Life Kit - Our favorite tips on exercise, sleep, and play
Episode Date: June 5, 2025Dan Harris of the 10% Happier podcast interviews Life Kit host Marielle Segarra as part of their Get Fit Sanely series. Marielle talks her favorite tips, like building in exercise snacks, preventing r...evenge bedtime procrastination, finding your play personality and more.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Hey, it's Mary-Elle.
One of my favorite podcasts is 10% Happier with Dan Harris.
And he recently had me on as part of a month-long series they're doing on fitness.
Basically, it's about how to take care of your body without losing your mind.
We talked for an hour, which is a long episode for us here at LifeKit, but we wanted to share
it with you because it's packed with tips we've learned from lots of different episodes,
specifically about movement, sleep, and play.
It was a fun, playful conversation.
We hope you enjoy.
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This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Mariel Sagada, welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
Before we dive into your principal takeaways from covering health and wellness for many,
many years, I'd be curious to hear a little bit of your backstory.
How and why did you get interested in this stuff
in the first place?
I had a cocaine-fueled panic attack on live television,
so I have a pretty clear trajectory narratively
between my old life and my new life,
but I'd be curious, it doesn't have to be
as ridiculous as mine, but I'd be curious
to hear about your trajectory.
Well, I guess I have two answers for that.
There's the personal and the professional.
I feel like they married really well here
because this feels like the show that I should be hosting,
that I'm supposed to be hosting, but I didn't even,
I wouldn't have known that it existed before it existed.
Like I wouldn't have pitched it necessarily.
Life Kit existed for years before I started,
and then they decided to hire a full-time host.
And at the time, I was a financial reporter
at Marketplace, the public radio outlet.
And I covered finance and economics
for a number of years, a lot of news coverage,
and then a lot of consumer psychology.
So I know that was attractive to them
when they were hiring me, but I think the thing that really connected for my boss when we had one of our initial calls, I was actually talking to her about, I had applied for a different host job at NPR.
It was kind of like a screening call. I was gathering a lot of my ancestors' stuff, like anything I could find that belonged to
them, like a little prayer book that was my grandmother's, and then a little address
book that was my abuela's, and different little things, and also items to represent
them, basically creating like an ancestral altar on my bedside table, that I was on having
this kind of spiritual journey that way.
And I just happened to mention that to her and she was like,
that would be a great Life Kit episode. Did you know we're hiring for Life Kit?
You could consider applying for that. And yeah, I did. And it just,
it made so much sense once I connected to what Life Kit does. I was like,
oh, I am this person. Like I'm the person who likes to be really practical about whatever
I'm dealing with in my life.
We did an episode the other day on car safety and I was like, oh, every time
I drive over a bridge, I have that intrusive thought of if I'm going to,
you know, end up in the water and what would I do and then what would be the next step?
So I was like, can we do an episode on this?
Can we just find out what actually I'm supposed to do
that'll make me feel better?
So there's that, and then there's like,
when people tell me their problems,
I wanna try to help them and give them
like specific practical advice.
That's not always wanted in real life.
But I find that when you do like a life kit,
people are seeking it.
So it's a good outlet for that impulse of mine that where I want to try to fix people's problems
my friend
Gretchen Rubin calls herself a happiness bully
She can pull it off. But most of us can't most people don't want unsolicited advice
Yeah, but if you're hosting a show and people are clicking on it, then it's very much solicited. All right, so this conversation is part of the series
that we do on our show about how to get fit sanely.
And I know that overlaps with so many of the themes
that you cover on LifeKit.
So we're gonna talk about your top 10 takeaways,
like stuff that you personally are using
from all of the things you've learned about various aspects of
fitness, including exercise and sleep and even play, which I think is an undervalued part of
fitness and mental health generally. So if you're cool, I thought we'd start with exercise.
I'm cool.
And I'll chime in throughout with stuff I've learned in my own life.
But your number one takeaway
after having covered exercise for a while
is to incorporate small pockets of exercise
throughout the day.
Like what does that look like?
For me, sometimes it looks like doing calf raises
when I brush my teeth.
A lot of it happens when I'm watching TV.
I recently binged Severance.
Went back to rewatch season one and then watch season two.
And I do a lot of, because I've been to physical therapy
over the last year or so for some stuff,
and I do a lot of the exercises they give me during that.
