How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - 🎤 How To Fail LIVE: Mo Gawdat, the world-renowned happiness expert on how to manage stress, how to live with grief and how to be happy

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

All this week, I'll be dropping the recordings of our How To Fail live shows, held at Shoredtich Town Hall earlier this year.To kick off, I asked back one of our most cherished guests of all time: the inimitable Mo Gawdat. As regular listeners of How To Fail know, Mo first appeared on this podcast way back in season four. His interview blew my mind and changed how I lived my life. I asked him back during the first Covid-19 lockdown to help us navigate our way through the crisis. And now, here he is again: my very special friend, on how to handle anxiety, how to cope with grief (and keep on living through unimaginable loss), how to be happy and how to lean into love.--This episode was recorded live at Shoreditch Town Hall on 5th October 2022 and sponsored by Sweaty Betty. You have a chance to get 20% off everything until 14th December with the code HOWTOFAIL20. That’s 20% off everything until 14th December with the code HOWTOFAIL20 on sweatybetty.com Terms and conditions apply, and can be found on sweatybetty.com--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Mo Gawdat @mo_gawdat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned

from failure. I'm so delighted that this evening's recording is sponsored by Sweaty Betty. I'm sure many of you in the audience, especially that person, will already be familiar with this global activewear and lifestyle brand who are on a mission to empower women through fitness and beyond. I personally wear their clothes all the time and I'm a massive fan of their best-selling power leggings, so good that they sell one pair every 30 seconds. I love the way they make me feel held and empowered with four-way stretch for extra comfort. They're so versatile you can wear them for almost anything. A spin class, a yoga session or out to lunch with

friends. And there's lots of clever little details like pockets I can slip my phone into. They are bum sculpting, sweat wicking and quick drying. Truly everything you could ever need in a pair of leggings. You have a chance to get 20% off everything until the 14th of December with the code HOWTOFAIL20. That's 20% off everything until the 14th of December with the code HOWTOFAIL20 on sweatybetty.com. Terms and conditions apply and can be found Now, it is such a joy to welcome you all to my first ever live How to Fail podcast recording. And when I was thinking of who I wanted to be my first guest, there was only ever really going to be one person. That person, of course, is Mo Gowdat. He is someone who has transformed the way I live my life, and I know he's transformed

many of yours too, through his enlightened and practical wisdom. He first came on How to Fail in season four in 2019. Back then, he had just published his soon-to-be best-selling book, Soul for Happy. And when he spoke to me about his algorithm for happiness, there was an outpouring of love from listeners. I've lost count of the number of people who still come up to me and tell me how much strength they took from that episode, especially when Mo spoke so movingly about the death of his beloved son, son Ali at the age of 21 and how he learned to live with the crushing weight of that grief. Mo then came back on How to Fail at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic with wise calming words to help us through those

early panic-stricken months. Those two conversations are among my most downloaded of all time, and I'm not surprised, because Mo is the voice we all need, a reassuring arm around our shoulders, a handheld at moments of crisis, a companion to walk alongside through the bumpy paths of life. He's the former chief business officer of Google X, the best-selling author of three books, including That Little Voice in Your Head, the creator and host of the Slow Mo podcast, and the founder of One Billion Happy, an attempt to honour his late son by spreading the message that happiness can be learned to one billion people. I love this man, and I know you all do too. Please give the warmest welcome to the one in a billion, Mo Gowdat. You're the best, and you give the best hugs.

You're the best. You're the best, and you give the best hugs. I don't know what to do after this, honestly. Tell us what's in your little orange bottle. It looks like a urine sample, but it's not. It is. No, it's not. This is ginger and some cayenne pepper and a lot of honey. Like, half of it is honey.

So secret for public speaking is honey, not caffeine, because it gives you a sugar high like kids. So I will have a sugar high for an hour and a half and then I'll crash. Okay. So we've got you just at the sweet spot. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So we're going to... Hold on.

Sorry. Who loves this woman? Thank you. There was one person at the back not clapping. Sorry. Who loves this woman? Thank you. There was one person at the back not clapping. You. No, I'm kidding. Honestly, for the kind introduction, I should say the same. I always tell Elizabeth that she was a pillar in spreading One Billion Happy

because of all the things we've done together. Oh, it's been a pleasure. And One Billion Happy because of all the things we've done together. And One Billion Happy matters. I really believe that it does. And for you to be so impactful in it is something I'll always be very grateful for. Thank you. But it's all you. And all I've done is provide a bit of a platform for the wonder of you. And because you've been on the podcast twice before we're going to do a slightly unconventional episode where we're not we've done your failures you can go back and listen to that episode I have a few more you've had a few more but we're going to have more of a free-ranging conversation and you're going to tell us about

an exciting new project later on in the interview but I did go back and I looked at the introduction that I wrote before I had met you for that episode in 2019. And I ended that introduction with this quote. Happiness is not a coincidence, Gowdat says. It is not given to you by life. It's entirely our responsibility. 100%. Tell us, first of all, are you happy today?

I'm the happiest I've ever been by a very, very large margin. It's quite surprising, actually, more and more. I've embarked on a project in the last couple of years that, I mean, I've been on the project for seven years, but I started to really focus on part of it in the last couple of years that completely flipped my life. And around four and a half years ago was the first time I actually lived in my feminine fully for the first time. It was January 2018.

I remember vividly, I remember the situation. I think I'm reasonably balanced between feminine and masculine, probably a tiny bit more feminine than masculine. But then, of course, the modern world pushes you to, you know, live in a hyper-masculine environment and so prioritize masculine qualities like linear thinking and forcefulness sometimes and competition sometimes and so on. That was my executive career. And then as I started to embark on the feminine, I realized that the biggest hurdle I ever had was flow. I never actually managed to live in flow. I never let life take me anywhere. A big difference between the feminine and the masculine in my analysis is that if we all say we want to get to the end of

the river, you know, a bit of a whitewater raft, the masculine will try to push their way to where they think is the right way, while the feminine will just float with the river and balance themselves. And so I started to do that. 2021 was my year of flow. And this year was my year of joy and flow.

So last year I learned how to let life take me somewhere. And this year I learned how to enjoy it. So when you talk about masculine and feminine, I assume you're not talking in sort of general terms about all men or all women. It's more of an energetic feeling. So what do they represent to you, those terms? Man and woman is a biological definition. If you have certain body parts,

you're in that definition or in this definition. This has nothing to do with masculine and feminine at all. Of course, there is a statistical correlation, if you want, between those who have female body parts and feminine qualities. Statistical correlations meaning the feminine qualities will show in them a little more frequently, and they'll be more intense, right? And vice versa. But my work on the feminine and the masculine is that they are a set of qualities, qualities, attributes, if you want, that we choose to adopt as we go through life. So you can go through life with linear thinking as your top way of solving problems, right? That's a very masculine way of doing things. Linear thinking is, it's going to be this point, this point,

that point. I promise you, this was not going to be your first question, but you're feminine. I know. Well, I also just want to respect people who don't feel defined by their sex at birth. I just wanted to make that point that that's not what you're getting at. You're talking more about... Not at all. It's a set of attributes that we choose to live by that are available in every single one of us to certain intensities and differences. And we have sadly built a capitalist world that is hyper-masculine in its preference. Because we want to make more money, we want more profits, we want to manufacture things, and so on and so forth,

we've given preference to attributes that are actually, if you ask me, not the most valuable for our world, especially at the time we are today, because the masculine is very good at doing. You just say, okay, go and build more things and they'll build them and destroy the planet in the process, right? In a way, it's like the analytical brain and the emotional brain. A bit of that is what I write about in that little voice in your head, but it's a lot more than that. It's your entire emotional makeup. It's your entire spiritual makeup. It's about being versus doing.

