rather than a check box of things you need to do to be a well rounded human way need to rethink. And the Nordic countries again are doing such a good job in this area. And it is about the joy of learning rather than the tick box exercise to get you through to the next year and the last year and out the back into university and a good job.

P: [Laugh]

M: And it’s that that treadmill we’ve been talking about and that is shown not to make you happy. So in the Nordic countries, there again, looking at what makes you happy and they rather than sitting down and reading a chapter of a text book and then rote learning and writing about rocks, they get kids out to the playground and playing with rocks. They have to go collect 20 rocks and they bring them back in, and then they’ll divide them up into the types of rocks they are, and they’ll teach them that way.

P: Right.

M: And if the kids don’t feel like doing that that day, they might be off learning or climbing trees and learning about gravity. What happens when you fall?

[Laughter]

P: The experience, experiential as opposed to the academic approach.

M: Well, no academic, they’re both academic, but the traditional, as opposed to the traditional approach.

P: That’s read and learn.

M: Yes, and let’s take all of the love of learning out.

P: Yes,

M: And force you to rote learn a bunch of things so that when you finish school you think ‘Hoorah, I don’t have to learn ever again.’

P: [Laugh]

M: Yeah, and as we know, growth mindset is so important, to growing and learning over your life and is actually a factor in happiness. So our whole education system needs a rethink. And that’s a whole other episode, [laugh] to be honest.

P: [Laugh]

M: Yeah, but there is just so much in here that sadly we haven’t caught up on the 21st century from an education point of view. We’re still teaching that industrialised way of learning that hasn’t changed since the early 19 hundred’s when it was first put in.

P: Hhmm.

M: We haven’t caught up yet, and I think a lot of that is adding to the stress and pressure that our teens are feeling.

P: Because teens are being left behind, some teens are being left behind because they don’t learn?

M: I mean there is that definitely, but we’re just not giving them skills they need for the 21st century.

P: OK.

M: We’re not teaching them that happiness isn’t about how many boxes you can tick it’s about the enjoyment of ticking boxes [laugh].

P: Is it about more play. Is it about allowing more space to have other things come into your life, other influences because we are so pressured with achievement and getting there, I mean even at year six and year five getting 100% are getting an A on the test is still the goal.

M: Rather than exploring the joy of maths, that’s the different.

P: Ok.

M: And if you love maths, you should be able to go to year seven level of maths. Even though you’re in year six, because you love it as long as the teacher is also teaching you balance, so you might love maths, but what can we love in English, too?

P: Yeah, righteo.

M: And kids who take themselves through their learning journey are far more engaged, and there’s actually a whole lot of research now into what used to be the weird kids who did home schooling.

P: [Laugh] Yes.

M: Home schooling was for the weird, eccentric, hippies or whatever else.. cults.

P: [Laugh]

M: You know, or whatever else, that stuff. But there is so much research now they’ve organised in the States. There is so much to be said for the kids who direct their own learning based on their own interests.

P: Mmm.

M: That doesn’t mean that they get to not do certain things.

P: Yep.

M: These kids are so much more balanced. And the fear was always that they wouldn’t develop social skills needed because they weren’t at school.

P: Yeah.

M: Nowadays, they’ve organised like I said. So they’re doing the field trips with other home schooled kids and things like that.

P: And that’s a change storm, they’re changing it up completely of how we interact on an educational level.

M: Yep.

P: But again, it’s about balance. So as you were saying, it’s finding a solution outside of what we need because okay, so we are not interacting at a school level. So let’s have a field trip that come together and that has to be organised and generated from the top down.

M: Yep, and allowing home school kids to band together into a baseball team and join the local schools comp.

P: Yeah.

M: As a bunch of home school kids so that they can still play sports, team, sports and things like that. But what they’ve done is they’ve looked at the education system and seen that there is a gap there, and these kids are well out performing in intellect and IQ and general EQ as well, emotional intelligence. A lot of the kids that are going through all your prep schools.

P: [Laugh]

M: The model is broken right now, and that’s adding more pressure and stress and hurting our kid’s ability to be happy.

P: So how can we change that? How do we create situations as a, as an adult looking at interacting with teenagers and trying to help them get a little bit more social interaction and bring up their happiness levels?

M: Look, we were products of the same system that they’re going through. Just theirs is on steroids.

P: [Laugh] That’s a good description.

M: Right? So we need to role model the right behaviours for our youth. We need to put the phones down at dinner. We need to do around the table, ‘what are we grateful for today kids?’ conversation before we dig in to our meals.

P: Right.

M: If you’re not religious and you’re not thanking God, you’re, you’re just going around the table and still doing that exercise of what is ‘what are we grateful for today, kids?’

P: So is this coming back to some of that old school things that we have talked about.

M: Yeah.

P: This seems to be a trend, but a lot of happiness movement, it’s coming back to some routines and connection between the generations. In my own experience, having the kids around Grandma has been a huge influence for them. And don’t get me wrong Grandma’s difficult to deal with sometimes.

M: [Laugh]

P: But the kids have learned to negotiate that space, and I remember watching my niece deal with Grandma in the back of the car and it was great because she was, she was finding her own way and eventually she fell asleep.

[Laughter]

P: But they’re was, because Grandma was a part of their daily lives, they had to negotiate that. And it’s now a source of comedic relief if you like in terms of conversations like ‘ Oh that’s a Grandma statement, or that’s what Grandma would do.’ But it’s a relative experience.

M: Yep.

P: And it’s bringing that into connection between the generations which is so important. And again the…

M: Face to face.

P: The face to face, the dining room table conversations and having those routines of gratitude and saying, ‘OK, phones are off the table, we’re all sitting and we’re all enjoying a meal together, spending time together.’

M: Yep and don’t make it a special one off, it’s just what we do in our house.

P: It’s a Sunday thing.

M: Yep, and one of the other things that I think a lot of people have realised through Covid is, it could be so simple, it could be baking cookies with kids. It could be doing gardening with kids, the puzzles, games, all this tech free stuff. It’s returning to that simplicity, but it’s the activity of just enjoying doing something.

And the last one that I’ll throw in there is ‘let your kids be bored.’

P: Yes, “the groundswell of creativity is boredom.”

M: [Laugh]

P: That’s not the right quote but someone said it, who was it? [Laugh]

M: There’s two things to it. Boredom creates an opportunity for creativity. But also boredom helps you to feel uncomfortable and you never grow without feeling uncomfortable.

P: Yes, yes. I agree with that.

M: So there’s definitely, and they’re gonna hate you for it. But explain why. Kids are smart.

P: Yep.

M: Yep.

P: I like it.

[Laughter]

P: Ok, I think we’re there. Thanks for listening. And if you like this podcast, then please subscribe and don’t forget to visit us at www.marieskelton.com, which shows a lot of the research and the articles that we talk about here on the podcast.

M: Including our new book, which was recently launched.

P: Yay!

M: If you’re interested in the book, go to our website and you can find where to buy it but we’re also on Amazon. Alright, thanks for joining us.

P: Remember people, choose happiness.

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Read Moving On article 5 ways to teach kids resiliency and happiness , listen to our Podcast: The Importance of Being Social (E14)

The Good and the Bad of Stress (E33)

31/08/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics

In this week’s episode, Marie and Pete discuss some studies on stress, uncovering that stress can be both good and bad, but it’s all in how you perceive it.

Transcript

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

P: And I am Peter Furness, a bringer of bingo, lover of lingo and a passer of Pinot Grigio.

M: Ew.

P: [Laugh] Yeah, ew… 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 alcohol is no longer numbing your pain.

P: Or you want to laugh, love and live like a voracious beast.

M: Or you just want to know what all the fuss is about.

P: [Singing] Then this is the place to be.

M: Because this week we’re talking about…

P: Stress!

[Dun, Dun, Duunnnn!]

[Happy Intro Music]

M: Alright, we’re talking about stress, and in particular… and the reason we talk about stress is because it is the complete opposite of happiness, really.

P: Oh, is it?

M: Well, not the opposite. You’ve got all these negative things, and stress is one of them. And they really do impact your ability to be happy.

P: Yes, I’ll agree.

M: So that’s why we’re talking about happiness, ah we’re not talking about happiness-

P: Stress?

M: – we’re talking about stress. Yes, and there are two talks that have shaped my thinking for this episode. So, one of them is by Kell… One of them is by Kelly Mc. [Stumbling over words.]

P: [Laughter and clapping]

M: Damn it. This is just not happening. One of them is by Kelly McGonigal, and she’s a health psychologist, and her 2013 Ted Global Talk is called How to Make Stress Your Friend. And I highly recommend that one and the other one. And again, I just feel bad that I know I’m butchering these people’s name.

P: [Laugh.]

M: I don’t know any way around this.

P: Well unless you’re going to research linguistics. Then you’re just gonna, you know have a bash?

M: Yep. So, Madhumita Murgia is a journalist, editor and speaker with expertise in the fields of science, health and technology, and her 2015 Ted talk [How Stress Affects Your Brain] was all about how stress affects the brain. So..

P: Science, science, science.

M: Yes. Do you expect anything less from me Pete?

P: No definitely not.

M: So they’ve both got different ways of looking at stress in the brain and there’s two things I wanted to talk about. Madhumita talks about how stress isn’t always a bad thing. It could be handy for a burst of energy and focus like when you’re playing sport, there’s people cheering for you and it’s the final or when you’ve got a deadline looming at work and you’ve got to get this done right?

P: Yep.

M: And stress can be a real motivator. I don’t know if you’ve felt that.

P: It’s a lever. It’s a definite lever.

M: Yep.

P: It pushes you forward.

M: Absolutely. So stress can be a really good thing, right?

P: Mm Hmm.

M: Or have you ever had to speak in public? And you’re not quite comfortable speaking in public.

P: Yes.

M: Your capillaries open up, your heart beats faster and you just feel alive, right. So stress can be an amazingly good thing, right?

P: Yes.

M: But what Madhumita talks about is how, when it’s continuous, it actually begins to change your brain.

P: Ok, so our brain synapses and neurons change?

M: Yes. So if you are in a war zone, for instance, which is kind of the epitome of bad stress.

P: Well that’s the big end of it.

M: Right? Like, there is day to day first world, what you and I experience. And then there’s war. If you’re living in a war zone and you’re constantly worried about how to feed your family-

P: How to survive.

M: – whether or not you’re going to live, whether or not you’ll be bombed with all of the horrible things that you and I can only guess at.

P: Yes.

M: That is a level of constant and deep stress, and that fundamentally changes the way your brain works. And there’s actually some really good research from a lot of the Holocaust survivors and people who lived through World War II.

P: I’m thinking World War II London straightaway, as soon as you said that.

M: About stress and how people react and how it changes the genetics and kids that were born from people who went through that level of stress. There is so much psychological, physiological and physical impact.

P: And change of behaviour, fundamental patterns that come about because you’ve lived through that experience.

M: Absolutely. There’s a great one that I’m thinking of from a physical point of view where people were starving, they were there, honestly, starving. They couldn’t get access to food. They were eating cardboard to just put something in their stomach and their children, children who are born around that time they were born with changes in their genes and make up that meant that they held onto any nutrient and any carbon and fat. And so they’ve all got obesity problems, so their parents were starving, and these people cannot lose weight. They cannot, because their bodies have been taught to hold on to everything.

P: Absolutely everything.

M: Yeah, and again the mind does the same sort of thing. So stress can be such a positive thing in short bursts, but when you experience it over a long period of time it can have the opposite effect.

P: Does it matter about the level of stress in terms of the perception of intensity? So you’re talking about the war zones and so forth, but are we talking about the day to day stuff.

M: Well, look I picked wars as an example, but the research and Madhumita is talking about what you and I experience as day to day stress.

P: So, first worlders?