Even stuff like you're sitting on the floor,
it's a shoulder stretch.
It's like I'm sitting back against my couch
and just kind of stretching my arms out like that. It's a simple thing. Also like lunges, squats, anything like that that's
stationary or I have an exercise bike that faces the TV. So these are all very helpful,
but you could also do it like if you have kids and you're waiting in the pickup line
to get your kids, you could take that moment and pair it with movement, right? Like if you're parked and everybody's just waiting,
you get out of the car and you do a couple squats or you reach up and move your body
in a different way than you've been moving it all day. The reason for that is you want
to pair movement with some activity that you're already doing
routinely because that'll help you remember to do it and it's time that's
already accounted for like we brush our teeth every day you know ideally and so
if you do that or you do it when you're taking your pills or you do it when
you're making your smoothie then you find a way to work it in and you don't
have as many excuses like I just can't make time for a whole hour to go to the gym. Is the
idea there that you'll start seeing benefits and then want to go to the gym
or is this just as good as going to the gym? It's not necessarily the former. It's
you can still get a lot of benefits from breaking up movement into these exercise
snacks is what some people call them throughout the day.
You can still get the benefits for instance of strength training or cardio as long as
you're getting your heart rate up to for cardio to like the target zone, which you
can achieve even by walking.
It's okay to break it up.
You don't have to do it all at once.
So you don't have to have the gym that you go to
unless you like that, which I do not.
I find gyms depressing a lot of the time,
unless it's the rock climbing gym,
because then it's like a fun little puzzle for me to do.
And it's like competing against yourself.
But the lighting in gyms usually the smell all the clanking of weights and things
Like I hate it. I won't go
I'm sure for many people who feel the same way you do either because they hate gyms or because
They can't find the time to go
To know that you can just weave it into your life as it is is liberating.
It is. I think it's a relief for a lot of people that they don't have to work out in the way that
they were told they have to work out and that also exercise can be fun and you can find the
way that works for you. At this moment, you might be really into biking around your neighborhood
or something or biking on the road right now, and then you decide, meh, not so much anymore.
Now I want to start jogging or start swimming or something. And like, it's also okay to
just change it up as you get bored of one thing or what suits your needs. I like to
lately as especially as the weather has gotten nicer, I'm like, oh, let me start
biking again to get places in Brooklyn.
Then I don't have to take the subway and I also get some exercise in.
I've been doing that with walking, taking meetings.
If I've got a meeting that would have otherwise been a Zoom, but I can make it a phone call,
I can just walk through my neighborhood, or instead of taking a cab,
to actually just carve out a little extra time
and walk to a place, I found that to be really helpful.
I think if you take meetings when you're walking too,
it can also, it can foster creativity.
It can help you come up with better ideas.
I have definitely felt stuck before
on a story that I was working on,
and then I go for a walk and I talk to my editor or a producer or someone. I'm able to think outside
of the box that my apartment creates. You know, when you're looking at the same things all the time,
I don't know, it's like your brain doesn't go there, but then you're suddenly among the trees
in the park or whatever and you're like you're newly inspired.
There's an evolutionary case for this. I'm not an expert in this. I'm repeating things
I've heard from experts, but yeah, we evolved
to think while moving through nature and that makes a ton of sense because we were hunting and gathering
migrating lots of things on the go.
And so deep in our molecules, there is a good reason why taking a walk can not only be good
for your physical fitness, but also for your creativity and larger mental health.
I love that.
Yeah.
I think it can also be really helpful to know you might get these benefits, but to let go
of outcomes. So it's like,
I'm pretty sure if I go for a walk, it's going to shake me loose a little bit, but I don't
necessarily know in what direction or towards what productive outcome. And sometimes it'll just be
the joy of that experience, the joy of being in the park and seeing a little kid on their
bike like learning how to bike with their parent or a cute dog that I smile at or I
was on the beach in Puerto Rico last week and I just watched a little crab dig a hole
for 20 minutes.
He had his little claw and he would go and scoop up the sand
and then come out of the hole, dump the sand,
come back in, get these like really cute eyes, you know,
like a cartoon character.
As I got closer to him, he got a little more wary of me,
like, is this girl going to eat me?
And I was like, no, no, no, it's okay.
I just want to take a picture.
So he started dumping the sand like real quick
and then running back in.
I loved it.