Can I ask you about that quote, about the idea that happiness is our responsibility? Because there will be people who say, well, terrible things have happened to me. So you can't tell me in all conscience that happiness is up to me because I feel sad. What's your response to them? Well, terrible things happen to everyone interestingly the challenge of the thing that happens to you is probably seen to be the most terrible to you so in an interesting way I always spoke about this very openly when Ali left our world I was very successful and very rich okay I had made a lot of money from my career at Google, I had a lot of fancy stuff. And I can promise you, if life had taken away all of it, like all of it, every last dollar of it, I wouldn't have been moved at all, wouldn't have cared. The reason why my test

was the most difficult for me is because I love nothing more than my children. I love nothing more than Aya. I think Aya is here in the audience somewhere. I love nothing more in life than Aya. And I loved Ali immensely. So the test that I got was extreme for me. I know people, I know them personally, who are multi-billionaires, who also have children, who would actually care more about not losing a million dollars than, you know, what their children are doing in life. Without names, this actually happens to be true for many people. The tests that we get are the most difficult for all of us.

If you think of life as a school, a refinery, a refinery that you go through with a few things that you need to learn so that you come out of that experience a better version of you, then that refinery can only teach you by giving you the tough tests. Now, of course, some tests are incredibly painful and incredibly difficult. And I feel for everyone who goes through those tests. I know. I feel the pain. I felt my own pain. But what I say when I say happiness is your responsibility is that there is pain that comes from that experience. And that is not your choice. I will always be left with the pain of missing my son. But then there is suffering, and suffering is a choice. Suffering is for you to take the pain and make it worse. It's for you to take the pain and add

to it, okay? And we all do that instinctively in our hopeless attempt to try and find a way out of our pain. We build stories. We tell ourself stories. We create drama. We do things that only serve to make us suffer. Now, that is a choice. It is a choice. I'll tell you openly, if I don't think about losing my child as an experiment, I don't feel any pain. It's only when I trigger that thought in my head that I start to feel the pain. Now, I have a choice to trigger that thought in one of two ways. I can trigger that thought as Ali left our world, or I can trigger that thought as Ali came to our world, which happened 21 years earlier, which was a gift.

I can trigger that thought as I lost everything or I can trigger that thought as I love Aya and Aya still hugs me. And when you start to see life that way, you maybe not have a sure path to happiness, but you have a sure path to happiness, but you have a sure path to happier. Yes. A little less suffering. And believe it or not, through neuroplasticity and the way our brains work, a little happier every day is just like a little fitter every day by going to the gym.

And then when you're a little fitter, you're better at being fit and better at being fit until you're an athlete, if you want. But it never happens overnight. It just takes that choice, if you want. I know we've spoken about Ali before, but I don't want to let that moment pass without saying how sorry I am and also paying tribute to him, and the extraordinary young man he has always sounded like to me. And I know his sister Aya is in the audience, and we're so lucky to have her here. I wanted to ask you about committed acceptance, because you write and talk about that a lot.

Would you explain to us what you mean by it? Committed acceptance, in my view, is the Jedi master level of happiness, if you want. So, you know, beginner's level is to find happiness when life is easy. Black belt level is to find happiness when life is hard. Jedi master level is to find happiness when life really forces your head. And they say, my next book that we're going to talk about, that 97% of all people will have one traumatic event in their life that is so traumatic that it might trigger PTSD. That kind of event like losing a child or a very hard breakup and so on. Those kinds of events, sadly, are not within our control.

And sadly, they seem to happen at least once to each and every one of us. And sadly, you cannot fix them. You cannot do anything to reverse them, right? Your company is going through bankruptcy and they shut down and you're laid off. Can't fix it. You can't go and bring the company back to life.

You lose a loved one, you can't bring them back to life. And so what do you do? What do you do when you're in a situation where life forces your hand and you can't do anything about it? It's to accept and commit. Accept is a sign of strength, in my view. It's basically you saying, look, the baseline of my life has changed, and I'm strong enough to acknowledge that. I'm not lying to myself. I'm not denying to myself. If you look at the five stages of grief, or seven stages, sometimes they call them, the very last one of them, where things start to improve, is acceptance. I accept that Ali left, or I accept that I lost my job or lost, you know, broke up from a relationship, or the simple things. I accept that I'm stuck in traffic.

I accept that. I can't change the traffic lights, right? Accepting sort of eases you a little bit to make a choice to commit. But you can't commit to fix it. You can only commit to make your life better despite its presence. So, you know, simple example, you're stuck in traffic, you're going to be late for your meeting.

There's absolutely nothing you can do to change that. And you can stress about it until you get to your meeting and get to the meeting stressed and spoil everything. Or you can just text your client or your peer or your friend or whatever and apologize and say, look, I miscalculated or peer or your friend or whatever, and apologize and say, look, I miscalculated or there is something different or whatever.

We had a lot of people that sent us a message and said, because of the train strike, we may not be able to make it today. Great move, right? Now, that kind of acceptance, when they reached out to me on Instagram, they were like, we're so sad about this. And I was like, you know what? It's going to be recorded. You're going to see it. And thank you so much. We're now in touch. And life is going on. Okay? And I think that idea of committed acceptance is the only way for us to deal with the stuff that's not going to change. And if that is

inevitable, then that's a skill, though Jedi master level, that I think we all need to learn. I love that idea that the baseline of your life has changed. I think that's extremely helpful. We're going to talk about a retreat that you've been on. Yes. And because you failed to be kind to yourself in the lead up to it. So you needed this retreat. So what was happening in the lead up to this that made you feel that you needed just time out?

I write too quickly. We published... I wish I had that problem. Yeah, the publishing industry is able to publish slower than what I'm writing, basically. Which is sometimes... I love my publisher to bits. But what happened is writing, basically, which is sometimes I love my publisher to bits. But what happened is when I learned to write this quickly, we started to publish very quickly. So we published Scary Smart in September and then published That Little Voice in Your Head

in May. And I'll tell you openly, I did not want to publish That Little Voice in Your Head. It was the third time I wrote it and I thought it was crap. I swear, I really just didn't want to publish that little voice in your head. It was the third time I wrote it, and I thought it was crap. I swear, I really just didn't want to publish it. And my publisher was like, are you mad? This is a very, very good book. And so my plan going into May was not to really support it that much. I was like, yeah, it's gonna be out there,

and people will read it and so on. And just, it exploded. I actually get quite hurt sometimes when people tell me they like it more than Soul for Happy. I don't. I mean, no, I like it. I love Soul for Happy and I love your new book equally. I think Soul for Happy is very dear to my heart.

