How to Be a Better Human - How to find the emotional support you need right now (with Guy Winch)
Episode Date: January 11, 2021Have you been feeling isolated or emotionally vulnerable lately? Loneliness is universal and while we can experience it at any point in our lives, we may be feeling it now more than ever. In this firs...t episode, Guy Winch explains why your emotional health is so important and how you can find the support you need right now -- from cutting through the small talk to finding a deeper appreciation for what you already have. Drawing on extensive experience helping patients repair broken connections, we’ll explore how loneliness influences well-being — and Guy will offer strategies for practicing emotional self-care. Guy is a licensed psychologist who works with individuals, couples, and families. As an advocate for psychological health, he has spent the last two decades adapting the findings of scientific studies into tools his patients, readers, and audience members can use to enhance and maintain their mental health. As an identical twin with a keen eye for any signs of favoritism, he believes we need to practice emotional hygiene with the same diligence with which we practice personal and dental hygiene. In January, Guy partnered with TED to launch Dear Guy, a science-based advice column for TED's Ideas blog. His new podcast, Dear Therapists, is cohosted with fellow TED speaker Lori Gottlieb and executive produced by Katie Couric. He has also dabbled in stand-up comedy. To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there.
The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs.
It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges.
From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology,
it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors.
For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA.
That's uvic.ca slash future MBA.
Hey there, you're listening to the very first episode
of How to Be a Better Human from TED.
I'm your host, Chris Duffy,
and I'm hoping that together on this show,
we can learn how to be better humans together.
It's kind of a big promise putting out a podcast called How to Be a Better Human.
When Ted first approached me about it, I was like, are you sure you actually have the right Chris Duffy?
I'm a comedian and a TV writer. I'm not like a self-help guru slash psychologist.
But they told me that was kind of the point.
I haven't learned all this. I don't know how to be a better human, but I want to learn. And hopefully you want to
learn too. Let's try and learn together. We're coming off of this really challenging
year. You know that. I don't have to tell you that. It has been a year though, where I feel
like we've all been really faced with shortcomings, both societal and individual. And it's a year when it has been very, very, very clear that there's a lot of work to be done.
And we desperately need more people to be doing that work.
So on every episode of the show, we're going to have a guest expert,
someone from the TED universe who's full of ideas and information, someone who's giving a talk.
But instead of just letting them say their big ideas and then walk away, I'm going to be asking them questions to get at what the rest of us are
actually supposed to do. Like, how do we take their big ideas and put them into practice?
How do we change or improve our own lives? Over the course of the season, we're going to talk
about everything from relationships to social media, to grief, to climate change, to making
the best choices when you go on a movie binge.
But for this first episode, we're going to start with a topic that is both timeless and universal.
And yet it's a topic that so many of us have experienced much more acutely over the past few
months. Loneliness. We'll talk to one of the world's leading experts on loneliness and find
out what you and I and everyone else can do to practice emotional first aid. But first, I'm going to read you an ad. That is how you know you're listening
to a podcast. There could be no better person to kick off this show than Guy Wench. He's a licensed
psychologist whose TEDx talk is one of the most popular TED talks of all time, which really means
it's one of the most popular talks of all time, period.
Here's what Guy had to say in that talk about emotional first aid.
I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing
emotional hygiene.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone were psychologically healthier?
If there were less loneliness and less depression,
if people knew how to overcome failure, if they felt better about themselves and more empowered,
if they were happier and more fulfilled. I can, because that's the world I want to live in.
There's a reason why Guy's talk resonates with so many people. Loneliness is universal. You can feel
lonely when you're isolated, of course, but as Guy told me in our interview, sometimes you can
feel just as lonely when you're surrounded by people. It's a scary feeling because it so often
feels like you're the only one going through it. But you are not alone. Even if it feels that way,
you are not alone. And personally, I found what Guy has to say has made a real immediate impact in my own life. And I promise you that we are not just going to say,
try meeting people. That's not the advice we're going to give you. So here we go. You're a human,
I'm a human, Guy's a human, and we're going to try our best to be better humans together.