Like, it was one of the best moments of my trip.
Just sitting there and watching this crab do his thing over and over.
And then I was also like,
oh, there's metaphor here for my own life,
which is something we learned when we did the forest bathing episode.
You can find metaphor in nature for pretty much anything
you're going through.
Whether it's the way that trees, when they die and they fall, they decompose and they
become part of the forest floor and they become a different part of the ecosystem, right?
Where mushrooms can grow and maybe like little birds can live in there.
It can be a metaphor for death and grief.
I find there's just a lot of wisdom in nature
when you sit and watch.
And so you don't always, you could go for that walk
and say like, this is gonna help me think about
the next chapter of my book or whatever,
this is gonna help me come up with my business plan.
Or you could go into it with a little less attachment to the outcome and just see.
I love that.
In my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein often says that meditation actually can be
a good way to problem solve, but not in an obvious way.
You're not supposed to sit down and think about the problem because that's normally
what we do.
Instead, you can seed your mind with the problem
and then go into a mindful state
where you're just watching your breath
or noticing whatever's coming up in your body and mind.
And then when you get distracted,
you start again and again.
And when you let the unconscious mind go to work
in this way, connections that you might not have been able to make
with your everyday discursive mind can get made.
This is why we get ideas in the shower.
So yeah, I see a lot of resonance there.
You can work with your dream self, your sleeping self to do the same thing.
We did an episode about dreaming and we interviewed a researcher at Harvard about this and she has studied dreaming for a long time and
She would have her students basically there was some problem
They were working through with a project and they would I think it was that they would think about it right before better
They would ask it was like one question
They would ask themselves not like pouring over it before bed, but I believe it was like they would ask themselves, not like poring over it before bed, but I believe it was like they would ask themselves,
okay, how might I approach this?
Or like, what should I do about X or whatever
right before bed?
And in a lot of cases, they would end up
eventually dreaming about it and coming
to some sort of solution that might show up
in the form of a metaphor or like visual imagery,
our sleeping minds are really good at that.
And they're kind of amazing.
Like if you dream, if you remember your dreams,
I'm sometimes like, wow, my brain is so creative.
The way it's showing me this problem in my life,
but just in a different way through a movie
that it's creating, this vivid movie.
And it's showing me that, oh,
what I'm feeling about this thing is guilt.
I had a dream once, I remember that, okay,
I dreamt that I was like, I had drawn tic-tac-toe boards
on a public wall for some reason.
I was like bored waiting in a train station or something.
And then I got arrested and I was gonna be sent
to prison for like 10 years.
And I had drawn this in pencil, you know? Like, it was not a high crime,
but I was in the courtroom, and it was like, you need to like apologize for what you've done,
and they were like talking about how I was so unrepentant, and I was like,
like I woke up, I was like, I'm going to be sentenced, but I didn't even know what I'd
done wrong. And I woke up and I was like, oh, the guilt is heavy.
Like, what am I feeling guilty about?
And I realized it was someone that I was seeing at the time who kind of used guilt
as a manipulative tactic.
But I didn't really recognize this about him consciously.
I was like a new person I was seeing.
But then after I had that dream, I was like, oh, this is the state that I'm living in.
Like I'm feeling guilty all the time.
I don't like this.
I don't want to see this person anymore.
Hoping my wife doesn't have dreams for me anytime soon.
I mean, I do think your dreams can help you work
through whatever.
It doesn't mean you have to end relationships,
but it can help you understand something
that you're dealing with day to day,
that you're like, ooh, what does that symbol represent to me?
There's a lion in your dream?
Okay, what do lions mean to me?
What does that represent?
And what were they doing in the dream?
That's what we talked about to that researcher about.
I love, we've gone a little bit far afield,
but in a great way, I'm gonna bring us back,
but not with any kind of feelings about it.
Just to number two in your list of three exercise tips
that you, as the host of LifeKit,
have actually incorporated into your own life.
And number two is bundling your temptations
with your exercise. Sometimes researchers call this temptation bundling, butations with your exercise.
Sometimes researchers call this temptation bundling,
but say more if you will.
This is sort of what I was talking about before
with the workout while you're watching TV.
TV is a good example because a lot of us have shows
that we really like and they might come in bite size chunks.
So I really love the show
Abbott Elementary. I think it's like half an hour, maybe a little less without ads.