But anyway, it seemed to be, I think my misunderstanding was that people, I thought people knew that stuff. But it turned out they didn't, actually. That's sometimes the most profound wisdom, is the thing that seems so natural to you, but other people need a guide to it. And that probably was exactly that book. I have worked with my brain for a very long time, and the book explains how your brain works. Anyway, so leading into it, I thought I will do like, yeah, a couple of press interviews, and then just chill. Okay, and that was really my intention. I would just completely chill in summer, and life would be fine. That's not what happened at all. So I ended up by mid-July,

I was literally so exhausted that my immunity was breaking down completely. And I basically was moving from a flu to a flu. Like I would get a flu, I would recover after a week and then I'm good for two days and then recover, you know, catch another flu. And so I was really, really grueling. And so I did what I promised myself I will do for a very long time. I took 40 days completely alone. Four zero? Four zero. Okay. Completely alone.

I disappeared from the world. I mean, I chatted with my landlord maybe for 10 minutes every three days. Oh, so it wasn't an official retreat? No, I don't do it official, no. I don't do very well when somebody tells me to say om. It just doesn't work for me. It doesn't work. I'm like, yeah.

Very refreshing to hear. As someone who always finds that bit a bit awkward in yoga class. So did you just lot yourself in your apartment? I rented an Airbnb in the countryside. Okay. British countryside. Thanks for the no rain. And yeah, and I spent 40 days alone in

nature life changing and did you have any rules for yourself did you not allow yourself to look at your phone or how would you spend I did an hour a day on my phone which is very much less than what I normally do I you know I spent quite a bit of time sadly sadly. Now three hours and 23 minutes, to be exact, because I measure it all the time. Actually, in the retreat, I recorded a whole series of tips for digital well-being because I think it's really important for our stress. But anyway, I think the main thing is,

first of all, I allowed myself to be in nature completely, listen to a ton of music and wrote. And writing, to me me truly is joyful. So I cry an hour into writing from the joy. And I wrote six hours a day. It was just phenomenal for me. I also, interestingly, was editing. So the first two weeks of the retreat,

I was editing my next book, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author, Alice Law, who is also in the audience today. And I was editing one of her chapters, which was about physical stress, which she wrote completely. I had not read it before. And oh my God, it completely was head on. Like every single symptom Alice was talking about, was felt in my body. And so I started the retreat with a very spiritual rejuvenation, if you want. And then I went on a very interesting anti-inflammatory diet for the rest of the retreat. And I just felt like a human for the first time in a long time. What did you learn philosophically from those 40 days of retreat?

Leave me alone. Do you actually, but that's interesting, do you think you're an introvert? There are 700 people in the room. I know. But I consider myself an introvert, and isn't that ironic? But I think it's because with an audience like this,

I feel that there's an intimate connection with each and every one. True. I think that's because with an audience like this, I feel that there's an intimate connection with each and every one. True. I think that's the difference. I don't like big crowds in music festivals. I like parties because either you don't have to speak to that many people because it's just like a rush, a joyous rush,

or you get caught in a corner and you're talking to one person? Yeah, that's me. Okay. That's an introvert. Yes, so you are an introvert. I'm the ultimate introvert. Like, if you leave me alone, you'll never see me again.

Right. None of you ever. I'm so glad we got you here tonight. Like, literally, if I'm left to my nature, you'll probably receive a book every three and a half months. Yeah. And you won't know where it's coming from. Okay.

Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Join me and world-leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real-life history that inspires the locations, the characters and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you're a hater first and a lover

of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news.

Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides, don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This

on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. allowed to be, by which I mean we live in an extroverted culture. Absolutely. One of my top 10 books of all time is Quiet. It's an amazing book. Susan Cain. And Susan Cain basically talks about the fact that being an introvert is not being socially shy. You're not shy. You just get your energy from being alone. Some people energize by being with

people, being with others. They soak energy from being with others. I get very drained. Even though I love the hugs and I love everyone that I meet, and I'm a very trained extrovert, so I can go for ages as an extrovert. But it is definitely my absolute favorite moment. I promise you, favorite moment ever is around 10 a.m. I start writing at nine around 10 a.m. sometimes I weep from the joy of writing because I'm sitting there I'm alone with my thoughts and I'm just loving it I'm loving the idea of being able to connect to me deep inside and say aha you lied to yourself about this for 50 years it It's quite interesting, right? Do you know, I adore hearing that because I think there's such a myth

of the tortured creative. And very often it's a tortured male artist who's in a garret somewhere suffering from tuberculosis. And Elizabeth Gilbert writes about this brilliantly in Big Magic. That's me, that's me. Well, no, but if you take joy,

I think it's really important to talk about the joy of creativity. There is nothing good that ever comes. I mean, torture can inspire you. So pain can inspire you. To disapprove of something that's happening in the world can inspire you. But if you don't find joy in anything that you do, you can be really good at it, but it's not going to be you.

It's not going to have that part of you in it. So let's talk about that book that you mentioned that you were editing and writing at the time. It's called Unstressable. Yes. Everyone here is getting a world exclusive because this is the first time Mo is talking about it. And there's a very special offer coming up as well, so keep your ears peeled. And it's about stress and how we can manage it. And I have found it revelatory. Thank you. I really have. And it's full, again, of that practical, eloquent wisdom that you can apply to your everyday life. So tell us why you wanted to write this book. I didn't. Moving on to the next question. I actually didn't. So Alice is here somewhere. And Alice interviewed me on her podcast. And at the end of the interview,

it was COVID years. So it was locked down. She was in London, I was in Dubai. And then sort of like got to know her a little, asked her a little bit about her life. And Alice, I think, is the queen of managing stress. What she has gone through in her life in a very short period of time in her early 20s was beyond the capability of anyone to deal with. And she found a way through it. You know, she learned to be a stress management expert. She learned to be a Reiki master, meditation teacher, and so on. And when she told me the story, I chose to invite her to my podcast. And she spoke so openly and kindly. And then she became one of the top 10 episodes of that year, even though the other names around her were quite famous people. And she was still in the top 10 until the end of the year.

And so we stayed in touch. And one day she said, we should write about stress. And I was like, nah, not my topic. Because you didn't feel stressed? I don't feel stressed, no. I mean, come on. And you're going to teach us all how not to feel stressed, how to be more Mo and Alice. It's really not that complicated. Tell us how to do it. Tell us about the three L's. How much time do we have?

Actually, not that long. So stress biologically is very well understood in everyone. It's a few glands and parts of your brain that trigger cortisol in your blood. And when you have cortisol in your blood, you're superhuman. Your pupils dilate. Your muscles are very strong. You can do superhuman feats.

And there's nothing wrong with that. What happens in stress is that there is another cycle after you're stressed that is known as the negative feedback loop. And I hosted Jill Balty-Taylor on Slow Mo. I love her. She's my best. She's amazing. Like my, my friend, I should introduce you. You should absolutely host her. She's a stroke survivor. And if you haven't watched her TED talk, you really should. It's

extraordinary. Definitely one of my biggest teachers in the world. So Jill, in her very, very specific way, talks about something she calls the 90 seconds rule. And in the 90 seconds rule, she says, after you're flooded with cortisol or whatever, you know, stress hormone in your blood, it takes you 90 seconds for all of those to be flushed out of your body. Whether you reacted or not, they will last 90 seconds. And then you are hormone free. So you're not supposed to be stressed anymore. And I asked her, so what happens? And she spoke about the negative feedback loop.