M: Yeah, like commutes and crappy bosses, making rent and all of those day to day [stresses], making sure that you answer all the e-mails in your inbox in a time that is deemed socially acceptable. And all of that stuff is day to day pressure, and a lot of people have talked about burnout. And The World Health Organisation has definitely labeled that as a concern in the 21st century. But that level of stress is also having a negative impact on people’s brain.

P: Mm. OK. How much do we control that? How much can we take control of that interpretation of stress? Because I know where you’re heading with this. [Laugh]

M: I love that question, Pete. Why thank you.

P: [Laugh]

M: It’s like we discussed this episode beforehand.

[Laughter]

M: So, Kelly McGonigal, the person who was talking about beginning the episode she has done a whole bunch of research into how we need to start seeing stress as a good thing.

P: Exactly.

M: So she talks about a study which tracked 30,000 adults, that is a huge study. So when you normally talk about studies, there’s 100, 200, 500 maybe 1000 people that you’re looking at.

P: Yep, most study groups.

M: 30,000 adults in the United States, and they followed them for 8 years.

P: Wow.

M: Huge, huge study. And they started by asking people how much stress have you experienced in the last year? They also asked, do you believe that stress is harmful for your health? And then they use public death records to find out who died.

P: Oh, Wow.

M: Right? Let’s cut to the chase. If stress is going to impact your heart health your everything, your brain it’s going to change you at a fundamental level and lead to poor outcomes, we’re talking death here, right?

P: Yep.

M: Okay. And what they found was people who experience a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying. But, here’s the but.

P: [Laugh]

M: That was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.

P: So stress can be beneficial?

M: Only if you believe it is.

P: It’s about our perception.

M: Absolutely. This is the key!

P: [Laugh]

M: Now, obviously, we’re talking about a sample of 30,000 US people in a normal period.

P: Yes.

M: Now, I still, there’s no science to back this up, but I still believe that war is a whole other, you know kettle of fish.

P: It is. But..

M: There’s so much for us to learn. We’re not in war time in Australia here, and America isn’t either. There’s no more happening in America, so in a lot of first world countries where this research would apply, well you could say that it should apply, the way that you perceive stress will have an impact on whether or not it is negative.

P: Absolutely.

M: Or positive.

P: Absolutely, couldn’t agree more.

M: Yep.

P: And it’s really funny that I came across this through the teachings of the Dalai Lama.

M: Oh, we’re back on this again.

[Laughter]

M: Tell me more.

P: This is a Buddhist doctrine. It’s this capacity for human intelligence and to develop determination and use it in a positive way. It’s how we perceive our reactions to events. It’s not necessarily the event itself that is negative. It’s our perception of it, and if we can change the way that we react, we are reactionary beings and if we react in a certain way, that predicates stress and that predicates a whole series of biological and physiological changes.

M: Yes.

P: But if we change that perception, if we flip that switch and find some sort of way to create a positivity around it, see it as an opportunity to change, interpret it as a lever for intelligence, for education, then perhaps we can flip the switch on stress. Oh my God! That’s a, that’s a sound bite!

M: We can flip the switch on stress. OK, we’ll be quoting you on that.

P: Done.

M: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. There’s one thing even before I tripped over all this positive psychology stuff and when I truly was the cynic that we portray in all of our advertising, which I always believed the worry-ings of no one. If something was going to happen, it was going to happen.

P: Yes.

M: Stressing about it and worrying about it didn’t serve anyone.

P: I couldn’t agree more. Worry doesn’t serve anybody.

M: Don’t worry about breaking the egg. You deal with the broken egg, if it happens, right?

P: Yep. Or you take steps to prevent the egg from breaking.

M: Absolutely. But really, you just keep cooking.

P: [Laugh]

M: If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen right?

P: Yep.

M: And that has always been something that I’ve believed in. I maybe had too much of a lazy air.. and see what happens.

P: Approach?

M: Yeah, and nearly dying kind of makes you reassess how carefree you have been.

P: Yeah, true. But in some ways that that blissful, I’m going to say ignorance, but you’re going to say arrogance in that respect, it gives you a certain ability to deal with things in different way. If you’re not in a highly stressed, reactionary state, something bad happens and you’re like ‘Okay, all right, let’s go with this. Let’s see where this leads.’ You can actually deal.

M: ‘I can cope with it.’

P: Yeah. ‘I can cope with it.’

M: ‘I can cope.’ So, I think again, like we’ve spoken about in the past, it’s about feeling the pain and feeling the negative emotions that comes with bad things happen. But then, knowing that it’s a temporary state.

P: And understanding there’s a path out of it, if you can find it. And there are certain things that happen where the path is not obvious and we’re talking grief. We’re talking the loss of a loved one. You know you’re going to stay in that for a little while. We’ve talked about that before in other episodes.

M: But there is an out, and that’s not if you can find it, it’s when, when it happens.

and you might need help.

P: Definitely, and that’s the case of human nature we are reactionary beings and we react in a certain way. If we can control that reaction or look at the different possibilities of that reaction. Then perhaps we can lessen the effects of stress.

M: Absolutely yep, absolutely. So to circle back to that study. So they found that people who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. I really want to circle back to that the physical effects of how you perceive the world.

P: Oh the world.

M: How you perceive being victimised, being not able to cope, being passive. It’s like seeing yourself as a leaf in the wind versus in control and..

P: Being able to ride the wind?

M: Right. That perception fundamentally changes you physically to the point that you do or don’t die.

P: I could see why it would change the way that your brain works, how your synapses work the access of pathways of thought processes and so forth.

M: For a cynic, this is such a big leap.

P: Yeah, right.

M: Such a big leap.

P: What is it that stops you from being able to make that jump?

M: How I perceive the world is going to make me die, younger or not. [Psht.]

P: You just don’t believe it? Fundamentally don’t believe it?

M: Well, yeah.

P: Wow.

M: It’s all.. yes.

P: [Laugh] and then it isn’t.

M: It isn’t the science shows [it]. 30,000 people over eight years, that’s huge.

P: That’s a decent study.

M: That is a good study, that is, yeah, that passes.

P: It’s not anecdotal.

M: Yep, and it’s not so qualitative that three people were interviewed in depth, over 8 years.

P: And there were these differentiating factors.

M: Yeah, absolutely. So, the lowest risk of dying of anyone in this study, including people who had little stress, was people who believe stress is positive. So this is actually the next big thing. So stress is bad, is what we’re saying. If you think it’s bad.

P: Yep. If you can[‘t] flip that switch.

M: If you think stress is good, it has no impact on you whatsoever, even if it’s prolonged, repeated year after year, ongoing stress.

P: And I’m thinking of a personal story here of my lovely adopted Nan McSweeney, who was 103 when she died. Dear old Nan McSweeney, she –

M: – Tell me her secret!

P: [Laugh]

M: 103! My grandma’s 95 and I’m cheering for her.

P: Yeah?

M: Yep.

P: So Nan McSweeney. She was a very devout Catholic woman. Incredibly devout, she was actually the last known survivor to have personally met Mother Mary MacKillop in Australia. So she had this amazing faith and she clung to it, and she let that drive her life in many ways so that when stress did come up think bad things happened. This wasn’t a wealthy woman. [She] wasn’t a woman who had an easy life. She was a cattle farmer in Glenn Innes for most of her life. She would give it up to God. She would give it up to a higher power and have her trust that I’m meant to endure, whatever the challenge is but I know I can come out the other side of it and it was one of things that she gave to me. Now I, I was an anti-religious person when I was young, 21 year old in college and having every Sunday dinner with Nan McSweeney.

M: You still are. Both of us. Both of us are. That’s the premise behind our book, Self-Care is Church for Non-Believers.

P: [Laugh]

M: You can buy it from October.

P: [Laugh] Available on iTunes!

M: No, not iTunes. Amazon. Available on Amazon.

P: [Laugh] Getting back to the point. She had this wonderful resilience of like, ‘oh well, on we go’ and that reminds me of the attitude of the blitz in London and why the English are so stoic and they still to this day, they believe that a cup of tea will solve every problem.

M: It does.

P: It does because there’s a certain –

M: If you believe then it does.

P: There’s a control. There’s an element of control there. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea, we’ll sit down and we’ll talk about it’ and everyone buys into that. Imagine you’ve had this massive argument with your husband and you’re ready to kill each other. The French don’t do it, they actually go through it with knives and pistols and things and then have sex afterwards but that’s all fine.

M: Oh, South Americans, that’s a whole different.

P: Oh, yeah, whole other thing. But the British they go ‘I’m going to make a pot of tea’, and it’s this weird, wonderful sort of ‘I can control the tea’ and we’re going to sit down and we’ll have tea and through the tea we’ll find a solution because we’ll take that moment and there’s a belief in the process that I have control over one little element.

M: It’s all in how you perceive. And in a way, I think it’s kind of a shame that we’ve had such a good run.

P: Yeah, we’re victims of, victims of our own opulence.

M: Since WWII.

P: Yes.

M: Because we don’t have resilience. We don’t and we’re then tripping over normal, everyday life.

P: Influences.

M: People have injuries and disappointments and things that happened in their life that aren’t how they planned or wanted and we’re so not equipped for it.

P: Thrown by it.

M: So not equipped to deal with that, because where we’ve given this false sense of control over life nowadays.

P: Yes and then we go see them with their hands going ‘Oh, I can’t control anything!’

M: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s a few really good books, Homo Deus [by Yuval Noah Harari], and what is it? Guns… [Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond]. Anyway, [books] that show that there’s this false sense that we can control the randomness of life nowadays that we all have.

P: Yeah.

M: And so it really takes by surprise when it’s not actually something we can control.

P: But that’s the whole point and that’s what I go back to the ancient teachings are like it’s not about control.

M: Yes.

P: It’s about you have to give yourself over to these elements and go with them. But learn to find some control in the elements that you can. So you know a Buddhist monk would go to their meditation or a Catholic would go to their prayer. An English mum would go to her pot of tea. I cook.

M: And in the 21st century you would argue meditation and mindfulness have a place to combat stress when against too much?

P: Absolutely, Yeah, definitely.

M: Yeah, and I haven’t really bought into the meditation stuff.

P: We keep pushing this point.

M: Yeah, yeah. So maybe one day I’ll tip over the edge.

P: I’m going to sit you down and chain you up.

M: For me, it’s exercise.

P: Oh, yep.

M: I just need a good exercise, like a 30 minute run or a gym session and it re-centres me and I sleep well that night as a result. Like if I’m mentally stressed the physical exhortation balances me out.

P: That also comes down to a physiological [response], because it’s getting rid of your cortisol levels. It’s using up your adrenaline that’s in your body. It’s helping to dissipate those switched on elements and take you to a place of more calm. ‘OK, now I can switch off let go’, which is the essence of meditation.

M: Yep, what-evs. Right, we’re out of time.

P: [Laugh] Here we go with that one. We’ve got English tea parties.

[Laughter]

M: Okay, so stress is good but bad is the –

P: – it’s all about your perception. How you perceive stress is the key.

M: Look, I think that a lot of this again I’m going to summarise a lot of what we’ve talked about, we’re up to Episode 30 something or other and again what I keep learning from this fabulous science of positive psychology is that I have so much control.

P: Yes, we do have control.

M: We do have control.

P: We have the tools we need to wake up and use them.

M: Yep and sometimes you might want to burrow down and just let the emotion rule.

P: Yep, I agree.

M: But then again, you don’t have to always be in that place, right?

P: No.

M: You’ve got control over whether you choose –

P: Take action people.

M: – Choose happiness. I hate to say it cause it’s a T shirt slogan. But there’s so much behind that.

P: I agree.

M: Yeah.

P: That’s why we say it.

M: Yep. All right, So..

P: if you like this podcast, then please subscribe and like us on your favourite platform and remember that we have all our information on www.marieskelton.com. Org?

M: .com Pete obviously doesn’t go there ever…

P: It’s written in the website browser thingy that I click and goes ‘Yes, straight to’.