You could save that and only watch it when you're working out. So I could say, I'm going to just
only watch Abbott Elementary when I'm on my exercise bike. And then that's like 20-something
minutes on the bike. I imagine this is sort of like a Pavlovian response, right? You're telling
yourself I'm going to get a treat when I do this other thing that's also good for me.
And that's an idea that Katie Milkman at Wharton, she's a behavioral scientist, she shared with
us this idea of temptation bundling. You know, the idea is like,
you will start craving trips to the gym
or you'll start craving about on the exercise bike
if you know that it's paired with,
for instance, your favorite show.
Yeah, Katie's amazing.
She's been on this show.
I'll drop a link to that in the show notes
and also a link to your conversation with her as well.
So temptation bundling, a lot of evidence behind that.
And the third tip that you've incorporated into your own life, I think is maybe based
on my understanding of the science of behavior change among, if not the most powerful, and
that is finding and exercise accountability buddy or buddies, plural.
Yeah.
People have been doing this forever.
You know, my mom and our neighbor would go for walks
around the neighborhood and it's basically like,
when you say to a friend, the simple version is,
we both want to start walking around,
we both want to be more active.
Let's meet up once a week, let's meet up every morning,
whatever the cadence is.
And because you know that this other person
is relying on you,
you're less likely to flake on it than you would be to flake on yourself. A lot of us are people pleasers,
so we need that
impetus to please another person, to actually meet our own goals, or in this case health goals.
There are lots of ways of doing this. You don't
necessarily have to do it with just one person and do exactly the same thing. I like the
idea of parallel play in a way, but like doing slightly different things. You know, you can
be, you could be on your exercise bike while your friend is doing yoga, you know, in the
same living room. Or you could both do your own exercise
and then just say, we're gonna meet up for a coffee after.
And this will be like before work
or something that works for you.
I would never do that because I'm not a morning person.
So I might be like a post-work kind of situation,
but it can work really well for exercise.
It also works for other pursuits, like creative pursuits.
And we can get into that.
I know that that's an area of interest too,
just like pursuing fun and joy and play.
I went to a woodworking group last night
where we meet up once a month, we make wooden spoons.
I say we, I'm new to this, it's my second time,
but I really liked it and I was working away on my spoon.
And it's that idea of like,
I'm not gonna work on the spoon the rest of the month.
I'm just gonna go for a couple hours
and we're gonna do the spoons together, you know?
Is there anything more Brooklyn than that?
No, probably a lot of what I say is gonna sound very Brooklyn.
Yeah, and then we have a drum circle in the park.
No, it is kind of great though.
People are really nice and I feel like you meet
like-minded folks and someone will stop you
if you're using the knife the wrong way.
Someone will be like, no, no, no, don't do that.
You're gonna cut your finger off.
It's not a class, but it's a community, which I love. And the goal is
not like, oh, I need to make this many spoons, you know? It's not anybody's job. It's more
just like, I want to learn this skill. I want to work with my hands. I think that feels
good. It, again, gets me thinking in a different way.
Yeah. No, I buy it. I'm smiling just because I used to have a colleague
back when I had a meditation app.
My colleague Eva once unironically told me
that she was in an artisanal yogurt listserv
and I was like, there is nothing more.
That is super, that is over the top.
Well, maybe the spoon making club
is also kind of ridiculous.
It's, you know, I don't know. maybe it's a notch below the artisanal yogurt.
Yeah.
Having said that though, there's something deep here around the power, not only of
having accountability buddies while you're doing exercise, but just to connecting to
other humans, you know, in pretty much any context, as long as it's voluntary,
is incredibly powerful. I don't have trouble getting to the gym. I actually like it. I'm a
bit of a mutant in that way. And I have been recently doing some group workouts on the weekends
and it's so much more fun to do it with other people. It's the same vibe where my form is often
bad and so like the other people in the room
are helping me with my form and so that's really helpful.
Yeah.
Let's talk about another area of fitness that I think,
you know, often when we talk about fitness,
people go right to exercise or food,
but sleep I've often referred to as the apex predator of healthy habits, like nothing can happen
if you're not sleeping.
You very kindly let me know in advance about the three
sleep tips that you've heard about in the course of
hosting your show that you've actually incorporated
into your own life.
And one of them is, and I'd be curious to hear you
explain this, find your sleep sweet spot in 15 minute increments.