Basically, your hippocampus and hypothalamus basically engage to ask your prefrontal cortex, your logical brain, to look at the world around you and see if there is an actual stress, threat, an actual reason to be stressed. And theoretically, if there is no tiger anymore, like if somebody jumps an actual stress, you know, threat, an actual reason to be stressed. And theoretically, if there is no tiger anymore, like if somebody jumps from behind me, you know, and annoying and says, boo, right? And I jump out of my seat, my hippocampus would then engage and go like, ah, he's just an annoying friend. It's not a real tiger. I would, you know, either calm down or hit

him, whatever, right? But the idea is I'm not supposed to continue to be stressed. Because the stresses in our modern world are quite intangible, your boss being annoying, your boyfriend said something unkind, whatever that is, they're quite intangible. So they're very recreatable in your brain. So what ends up happening is your prefrontal cortex assesses the situation and goes like, no, there is still a stress. There is still something wrong. Of course, especially if you watch the news every day, there's always something wrong, right? And so

accordingly, you remain stressed. You remain stressed over and over and over and over for a very long time. And being stressed is amazing. From an engineer's point of view, it's an amazing machine to give you superpowers. Breaking the machine through the, you know, the breaking of the negative feedback loop is a problem because if you linger the stress, you end up being in your sympathetic nervous system engaged. So you're depriving your liver, your kidneys, your digestive system, your many vital organs are deprived of energy for days, weeks, months, or years. And so you're literally killing your own body and stressing yourself even more.

So we know what happens. We attempted then to say, so how do you fix it? And you know me reasonably well. I can only understand things when I put algorithms on them. So to understand how to fix this, I thought maybe the way to look at it, because we know stress in physics. And stress in physics is when you push down on an object. It's not just the force that causes the stress. It's the square area that's carrying it. And interestingly, in humans, you basically, if you have a force or multiple forces stressing you, but you have the abilities, the skills, the resources to deal with them, you're not as stressed anymore. So that's one of the L's. I'll come back to it in a second.

The other thing is that, as we said, stress in itself is not horrible. It's good for you. It makes you superhuman if it's for a short while. So when do we break? We break when in physics, we actually call it fatigue. Fatigue is, remember those Ikea stores where they have a chair and they keep pushing the poor thing, right? They keep pushing it until they're trying to break it. The force itself is not that big, but they keep doing it over and over. That's exactly what we do to ourselves as humans. We take one stressor and we apply it over and over and over. Or we take a hundred micro stressors and we repeat them every day, right? Until we break. And so the other two L's are simply saying, don't do that. Don't allow things in your life that will stress you. Limit them is the first L.

Okay? Learn is your limit. Learn. No, limit. I don't know what the first L was. Alice. The first L was the negative feedback loop. Is it loop?

No, hold on. Listen. Okay. Listen. Yeah, listen. Ironic. Ironic. Listen. Okay. Listen. Yeah, listen. Ironic. Ironic. There you go.

So limit, learn, and listen. Listen is actually quite eye-opening for us because when we continued to write, we wrote four chapters about something, about what we called mental stress, emotional stress, physical stress, and spiritual stress. And as we wrote each and every one of them, we discovered that there is a language barrier.

The reason why we allow stresses to take so long before we resolve them is that we don't actually understand the language that your mind is speaking, that your emotions are speaking, that your physical form is speaking, or that your spirit is speaking, your soul is speaking, that your emotions are speaking, that your physical form is speaking, or that your spirit is speaking, your soul is speaking. When you really look at it, then you have a very strict responsibility, okay? If you don't want to be stressed, I cannot limit the stressors of life to come your way, okay? But I can show you how to limit them yourself. I can show you how you can literally scan your day and say 70% of those stressors, you know, from the aggressive alarm in the morning to the friend that's annoying me to, you know,

the commute that's really not a joyful experience for me. We can actually either remove those, have a nicer alarm, or through committed acceptance, make some of those stressful experiences a lot more joyful, if you want. You were kind enough to share with me an early copy of the book, and there are two quotes that, with your permission, I would love to read out, because... Read it all. If you can read the whole book, I'll help you.

They were so good, and they really spoke to me. So the first is, the very fact that you have the time and space to stress about a thought or an emotion inside of you is in itself evidence that there is no physical danger in proximity outside of you at this very moment. So clever. So simple yet so clever. And the second one is the biggest negative impact the harshness of life brings is found in the years we spend fearing it. And I think both of those go back to something that we have spoken about so many times before and that I never get tired of quoting, which is the primary cause of unhappiness is very often

not the unhappiness itself, not the fact, it's the story we tell ourselves around it. Absolutely. And you introduced me to the concept of the Becky brain. Who knows what I'm talking about? And it transformed my life. And I quote it so often, I feel like I should give you a commission. But I never explain it as well as you do. Tell us about the Becky brain. You are not the thoughts in your head. It's as simple as that. You have all this noise happening in your head.

Not everyone, by the way. So I know quite a few high-profile monks who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours who don't have that noise in their head at all. They get thoughts, they get fears, they get anxieties and so on, but they don't linger. They know how to shut them down. And the idea of shutting them down mainly is because it's not you talking.

I mean, I love you, Elizabeth, but if you keep poking me and saying things that hurt me and not make my life better, most humans will come to a point and say, Elizabeth, that's enough. You know, please. And they have, many a time. Yeah, I'm saying it now. No, no, no.

But you understand that, right? Yes, of course. And that's exactly what our brains are doing. Our brains are either talking to us about things that don't really exist, that are not really true. They're making them up or exaggerating them. They're always looking at the negative. It's their job to look at the negative.

And they just don't shut up. Like they seriously don't shut up, right? When you start to look at that brain and tell yourself, how has that served me? When in my life was that chatter actually a positive thing for me? When did I actually manage to use that chatter for anything positive? You realize that it was never the case, that this brain chatter is always pulling you down. And if it is a third party, because your brain is not you, if it is a third party, you know, there was this MIT study in 2007, which I really believe nailed it.

They put people in MRI machines, and they asked them to solve word puzzles. And the parts of the brain that were able to solve the problem would light up for as long as they needed to to solve the problem. And then the problem. And then the problem-solving parts of the brain would not blink anymore and the verbal association part of the brain, the part of the brain that you use to speak out loud, would start to blink for up to eight seconds. That's basically the brain turning the answer it found into words so that it tells it to you. Your brain is literally talking to you.

And when you know that, you start to go like, okay, so all of those opinions, all of that chatter, all of that noise in my head is not me. It's a three-pound lump of meat. I might as well tell that lump of meat to stop. Or I might as well verify what lump of meat to stop or I might as well verify when it's what it's telling me Okay, the example I say is in the room is I am may remember we had breakfast one day in Montreal It was wonderful. And then we argued right so I walk out or you know, I basically say baby let me just go have a coffee cool down come back and

You know as the minute I go out of the building, my brain tells me, Aya doesn't love you anymore. I was like, what the F? How can you make that claim? Like, look at your WhatsApp. She just sent me, lovesy puppy in the morning, you know, come have breakfast. She made me breakfast. She sends kisses and hugs all the time. Like, who gives my brain the authority to suddenly say, I've changed my mind, I have a new idea, right? And literally, I stopped in the middle of the street and I said that out loud. I said, what the F did you just say? Okay? I know it sounds mad, but it stopped. My brain was like, oh, I'm sorry. Right? Yes. And the whole thing moved away from stressing myself and killing myself throughout

that coffee to, but I love her too. We argued. Yeah, she has a point. I have a point. Neither of us is right or wrong. And people who love each other always argue. It's fine. Right? And when you start to see life that way, suddenly that noise is within your control. One of my favorite ideas on this was a friend of mine. And she said, yeah, yeah, when my brain starts to attack me, I take an appointment with it. Okay?