[Laughter]

P: Where we publish all our research and articles and links from our podcast episodes.

M: Thank you for joining us.

P: Choose Happiness.

[Happy Exit Music]

Related content: Read Moving On article How to Build Your Resilience With Mindfulness and Meditation, listen to our Podcast: The Power of Meditation (E9)

Buying Into Positive Affirmations (E29)

03/08/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics

In this week’s episode, Pete tries to convince Marie about the science behind positive affirmations and how they can change your mindset.

Transcript

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

P: And I’m Peter Furness, hug lover, shade thrower and sweaty Betty. 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 if you are only satisfied with life but not truly happy with it.

M: Or maybe you just want more, then this is the place to be.

P: Have you ever tried the power of repetition? Got a song stuck in your head or tried to live your life by a quote or inspiration and then wondered why it didn’t stick?

M: If so, stick with us.

P: Ha ha.

M: Because today’s episode is all about positive affirmations.

[Happy Intro Music]

M: Alright Pete, positive affirmations.

P: This is going to be a fun one, ha ha.

M: Load of BS. Right?

P: [Laughter] I can’t wait to watch your mind unravel Marie, your cynicism and scepticism fall apart like an unmade Pavlova on a hot summer’s day.

M: I just have to say, I’m not doing it.

P: [Laughter] I beg to differ. I think this is one where you’re going to have to step up. You’re going to have to do it. You’re going to do your yoga, you’re going to do some Om-ing and chanting.

M: No, it’s not. It’s not me.

P: [Laugh] Outside the comfort zone Muz.

M: I have at one point put um… I’ve done a Grateful Wall, a Gratefulness Wall, and put things I’m grateful for. But positive affirmations.

P: [Laugh]

M: It’s just a step too far. It is relegated in my mind.

P: Okay, I think I think we need to explore this because as you’re discovering, I sat here and watched it. The science proves it.

M: Yeah…

P: [Laugh] So what are we talking about?

M: But you never really know who has paid for the science.

P: Oh, here we go, here we go.

M: [Laughter]

P: Who was the money behind the research?

M: Mmm Hmm right? It was probably the sugar industry is all I’m saying.

P: [Laughter] Or the pharmaceutical industry.

M: [Laugh]

P: Oh! did I say that, sorry.

M: All right. You tell me, what are we talking about?

P: We’re talking about words. Words are powerful.

M: The irony is that I was a journalist. So I’m down with words.

[Laughter]

P: That’s a fundamental standing point. If we start with that point that words are powerful and our words have an impact on how we interpret and feel and exude and shape ourselves. Can you agree with that?

M: Yes.

P: Yes. Okay, so we agree on that point.

M: I feel like you’re about to trap me.

P: I am about to trap you.

[Laughter]

P: Positive affirmations are used by lots of different people in lots of different ways. The fundamental belief is that if you can say something to yourself, you start believing it.

M: I am a Care Bear. I am a Care Bear. I am a Care Bear.

P: [Laugh] Can we agree on…

M: See I’m not a Care Bear. I don’t even believe it.

P: [Laugh] we’re going to come back to that in a minute. But if we can believe that, that’s what we’re talking about, is the phrases that we have and that we use and that are used by people to reinforce themselves or to make themselves change a habit or to make themselves feel differently about a situation.

M: Okay, I’m also not down with hypnotherapy. Just so you know, and we can do that another time.

P: Oh no, no, no, no, no, this is not hypnotherapy. This is different where we’re going to stay on track.

M: I know. We’ve hit the limit of my sceptic mind. My inflexible mind is just not quite coping with this one.

P: So I’m going to throw a few things that at you, so Dr Carmen Harra, who is a well known author and interpretive psychologist she calls herself. She has a couple of quotes ‘Affirmations do indeed strengthen us by helping us believe in the potential of an action we desire to manifest.’

M: Now the fact that she’s given herself her own title is not reassuring me.

P: Ok, let’s just look at the quote.

M: Ok, say the quote again, say it again.

P: We’re going to say the words. ‘Affirmations do indeed strengthen us by helping us believe in the potential of an action we desire to manifest.’ Can you talk yourself into believing something will happen?

M: I think it can change mindset not, not scenarios or situations.

P: Okay, so it changes mindset, so we can change our…

M: I can’t talk myself into being president of the United States.

P: Ok. True? Yes, but it can change your belief in the potential that you could become a president of the United States, if you so desired.

M: Ok…

P If that was your goal, and you’re using a positive affirmation every morning to keep you on track with that goal.

M: Then I’d just call you an arrogant nitwit.

P: [Laugh] alright, okay. Let’s move on to something else then.

‘In the sequence of thought-speech-action, affirmations play an integral role by breaking patterns of negative thoughts, negative speech, and, in turn, negative actions.’

M: This one I’m on board with, right. If you say a bunch of negative stuff to yourself or either internally and internalise it or actually say it out loud to self and you start sprinkling in positive stuff to balance that out, then absolutely, that changes.

P: So the power of words in positive affirmations can change the way that you interpret information.

M: And perceive the world.

P: We agree on that one?

M: Sure.

P: Great okay, all right, I’m going to throw another at you. This is from Rosslyn Kemerer. Who is a Yoga and Reiki practitioner ‘Speaking in the affirmative is life-changing because in order to speak positively, we must think positively.’

M: Again, I am a Care Bear. I am a Care Bear. I am a Care Bear. [Laugh]

P: Stop focusing on the Care Bear.

[Laughter]

P: We’re going to look at the quote and the words. Speaking in the affirmative is life changing, in order to speak positively we must think positively.

M: So, I do believe there’s correlation here. However, I don’t think that if you’re negative and you are in a negative head space that simply saying positive words is going to get you out of a poor mental state.

P: I actually agree with you on this one Marie.

M: Woo! I like that.

P: [Laugh]

M: I don’t think it can hurt. You may as well try it right. Let’s just throw mud at the wall and see if it sticks.

P: It doesn’t hurt but there’s a fundamental difference here in terms of what I’ve experienced with positive affirmations now being the buyer-inerer, the person that just accepts and runs with everything for years until I’m proven otherwise. I did get into positive affirmations there for a while and was following them and ruling them and so forth and perhaps my more cynical state in the last few years and my more scientific based, evidence based research, I have come up with some, some concepts that you can say as much as you want. Unless there’s a deep seated belief in what it is that you are saying that is part of your conscious and your subconscious, you can say whatever you want in it isn’t going to isn’t going to occur. So you could say, I’m a Care Bear, I’m a Care Bear, I’m a Care Bear.

M: And that is the end of today’s show ladies and gentlemen.

P: [Laugh] No, no, no, no. We’re going to explore this further.

[Laughter]

P: [DR] Sophie Henshaw, who is the person that I read and did some research on. She talks about it in terms of

“If what you are trying to affirm is in-congruent with a deeply held negative belief, then all that results is an inner struggle.”

And she talks about the fact that if you’re putting positive affirmations out there when you’re reciting these tasks, daily, daily, daily, but you have a deep seated belief in your subconscious that doesn’t support that, your subconscious starts to have a battle with your conscious, and you end up in this spiral of inner turmoil because you can’t reconcile the ‘I am a Care Bear’ with the fact that no, I don’t believe in Care Bears.

M: You don’t?

P: I’m using your example here.

[Laughter]

M: Yeah look, I hear what you say. And for me, I think positive affirmations might round out a positive, a positive personality.

P: Yes.

M: But I don’t see them turning a negative into a positive.

P: And you’re absolutely right.

M: And I don’t also see that someone who isn’t a Care Bear is going to become a Care Bear because they believe it, or President or any number of other things.

P: Actually, I’m going to pull you up there, they can believe it. They have to back it up.

M: And then the third group is the ones who believe it. And their reality is so separated, so far gone from reality. Their reality is not tied and they’re the arrogant ones that we’re talking about and we come across a lot of them playing sports.

P: Yep

M: Who believe they’re all that and a team couldn’t survive without them. And lo and behold, they’re the worst thing and the toxic person on the team, and you take him away and the team works better and they’re in this, this… And I’ve come across so many of these people throughout my sports career.

P: Yes.

M: Who… They might be talented, but they think they’re all that, and also in my professional career, who must be telling themselves some kind of positive affirmations or something. Their internal monologue in general is not based in reality at all. And they’re the ones I worry about as well.

P: There’s a disconnect between what they’re exuding to the outside world and what their true beliefs are on the inside. And this comes back to what we’ve talked about a lot with a lot of our episodes, about doing the work, doing the work on the self so that you can go down to your core beliefs, go down to your inner beliefs. And that’s where the subconscious rules. Because the subconscious draws on all those core and inner deeply held beliefs.

I could tell myself I am the world’s most beautiful model, but I know that deep down inside me that’s not congruent with who I am. You know I have, there are issues in there that will eke out and start to have that battle because I’m telling myself I’m this beautiful, beautiful person, that I could be a magazine cover model and deep inside that’s not going to be congruent with who I am or what I am or what I believe. There’s gonna be a lot of turmoil there which…

M: So, if that’s the case, then why do it at all, if what you believe is negative and you’re trying to then make that change?

P: This is where it comes down to the psychology of it and trying to again use positive affirmations that back up the work that you’re doing. So unless you have done the work on belief systems and what you’re trying to achieve, being truly beneficial for you and believing in it, positive affirmations don’t work. They’re just a Band-Aid.

M: So they just work alongside much tougher work.

P: Exactly.

M: There’s a great book that I read called ‘Can’t Hurt Me’ by David Goggins, and it’s a huge book right now. This guy’s a bit crazy, let’s be honest. He is amazingly inspirational. So ex-Navy, Navy, Air Force and Army, did Army Rangers. He was a SEAL, he’s just crazy, and then and then he went and did the ultra-marathon running with no training, almost no training, exceptional specimen of a human being. But it is tough to do all this stuff, and he talks about positive affirmations. I think you’ve got to be putting in the work and then putting in the work and then talking to yourself in the right way. And I know when you’re exhausted, how easy it is to give up.

P: Yep.

M: Right? And I think the power-

P: The physical capacity is done.

M: – of his mental strength is that he pushes himself harder when it’s the hardest, rather than allowing himself excuses when it’s the hardest.

P: Definitely.

M: And as an ultra-marathon runner. You know that’s 100 miles minimum, I think. You know by mile… who knows what, you’d be thinking ‘Why am I doing this? I don’t need to prove anything.’

P: Yep.

M: You know the internal monologue, my feet are blistered and you start that, and you start that talk to yourself, which is all about giving yourself an excuse.

P: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I actually have an ultra-marathoner who’s a client. This guy sleeps in ditches. He goes on these crazy three day bike rides, and then will literally pull over the side of the highway and fall asleep in a ditch in the freezing cold.

M: See, I think even, it is actually the definition of sanity to question why you even we’re doing that the first place.

P: But if he, okay so if Dr Bradley I will mention the name if you’re listening, Dr Bradley, I told you it would happen. I’d quote you here. He used, the use of positive affirmations in that instance is when you can tell yourself because you have done it before. So he’s doing these crazy training things to prove to himself that he can actually achieve these goals so that when he is faced with a run in South America doing a 100 kilometre marathon and if he is feeling that pain or that excuse to give up, in that instance positive affirmations could work because he’s referencing deeply held beliefs that he can actually do this. He’s existed in it before he slept in a ditch. He’s done this in the Australian outback, so why can’t I do it in the South American wilderness?

And in that way, you can train your brain to access those extra reserves of physical capacity via the use of positive affirmations and self-talk.

M: Absolutely so David Goggins ideas that we’re only using, it’s been years since I read the book, about 20% [40%] of our physical ability ever at any point and he thinks he’s gotten nowhere near 100[%]. But many would argue past 100. I don’t know if what he’s done is actually healthy a lot of the time.