What does that mean?
Yeah, sleep sweet spot is very hard to say.
I'm impressed that you got that out.
30 years of being an anchorman.
So this was, we talked to Rebecca Robbins.
She's a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
And she was saying basically,
you wanna get seven to nine hours of sleep in a night.
That is the ideal range.
A lot of people will say that they can do with less,
but often they're taking naps throughout the day or they're reaching for a lot of coffee
or they're drinking 24-hour energy from those little bottles.
That would probably give me heart palpitations,
but I know some people rely on them.
And so are you on the seven-hour part of the range? probably give me heart palpitations, but I know some people rely on them.
And so are you on the seven hour part of the range?
Are you in the nine hour part of the range?
It's possible you fall outside of the range also,
but you can sort of figure that out,
figure out your personal sleep needs
in 15 minute increments, like work your way back
and be like, okay, do I feel more well rested
if I try basically sleeping for 15 minutes earlier than you normally go to sleep?
So like 15 minutes earlier than normal, you start doing all of the sleep hygiene stuff
that we talk about, which is like, put your phone away.
Ideally, stop watching TV, especially stop watching it on a laptop.
Start turning the lights off.
The same as you would for a baby
when you're trying to teach them to go to sleep
and this is your routine, you gotta do it for yourself too.
Maybe part of your sleep routine is you take a bath
or whatever it is that cues you,
reading your little book in bed, dim lighting.
You start that routine 15 minutes earlier
and then you just keep
inching it back and you're looking for whether you're able to wake up and feel refreshed
and have enough energy throughout the day and not really be like, have to reach for
the coffee and the energy drinks. You can do that over the course of time. Because often
we know too, if you try to be like,
you know what, I'm going to bed earlier, I'm going to be so much better about this. You do it one day
because you try to do it all at once. You're like, I'm going to sleep 10 hours tonight. And then it
doesn't happen again. You got to do it in small bits. First of all, my dad worked at Brigham and
Women's for about 30 years as the head of radiation oncology. So I'm quite familiar with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
It's an intense job, radiation oncology.
Yes it was.
So this idea of going to bed early or early-er is a thorny one and actually connects to another
of your takeaways.
And it's really something I see in my own life too.
There's this concept, this is one of my favorite terms,
revenge nighttime procrastination,
or revenge bedtime procrastination.
Just last night, in fact, I got home from dinner,
I went out to dinner with some friends
and I got home at 10.
I have learned recently actually,
that 10 is actually the right time for me to start my sleep routine.
You get in your footy pajamas and...
Exactly. My footy pajamas and my chamomile tea.
No, actually my bedtime routine is walking meditation.
Okay.
Because my big sleep obstacle really is like a restlessness.
And so if I can do like a amble around the house
for 10, 15, sometimes 20 minutes before bed,
while I'm trying to be mindful,
it really gets my body ready to go to sleep.
And then I read a little bit.
But I've found that if I push it too late,
it screws me up.
And so last night, that's exactly what I did.
I pushed it too late and I had trouble sleeping.
And this I think is a very common issue
and it's on your list of things you've learned.
So what have you learned about revenge,
nighttime procrastination and how to deal with it?
Well, okay.
I'm wondering what did you do when you got home?
What did you want to do?
Oh, I watched TV.
You watched TV, okay.
So I think revenge bedtime procrastination
is really about you go all day,
you're maybe being very productive,
whatever it is, you have to like, you go to work,
you get this done, you get your errands done,
you drop your kids off at school.
And then maybe you socialize and that's important to you too,
or you go to the gym and that's important to you too, or you go to the gym and that's important to you too, but then you get home and you want some quiet
time or you want some creative time or you want some time with your partner and you can't
squeeze it all in into one day.
And so you're like, but I don't want the productive stuff to be my whole life, like my whole day.
It can't have my whole day.
And so you try to carve out this extra time
and you're like, I can steal from sleep me.
Cause that's really what it is.
You're like stealing from your sleeping self
and you're stealing from yourself tomorrow.
But you're sort of like, I need to do this right now.
And sometimes it can be bad if you're like,
you can get into a pit cause you're like I want to feel
Creative or something, but you don't have a creative project
You're really working on so instead you go online and you start online browsing and shopping and it that's like fake creativity
It's just giving you a little bit of like a buzz. It's giving you a feeling
That you're doing the thing that you seek, but you actually are not,
and you might end up just buying something,
then you look up and it's midnight,
or it's 1230 or something like that, or 1 a.m.