What is loneliness? So loneliness is defined purely subjectively. It is defined as
a subjective feeling that you feel emotionally disconnected from the people around you,
that they don't quite get you, that they don't quite see you, that they don't appreciate you
fully or that they take you for granted. And it's that feeling that, you know, people see me,
but they don't get me. They don't really understand me. So loneliness is truly subjective. It's different from being alone,
there are people who, whose emotional needs are such that they don't need a lot of people in their
life. If they have one person they're really close to, they feel good, they don't feel lonely.
And there are people that they can have like 10 friends, but they're not good enough or close
enough. So they, even though they're seeing people
and talking to people all the time, they still feel fundamentally alone. So it's truly about
the subjective definition. We're recording this at a very unusual time when it comes to
people's relationships and people's mental health. And I wonder as a psychologist and as someone
who's famously studied loneliness, has anything about the pandemic changed the way that you think about what you've said in the past or what you've believed about
loneliness in the past? Well, what the pandemic has changed for sure is people's readiness to
listen to what I've been saying. So I just think that the pandemic has opened up people's awareness
to emotional health and how it can be impacted and how it needs to be a priority in a way that nothing else has before.
And one of the big things that you've really advocated for is framing it in this way as emotional health.
Why is that so important?
It's a fine distinction.
For me, the difference between mental health and emotional health is that mental health is about diagnosable conditions. The stuff that is actually diagnosable in the DSM, you know, clinical depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders.
I talk about emotional health because most of the things I talk about are not diagnosable.
Loneliness does not carry a diagnosis.
Loneliness does not carry a diagnosis, neither does the experience of failure or guilt or rejection or lots of other kinds of things that impact our emotional health and even our physical health.
Loneliness certainly impacts our physical health.
So they have those impacts, but they are not considered in the mental health category because they're not diagnosable. So for me, emotional health is a much broader category that encompasses any kind of challenges to our emotional health, our productivity, our functioning, our relating, all of it.
I think just individually as myself, one of the things that I so appreciate about that is I had a real struggle to try and think about taking care of myself and beginning therapy and doing all of that because I never felt like it was bad enough, quote unquote. It was never bad enough to really
need that. And then when I finally did start going, it was transformational and helped me
to really work through things and to be better, happier, more realized as a person.
But I think that I really was struggling with that kind of stigma.
Which is unfortunate. I mean, that is the popular sentiment that people have, that, you know,
I'll go if it's really, really bad, you know. But that's almost like saying, you know, I won't go
to see a physical therapist when I'm limping. I'll go and I'm totally paralyzed. No, you kind of
should have gone before. And I think it's the same kind of thing. In other words, there are challenges
we experience to our emotional health, which tie directly to our functioning, to our productivity, to our happiness, to everything we do on a daily basis of which we're mostly unaware.
But if we were to become aware and mindful, it could actually make a difference way before we get to areas in which it's bad enough.
And that's because what most people don't realize is that loneliness has a huge impact
on our physical health. It contributes to an early death and is considered to be the equivalent of
smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of the damage that does to our health and longevity. So truly,
it is a crisis of both psychological and physical manifestations. But there's not enough awareness
about it. The difficulty with loneliness is really that it makes the person who's lonely
so emotionally raw and risk averse,
is that they really hesitate to reach out
or even to respond when someone else is reaching out
because they just don't want to be rejected again.
They don't want to feel marginalized again.
They're not sure if the person's sincere.
It makes us perceive our relationships as less valuable as they are than they are. And it makes us think of
the people who care about us as caring less than they actually do. So all of those things contribute
to real hesitancy. And that's why it's difficult for people to reach out when they're lonely, to
really let people know, and even to respond to gestures from other people. That's one of the
biggest problems. But when you feel really lonely, you start to doubt whether people care, even the
closest people who clearly care. And that's the difficult thing. It makes you really hesitant.
In his talk, Guy has this really poignant story about how you can feel like that,
even with the person that you're closest to in the entire world.
So we're going to play a clip of that story for you right now.
It is time we close the gap between our physical and our psychological health.
It's time we made them more equal, more like twins. Speaking of which,
my brother is also a psychologist, so he's not a real doctor either.
My brother is also a psychologist, so he's not a real doctor either.
We didn't study together, though.
In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology.
We were apart then for the first time in our lives,
and the separation was brutal for both of us.
But while he remained among family and friends,
I was alone in a new country.
We missed each other terribly,
but international phone calls were really expensive then,
and we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week.