P: [Laugh]

M: But I definitely think that when your mind is telling you to stop, you can definitely counter that by saying, actually no, I can do this. I know I can do this.

P: Yes, and it doesn’t even…

M: …that positive and balancing your negative self-talk with the positive. Where I struggle with positive affirmations as a cynic and a sceptic is with the very average looking young lady who wants to be a model, and she’s telling herself, I’m going to be a model, I’m going to be a model, I’m going to be a model, I’m going to be a model or the person who cannot, for whatever reason, put the sugar or the carbs away.

P: Yeah, definitely.

M: But is saying I’m going to be thin, I’m going to be thin, I’m going to be thin, right? Or I just don’t think that saying the words without doing the work can make any difference.

P: And science supports you. And even as a user of positive affirmations and the biggest jump on the bandwagon kind of guy, I support you as well. I believe that that’s the fundamental truth is that you can’t just will yourself into a state of being or a result by using positive affirmations. They have to come from somewhere deeper, based within in the subconscious, and that only comes from doing the hard work.

M: Now, sigh.

P: [Laugh]

M: After saying all of that, sharing my scepticism and with only a few minutes left in the show. I’m going to say that I did do some research.

P: Off we go, I’ve got some science here too actually.

M: And as much as it pains me to say-

P: Ha, ha!

M: -there is research that supports the effectiveness off positive affirmations. So MRI evidence suggests that certain neural pathways are increased when people practise self-affirmation tasks. I imagine that you’d have to do this without my scepticism, and cynicism.

P: [Laugh] not necessarily.

M: You’d probably have to put a little bit of belief and heart into what you’re doing and then as far as more research goes so self-affirmations have been shown to decrease health, deteriorating stress, so they help with negative stress. They’ve also been used effectively, and this is what we’re talking about before they’ve been used effectively in interventions that led people to increase their physical behaviour.

P: So that’s the cutting off the negative to increase the positive to create a desired result.

M: Yep, so if you are training for a marathon or just working out the gym or just hoping to get fit, then positive affirmations can definitely help to boost the effectiveness of the intervention you’re already taking.

P: Yep

M: They can make us less likely to dismiss harmful health messages. So this in particular was looked at in relation to smoking and trying to quit smoking. They can help with your intention to change for the better and also to eat more fruit and vegetables.

P: Really? I will eat bananas, I will eat bananas.

M: [Laugh] so that was Epton and Harris in 2008 who looked at fruit and vegetables and then Harris and some other researchers in 2007 looked at harmful health messages. And then the last one I looked at it’s been linked to positive academic achievement by mitigating GPA decline in students who felt left out at college.

P: Oh, really.

M: So this is, we’ve talked about social exclusion before. So students who were feeling excluded and not part of the group, generally they’re GPA declines. It has a real negative impact being excluded. We’ve talked about that so positive affirmations help them to keep their GPA consistent or increase it again.

P: Hhmm interesting.

M: And that was Layous in 2017.

P: I like all those examples. I’m going to throw something a little bit left field in here and trying to compute that GPA output with the social exclusion. That’s a very interesting…

M: Well, we do know that if you’re feeling left out, it can have huge impacts on your mental health, so.

P: The type of, type of person does for some it actually garners your resources and that makes you even more determined in a certain way. I think that comes down to personality.

M: I think you’ve still got to have someone. So if you’re at university and you have no friends I think there’s very few people that are not going to be impacted by that, and it depends on the level of exclusion. If you’re being bullied, that’s a whole other kettle of fish, right?

P: Yeah. Yeah. I’m thinking of the Sheldon’s in the world.

M: [Laugh] Who don’t notice and that’s why they keep going.

[Laughter]

P: Alright, I do know we’re running out of time, but I do want to throw this in there that some people have a different interpretation of the affirmations versus mantras.

I’m actually going to reference the work of the Gabriel Axel here, who’s a neuroscientist and a certified yoga teacher. He has written a lot on the use of mantra in terms of trying to develop a mind state, but also looked at the science behind it, using words like ‘Om’ and even ‘Amen’ in religious beliefs, he’s actually gone and done the science behind what the words do in the brain and he finds that sound evokes movements of energy within the brain. Evocations of certain sounds are linked with interoception… which is inner body sensations and in the emotional sense of self. Now these have found predominantly in the right hemisphere of the brain. Conversely, the narrative strand of sounds in which we give meaning is done in the left hemisphere of the brain.

M: Say that again.

P: The narrative strand of sounds in which we process meaning. So the way that we feel about sounds that come through our brain is done in the Left Hemisphere.

M: Okay, and sorry, what was the right?

P: The right is the inner body sensations, so that’s interoception.

M: Okay, sensations versus feelings.

P: Yes, what he’s talking about is bridging those two hemi-spheres by the use of mantras, and he says mantras from a physics standpoint, the sounds themselves will resonate in different parts of the body and mind creating actual interactions or events so therefore you can get sounds to cross the hemispheres of the brain to actually create different thought processes. So this is the science behind mantras and not necessarily affirmations. And he talks about validating a mantra for ourselves so we’ll be using the words such as ‘Om’ in a yoga practise, you can actually ‘Om’ your way out of a negative thought pattern.

M: Mm Hhmm…

P: It’s scientific. [Laugh]

M: Mm Hhmm…

P: You can look it up. He has supporting evidence from Mark Changizi who’s written a book ‘Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man’. So these are all interesting things will put on the website to maybe follow up.

M: Alright…

P: But you know, that’s just another aspect to come at it from in terms of the neuro scientific point of view.

M: All right, well, if the cynic me decides that I’m going to buy into this, I might read your book otherwise,

P: [Laugh]

M: it can be in our show notes.

P: [Laugh]

M: All right. I think we are going to have to finish this up for today.

P: So if you want to go out there and do some positive affirmations people, that’s all fine. But do the work behind it as well. I think that’s what we get from this.

M: Go do some work and throw in, layer in. It’s the icing on the cake. I guess is what I’m saying.

P: Yeah exactly.

M: It isn’t the cake.

P: No, you can’t rely on it alone. It has to be an add on.

M: Yep, all right, well thank you for joining us. As always, if you can like or subscribe to our podcast, we would very much appreciate it. And if you want to see our show notes or transcriptions you can visit marieskelton.com/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

P: Choose happiness.

[Happy Exit Music]

Related Content: Read Moving On articles Lessons From Navy SEAL David Goggins and Words That Can Change Your Mindset

Happy International Day of Friendship (E28)

27/07/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics

Celebrate International Day of Friendship with besties Marie and Pete, who hide under a blanket fort on a bed to discuss the value of friendship – from combatting the loneliness epidemic to how it can help you perceive the world differently.

Transcript

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

P: And I’m Peter Furness a flexibility fan, adaptive, creative and gold focused obsessive. 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 if you’re only satisfied with life but not truly happy with it.

M: Maybe just want more.

P: Then this is the place to be.

M: And this week, we are talking about friendships.

P: Awe

[Happy Music]

M: So, Pete, we’re trialing a new model for recording podcasts this week.

P: Yes, we’re talking about friendships. And I’m being a really good friend because you put me under a blanket.

[Laughter]

M: Literally.

P: Literally, really. And I’m sitting here and I’m hot [Laugh].

M: So I was listening to our own podcast this week, and I decided that we echo too much because we don’t have the sound studio. We’re now in my bedroom. My husband is very forgiving.

P: I’m schmitzing like a schmagetthi.

[Laughter]

M: We’re hiding under a blanket. We’ll see whether the sound quality is any better for all of you out there.

P: This isn’t gonna last in summer you can tell.

M: We have air con it’s OK. So this is what good friends do, we make forts on the bed.

[Laughter]

M: And speaking of good friends were talking about friendship today.

P: Very big topic.

M: And really, I’m going to call out to a new friend that we’ve both made recently, David. David, no last name, we’ll protect the privacy of our new friends and we were talking just last weekend about the concept of your chosen family.

P: Yes.

M: And I think for a lot of us today who move away from our hometowns you choose your new family when you move to new areas.

P: I think it’s vital to find your chosen family because you need to replace those close bonds with someone else and if you don’t have your family around you. Then you need to find, you need to find your tribe.

M: Find your tribe. And you know what? When you could choose your family..

P: [Laughter] there is a little bit of that.

M: Times can be much happier.

P: Well they can be. Although there are, there are lessons to be learned by sticking with the one person for 20/30 years.

M: Yeah, True, true. So let’s get to why this is important. Why friendship is important. I think that the macro story here is that there is a loneliness epidemic right now.

P: Is there? Is there actually a loneliness epidemic at the moment?

M: Absolutely. So, there’s a lot of research right now. We’re living older and unfortunately, even when we do couple up, we don’t always die at the same age. So there’s a lot more people who are living a lot longer by themselves we’re also divorcing at higher rates, not so much in the last 10/ 20 years, but divorce rates have gone up in the last few hundred years. So there are more people in general who just are single going into their older years as well. And also we’re marrying later. So again there are a lot more single people out there who are living by themselves and particularly with Corona virus. This has been a huge problem with people just being alone, not only lonely but alone for so long.

P: Yeah, that’s true.

M: So it is definitely. They’re calling it the loneliness epidemic. So estimates as high as 30% of people are lonely.

P: Wow.

M: And feel lonely regularly in their lives.

P: OK.

M: Yes. So this is why friendship is so important. Such a big topic. And also because all the research shows that having strong relationships and finding your tribe and sense of belonging and connectedness is critical to happiness.

P: Yeah that message comes through in every single time we talk about something. It’s like, it’s really the social connections are the big ones. Friendships is another one of those social conventions. And I guess with friendship as well that comes down to a social paradigm; Because since the change of the last 100 years of social conventions and the ideas of marriage and so forth where a lot of people are choosing not to be married at all and that whole concept of staying single and being content, staying single. It’s no longer a thing of like ‘Oh, you’re going to die an old maid.’ Now it’s like ‘you’re going to die and old maid and it’s going to be great!’

M: [Laugh]

P: There is, There is. There is no..

M: Shame.

P: Predilection to being, yeah or shame being single and being, you know, cast into a life of looking after your parents in the county cottage aka Jane Austen anymore. You know, you can be single, be happy and this is where friendships do come in because you can replace those marriage ties or family ties that come with marriage with friendships. And that’s where David’s thing about the chosen family becomes really important.

M: Absolutely and even your.. I’m married and happily married. Mostly.

P: [Laugh]

M: I mean, no marriage is perfect. Let’s be really honest and vulnerable here. He leaves his socks everywhere. It’s a thing. It drives me batty. But we’re happy, so happy, so, so happy.

P: [Laugh]

M: Anyway. But my friends are such a big part of my life. And..

P: I was going to take you to task over this Marie because those of you who do know us, we’ve been friends for a while now. I would say you’re a very driving force in terms of keeping our social connections going. In our social group. You are the one that actually gets in there and organises regular catchup’s and says, no, no, no, let’s do this, let’s keep this going on. I was going to pose a question to you. It could be part of your personality because you are the organisation princess, that we know and love. But is that, was it a conscious decision for you? Or is it a conscious decision for you to to, make sure and plan those catch ups and commit because I find you are very committed to those catch ups.

M: I can. Umm, that’s a really good question, and now you’ve thrown me.

P: Ah ha! He he.

M: I think part of its personality. Let’s be really honest.

P: Yep!

M: I like control.

[Laughter]

P: I get that. But there is, you’re the person that really does, like, push. Like ‘No, no, we’re not letting this go, guys. We’re going to catch up this week, and it’s going to be this week and it’s going to be tomorrow.’

M: ‘And you will enjoy it and it will be fun and everyone will laugh!’

P: And that’s your personality coming out.

[Laughter]

P: Whereas I think for some of us and I’m guilty of this, definitely some of my long term friends will be nodding in agreement that it’s too easy to let those catch ups to go.

M: Yeah.