And I said, what do you mean? And she said, I say, okay, I heard you, you're upset with my boyfriend, we'll talk about it at six. And believe it or not, your brain stops. It goes like, oh, six is good. You've given it the attention.

You acknowledge that it's been hurt. I said your Becky brain, because when you explained it to me the first time, you said, imagine someone at school called Becky who's constantly pointing out all of the things that you've done wrong, that are going wrong, and how annoying that would be. But it was a fictional Becky, is that right?

It wasn't actually a school friend? Partially. Is that what you said? For the purposes of this podcast, fictional. But I always say, when I quote you, apologies to any Beckys in the audience, because I'm sure you're lovely. We love you.

Yay! That was a Becky! Well, you look like a very nice Becky. OK, not... You need a different name. You can call it Mo. You can call it Elizabeth. Call it Mo, yeah. It'd be hard to think of the brain doing anything bad then.

Anyway, okay, so we're rapidly running out of time, but I didn't want to miss out this, even though you didn't really want me to talk about it. But you told me about it, so it's your fault. I told you about it as a friend, and I told you we shouldn't bring it up. You said, if you'd like to make it a bit spicy, we can talk about my Momo vow.

What is your Momo vow? Next question. Look, my love life has been in podcasts too many times this year. But I'm off the market completely and single until my next book comes out. Oh, okay. So those two things, we weren't expecting them to go together.

So you're single and you're celibate by choice. Yeah, so Momo is modern monk is what I call it. So I'm in this retreat with no one to distract me. Heaven.

And basically, I'm writing a book called Finding Love. I'm writing too many things. I'm writing Finding Love. I'm writing children's books. I'm writing, like, weird things. Anyway, so Finding Love has been my project for the last two and a half years. I wrote it two and a half times already. I really, I write it, and then I, you know, bin it and write it again.

And this time, I honestly, I think it and then I, you know, bin it and write it again. And this time, I honestly, I think what I'm writing is really gold. Even to me, it's like the way I look at it, I go like, now that makes sense. Understand, love itself is too divine to be written about in a book, okay? Most of what people refer to as love is what I refer to in the book as a love story, which is an augmented experience of love and many other things. When we want someone in our life, we want love, we want companionship, we want romance, we want passion, we want so many things, a combination of those things. But I found so much clarity to parse those things out and to see them as they are and to write them in words, to be honest, that I felt would upset my girlfriend if I had one when I was writing them. And so I found myself at the end of the, you always write your introductions after you've written a little bit.

So at the end of the introduction, I had that section that was called Modern Monk with a Purpose. And I basically told myself, I will stay celibate until I finish the book. And finding love, for you, does that mean finding someone to be in love with? Or is it bigger than that? Much bigger than that. or is it bigger than that? Much bigger than that. We have minimized love. Love is too divine to be seen as a relationship. You know my relationship with my ex, okay?

And then I say that publicly, Nibel was my wife for 27 years and I love her so deeply today. As with every day I've ever loved her, the only difference is we don't sleep together, if you want. And if people equate love to that, sorry, honestly, that's almost an insult to love. It's part of what creates relationships, what brings us together, what makes us stay together and tackle life together.

All of those other augmented parts of the love story. But it's not love. I don't know if we should go that far, but in my analysis of love in finding love, I compare it to the elementary particles of physics. So if you understand physics, quantum field theory to be specific, everything in the universe is made of a solid field of elementary particles. And when you observe a particle, it shows up. It comes to existence. I'm saying that there must be something known as the spiritual field theory, where basically if elementary particles make the physical world, there are elementary components that make the spiritual world. Consciousness would be one, and love would be one, which basically means that love always exists. Love is always there,

okay? And most of the time, by the way, you actually would, if you notice that, you would realize it. You never really gradually increase your love to someone, okay? You know, all of those relationships and dates and all of the things that we do and dance around and so on, and there is that one moment where you go like, oh, I think I love them, right? It's not like I love them 10%, then 20%, then 30%, right? It's like either zero or one. That's quantum field theory at its best. It's suddenly that you tune into the field of the ultimate love that's connecting all of us, and poof, you feel it. As long as you're connected, it's there.

Its object is irrelevant. You love your dog exactly the same way as you love your partner, exactly the same way as you love your car as exactly as the same way as you love your car if you feel a love for your car it's definitely true about my cat cat for sure yeah I mean a little more than Justin but you know well yeah no no no don't say that in public but no but what I find deeply beautiful about that is you are someone who has had to live with traumatic grief. One of the most tragic things that could ever happen to a human

has happened to you. And I imagine you must feel that your love for Ali and with Ali is still very much a part of your life. It's still there. It's still alive. 100%. So you see, this is the whole point. If you really strip love from all of the augmented experiences around it, because my love for Ali includes laughing together and playing video games together and so on.

My love for Aya includes all of those wonderful dinners we have together. But they don't happen all the time. But the love exists. If you strip it off the material world, the material experience we've created around it, that thing that we call love always exists. If it turns into one, so in physics it's either zero or one. If it turns into one, it is one. And it will always be one.

And I struggled because even in that little voice in your head, I wrote that the only emotion I didn't find an equation for was unconditional love. And then I found it. So in finding love, the equation is love equals one. That's absolutely simple. It's so clear. It's finding the one. Yeah, it is. Thank you.

That did just happen. So if you want to be a little philosophical everyone is the one so that's the interesting thing that we also we also try to allocate love to a single person but the most evolved of all of us will say we are all that one person. I love that. And I have one more question for you before we go to audience questions. But before I get to that, you have been generous enough to give this audience here tonight an extraordinary opportunity, which is to be a founding member, essentially, of Mo and Alice's new, would you call it a club? It's a new membership platform called unstressable.com. It is launching tonight. Actually, right now. Right now, Alice is pressing the button. We'll press the button, yeah. And if you use the promo code, howtofail, you get free membership for two months. But you need to do that before

the end of the year. So use the promo code howtofail and go to unstressable.com. And there you will find lots of practical tips to manage stress in your daily life. What else? Basically, it's built on learning material. So the book is coming out in March. And Alice is quite impatient. So we decided to go with them. I mean, you're quite impatient too, to be fair. We have a target of a million people out of stress every year. And the people that have tested the book and the material say it really makes a difference.

So it's actually quite wrong to wait, I think. So it's training material followed by a monthly webinar live for me and Alice, followed by guest experts to talk about things like how to fail and so on. And then it's also, I think the most important part is there is a community area where the members talk to each other and we answer their questions and so on. What an extraordinary thing. Unstressable.com, the code is how to fail, and I think Mo deserves a round of applause for that generosity. Thank you so much.

Let's find out who's going to be the first member, actually. That would be quite cool. That would be cool. My final question to you is I know that there will be people in this audience who are dealing with challenges with unimaginable pain with grief and I know this puts you under a lot of pressure

but I wonder if you could say one thing directly to those people right now what would it be what would it be? Cannot be one thing. Grief is the most painful experience I think a human can go through. I strongly believe that. Again, when we wrote Unstressable, we wrote something we called The Nine Beasts of Grief.

It's not going to be part of the first book, but it's going to be part of the membership. And grief is so complicated. So when people speak about the five stages of grief, they're just talking about chronological order, right? It's the beasts that you're dealing with. It's the loneliness. It's the uncertainty. It's the mistrust for life. It's all of those blended negative emotions that completely redefine you. And redefine truly is the word. I have to say, a life with me, Nibel, my ex, and Ali, and Aya, without Ali, completely shakes who I am.