When our birthday rolled around,
it was the first we wouldn't be spending
together, we decided to splurge and that week we would talk for ten minutes.
I spent the morning pacing around my room waiting for him to call.
And waiting.
And waiting.
But the phone didn't ring.
Given the time difference, I assumed,
okay, he's out with friends, he'll call later.
There were no cell phones then, but he didn't. And I began to realize that after being away
for over 10 months, he no longer missed me the way I missed him. I knew he would call in the
morning, but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life.
I woke up the next morning.
I glanced down at the phone,
and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before.
I stumbled out of bed.
I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later,
and it was my brother.
And boy, was he pissed.
It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well.
Now, I tried to explain what happened, but he said,
I don't understand.
If you saw I wasn't calling you,
why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?
He was right.
Why didn't I call him? I didn't have an answer then,
but I do today. And it's a simple one. We're going to hear Guy's answer to that and so much more
right after this. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose,
we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable
Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently
and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy,
government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors.
For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash
future MBA. In his talk, Guy talked a lot about his twin brother and how his twin was able to
maintain his psychological health, even while struggling through cancer treatments and being
in a really tough spot physically. Guy also talked about how he spent a terrible night waiting for a call from his brother without it ever occurring to him that
he could just pick up the phone and call himself. Does your brother feel vindicated by the fact that
you've now told that story and apologized in a viral TED talk? I feel like the fact that millions
of people have seen an apology gives it even more weight maybe. Look, about that TED talk,
his feelings about the TED Talk are different.
One of them is that when I said to him,
there was a story there about him having cancer
and going through treatment,
and I said, I need a picture of you going through chemo.
He goes, oh no, I look horrific.
I'm like, you know, look, it's a small talk.
Who's going to see it?
And so I convinced him,
and then it went viral,
and he's like, are you kidding me?
And I'm like, well, but it's good news. It's good news for one of us. No, it's good news for both.
Yeah, no, he's extremely supportive. In his professional work as a psychologist,
Guy's been able to use his personal emotional experiences to inform his approach,
moments that he lives through like that night waiting for his brother's call.
So what has that taught him about what the rest of us should be doing? Now, what people have to do to be on top of their
emotional health is, first of all, pay attention to it. It starts with paying attention. Don't
just pay attention when you're so depressed you can't wake up in the morning or you're so anxious
you're crying outside your office because you can't go into the building. Don't wait till then.
There are certain practices that
we can do on a daily basis that have proven to be extraordinarily useful psychologically and in
every possible way. So one of them, for example, is gratitude exercises. That's something I do on
a daily basis. I start the day, I, you know, you either journal or you think about or you talk
about three things for which you're really truly grateful that day.
And,
you know,
as I did this with patients,
many times,
one woman came back and she said,
okay,
here's my list,
the sun.
And I'm like,
no,
no,
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no, no, no, no, no, no, when you walk outside, that's good. But not just the sun. The sun is there whether you're grateful for it or not.
So it's got to be something that you truly connect to
or something that you appreciate.
And I mentioned the sun because I'm one of those people
who gets light deprived in the winter.
And so when it's a sunny day,
I really appreciate the feeling of the sun on my face.
And I'm grateful for that.
Absolutely the same.
Oh, yes.
So, so, so much.
Well, you moved to LA, so fair. Yes, I moved to a place where I get to write that. Absolutely the same. Oh, yes. So, so, so, so much. Well, you moved to LA, so.
Yes, I moved to a place where I get to write that down almost every day.
Well, what do you do on the days when things are, when you're feeling a little beaten down
or things are feeling challenging?
How do you still find the three things to write down in a gratitude journal?
How do you, how do you find the practice of doing that even on the challenging days?
It's useful to sit with those feelings a little bit. A, to make the point to yourself that they're
tolerable, because one thing that we should always remind ourselves is that difficult feelings are
tolerable. They're not pleasant, but we can tolerate them. We don't have to run from them.
And they can give us valuable information. So first of all, extract information from that.