P: It’s too easy to just go ‘Oh no, let’s just do it next week. I’m feeling tired.’ And that’s actually it’s important not to do that all the time.

M: Yeah, look, I think it depends on the person you’re going to get me in trouble here. I find it easier, proximity helps to drive a lot of what I choose to do with my friends. So if it’s just going down to the local pub, so much easier than driving across the bridge.

P: Oh, yes, absolutely.

M: To go see someone.

P: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

M: And if it’s an activity I like.

P: Volleyball.

M: Food.

P: Food, volleyball. Got it. [Laugh]

M: Yeah, pretty much so look as long as those two things align, then I’ll push for things happening. But it’s, it’s weird that you say that because I feel like I’ve been really quite introverted and isolated during Covid.

P: Which, this surprises me about you because that’s not the impression that I’ve had to you for the last eight years or so.

M: Yep, yep. I don’t know.

P: Maybe, maybe the pandemic has changed you.

M: No I’ve always, I’ve always fought against too much social time, a love my social time, and I love people and I love hanging out with people, and I get a lot from those interactions, and I think it’s critical. And as a journalist and then a communications expert, I completely understand the benefit and value of face to face communication in particular. And I understand how that’s challenging people right now during Covid, however, it’s exhausting to me.

P: Yeah, alright.

M: So I need my time to re-centre, and I think that’s where the writing and reading comes in, and researching.

P: That’s the introvert/ extrovert balance there isn’t it?

M: Yeah, and I’m constantly fighting that pull.

P: I think it’s a fine line. I think I do the same thing. I really value my solo time. And for me, I’ve had more people living in my house lately and it’s interesting how that changes your solo time. And every now and then you’re like ‘Oh, can everyone just leave.’ I just need an hour. [Laugh]

M: Yep, So that’s been my reality. And I feel like I’m always fighting that every day, like I just want everyone to go away.

P: Yeah.

M: So that’s why I say I’m an introvert. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to hang out with people and love people.

P: But friendships are vitally important to making sure that we keep those social connections and instances alive. So let’s talk a bit more about the research behind that.

M: You’ve done a whole lot. So, I looked very much into why this is important and looked at the loneliness epidemic and another one, sleeplessness breeds loneliness.

P: Sleeplessness breeds loneliness. Okay, let’s go into that one.

M: Again, I don’t actually, we won’t spend too much time on this one. I don’t know whether lonely people don’t get as much sleep, and therefore, when they’re not sleeping there feeling more lonely, I don’t know the cause and effect there, right? They’re not going out, and I don’t know how that works, but absolutely there’s so much that’s tied to insomnia and sleeplessness when it comes to depression and just not feeling good. So, sleeplessness or insomnia or poor sleep could be a cause or an effect.

P: I think it makes you less likely to reach out to people because being in proximity to people and having to take part in a conversation becomes a bit more exhausting if you’ve had sleeplessness.

M: Mmm Hhm. Yep, Absolutely. Now you had some great studies here?

P: Yeah. I have.

M: I want to hear about your University of Virginia one. Can we go to that one?

P: [Laugh] Yeah okay. So the perception of friendship and how it makes us perceive things, friendships make us perceive our life better. One of the great benefits of friendships is that we get to sound things off people and that can change our perception of how well off or how beneficial we are or how healthy we are and all those sorts of things.

The University of Virginia did a wonderful study with backpacks and a hill. So, they took 34 students. Put them all at the bottom of a hill and for some of the students, they couple them up with friends, and for some of them they were left alone and the question was how steep is the hill? And they had a high degree of the people with couples, friendships perceived the hill to be a lot less steep because they were standing there with a backpack on their shoulders and they had their buddy.

M: Oh, I love it.

P: Mmm. So it changes the way that you look at the world when you’ve got someone standing next to you or by you or with you.

M: So it’s just a perception thing.

P: Completely.

M: I have a great little story that I want to share, which has nothing to do with anything but I want to share it.

P: [Laugh] That’s what you do on this podcast.

M: But you made me think of [it]. Just about.. ‘Oh, I’m just going to share it anyway. So, a teacher blew up balloons, hundreds of balloons and put them into the corridor with each of the students names on it. And all the students came out of their classrooms at the end of the day and she said, ‘Okay, kids, you’ve got a minute to find your balloon.’ And there were hundreds of kids and hundreds of balloons.

P: That sounds like so much fun! [Laugh]

M: They went into the balloons and they were looking and after a minute she said ‘Ok everyone stop, who’s found their balloon?’ and no one had ofcourse because there were too many and no one could find their balloon. She said to them, ‘If you had stopped for a second and not thought about you and your balloon, but thought about everyone else in the room and found one balloon with a person’s name that you know and handed them their balloon. Everyone would have had their balloon within a minute.

P: Mmm. That’s beautiful. That’s wonderful.

M: Absolutely. And so the moral is, happiness is the same. If you’re constantly looking just at yourself, you’ll never find happiness.

P: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn’t come through.

M: But if you do it with your friends, if you find your friends and you worry about their happiness. Happiness will come back to you.

P: That’s because happiness isn’t a destination, it’s a benefit.

M: But it’s also social and it’s about, it’s about looking after others and being kind to others and we’ve talked about volunteering before as an example as well, spending your time being kind to others comes back to you tenfold.

P: Tenfold, definitely. I’ve got a story that supports that actually.

M: This is actual research not just story.

P: Well, no, this one’s a book and it was written by Jeffrey Zaslow and it’s the story of The Girls from Ames. I think I said that right. It’s a story of women in a 40 year old friendship and this author talks about a group of 11 childhood friends who shared crises and support and lives, and they’ve been in this relationship for 40 years to the point where they all moved to different parts of the country and they were separated by a great geographical boundaries and at some point, as these ladies aged, there were different things that came up and one woman was diagnosed with breast cancer and when she spoke to her doctor, her doctor said, ‘Surround yourself with the people who love you’ and, of course she immediately thought of her, … her family. But then the first people that she reached out to was this circle of friends, this circle of 11 people and she talked differently with them than she did with her doctor and even with her family.

And one of the things was when she was going through the chemotherapy treatment, she said, ‘Oh, my throat is always really dry.’ So one friend sent her a smoothie maker and recipes for smoothies and it was that kind of thoughtfulness that came through, and it’s because she felt much more comfortable talking about the intricacies and the details of her, her symptoms and how she was feeling because she knew she could trust these women with everything, and it’s that honesty and openness. You know, it comes down to, you know I’ll be really blank and frank here. Being able to talk about lovers and so forth with friends and going this was happening the other night, and I didn’t know what was going on. We’ve all had those conversations. You can’t talk to your husband about that.

M: Yeah.

P: Vault conversations. I remembered you talked about that once. No this doesn’t leave the…

M: There are some vault conversations, yeah.

P: But it is. It’s that freedom to be able to talk completely and honestly and openly, and that’s where friendships are really special and in this way, it’s supported by some of the other research that I’ve seen with Rebecca G. Adams, a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and she cites .. that ‘friendship has more psychological impact than family.’

M: It’s your chosen family.

P: It’s.. See the research supports that perhaps our friendships are really more important than our family relationships at certain points in our life.

M: Well, obviously not as a baby, but..

P: No but maybe as we get older, it’s possibly more important that we surround ourselves with close friendships.

M: Yeah.

P: And I can say this. Honestly, I believe that I have a really close friendship with my sister, and that’s gotten even more closer as we’ve gone on together. We were never that close as kids, but now I could trust her with anything. And yet I probably wouldn’t ring her up and talk about my lover’s and things like that. [Laugh]

M: I don’t think she’d want to hear it Pete.

P: Well she might [laugh]. You never know.

M: I think that it starts in teen years when you’re trying to break away from your parents. I think that’s when, when the shift happens, definitely you’re learning to be independent and friendships at that age can have a huge impact on who you end up being as an adult.

P: Absolutely and that, they are very formative, some of the research I came across was really supportive about how we seek friendships in our teen years and what that does for our development.

M: Mmm Hmm. Definitely, always looking for the cool kids.

P: [Laugh] The rebels. I think that says something about us.

M: [Laugh] So I know both of us have moved a lot and have had a variety of different friendships, and I’ve definitely been blessed with the different cultures that have had to..

P: Get to know?

M: Get to know.

P: And understand? [Laugh]

M: Yeah, definitely and I think, I think it’s just such a blessing when you move overseas and can make friends with people who are not like you.

P: Yeah, Ahh yes.

M: And you find things that bond you together and learn so much more about yourself. You know, I think it’s really valuable to.. And then I went and married an American.

P: He he

M: So I think that’s just such a good growth opportunity as well. But making friends is not easy.

P: It kinda.. for some people it’s really difficult, definitely. I wasn’t I wasn’t able to make friends very easily at all until I moved away from home.

M: Same, actually. And I went to a preschool that fed into a primary school, that fed into the high school friends, and then my college and then most of my friends, all went to the two universities in my town, right?

P: Right, He he.

M: So it wasn’t ‘til I went overseas that I had to.. And I’d made different friends along the way, but more because they’d come into my life and joined my friendship circles, not because I’d gone looking for them. It was until I moved overseas that I was like, well, this is awkward.

P: Yeah.

M: Hi, I’m Marie..

P: How do I do this? [Laugh]

M: And I like long walks on the beach, oh no that’s dating, shit.

P: [Laugh]

M: You did the same thing you moved to London.

P: Yeah, that was one of my big moments for me. I was actually on my way to the continent, I was going to Paris that was my goal. I wanted to work in Paris, but I landed in London. And my beautiful, lovely, wonderful friend Adam was living in London at the time and he was already established in a house and long story short, my trip to Paris never happened because I got to London. I got into the house and they were like ‘dude there’s a room here, you could possibly stay here’ and all of a sudden I had work. I was like, Oh, looks like I’m staying in London then. And those guys were my chosen family overseas and we had a Skippy house. We had one Scottish girl on one English girl, but we were predominantly Australians and it was kooky, crazy blend of people but it worked and it gave me a support network so that I felt like I had that instant crew and friendship around me. In a city like London, really important.

M: I think it’s interesting that as we’ve gotten more money, we tend to move to single living. Living by ourselves like that’s an achievement to have a place of your own and the implications of that are that we can be really lonely.

P: [Laughter]

M: It’s actually really bad, so I don’t know whether we’ve put value on the wrong thing. We’ve spoken before about success and the..

P: Markers that we achieve or aspire to.

M: You know, having a house by yourself shows that you’ve really made it. I just think maybe communal living is actually the way to go. I think that sometimes, I think ‘My God I’m a 47 year old man and I’m still in a share house. But at the end of it, it works and I enjoy it, and it is nice sometimes to come home on your own as I said, and my housemate’s are going to be killing me here. [Laugh] But it is also really lovely sometimes to come home and go ‘Hi, and sit down and all of a sudden there’s a bottle of wine open and there’s pizza in the oven and you chill out and all of a sudden it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you go ‘oh we’ve just talked the night away.

M: Which is lovely. Alright, well, that’s all we have time for today, unfortunately.

P: Awe.. sad.

M: So thank you 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 marieskelton.com, a site about how to find balance, happiness and resilience in your life, including some really practical tips and resource is to get you started on your happiness journey.

P: Yay.

M: Until next time.

P: Choose happiness!

[Happy exit music]

Related content: Read Moving On article How To Make Friends As An Adult, listen to our Podcast: The Benefits of Volunteering (E22)

The Importance of Having Fun In Your Life with Dr Mike Rucker (E27)

20/07/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics

In this week’s episode, we talk to Dr Mike Rucker about the importance of having fun in your life and how it improves your overall wellbeing.

One of the narratives that I like to talk about is productivity porn or hustle porn. We get caught up in this notion that we have to devote our lives to work and that should be our purpose. And we’re just not wired for that.
Mike Rucker

About Dr Mike Rucker

Mike Rucker is a thought leader in the field of health and wellness, specifically regarding tactics to attract and motivate people towards healthier behaviours. He has worked with Universal Studios, Sony, Red Bull, and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, among others.