It's to the core. If you've connected to a father or an uncle or a grandmother that has made a difference to your life and they disappear, the finality of it is like, so who am I now? And I think most of us, because of the pain or because of the pressure of society, will go through grief and say, okay, let me just try to run through this.

Let me try to get out on the other side. I can't stand that pain anymore. I have found in my experience that there is no escape, that there is a journey that will be painful. And if you don't live that journey, if you rush through it, you're going to go back and live through it later. If there is unfinished business, it doesn't go away. So my first advice to anyone who is grieving is cry. Feel it fully. Scream if you need to. Just accept the fact that this has been a very bad hand from life. That's the first thing that you need to do.

The second thing, level of reasoning if you want, which is very difficult to reason when you're grieving, is to understand that the pain is not making things better and that there are things in life that will not improve if you cry about them for 600 years. The finality of death is just it. And you know my story. Four hours after Ali left our world because of my position at Google at the time, the top officials in the health ministry of Dubai called me and said, we're going to get to the bottom of this. Can we perform an autopsy on Ali's body? Because he died during a routine operation for anyone who doesn't know. Yes, because it was a medical malpractice, basically. And I looked at

Nibel, my ex, who's the wisest woman on the planet, with all due respect to all the women in the audience. But she's an amazing woman. And I looked at her and I said, Nibel, would you mind if they did that? And she said one word that anchored us in the truth.

She said, will it bring Ali back? Will it bring Ali back is really the reason why I'm sitting in front of you. Because there is a moment of acceptance of, I hate this. This hurts really badly. But it is what it is, and it's not going to change. And I think all of the therapists and psychologists and all of the work that is around grief

tries to get you to that moment of accept, accept, accept. Or you can just tell yourself in a very harsh way, it is what it is. It's gone. It's done. Now the third layer, which I think is really where hope comes in, requires a tiny bit of spirituality. It requires you to understand that this is not me. This is the vehicle I use to navigate the physical world. That if you like anything about what I tell you, it's not just because of how my brain analyzes things. It's also because of what my spirit is trying to achieve in its short journey here.

Most of us know it instinctively but refuse it sometimes because we don't like religion or spirituality or whatever. But there is a physical part to each of us and a non-physical part. Call the non-physical part anything you want. Call it a goat if you want. But that non-physical part. Call the non-physical part anything you want. Call it a goat if you want, okay? But that non-physical part exists. You feel it, you know it, you see, you dream a dream and then you tell someone about it

and they may have dreamt the same. Or there are so many mysteries in the way we perceive life that definitely have nothing to do with the physical. Now, that physical part, and I'm not going to go into physics, but if you really, really trust my judgment of physics, that non-physical part never dies. Okay? That non-physical part has actually never been born in this world.

It was alive before the physical started, during your journey through the physical, and after the physical ends. Okay? So I know it sounds really difficult to understand this because you're in pain. But the truth is, I am more certain that in an interval of time, I will hug the non-physical form of Ali again, then I am certain that I will spend another minute in this physical world. Do you understand the comparison? This could be my last breath. Not for any one of us.

It could be my last breath. And I don't know when my last breath is going to be. But I know there will be a last breath. And I know when that last breath comes, I will be where Ali is. Okay? Because Ali never left. Did you, please understand this.

I know it sounds super spiritual. I promise you if we have the time to explain the physics, you'll understand. Ali never left. We were never here. This is all a simulation if you want. It's your avatar. It's the non-physical form that's sitting on a red sofa somewhere holding the controller. Okay? And that red sofa is not

subject to time. It doesn't have a yesterday, a today, and a tomorrow. Okay? Ali was not born after me. Ali's physical form was born after me. When he was born, that was not the start of his life. Death is the opposite of birth. It's not the opposite of life. Do you understand that? Life continues all through, before, during, and after the physical experience. So if you start to understand this in a simpler way than what I just said, which I know

sounds complicated, you realize I'm going there too, in an instant, because I'm in my 50s now, it felt like that. So how much do I have left? Tens more years? It will feel like that, and then I'll be there too. Okay? So when I felt that, and I wrote it so clearly in soul for happy if people want to find it I said okay so how are those remaining pages going to look like if that book had 50 pages in it and it had it has 30 more to go what are we going to write in the 30 and they'll pass like that and I'll be hugging him I'll sp spank him first, but then I'll hug him. Okay. For leaving. Oh, Mo, that is some wisdom right there. I can't thank you enough for being you. Every time you talk, I learn and evolve and grow. And I feel so lucky to be in your warm and generous presence. Thank you so, so much for coming back on How to Fail.

I'll keep asking you. For the rest of those 30 pages, you'll be coming on How to Fail at least 10 more times. Let's have Elizabeth Day on every third page. Why are we a bit too much? You described love as one and there's a whole lot of one

here for you tonight. Please would you join me in a round of applause for the magnificent Mo Gowdack. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Introvert, very uncomfortable. We would love now to turn it over to you if you have any questions.

And are there any questions that anyone would like to ask or have we comprehensively covered everything the meaning of life itself a brave hand one year thank you so much for being the first would you wait for your we have brave hands there too and back there for the next ones so just stand here and you're wearing a lovely headband and you're sitting in front of my father and mother hello hello to tom and christine sorry to embarrass you also introverted okay hello um thank you that was incredible um i was so interested in what you said at the start about the flow state and i read a little bit about this but i don't really understand fully what it is and i wondered whether you wouldn't mind spending a

couple of minutes just explaining how you got to the flow state is it available for all of us how do we get there totally thank you great question so there are two uses of the terminology and allow me to talk about each of them there is the very famous term word flow that was coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow, which is definitely the quintessential book on the topic. And he's talking in Flow about that state of an artist, for example, a pianist that gets on stage and just performs and is completely out of life, if you want, and completely into that performance. And it's full of joy, and it's full of excellence. So it's success and joy at the same time. It's the only state

that humans know where you have both serotonin and dopamine in your blood at the same time. Normally, serotonin, your happiness hormone, is a calmer. It makes you calm and quiet and contented. When you get dopamine, the reward hormone, serotonin comes out of your blood. So flow is that state where you have both at the same time. There is another flow that I define as the ability to let go and move with life. Just let life take you wherever you, you know, life wants to take you and trust that life knows more than you, which Alice writes about very clearly in the chapter that we call Spiritually Stressed and Unstressable. It's the feminine flow, if you want.