But it's a two-step process. It's like
you want to go in there and get the information, but you don't want to get lost in there. So you
want to kind of bump yourself out of it at some point. And then to do that, it would be useful
to focus on what are the things that you can be grateful for. You can be grateful for the
potential that you have to search and to create a bench of new support system if you're lacking.
have to search and to create a bench of new support system if you're lacking. So there are always things you can point to in terms of, yes, things could be worse. So I'm grateful that this is the
case, right? I mean, there's a lot of us that thought things were absolutely terrible before
the pandemic. And now they're like, I wish I could just go back to that terrible place,
because it's still a better place than the one I'm in now. So it's always possible to
get a larger, broader perspective, and then see the ways in which you are fortunate.
Do all groups of people experience loneliness the same? Is it equally spread across age groups and
ethnicities? But since you have dealt with these hard numbers, I'm curious.
dealt with these hard numbers, I'm curious. Right. So it's an interesting thing, actually, because my belief is that our underlying emotional experience of feeling loneliness
is going to be very similar across ages, cultures, race, etc. We tend to have a similar emotional,
visceral experience to certain phenomenon. What we display toward the outside, what we manifest,
what we show can be very, very different. And how we respond, what our emotional response
to that loneliness is, can be very different in certain, like in collectivistic societies,
it's going to have a different response. Somebody feeling lonely will have a different response than
somebody who does in individualistic societies, for example. But in terms of ages, we tend to associate or we used to
associate loneliness with the elderly, right? So here's somebody in their 80s or 90s living alone,
etc. But we find now that the loneliest group of people are actually the youngest, they come out as significantly lonelier than do all the elderly and middle-aged groups.
How do we make the connections so that you don't feel like you're just lost in the crowd?
You're just a face in the crowd that no one knows.
In other words, how do we connect more deeply to other people? It's a skill set, in fact.
And a lot of people are not that clear how to do it.
They may be clear to do it how I do it in the dating sphere.
It's a one-on-one.
I know what to do that.
But as an adult, how do I go and just make friends?
It's something that you do so much more easily as a young adult, as a college student, just
to go and start just making friends.
I had a woman I spoke with who's, you know, has two young,
young, young kids. And she was like, she's trying to make friends. And she felt like she was asking
another mother out on a date when she was saying, do you want our kids to have a play date? She
felt like, oh, please don't reject me. Please don't reject me. And I'm like, it was a play date
with toddlers. But you know, it feels that way, because she felt so lonely, she was desperate for
the, for the connection. So it's about reaching out.
And once we reach out, it's about creating meaningful connections, having meaningful
conversations.
Connection happens by sharing an experience or by connecting verbally through conversation.
And to connect through conversation, you have to be able to share your hopes, your
dreams, your emotions.
You have to be open.
You have to get the other person to be open.
You have to kind of forge this connective tissue between you.
I can 100% relate to that feeling of it feels like you have to ask someone on a date to become friends as an adult.
I've thought that one of the things that's so beautiful about making friends in high school or college is if you're in a place with a campus, you tend to run into people, the same people over and over.
And so there's just this natural progression of, oh, I know you a little bit and then I know your name
and then we know each other.
And then by the time you're actually asking them
to do something, you're already friends.
But now I have to be like, this was a good first meeting
and I think that this could be a thing,
but if I don't get your phone number
or I don't get your email,
we're never gonna see each other again.
So I do have to do that like friend pickup almost
and it's always so uncomfortable but then you just know that if you don't do it you'll you will miss
out on the reward so i have to force myself to do it but i and even for me as a huge extrovert it is
such a struggle it's really difficult because it feels even a little foolish and childish because
we so associate it with those younger years right so you know and when you know
two two you know you're still a very young guy i think but but when two 40 year old men are you
know chatting with each other in the locker room and you know and they're getting along and they
want to suggest hey let's grab a beer or something it feels so awkward to do and and you know and
it's funny that it does because this is something that's so much part of
human society. But there's the formality of actually, let's exchange numbers, let's get
our contact information without an excuse, such as, oh, we can meet at the next group meeting or
committee on that or something like when you're literally taking it out of whatever the
official thing is, it's uncomfortable. people need to understand is that as adults the repetition really matters you can go to the gym
but if you go to the gym at different times and you keep seeing different people you're not going
to meet a lot of people there but if you go at the same time and keep meeting the same people
if you go to the same 12-step meeting or the same tai chi class or whatever it is and you keep seeing
the same faces of the same yoga class at some some point you just go like, oh, hey, hey, because you've seen each other a while.