In 2016, he was named one of the top 50 influencers in digital health by Onalytica. He has a Ph.D., is a charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association, and a member of the American Psychological Association.

Find Mike at:

Website: MichaelRucker.com
Instagram: TheWonderOfFun
Twitter: @PerformBetter

Keep an eye out in 2021 for Mike’s new book!

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the Podcast Happiness for Cynics. Each week we will bring you the latest news and research in the world of Positive Psychology otherwise known as happiness. I’m Marie Skelton a writer and speaker focused on change and resilience my co-host Pete is a bundle of joy but he’s off doing something fabulous I’m sure because today’s episode is all about bringing fun into your life and to discuss that we went straight to the source with an interview with Dr. Mike Rucker who has the coolest title ever, he is a fun expert. So, let’s get to this.

[Intro Music]

M: Mike Rucker is a thought leader in the field of health and wellness, specifically regarding tactics to attract and motivate people towards healthier behaviours. In 2016 he was named one of the Top 50 influencers in Digital Health by Onalytica. He has a PhD, is a Charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) and a member of the American Psychological Association. He’s worked with Universal Studios, Sony, Red Bull and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, among others. And although he’s passionate about many more things than I can fit into this short bio; today he joins us to talk about having fun and improving people’s overall well-being. Thanks, Mike, for joining us on happiness for cynics. I’m so excited to have you on the show.

Mike: Thanks so much for having me.

M: So, I’m keen to start by asking you how you got involved in studying the science of fun.

Mike: So… so as you mentioned in the bio at the onset of the positive psych movement, I mean, I guess, Csikszentmihalyi and flow and all of that kind of thing predated the IPPA. But when Marty Seligman’s book Authentic Happiness came out, that was really the onset of, you know, popular psychology, becoming popular, Sorry excuse me positive psychology, becoming popular.

Mike: And I was caught up in that movement. So I became a Charter member of the IPPA and study diligently Seligman, Csikszentmihalyi and others and a lot of the things that you discuss on your podcast, things like gratitude and kindness and so you know, I have been practising those tools for quite some time, but in 2016 kind of a trifecta of bad news came my way. I’ve been a lifelong runner and found out that I was going to need a hip replacement. My little brother unexpectedly passed away from a pulmonary embolism and then my wife got a job offer that was going to take us out of state. So that kind of uprooted us from family and friends. And so a lot of what I had learned, you know, taking gratitude and things of that nature just weren’t working, you know, I was really trying to use mindset and the other things too and I found that there were a few things right, so I had used them for so long that it kind of, you know, they weren’t effective.

And then two, especially with the passing of my brother. I didn’t necessarily want to be happy. I didn’t feel like, you know, happiness was the right thing for me. It wasn’t part of my identity in that moment, but and I was also in the throws of finishing my dissertation. So, like any good academic went to the literature and started seeing if there was anything that I had missed and what I did find was a big research gap in this idea of fun and the fact that we have agency in any given moment to, you know, add positive valance, positive emotion to an experience, even if we’re not necessarily feeling like we want to be happy in that moment, so those two can co-exist or can exist separately.

Obviously you add enough indexing of fun experiences, and it tends to pull you out of despair, which is great. But I think the reason that I like looking at it as a separate construct from happiness is that it points to the fact that we have agency in any given moment to enjoy ourselves and find enjoyment. Even if you’re dealing with a loss or divorce or, you know, stress somewhere you don’t necessarily need to identify as happy to go and have fun. And then another thing I like about it in the context of positive psychology is that it’s action oriented.

I think happiness, you know, we’ve quantified it to some degree in psychology and so therefore we kind of use it as a measure, right? And we know from things like the Hedonic treadmill and Perceptual adaptation that a lot of our happiness is kind of based on circumstance, where we are in life and our comparison to our… socioeconomic class. Where fun really transcends a lot of that, but certainly people can use resource is to have fun if they have a lot of money. But often times, especially with children, we’ll see that completely transcend socioeconomic classes. Two puppies don’t really need to know each other to start playing. Two children, you know on the playground, don’t need to know each other’s background in the context, you know, to enjoy kicking the ball around. And as we grow older, we lose sight of that because we’re such victims to the judgement habit.

One of the things. One of the interventions that I like to talk about. I can’t take credit for it. It’s from IDL[?]. But it’s this idea where you take a bunch of people in a room and you have them pair up with strangers and you have them do caricatures of each other, which is a really fun assignment, right? Like everyone in the video, you can see is smiling and enjoying themselves, and then you’re asked to share that with your partner. And then you see this anxiety and fear almost instantly, right and no one cares, like there was no assumption that you are an artist, right? But this idea that now you’re going to be judged by someone that you don’t know. Even though the assignment was completely fun and whimsical sucks it out. And so if you practise having fun you can start to get some of that back. You can realise that you’re not being judged as much as you think you are. And so I have just really taken a liking to it. Not as making it overtly important, but something that we don’t think about enough.

M: Absolutely. I’d say that as an adult where, I don’t know, from childhood where we’re trained that growing up involves taking fun out of our lives and becoming serious. And so I find this idea fascinating. So happy to be talking to you about it.

So what does the science say about what fun can do in our lives?

Mike: So, I think there’s a whole host of things, right? So we know that in fact, there’s a recent study that shows the more spontaneous we are, the more that we kind of look for the spices of life can lead to happiness. Another thing about having a deliberate fun is I think you are able to circumvent the Hedonic treadmill if you do it mindfully, right. A lot of things that we pursue are based on keeping up with the Joneses and things that we think are fun or we’re kidding ourselves. But when we take a more mindful approach to it, fun, pure elation and really enjoying something that is true to your soul is [it] ads gains to our life like episodically we have these indexes that we can relish were sort of chasing happiness.

I think we’re starting to see more of that it can lead to negative outcomes because what happens is especially if you’re doing it in the context of a clinical setting. You take these assessments like the PERMA or whatever it is and it says ‘Oh, you know, you’re not where you want to be’, and so that then becomes part of your identity, right? As soon as you get the results, you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m not happy’ where fun is so immersive that, you know, almost anybody can do it. And so in that context, that’s why I believe it’s important.

M: So can I can paraphrase and correct me if I’m wrong here.

Mike: Yes.

M: You can’t chase happiness, but you can chase fun and fun will bring you happiness, at least in the short term.

Mike: Yeah, and I would be careful because chasing happiness can lead to escapism. And there’s good escapism and there’s bad, right? And so you know, bad is coping and certainly, you know, we all need to cope and so having a bit of fun, It’s not necessarily chasing it, but there are people. I have interviewed a gentleman by the name of Chip Conly and he’s, are you familiar?

M: No, not with Chip. I’ll have to look him up.

Mike: He might be more U.S. centric, but he, he’s an entrepreneur by trade, he started a hotel chain called Joie de Vivre. But he’s also he either is or was on the governing body of Burning Man. And so we talked about this idea, folks that chase festivals. I’m sure you have the same phenomenon in Australia. And so that really is chasing fun, right? And that can lead to, you know some really bad things. And so the idea is that that fun is all encompassing like a lot of times when I have these discussions, especially because some of my earlier work, you know, I have blogged things like optimise fun, things of that nature, which when I find the time, I’ll rewrite because the idea there wasn’t necessarily to say that we should have a life full of fun. It was that we’re facing, you know, burnout at rates that we’ve never seen before, right? The World Health Organisation has now categorised it as a global epidemic. And after Covid, who even knows, right? Because that was in 2019. So, like, you know, we know people are losing their asses right now.

[Laughter]

Mike: So, idea is you know, to add it [fun] back into your lives to loop back to something that you said a lot of us as adults have moved away from it because social norms or especially one of the narratives that I like to talk about is productivity, porn or hustle porn. You know, we get caught up in this notion that, you know, we have to devote our lives to work and that should be our purpose. And we’re just not wired for that. We need downtime and leisure.

It’s extremely important, I think in oceana you guys take it a little bit better than us. I remember I did a stint at Christ Church at Lincoln University and you could actually major in leisure which I thought was awesome.

M: Ha ha.

Mike: But, you know, I think everywhere, certainly here in the U.S. But I think everywhere we’re just finding that people aren’t using their paid time off. They have a sense of duty. So they think, especially folks in my age range that are caught in what it was called the sandwich generation. Or you have kids and you have to look, look after your parents that, you know people will feel guilty even if they are engaging in a night out, which is just not right.

So you know you have 168 hours in a week, and I think if you can’t find one or two where you’re actually finding pleasure out of that, that’s meaningful to you, that isn’t [good], You know at the sake of, you know like playing with your children and then kind of, you know, even though that could be fun, I think a lot of people are doing it out of a sense of duty and are on their phone really the whole time. So they think they’re playing with their kids, but if they look at it critically, they’re not really having fun there. Half of their brain is at work and the other half is treating that hour as obligation yet they’ll kind of log it in their brain as play.

M: Yep. Or it, it’s another list item that you’ve got to check off in the week, you know. It becomes a stress to have fun.

Mike: Yeah

M: So what are some tips then for listeners for how to introduce more fun into their lives? How do you do it? So it’s not just another thing that you’ve got to add into your week and another expert telling us ‘here’s something else you need to do to make your life more full and meaningful.’

Mike: Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question because… I’m writing a book right now called The Fun Habit. It’s coming out next year, and I think in the original manuscript you were exactly right. Like we realised, I’m working with a development editor, and it was, this is just, a lot of these tactics are giving people just another thing to do and that certainly was implied. And so we’re reworking it because you’re right. If it’s a burden than it’s the scenario with childcare. It’s the same thing.

So what I suggest is you know 168 hours isn’t a lot right to really be mindful on any given week. And so I suggest taking a look, doing a really general time audit, you don’t have to be completely thorough but investigating in one week’s time, what you’re doing and kind of logging it within four different categories.

I call it the PLAY model, so it’s:

Pleasing;
Living;
Agonising; Or
Yielding.

And without going too deep into it, you can often find those opportunities where you think that you’re having fun but changing things up just a little bit. You can actually enjoy yourself. So in the scenario with the child you commit to that hour and that you might do something using self-determination theory, where you both have some autonomy on what it is, right. So both the child and the adult will agree because, it’s funny I talk about it in the book, but sometimes if you don’t do that extra step and you do it, something that the adult thinks the child will have fun that could backfire. I did that one time. I took my daughter to a lantern festival. It was kind of a father daughter date, and I really wanted to sort of be this reflective spiritual experience. And she really just wanted to light as many lanterns off as possible, right?

M: [Laugh]

Mike: So that’s where I failed at my own advice, because I was looking to have fun. But I didn’t. It wasn’t really inclusionary. It was more prescriptive, right? So, but you can also do that. I don’t want this to all be parent centric. I think, you know, let’s say you’re a single individual. If it could be making sure that you sit down at lunch and use that opportunity to reconnect with a friend or whatever it is.

But often times what people think you know is leisure, like binge watching a show that they don’t really care about can be replaced with something more meaningful. And so I want to be careful there, too, because it certainly is meaningful if you’re watching it with, you know, it’s something that you really enjoy on. You can think back on it, but a good litmus test for that is, you know, any sort of activity that if you went back to savour or relish it, would you remember what it was about? You know, a lot of times if people are being honest with themselves. You know, social media viewing or TV doesn’t fit in that category. A lot of times it does. I always like to preface it because I’ll get emails that say ‘Why are you demonising media?’ And I don’t think that’s the case. I think a lot of people do have fun, you know, engaging with content and things of that nature. But a lot of us do it to kind of placate to you know, to distract us from other things.

M: And I think again it comes back to mindful viewing and being mindful about what you choose to spend your time on.

Mike: Or if you’re in the company of a good partner, you know, enjoying that time you might not remember the show but you’ll remember that you guys laughed and drank wine and whatever it is, you know.