And so that's also really common among people
who have high stress jobs,
and they're like, I need that break.
If you are gonna do those things,
like if you do wanna stay up and be browsing or whatever,
you should not do it in bed.
You should make your bedroom a space
that you can actually relax,
a space that's just for sleeping.
And I would say like to be reasonable also for sex.
I mean, that's what most people do in their beds
and that's like a healthy thing.
But those two things and not online shopping,
not working, not watching TV, can help you a lot.
And if you are up and you're like thinking about something,
you're stressing about something, she says,
get out of bed and just deal with it,
or write a note to yourself or whatever,
and then get back into bed and try to sleep.
Yeah, we've had experts on the show talk about this,
and it seems like it just comes down to teaching your brain
that the bed is a place to sleep.
And if you're teaching it that it's for anything else,
I was having a conversation the other day
with a therapist for my own stuff.
I've been suffering with claustrophobia.
And she, in the process of the conversation,
said, our brains are really dumb and it will panic,
even though you rationally know there's nothing to fear.
And the same, I think, applies to a certain extent
with sleep, if you're training the brain that,
oh yeah, this is a place where I shop on my laptop,
then you're in a state that's not congenial necessarily to sleep.
Mm-hmm. Have you talked about the claustrophobia thing on the show?
Yes, I have, although I'm in a whole new
realm because I've been dealing with this for about three years now and I'm now
kicking it up a notch and getting serious about it because my family is getting very tired of me
needing to take Klonopin to get on a plane
because it makes me annoying in the moment
and grumpy later when I'm hung over.
I've had some experiences with claustrophobia too,
so I'd be curious to listen to any episodes
that are specific to it.
It's a not uncommon phobia.
For me, it's like I got locked in bathrooms a couple times.
And so now I'm like, public bathrooms,
I'm like terrified to lock the door
unless it's a lock mechanism that I can like see
and you know, know that.
I completely relate to that.
Yeah, nightmare fuel.
But I know what you mean.
That's what I was gonna say.
I know what you're talking about,
where your brain is like,
okay, but I'm fine.
Someone is going to come and eventually
and they will be able to get the door open.
But I'm like, I'm gonna die in here.
It just, your brain goes to like a million, you know?
Yeah, I get it.
Yeah, so the dumb brain of ours, it's an amazing,
it's not dumb, but in this way, it can be kind of dumb
and it needs to be trained like in a very kind
of obvious ways.
And so if you're teaching it that the bed is a place
to get activated or acquisitive or inquisitive
or productive for many of us, it will make sleep harder.
Yeah.
Another thing by the way that we learned was that it's very important to keep your bedroom
at a cool temperature. I like to sleep a little more on the warm side, but Robbins was telling me,
you know, you want to make sure it's under 70 degrees, ideally. Even in the winter when you're trying to be all cozy,
you know, under your sheets,
because they have done studies on this
and they have data to show that when they increase
the temperature from that,
people's sleep was more fragmented.
So they were tossing and turning more,
they were more disrupted, they were having more nightmares.
So that's another thing we can do to set ourselves up
to be successful is like keep it cool in your bedroom.
That was the third, just to flag for folks,
that was the third tip for sleep that you've found
to be helpful in your own life, keeping it cool in the room.
I was interested to hear that you're a warm sleeper
because I use air conditioning in the winter to keep the room cold
I have a lot of trouble sleeping unless the room is pretty frigid
I mean
I will say this has been a roller coaster over the past year because I did
Treatment for breast cancer and I had went through chemo and had hot flashes like really terrible hot flashes
So I dealt with that for a long time and that's shifted now.
So then I was all about the air conditioner in the winter.
I was like, this is no problem for me.
I don't even need the heat on, but my base level, yeah.
I feel like my little, like my hands and feet get cold
and I just wanna be tucked up.
Now I understand why you reacted the way you did to my saying
the thing about my dad being a radiation oncologist.
He was actually a specialist in breast cancer
before he retired.
So I'm sorry to hear that you went through that.
Are you doing all right now?
Yeah, I am doing as well as I possibly could be.
So my scans have been clear basically since surgery,
but they did all the other things
as a just in case.