And then it's just much easier to start chatting. That repetition, the consistency, being a familiar
face is an important aspect of any kind of integration into a new group or even with
individual people. You've said previously that multiple public health experts have
described loneliness as this public health epidemic even before the current pandemic.
And you talked about how the Minister of Loneliness was appointed by Britain in 2018.
But many of the solutions that people were working on to address that pandemic, they involved things
like walking clubs and art groups, in-person activities and now i think
a lot of people are struggling because those may cause us greater anxiety or actually put us in
risk during the pandemic so with that in mind i wonder how can we rethink solutions around
loneliness at this time but it is obviously a little bit more challenging when you're not
meeting people in person on the one hand on other hand, you have more flexibility in terms of being able to meet them virtually.
So it's not like you wouldn't set up a Zoom meeting with somebody.
You wouldn't have done that a year ago.
If you just meet a stranger on a playground, you know, you wouldn't say,
oh, we should grab a beer and talk about our kids.
You wouldn't, or grab coffee and talk about our kids.
You wouldn't say, and let's do it virtually.
That would be like, huh?
But it's actually a little bit easier because we can choose the time better and you actually
have more undivided attention that way.
You already named a few of these, but I'm wondering, do you have any other great examples
of virtual interventions that you think have worked?
Interventions in terms of loneliness?
Or just making connections.
Oh, yeah.
But the thing is that you have to pay attention to what the conversation is about our tendency is to do small talk and chit chat because
it's less stressful right like hot enough for you you know what do you think about the election or
whatever i mean that it's just it's a simple thing to throw out um so it's actually a little bit more
difficult to get personal and that's how you get to connect to someone more emotionally, you have to get a little bit personal. And the tip there is several things. First of all,
ask open ended questions, not closed ended questions, share something of yourself before
you ask. And so then you're giving the modeling of, you know, I've had such a, for me, May was a
much harder month than April this year, because of blah of blah, blah, blah. What about you?
Which was the hardest part of the pandemic for you?
So you state something that's a little personal and then you toss it to the other person in
an open-ended kind of way.
That's an important thing to do.
Active listening is important.
So when somebody says something, you can comment or reflect.
You can do it verbally or non-verbally.
Be like, oh, wow, that sounds so difficult, what you went through, would be an important thing to say,
as opposed to like, oh, bummer, which doesn't convey as much, right? So there are ways to
communicate and to go a little bit deeper in conversation. If you're reconnecting with
somebody you haven't spoken to for a while, reminisce about some of the fun times, reminisce
about some of the old times, reminisce about the way it was when you met, however long ago that was. That's always a connective kind of thing. So you actually have to be mindful of looking to create to forge that connection. Otherwise, you can just get swept away into this casual chitchat or arguing about politics, religion, or what have you. And that just didn't get personal at all, and it didn't feel connected.
and that just didn't get personal at all, and it didn't feel connected.
And obviously it depends on the person, but it is fascinating that the more that we make ourselves vulnerable with people we trust, that you're able to actually connect more, not less.
Yeah. Now, the thing is, it's scary. It's risky because when you make yourself vulnerable,
you're opening yourself up to get really hurt feelings if the other person
rejects, rebuffs, criticizes, doesn't respond
in a way that feels supportive, compassionate, understanding, what have you. So it's risky. And
that's why people don't like to do it. People don't like to own their vulnerability, especially,
even though it's actually quite an empowering thing to do, because by owning it, you take
control over it. You know, like when I speak with people who do stand up, one of the first things they
say is whenever something really crappy happens in their life, their first thought is, where's
the material?
No, absolutely.
And it's interesting because there is this part of vulnerability, right?
If I take something that happened that I feel really embarrassed or ashamed of or that was
painful and I tell it to an audience and they laugh. There's that connection, right? Generally that laughter means I understand and I relate to
that. Not like that's weird. I've never even heard of that. So that just makes me feel like,
oh, I'm not alone. Other people get this too. Yeah. But audiences are fickle mistresses indeed
for standups because they can laugh their guts out one minute and the next line doesn't land and now they hate
you so that's a very unstable you've been to my show and i used to do stand-up for a few years so
really wow okay really on the side yeah just like open mics that kind of stuff but i but i did it
long enough and hard enough that i'm highly familiar with how you know you think you have
them in you in your pocket oh no, you don't at all.