It's the way that we can be, just be, and not do anything. And when we be, we flow with life. Now, let's talk about those two very quickly. The flow, the state in which you're performing is available to every single one of us. And in that little voice in your head, I write about the steps to get there. Step number one is make the task a little harder than your capabilities, not too hard, but just a tiny bit harder. So if something is easy, you normally switch off and so you don't find flow if something is too hard you're normally not you just lose hope and so you give up okay so the second thing is break the task into subtasks

okay so they are basically if you're supposed to clean the dishes don't focus on the entire amount of dishes focus on every single dish. The third is be in the moment of every single one of those tasks. So just focus on the task at hand. Don't think about the one before or the one after. And the fourth is finish that task to perfection. And then repeat or do the next task. And as you go through those, you'll find that just because you're a little more challenged than your skills,

you get absorbed into the task fully and you actually feel flow. And it's very, very manufacturable if you want. So the way I tell people at work, for example, is answer every email the way you have answered your first email. You write it, you look at it, you make sure that every word is correct,

you consult with a friend, you sleep on it, and so on and so forth. So that's the flow of finding that state of perfection, if you want. Flow in terms of the feminine flow of going where life takes you is hard to explain through the brain, through words, but it just has an element of trust for life that

most of us have lost. Most of us have learned in our careers and at school that we are the doers. We are the doers means if I let go of the steering wheel, I will crash. But that's absolutely not true. As a matter of fact, most of the events of your life that actually made a difference to your life, that made you the person that you are, were unplanned, were completely unexpected. They came out of left wing and they changed your life to the better. Okay? So in a very interesting way, there is a reality that life sometimes knows better. So when we talk about spiritually stressed, spiritually stressed is that non-physical part of you trying to communicate to you, trying to tell you, trust me, I see more than your limited scope of the physical world. Just trust me and follow your gut feeling, follow your intuition. Okay? So there are two ways

you can do this. You can either do it blindly by surrendering to your feminine side, man or woman, straight or gay, doesn't matter. Every one of us has a feminine side. Surrendering to that and actually trusting your gut feeling. If your brain tells you do A, B, and C, and you still feel something inside that goes like, no, I feel I should do X, Y, and Z. Trust that bit. At least investigate it. The best book on the topic is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. That's number one. Number two is remind yourself that life is not out there to trick you.

The only thing that life wants is to be lived. That's all it wants to be experienced. And if you just let go and flow with life, you'll be fine. You'll find an amazing journey that's full of joy and a little bit of pain, not unlike the amount of pain that you would have had if you were hyper-analytical as well. But it will be a life that is designed by life rather than you. The third and most important thing is life is a quest. And this is a very, very different definition for most of us.

We don't understand this. We think of life as a journey. A journey is something where you set out of here, you tell yourself, I'm going to Manchester, so I'm going to be in this place at this time. I'm going to take that train. I'm going to get out there, and I'm going to do this. It's almost as you know your journey. It's not like that. Life is a quest. You have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow. And so my advice to people, if you want to find flow, is allow yourself

to review frequently. Go with life and then tell yourself, after a week, I'll look at this and see if it's still going okay. And if it isn't, I'll adjust a little, micro adjustments. Rather than the stubbornness of our masculinity, where we will say, no, life wants me here. I'm not going to go here. I'm going to go there, right? Try to say, okay, I'm going to flow a little bit.

A week is not going to destroy my life. We'll see how that works. And if you enjoy that and there is no threat, do another week and another week. Those micro-adjustments basically allow you to flow with a little bit more trust for life. Wow. I'm going to edit that out and make that a podcast episode

in its own right because that was so good life desires nothing more than to be lived what life wants to be oh yeah thank you for that magnificent question and that extraordinary answer we're going to go to the back of the hall now you should have a microphone already I'm hoping hello I just wondered if you had any advice for if the person in your life is someone else that's stressed, so a family member or a friend, how can you help someone else when they're stressed? Attend to yourself first before you help others. You know what they tell you on airplanes?

Put your mask on first before you help anyone else. We've made too many people our responsibility. I get asked that question quite a lot. Why one billion happy, not seven billion happy? Interesting question, because I can't make seven billion happy. There will always be a few billion that will say, I want to be grumpy. I like it that way. And my story was, you know, I write a bit, I write a lot like an engineer. I wrote Soul for Happy like a software engineer. So I had a beta version that I actually released in the open air.

I had 270 people read it and edit it. So people I don't know, I just posted on social media. They went in and changed the book. Of those 270 people, 8% in the survey before they started to read, they said they were already depressed. Okay? All 8%. Every single one of them dropped out at page 11. All right? And on page 11 was the way we opened our podcast. Happiness is a choice. Right? So interestingly, the dynamic of saving someone requires two things. Requires the skill and capability on your side,

which is you being unstressed, being chill, being capable, fully understanding the idea of stress and how it works and how you can get yourself out of it. That's one element that is needed. And there needs to be a willingness on their side. If there is no willingness, my advice to you is to not try. Okay? My only advice, if someone that is loved in your life that is either very stressed or, you know, suffering anxiety or suffering burnout and so on, is to pour love on them.

That's the only, I promise you, it's the only answer. Love fixes everything. Because if you pour love on someone long enough they will eventually go like oh I must be good I deserve better than this what can I do to get out of this when they ask the question what can I do to get out of this I'll hand you a pile of tools and a membership yeah yeah exactly like a great gift absolutely and's possible. But until you get to that point, sadly, people who don't want to be saved are not savable. In that little voice in your head, you explain the fact that thoughts trigger emotions

rather than the other way around, which I have found hugely helpful. But how would you distinguish between Becky's very sort of unhelpful, destructive thoughts, not the Becky in the audience, of course, and the kind of voice that comes from your gut that you sort of should listen to? How do you distinguish between the two voices? So this is a...

It was a very good question. It's not easy at all. So there is... These are multiple questions. One is your emotions are triggered by your thought. A lot of people will disagree with that, but it's actually very, very true. Even in the stress responses, the first response is triggered by the amygdala

and the cortisol and so on, but then the second response is triggered by your thought. Now, how do you distinguish between what your brain is telling you and what your heart is telling you? Simply, you ask yourself, if all the stars aligned, would that be my choice? If something is telling you, stay up all night and study, that's your brain, okay? And somehow your heart is saying that's not going to be good for the exam tomorrow. The only way to distinguish between the two is to say, well, if I was the luckiest person on earth and the exam tomorrow was easy and, you know, what I've

known so far has been good enough for me, should I go to sleep? And if your heart says, yeah, go to sleep, it's going to be fine, that's your gut. The connection to our intuition is sadly blocked by Becky. So every time your intuition, your spirit, your heart tells you something, Becky goes like, let me analyze this. Let me just rip it to pieces and like a good lawyer or a good accountant, tell you that it's not going to work. Okay, so the idea here, because the disclaimer is important, the disclaimer is Becky wants to come back. Your brain wants to come back and say, I told you so. Okay, I was protecting you. Listen to me next time.

So if all stars aligned, what would you do? That's what your heart is telling you. That's amazing. And also, I think Becky is scared of change. Of course. Yeah. Absolutely. So interesting. If the stars are aligned, that's what your heart is telling you. We have one up there as well. Yes. Okay. With a microphone. It is such a privilege to hear you speak. I mean, I'm not going to lie, before I came here, I hadn't actually heard of you, but now I think I'm your biggest fan.

Me or Mo. It's a brutal honesty. So thank you to my friend Penny for suggesting it. Everything that you've said has resonated so loudly with me based on experiences I've had in my life recently. I carry around a piece of paper that my sister gave to me a few years ago which said we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience and what you talked about latterly really sort of made it clear that that's the way I should approach life. What I wanted to ask you

is about your three L's and specifically about the acceptance piece. I've done the crying and the screaming. I think I've done the acceptance, but how do you know that you haven't done the acceptance? How do you accept that you haven't accepted does that make sense first of all can i just say thank you so much for that question and for sharing what sounds like a deeply painful thing that you're going through that is such beautiful courage invulnerability and we're all so appreciative of that and we stand with you in whatever it is you're experiencing. We never really accept without struggle. So the key to how you realize when you're accepting or not is the struggle.