You know, that's how complicated it is with cancer.
It's like they don't know for sure that like a little bit of it didn't get out.
A little micrometastases could be somewhere in your body.
That's why I had to do chemo and that's why they do radiation.
But I get checked regularly.
It's hard to know what to say because people who
haven't gone through cancer or like haven't maybe had a family member go through it, they ask,
or are you in remission or are you cancer free?
And it's like a little hard to answer those questions, like as far as I know.
But I feel good, I feel healthy.
It's just one of those things that is gonna be with you.
It's just gonna be a thing that you have to be careful about
and check on.
And I was already interested in living a healthy life,
but now I also know what a big role these kinds of practices play in preventing
a recurrence of breast cancer, specifically because breast cancer is hormone mediated.
And so sleep plays a big role. What you eat plays a big role. And also exercise does.
There have been studies that show it can decrease the risk of a recurrence
significantly if people, women exercise regularly, like get like the recommended amount that
the government recommends every week.
And so seeing those numbers, I was like, okay, I really need to be consistent about this.
This is going to help me maybe as much as taking this
pill is helping me, you know? Yeah, motivation to get even more serious about
the things we've been talking about, but also perhaps even an enhanced and
broadened perspective on the whole business of being alive. Yeah, I definitely
don't take it for granted. I never did, to be honest. I lost a few family
members when I was pretty young, an aunt and an uncle who both died young. My uncle was,
I think he was like 52, died from a heart attack. And my aunt, my aunt, she died from colon cancer
in her 50s. And I was like under 10 years old, very close to both of them.
So I think I always had this idea that that can happen, you know, when you're pretty
young and I've always lived in a way that's very like seize the day kind of, nothing is
promised and I was always pretty careful.
That's the thing, like a lot of people who get cancer young are like,
wait, I did all the right things.
I thought I was doing all the right things.
And then you realize there are more things you could do,
and there is more ways to avoid environmental toxins or try to.
But there's this feeling of like, maybe I've realized that you can do all
the right things and bad things can still happen.
It's not your
fault, but also very much like I said this to some friends and family at the time. People were asking
me if I was feeling like, why me? Why did this happen to me? And I was like, you know, not really
because it's a little like why not me?
I think it's one in two people get cancer
in their lifetimes and one in eight women
get breast cancer.
So I was like, well, those aren't great odds.
It has to happen to somebody.
But if it's why not me that this could happen,
then also why not me, why can't I have amazing experiences after I'm done with treatment?
I just want to have like a beautiful, brilliant life.
I want to still be able to have a kid.
I want to, you know, like find the, the partner who's the right fit for me.
I want to have like a great community and learn how to carve wooden spoons
on Monday nights in Brooklyn.
Why not me?
You know, flipping that has helped me.
I could get you into an artisanal yogurt listserv if you want.
You know, I'm lactose intolerant,
so I can't take you up on that.
I'm sure they have vegan variants knowing this crew.
Okay.
I'm curious because when we went to,
my team went to you and said,
hey, we'd love to have you on, talk about fitness,
what have you learned?
You came back with three things that have really hit home
for you on the exercise front and three things
that have really hit home for you on the sleep front.
And then instead of talking about diet
or something sort of obvious on the nose
when it comes to fitness, You wanted to talk about play.
Why play and how does that link to fitness in your view?
Yeah, we've done some episodes on this
and they confirmed what I think I felt intuitively,
which is that play is a basic human need.
We interviewed someone named Stuart Brown,
who's been studying play for his entire
career. And he talks about, first of all, that humans aren't the only animals that play.
Lots of animals do it. Bears, leopards, bison, ravens, dolphins. From an evolutionary perspective,
it might not seem to make sense at first, like, because it could often, it could be
risky, it could be costly, like, why do we do this thing? But animal play scholars and biologists
argue that it actually serves an important role. It can help us adapt to difficult circumstances,
it can help us practice skills we need to survive and help us problem solve and collaborate. And there are studies on this mostly, there are some in animals and
I think it might be a little harder to study play in adult humans and
see the outcomes but just based on the data that they have,
they believe that play plays a really important role in our lives.
And then I think we can also feel this when we do it
and we just like kind of intuitively see the benefits of it.
So play I think can be lots of different things though.