No.
Oh, my gosh.
I love that you're like, I decided to go for emotional,
to deal with emotional health and help people with that
because I have now experienced the rawest type of emotional health in the world,
which is the green room of a stand-up comedy show.
That's amazing.
But the first joke I wrote was usually my opening joke because I have a bit of
an accent in stand-up the rule is if there's anything different about you whatsoever you
must address it right away either the audience sits there and goes this you know he has an accent
this is like such a deep master class on not just emotional health but also comedy that is exactly
the best advice that you have to start with the thing that people always think about you. One of the things that I talk about that I think is
really interesting is that when a lot of people are giving advice about what you should do
in a certain situation, right? Go and have the confrontation, go and have the discussion,
go and change the habit. It is actually really, really, really, really difficult. You have to
put yourself through significant emotional discomfort often to do the healthier
thing than the unhealthier thing emotionally.
It's much less comfortable.
It's very uncomfortable for someone who's lonely to go to put themselves out there and
be vulnerable, as we're saying you need to be.
It is extremely uncomfortable and it feels risky.
And people don't let other people know that it's going
to be really difficult. This is going to be uncomfortable. This is going to freak you out
at first. This is going to make you feel like, oh my God, what am I doing? Or this is the wrong
thing, or I did the wrong thing. And if you don't know that, then you'll stop doing it and think you
are doing something wrong. Or if you don't know that it's going to be painful and feel very risky,
and you're going to have moments in which you feel, why did I do this? Then you will run away when you experience them as opposed to,
oh yeah, I knew this was coming. Now I'll just take a deep breath and stay.
The show's called How to Be a Better Human. So what is one thing that you have seen or heard
or read that's made you a better human? Okay. So first of all, I have to say
they're probably a thousand because of what I do when I read something important or something useful, I immediately will try it out myself. I'll try and incorporate it into my own life because if it's useful, then why wouldn't I? So there are just so many.
an hour ago, I'll follow on your therapy example there. So I just spoke with a patient an hour ago about something which I think is top of mind, just because I just think it's so important.
And that is self-compassion. Self-compassion means treating yourself the same way you would treat
a friend. And it goes against the idea of self-criticism and having a self-critical,
negative self-talk. Because the way we treat ourselves,
like when we get rejected or heartbroken, one of our first instinctual responses is to become
extremely self-critical. Yes, because I wasn't tall enough, I wasn't rich enough, I was to this
or to that, or not enough of this, not enough of that, if only I were different, if only,
and it just becomes so self-critical. Whereas if a friend said to you, I'm heartbroken,
I just got broken up with, the last thing you would do would be, let's review your shortcomings. Wouldn't that be the right
thing to do in the moment? You would never. You would immediately start to remind them of the
opposite, of what they have to offer, what they bring to the table. That's what we should be
doing. That's what we should be doing for ourselves. That's the self-compassionate approach
to, oh my goodness, you just got your heart broken. Let's remind you why you're a good human
being rather than review why you're an inadequate one.
And so the idea of self-compassion
and replacing negative self-talk with self-compassion
to me is a very, very important idea
that is not getting near as enough attention
and is not well-known enough
and applied enough as it really should be.
Well, Guy Winch, thank you so much.
We've talked about vulnerability.
We've talked about loneliness.
We've talked about joy.
We've even gotten stand-up comedy.
I mean, it was the whole emotional gambit here.
I love the whole thing.
We've run the gambit on emotions.
Thank you so much for being with us.
And thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom with us today.
Thank you.
It's been such a pleasure.
And thanks for the fun conversation.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of How to Be a Better Human. That's our show for today. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. And thanks for the fun conversation. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of How to Be a Better Human. That's our show for
today. Thanks to our guest, Guy Winch. You can read more advice from him in his column on TED's
Ideas blog that's called Dear Guy, or you can listen to him on his podcast, Dear Therapists.
Special thanks to the organizers of TEDxLinnaeus University, who curated Guy's talk.
I'm your host, Chris Duffy.
This show is produced by Abimanyu Das,
Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, and Cara Newman of TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez and Pedro Rafael Rosado from PRX Productions.
For more on how to be a better human, visit ideas.ted.com.
We'll see you next week.
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