M: Yeah, definitely. So your acronym there and again I don’t want to give away the book. We want our readers to actually go and buy the book. The acronym you used was PLAY to take that a little bit further and move away from the acronym. How are play and fun interlinked? Or are they? Have you done any research into how they’re tied?

Mike: Yes, they’re definitely different. And so, but obviously they come up right, because you’re going to have fun doing a whole gambit of different things and not necessarily playing, but play therapy, engaging in various types of play. [Dr] Stuart Brown is kind of a godfather of that I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work.

But because even that, you know, since it’s not really my expertise but reading his book, you know the amount of ways that you can slice and dice play. I found fascinating, right?

There’s child play.

There’s, you know, improv[ization] play.

There’s sport play;

So, you know play, you could fill up a few of these podcasts with just what play is because we often just think about it as being childlike with either other adults or with kids. But play as sort of a, you know, construct. Wellbeing is multifaceted, but fun can be, you can enjoy things outside of place, so that’s where the two are delineated.

M: Okay, great. So you mentioned your book. Is there anything else that you can give our listeners a sneak peek about, about what the book is about or the dust cover overview?

Mike: Sure. Well, it’s really just a comprehensive look at fun the way we described it, I think reintroducing folks to the fact that they do have some agency. And then one of the things that we didn’t really talk about, but I think is important is this idea of time affluence, right? You know, we talked about affluence and, you know, personal brand and money, especially in you know, the context of the Internet, right?

Everyone is always trying to sell you the next hustle, but time affluence is something that’s really important and people take for granted right, because often times, especially if you go back and do that time audit, you’ll realise that you’re giving away a lot of your time that you don’t really need to, you know, one of things that we talked about in the book certainly is things like email where just a couple of strategies there, you know, and I don’t go too deep into productivity, but there are a lot of things that you think are yielding some sort of output and it ends up just really making yourself believe that you’re busy and it’s not really contributing, so those are opportunities that you could put on pause or potentially take away from your day to day and implement better uses of time.

M: Great. I’m looking forward to seeing it come out. Now you have such an impressive bio and such a broad sweep of experience, and I know that you’re also heavily involved in the health and tech or health-tech and product design areas. Do you know of any apps that you could recommend to help adults bring more fun or play into their lives?

Mike: So there are a couple, I don’t have any that I’m affiliated with. I play with them all the time as you alluded to, right. So the one that my kids are having just a great time with right now is called Marco Polo, are you familiar with it?

M: No and look I’m really personally interested in the answer to this question as well. So Marco Polo?

Mike: Yeah, it’s a way where you can kind of, it’s similar to TikTok, but more personal, where you do something silly and then you kind of send it over to your friend and they can respond. So it’s a great way, especially during Covid for family members that are whimsical or silly to sort of, you know, just like the Marco Polo game kind of bounce stuff back and forth. So that’s a great one for having fun. And then the one that I’ve been enjoying right now is out of Duke [Behavioural Economics Lab] called Fabulous and it’s a habit changing app. So it’s a little outside the bounds of fun, per se, but it has a bunch of really cool sort of interventions and one of the you know, it’s got to slick UI [User Interface], I’m having a lot of fun with it [laugh].

M: Thank you so much. So thank you for all of your time. We’re almost at the 20 minute mark. But before we go, how can people find out a bit more about you? And where should we look out for your book?

Mike: Thank you for this Opportunity.

So my website’s michaelrucker.com

And then I’m also on all the social channels on Instagram under the wonder of fun. And on Twitter under perform better.

It’s kind of an old handle, but I didn’t decide not to switch it up yet, He he.

M: Sure, no worries. And where will you be launching your book?

Mike: Yes. So it got picked up by Simon and Schuster and they’re looking for a cue for 2021 pub date. So in about a year and a half it should come out.

M: No worries. Okay, we’ll keep an eye out for it then. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you talking to us.

Mike: This was great. Thank you for having me.

[Exit Music]

Related content: Read Moving On article Resiliency Is About Recharging And Self-Care, But Are You Doing It Wrong?, listen to our Podcast: Self-Care is Church for Non-Believers (E17)

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The Danish Art of Hygge (E26)

13/07/2020 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics Podcast

Denmark is the happiest country in the world, so this week we look at the Danish practice of Hygge (pronounced hoo-geh) to see what all the fuss is about.

Transcript

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

P: And I’m Peter Furness, a lover, maker and happiness creator. Has a nice ring to it, Doesn’t it?

M: It does.

P: 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 if you’re only satisfied with life but not truly happy with it.

M: Or maybe you just want more.

P: [Whispers] Greedy.

Then this is the place to be.

M: And today’s episode is all about Hygge.

[Happy intro music]

M: So today we are talking about Hygge. And we have listened to [the pronunciation of] it on Google multiple times.

P: And it took multiple chances to get it right.

M: And we’ve probably still got it wrong. So I apologise if you are Danish.

P: [Laugh]

M: So Hygge. How’s that spelled, Pete?

P: H Y G G E.

M: Yes. I think that’s how they teach kids to spell now. Isn’t it?

P: Phonetically?

M: Yeah

P: Oh wow.

M: Maybe, maybe I read that, I read a lot of things. I make a lot of things up to I’m sure of it.

P: Like Moses and the 15 tablets. [Laugh]

M: That was you. All you! [Laugh]

M: So Hygge, what is it?

P: Interesting.

M: Do you want to get started?

P: Oh no, this is all you.

M: Okay, so I came across this, this week, and I’m so intrigued by this on and I’m going to start by quoting a guy called Meik Wiking, we would say, taking in English. But I’m sure it’s pronounced Viking because he is a Dane, right? So that’s where the Vikings came from. Up there, right? So he’s the author of ‘The Little Book of Hygge Danish Secrets to Happy Living.’

He’s also the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. And even more impressive from a background point of view is that Denmark is the world’s happiest country, according to – [the 2016 World Happiness Report]

P: – Followed very closely by Sweden and Norway, who sometimes tip them over the balance, I was reading.

M: These guys are all happy so we’re going to actually turn and listen, so this is about saying what’s going on in the happiest country in the world, right?

P: There’s a reason why they’re so happy.

M: So he says that Hygge has been called everything from the art of creating intimacy to cosiness of the soul and even cocoa by candlelight.

P: Awe

M: And in his book, he explains that you know Hygge when you feel it, but that some of the key ingredients are:

Togetherness;

Relaxation;

Indulgence;

Presence; and

Comfort.

P: It just sounds like a night in front of the Telly [Television].

M: It sounds like an indulgent in front of the Telly.

P: Ooh! Tim Tams, coffee and champagne.

M: Yes a deliberate night in front of the Telly not just a.. I’m exhausted from work, and I happen to be in front of the Telly, it’s like I’m choosing it.

P: Yeah.

M: Which makes it all the more better. You’re choosing laziness and getting happiness out of it.

P: Yeah very true.

M: And what I’m so excited about this is it gives you permission to cuddle in the blanket and sweatpants all day.

P: [Laugh]

M: Bliss.

P: And if our listeners could see, Marie is still in her sweat pants and her little slippers, and it’s four o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday.

M: It pretty much excuses my entire behaviour for Covid, three months of my life was just dedicated to Hygge, not just laziness.

P: It’s just giving yourself permission.

M: I mean they don’t talk about not shaving or showering but I think you could go there if you wanted to.

P: Haha sure, ok it’s indulgent.

M: So pretty much. What we’re talking about is that actually the Danes spend a lot more time indoors over winter than we do. We are very lucky with the weather and this is a way of coming together and creating a cosy environment and blissing out.

P: Well, it’s interesting. I was reading one of the articles in The New Yorker actually about Hygge.

M: In the New Yorker?

P: The New Yorker, yes. Just to throw that out there. And what I found interesting was that they talk about it in terms of you can’t necessarily transfer the Hygge concept to Americanism because of the culture differences between Denmark and America.

M: Mmm

P: It becomes a little bit more of a[n] egalitarian concept. When you transfer it straight into American [society], they talk about the fact that-

M: What?

P: Well, they’re talking about it in terms of their culture that if you just say to people, you know you want the Danish experience, you want to have antlers on your wall and cosy fur rugs and the Scandinavian wood and all this sort of stuff.

M: And a roaring fire.

P: [Laugh]

M: I’m there, I’m there. Keep going.

P: I’m probably not explaining it very well, but they say that if you transfer that across to an American experience, it becomes different, becomes it a social. How do they talk about it, it becomes.. I’m trying to be really polite. I’m just going to come out and say it, it becomes egotistic. ‘Oh, I’m celebrating my fabulousness because I have access to all these Scandinavian design and so forth and the evolution of a roaring fire in my house.’

M: The irony is that Scandinavian design is minimalist, they’re known for their minimalism and not for their comfort and cosiness.

[Laughter]

M: But, I love this concept, which maybe layers on top of the minimalist.

P: I’m going to quote the article here.

‘When transferred to the United States. The kind of understated luxury that Danes consider a shared national trait starts to seem like little more than a symbol of economic status, the very thing that Scandinavian countries have sought to jettison.’

M: [Laugh] This is so New Yorker.

[Laughter]

M: This is more a reflection on the New Yorker than on America.

P: [Laugh] Ok, we’re not going to go there. We might delete this.

M: No, no, not at all. I think it’s a really valid perspective.

P: Well, they go on to say that there are lessons from the Hygge that Americans might heed.

M: And I think is we’re going into winter now in Australia, and because this is a new thing, it is the new Marie Kondo, you know, sparking joy; Hygge is the latest thing that everyone’s talking about right now, and in particular because of this ‘Little Book of Hygge’ that’s come out. So go look it up if you’re looking for something to read over winter, and I think it’s perfect in its timing because of what’s happened with Covid, we’ve just been given permission to spend all this time at home. Winter is coming Pete, and we need Hygge.

P: Let’s make it relative though the Australian winter is coming, which, let’s face it in Sydney means that it’s going to be 14 degrees, which is not exactly the same as a Scandinavian winter.

M: We may have listeners in the high country.

P: Ok yeah.. I’m coming down, once the borders are open. It’s interesting you talk about winter because I’ve got a great quote here that ‘The hard learned lesson of frigid Scandinavian winters, is that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.’

M: I love it.

P: [Laughter] That all you really need to get through difficult times is shelter and sustenance, kith and kin.

M: Kin, so again doesn’t have to be family. It can be a chosen family, and I think when the weather is crap, whether it’s raining here or it’s just cold and everything’s relative if you have you grown up in Sydney, then winters are cold. If you’ve been anywhere else in the world, you’ll know that Sydney winters are nothing to complain about. But it is all relative.

P: It is all relative. Yes [Laugh]

M: And then it’s about going ‘ooh it’s cold let’s get everyone together to have some port or sherry and –

P: And snuggle up together.

M: Yeah, snuggle.

P: That’s where I actually do love our volleyball friends we’re a very affectionate bunch.

M: [Laugh]

P: Maybe it’s because we sweat together, but get us together on the couch and we will literally fall all over each other, and it’s kind of like, you know, everybody’s body is our body in a way, it’s like yeah I’m just going to nuzzle in here.

M: There’s no boundaries. It’s true. [Laugh]

P: Well, pretty much.

[Laughter]

P: It’s lovely because there is an, I will talk about the importance of touch here, a subject upon which I am very passionate. It is important for hugs and touch and affection to be expressed.

M: It is particularly important for some people if that is their love language, as we’ve discussed we need to do an episode on love languages by the way.

P: Done

M: But yeah, but some people in particular, touch is such a vital part of how they feel connected and express love and care for other people.

P: But it does things to a scientifically it sets off chemical reactions. It sets off sensor in neurons that are beneficial to us. So we can’t live without touch.

M: Hhmm

P: If you challenge me on that one, I’m going to come back at you with science.