I'll tell you very openly. When I went on retreat, for example, let's take a very benign example. When I went on retreat, in the first seven days, it was almost impossible for me to stop looking at my phone. Okay? There is just a struggle. There is a change. There is something that I'm, you know, I'm not able to deal with. And then I did a very interesting trick. I took my broken old phone, which actually is still the phone that I have all of the bad apps on, okay? So openly, you know, I have Instagram there, I have WhatsApp there, and it has a broken screen, and the battery lasts around two hours. Okay?

And basically put everything there and told myself, I'm going to charge that phone once a day. And suddenly, after two to three hours of use every day, the phone died. And the two to three hours were grueling and annoying. And I found myself literally reaching to the phone saying, but maybe someone texted me, and maybe they need need me right now and maybe this and maybe that. There was that struggle.

The phone wasn't there. I was behaving in ways that basically said, yeah, I've done what I should do, but I wasn't accepting it inside. Until one morning, I just didn't reach out for it anymore. I didn't feel that struggle within me. I felt okay with life as it is. Now, I'll tell you very openly, it might seem really, really, really strange, but I'm happy Ali left. I really am. When? When you really think about an understanding that life is fleeting and the impact

that we created together, I think if I had asked Ali before he went into the operating room and told him, would you give your life for tens of millions of people to find happiness, he would have said, absolutely. And when you really start to get to that point

where you're not only okay, you're saying, this is okay, this is good. He's in a good place. I mean, again, I can't really explain to you everything I understand about death, but Ali's in a good place. Ali's fine. Ali's fine.

We're the ones that are not. And when you get to the point where you say, he's okay and life is better since he left, I'm actually really okay that he's not here anymore. It hurts, I miss him, but I'm okay with, I really am not struggling with it. In the absence of struggle, you have found acceptance. As long as there is struggle, don't push yourself, don't

punish yourself. Life is hard. Just keep trying to remind yourself that sooner or later the destination of this is you're going to accept. Thank you, Mo. Yes, hello. Thank you so much. Hiya. I was so mesmerized by your words that I even forgot my question, but I think it went along the lines of, you spoke so profoundly about grief and your experience of pain when you feel grief, but then suffering is the choice that comes after. How is it that you can forgive yourself for feeling like you played such a, whether you played a role or not in whatever

loss that you experienced and feel the courage to be able to actually take the steps to prevent the suffering. That is my question. What a question. Okay, I'll first be a little too factual. Whether or not we played a role doesn't make any difference. You can't fix that. When Ali Habibi left our world, I promise you this is a true story. The first four hours after Ali left, my hyperactive executive brain said one sentence only, and it repeated it over and over on hyperdrive. To torture me. It told me, you should have driven him to another hospital. I drove Ali. As a matter of fact, Nibel, who is hyper empathetic, every time our kids

suffered a tiny thing, Nibel would jump on it. When Ali started to feel a pain in his belly, she said, no, I'm not taking him to the hospital. First time in my entire life I see her doing this. So I said, okay, no worries. Maybe she's stressed today or whatever. I'll take him. So I drove him to the hospital where the mistakes happened and he left us. And my brain would constantly tell me, you should have driven him to the hospital where the mistakes happened and he left us. And my brain would constantly tell me, you should have driven him to another hospital. Until I shouted very openly, I have a very clear agreement with Becky, okay?

And actually, in that little voice in your head, the agreement is, you know, you have a picture of it. It's signed. The agreement is you're either going to give me useful thoughts or joyful thoughts. You can't give me a thought that tortures me that's not making anything better. Okay, it's very simple. So you should have driven him to another hospital. It's not very joyful.

You can agree. And it's not useful at all because I can't go back in time and do anything about it. You know, when Becky is annoying, I shout. I said, I heard you, Becky. I wish I could, but I can't go back in time and do anything about it. You know, when Becky is annoying, I shout. I said, I heard you, Becky. I wish I could, but I can't. There's no way I can go back in time and fix this, okay? Look forward and give me a useful thought. That's my advice.

Looking back doesn't change a thing. Looking forward, Becky then came back and said, okay, let's write what you and your family discussed about happiness in your life and put that in a book out there and, you know, get the people to remember Ali a little bit. Wonderful. I wrote, you know, a book that became a bestseller and you're here because of that. It doesn't bring him back and it doesn't allow me to go drive him to another hospital. But I'm just curious, how can you distinguish between trying to fast forward too quickly as opposed to actually sit with the pain? Because I found myself trying to really fast

forward the pace of grief so that I just keep looking forward and not looking back. So that's a question about how do you know if you're fast forwarding a stage that you need to go through and that maybe you need to sit in the pain? No, you don't need to sit in the pain. So one of the questions I very frequently get is, but there is a value to unhappiness. No, there is none. I say this openly, there is no value to unhappiness, okay? There is value to pain because pain alerts us that something went wrong or something might go wrong so that we do something about it, okay? Unhappiness is generated by our own heads in an attempt to either serve our ego, okay, or to protect us from something that's

not there and so on. Most people who grieve for a very long time and sit with the pain, one of the top reasons for that is ego. And I say that really openly. An ego of a parent is, I should have protected my child. An ego of someone that lost someone they really loved is, how can I be happy without them? These are all invalid questions. The truth is, being happy or unhappy, first, doesn't bring them back.

Second, honestly, if it makes a difference to them being happy does being unhappy doesn't make them happy at all one of my favorite conversations ever on slow-mo now that we covered grief so much was a cardiologist called dr pim van loemel he's a dutch person who spent 40 years of his life analyzing near-death experiences. And near-death experiences are highly documented. Best book on the topic is Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani. And there are more than 3 million near-death experiences documented. All of them, without exception, will tell you the exact same sequence of events, and 90% of them will say, we really didn't want to come back. It was so cool on the other side.

Okay? And please listen to Pim van Der Mel or read Anita Morjani's work. I had a near-death experience myself. I was 25, and I can attest to that. My brother was near me, and so he revived me. My brother is a surgeon, so he revived me, and I was so angry with him. I was so angry with him. It was like, it was so cool. Like, this is the best place I've ever been, right?

So they're unaffected by the little, tiny things that are happening in our life. But they love you. They love me. They love everyone that they've been in touch with and loved. They don't want anyone to be unhappy. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons for the spiritual field theory that I spoke about earlier is that everyone who's gone through a near-death experience will tell you, you feel submerged in love.

The minute you leave your physical form, it's just love. That's all you feel. Everything around you is love. It's a great place. We're the ones suffering. There is no point in suffering. We're not trying to prove anything. When we suffer because we miss them, I wake up every morning and my heart aches because I can't hug him. But it doesn't go beyond that. I don't create stories of I should have driven him to another hospital. That's the wrong story to create. They want you to be happy. Life wants you to take the experience and learn and be lived. Life wants to be lived. What an amazing note to end on thank you so much to everyone who came out tonight tag us in your social media posts because we would love every single night to have an audience as

generous and inspired as they were wonderful so wonderful thank you so much obviously mo is just an absolute hero of mine and i'm so delighted that I got to share his brilliance with all of you and we are sticking around for book signings so do come and say hello there if you would like and just one more time please can we say thank you to the extraordinary Mo Gowdat. if you enjoyed this episode of how to fail with elizabeth day i would so appreciate it if you could rate review and subscribe apparently it helps other people know that we exist