M: You can’t live well without touch. It’s not like air.

P: Alright, I’ll give you that.

M: Food, water.

P: We’ll come back to that one.

Hygge. Actually Hyggebukser.

M: So, Hyggebukser. And okay, what is Hyggebukser?

P: Hyggebukser: Otherwise known is that slubby pair of pants you would never wear in public, but secretly treasure. We all have one.

M: I’ve got multiple. Is that bad?

P: No. I’ve got t-shirts that this really should have gone in the bin three years ago. But they’re just so comfy.

M: Yep. I’ve Yep. Is particularly like if you bought them somewhere meaningful, Yep. And then the other Danish word that goes with this Hygge movement is Hyggelig, which is Hygge – like. So Pete, tell me about your last Hyggelig moment.

P: Hyggelig moment, hhmm. It didn’t happen in winter, but it was a moment of being, we’d had a debauched evening of wonderful celebration and so forth and I was in my underwear.

M: Ha ha. That is so not unusual for you. And I think somebody who we won’t name dared me to take off my pants at one point and then I just left him off for the evening because it was just convenient and lying on the couch and –

M: – Because it was just convenient [laugh].

P: Well, it is. I’m comfortable in my undies. But we were on the couch and it was the end of the evening and we’d all imbibed and taken part of something. And it was this really quiet Segway into the quiet, quiet sort of hours of the morning. And we’re all lying on the couch together. I think we were watching or listening to some music and everyone was just kind of, it was like a twister board if we just kind of wrapped up with each other.

M: Falling asleep. [Laugh]

P: Pretty much. At one point one of my friends lifted his head up and he looked around at the various people that were all inter linked by hands and legs and arms and so forth and went, yeah this is a pretty cool collection of people.

[Laughter]

P: But it was utter contentment. And I think the reason that we were all falling asleep is also because we felt very chill and it was it was encouraged. It was like I’m so comfortable and I am so comforted in this moment.

M: I think that’s what comes from having a really good close group of friends because I haven’t done that since university days. And we would have all been blind drunk and someone would mean throwing up in the corner. Had we been back in those days.

P: True.

M: Whereas I think I know the night that you’re referring to [Laugh].

P: You were there Marie. [Laugh]

M: And everyone going I’m just going to sleep right here.

P: And it worked. [Laugh]

M: Very weird, but anyway. That is a lovely, lovely moment. Thank you for sharing, Peter.

So Hygge? How do we practise Hygge?

P: I like it. I like that you’ve got this one in there, Marie. No money.

M: Yes!

P: Hygge is not about money. It’s not about spending money on indulgences, not about buying a car.

M: Absolutely. And it’s, yeah, it’s not about buying happiness and back to your point with The New Yorker article it is not about spending money to make something happen, right?

P: No.

M: It is about putting on your daggiest sweat pants and your ugg boots that you love but don’t tell anyone your own and that favourite T-shirt of yours that is so soft you feel like it’s going to fall apart soon because you washed it that many times. So it’s not expensive or fancy, and it’s about getting together people that matter to you or, or not. You don’t actually need the people. You could just get a good book and sit outside in the sun, right? It could be the exact opposite of the, the image that we’re painting with the room with the fire and the cold outside. It is finding a cosy space.

P: Does it have to be shared?

M: No.

P: Hygge doesn’t need to [have] another person.

M: No.

P: I’m gonna challenge you on that one, Muz.

M: I don’t think it does.

P: I thought it’s sort of, it’s about connecting with your intimate crew. And the thing that I was reading was that it’s about not connecting with a large group of people, but a close knit group of one or two people. And this is something that the Danes do. They don’t necessarily have large gatherings. They have cosy gatherings of one or two, which goes towards them almost seeming … standoffish because you can’t break into their little cliques and so forth. Now it’s something that could be a cultural perspective, but it isn’t about big groups of people, but it is about people and being connected with one or two others.

M: I think you’ve gotta have those moments of one or two in order to have these deeper connection moments, because when you’re at a big table of people having dinner, or a big party, you don’t get as intimate with people just by the nature experience.

P: Yeah, no. And you’ve got background noise and so forth.

M: As far as Hygge and whether or not it requires people, my understanding is that it doesn’t that you can jump under a blanket and watch a romcom with a steaming mug of..

P: Jarrah?

M: Cider or whatever, whatever floats your boat. It’s about the comfort as well.

So, firstly, it shouldn’t cost you much or anything. Secondly, it’s all about the simple pleasures in life and stopping and being mindful of those things.

So we are in our busy, hectic, crazy lives often sit down in front of TV and chill.

This is about choosing to do it on a Friday night with a movie that you’ve been wanting to watch and your tub of Ben and Jerry’s and ordering pizza and choosing that as a way to spoil yourself and indulging yourself, but with the simple pleasures in life or having a board game night with two friends and your partner, preferably non digital options, I would say. And it can be about spending time with people you love, or it could be about reading a book.

P: OK. I’ll give you that, the concept of indulgence and so forth does come from reading a book. Yes.

M: Hhmm. It’s taking the time to.. Yeah, and this is why again, I gave three different examples of what Hygge has been called up the beginning of the episode here. There’s no riel, solid definition of it. It is a thing that the Danes all get and know. And the rest of the world is now trying to cotton on.

[Laughter]

M: So excuse us listeners, while we kind of..

P: Catch-up?

M: muddle through it and work it out, yeah.

P: It’s not only a Danish thing, though. There’s a Swedish concept as well, which is very similar. It’s called Lagom. Now literally, apparently, that refers to a kind of moderation.

M: [Derisive noise] Moderation.

[Laughter]

M: It’s not part of my language.

P: [Laugh]

M: My vocabulary.

P: It comes back to a Viking phrase, so it’s still, it’s still part of the culture reference on Lagom. I’m probably saying that very badly, interprets as around the team, meaning it’s about sharing with people and it also refers to taking mead, so it means that you should take only a sip of the mead that’s being passed around so that no one is left without and Lagom interprets also as being adequate or just right or in balance.

M: I found this really fascinating that is so part of the Scandinavian mindset. They have very community –

P: Very socialist.

M: – focus, not even socialist. Not socialist in the way that Americans bandied the term around. They see it as, when Americans say socialist they think communist very often.

P: Yep, which are two very different words.

M: Very different things. So, yes, socialist its community and family first rather than self-first, and you look at who the happiest populations are and it’s the Swedish.

P: It’s the Scandinavians.

M: And yeah, it does come at a cost. I mean, they have a higher tax bracket. They have a much more community driven expense module. It’s about investing in the town and the nation. It’s not just about investing in self.

M: But it all comes back to them, it makes them happy.

P: It does come back and they value that and it’s I think that’s a cultural influence. It’s bandied about with them when they’re children. They’re taught to understand that this is how it works.

M: And here’s the irony of that. Even though you’re paying more in taxes, they’re getting more back so they’re happier and their wage gap, the wealth gap is actually smaller. So unlike in countries like America, where they say it’s all about the dream –

P: Hhmm..

M: and right? And they’re very much based in the self and capitalism and the promise off being able to work hard and do well in life, which means succeed and money, right? For that for many, many Americans, they’re living below the poverty line, many, many more than in Scandinavian countries. So the irony is that this system that was set up to enable people to prosper is not actually enabling most, the majority to prosper, nor is it making them happy. Sorry, I’ve gotten on my soapbox here.

P: [Laugh] I’m letting you go.

M: This has gotten very political. Anyway, so.

P: We’ve gone away from the mead and the cider and the fire. [Laugh]

M: And we’re about to head over time. So let’s get back to Hygge, how do you practise it?

P: How do you practise it?

M: So,

1. One it shouldn’t be expensive or fancy. We covered that off.

2. Two it’s about the simple pleasures in life.

3. Three, you’ve got to set the scene, get your warm blankets out, light your roaring fire, get your cup of tea and get your comfy clothes on with your elastic waistband.

P: [Laugh] So this is appropriate that, you know, I could take my clothes off at this moment.

M: And Leah if you’re listening, absolutely take off your bra.

P: [Laugh] First thing that happens when she walks in the room.

M: [Laugh]

P: I just shared that with the world! She’s gonna love me for that.

M: And then lastly;

4. You’ve got to add this on. And this is where I was like, it’s not about moderation. It’s about a little bit of indulgence, but within reason, get some comfort foods in there.

P: Tim Tams, lamington’s.

M: Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, cheese. I can’t eat cheese anymore cause I’m allergic but yeah…

P: I’m loving this topic more. It kind of links back into one of our other episodes about Ikigai, the Japanese art of fruitful living.

M: Meaning, finding meaning. So Ikigai I think, is how Japanese find meaning and purpose in life. This is how the Scandinavian or Danish in particular do self-care.

P: Yeah, right.

M: I think that’s the difference between the two.

P: Yeah, very true.

M: And I think you can do both.

P: Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, but I like this, I like this example.

M: Absolutely.

P: We could all be a little bit more like the Danes.

M: Cheers to that. So we are sitting on my bed under blankets.

P: Doing Hygge with Martinis.

M: We thought we could not talk about this without doing it for you.

[Drinks click]

P: Well, that was very nice. [Laugh]

M: On that note.

P: [Sings a note] Aaaahhhh… what was that a D?

M: [Laugh] so, thank you for joining us today if you want hear more please remember to subscribe and like this podcast. And remember, you can find us at www.marieskelton.com. A site about how to find balance, happiness and resilience in your life, including some really practical tips and resources is to get you started on your happiness journey. Please do check out the site and right to ask to let us know if you would like us to cover any specific topics or if you’d like to give us feedback, would love to hear from you.

P: Definitely.

M: Until next time.

P: Choose happiness.

[Happy exit music]

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Happiness for Cynics podcast

Transcript

Happiness for Cynics podcast

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Happiness for Cynics podcast

Transcript

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Transcript

That’s the GEM Principle:

Happiness for Cynics

Transcript

Happiness for Cynics

Transcript

M: Yeah, and again the mind does the same sort of thing. So stress can be such a positive thing in short bursts, but when you experience it over a long period of time it can have the opposite effect.

M: Okay. And what they found was people who experience a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying. But, here’s the but.

P: [Laugh]

M: That was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.

Happiness for Cynics

Transcript

‘In the sequence of thought-speech-action, affirmations play an integral role by breaking patterns of negative thoughts, negative speech, and, in turn, negative actions.’

“If what you are trying to affirm is in-congruent with a deeply held negative belief, then all that results is an inner struggle.”

And in that way, you can train your brain to access those extra reserves of physical capacity via the use of positive affirmations and self-talk.

Happiness for Cynics

Transcript

Happiness for Cynics

About Dr Mike Rucker

Transcript

M: Absolutely. I’d say that as an adult where, I don’t know, from childhood where we’re trained that growing up involves taking fun out of our lives and becoming serious. And so I find this idea fascinating. So happy to be talking to you about it.

M: You can’t chase happiness, but you can chase fun and fun will bring you happiness, at least in the short term.

I call it the PLAY model, so it’s:

There’s child play.

There’s, you know, improv[ization] play.

There’s sport play;

Happiness for Cynics Podcast

Transcript

M: So he says that Hygge has been called everything from the art of creating intimacy to cosiness of the soul and even cocoa by candlelight.

So, firstly, it shouldn’t cost you much or anything. Secondly, it’s all about the simple pleasures in life and stopping and being mindful of those things.

1. One it shouldn’t be expensive or fancy. We covered that off.

2. Two it’s about the simple pleasures in life.

3. Three, you’ve got to set the scene, get your warm blankets out, light your roaring fire, get your cup of tea and get your comfy clothes on with your elastic waistband.

4. You’ve got to add this on. And this is where I was like, it’s not about moderation. It’s about a little bit of indulgence, but within reason, get some comfort foods in there.

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About Marie

Podcast: Happiness for Cynics

Book: Self-care is church for non-believers