It's not necessarily like let's go fly a kite
or games that you hopscotch or things that you did
as a kid on the playground though, if you're into that, cool.
But for me, a lot of it is about creativity.
A lot of it is about storytelling.
I find my play through fashion, through nature.
Like I was saying, I like to watch
a watch the little hermit crab digging a hole.
And I find that playful,
almost like talking to the hermit crab, that's an
element of play or even sometimes you can be playful with yourself.
You're in the kitchen and you do something stupid.
I have this like water filter that takes a long time to reverse osmosis filter.
It takes a long time to like fill up my jug of water.
So I'll just like leave it going. And then on the countertop as the thing is filtering.
And I forget about it every other time.
I forget and it starts flooding.
Like it's just flooding the countertop
and then onto the floor.
And I'm like, oh my God, like you did it again.
Instead of being like, oh, like I'm so stupid.
Like sometimes I'm just kind of laughing at myself
like I'm my own bad roommate, you know?
You can just sort of be like, oh, you goon
and sort of like have a moment of play with yourself,
you know, or you could do it with a little bird
that lands on your window sill.
You can find these moments throughout your day.
Just like we talked about with exercise snacks.
Yeah, it's not just a practice, it's an orientation to life. I like that. Yeah.
One of the things you mentioned in the little memo your team sent me about takeaways that have
been important to you vis-a-vis play, one of the things that you talk about is that
for many of us, like we don't even know where to start. We hear that play is good for us and then
we don't even know where to start. We hear that play is good for us,
and then we look at our lives and we're like,
yeah, well, I haven't thought about this in a long time.
I don't see how to fit it in, et cetera, et cetera.
And one of the experts on your show advised
that if you wanna get a sense of what your play style is,
cast back to interpolate back to your childhood
and what were the things you enjoyed doing then?
Can you say more about that?
Yeah.
So one of our experts, he was saying,
what were your favorite ways to play as a kid?
Were you super into Legos or erector sets?
Did you like finger painting?
Did you like make believe or catching fireflies
or seeing how far you could catapult yourself off of the swing set.
I really liked playing with Barbies and telling stories with them and dressing them up and little
dramas and love triangles and things. We added on to that with what we learned from Stuart. Stuart
Brown worked as a psychiatrist for many years and he would ask patients about their early
experiences with play.
He and his colleagues would review the notes and they noticed certain types and they came
up with basically a list of play personalities.
I think there are eight of them.
You can be more than one of these, but maybe you see kind of where your clusters are.
You might be the joker who loves to laugh and make other people
laugh. Practical jokes, physical comedy, wordplay, like could be a lot of things. You might be
the artist creator, which resonates for me. You might be the kinesite who finds joy in
movement. So like swimming, running, stretching, whatever it is, archery. There's the director
who loves to call the shots and to plan parties, stuff like that.
There's the storyteller, which also resonates with me,
maybe obviously, and for a lot of journalists.
You can refer to his list, Stuart Brown's list,
to see which of those personalities resonate for you.
Or maybe you'll come up with a category of your own.
["The Daily Show"]
Coming up, Mariel talks about how to assess how much play you're getting in your daily
life and how to get more.
I'm curious, like, when I was preparing for this interview and I was thinking about, you
know, how much play do I have in my life?
I mean, I do play the drums, but not as much as I would like.
I do exercise a lot, but it doesn't feel super playful unless I'm doing it with other people.
Then I was thinking about socializing.
I really like to see my friends
and I, so several nights a week,
I probably could do it every night, honestly,
we'll go to dinner with friends.
I really, really like that.
And so like I did last night, I'm doing it again tonight.
That seems to incorporate both storytelling and joking,
for me in my experience.
But I don't know, does that make sense to you?
I think your dinners could be playful
or they could not be, depending on what's going on at them.
I think we've all been to dinners
that feel more like a funeral.
And then we've been to dinners that feel super playful
and have those elements.
So if it's good vibes, if you can joke around with your friends and, and lean into that.
I went to a dinner party recently and we did Esther Perel's game, I think it's called Where Should We Begin?
And it has the prompts on it. And that led to some really playful conversations.
Some people like to get together with their friends and literally play games like board games and things, which I do not like. I don't need
to learn new rules to anything ever again. I don't like it either. I'm like, I am going
to want to do this really well. And you've been practicing this because you own this
game. You've been practicing this thing at your house for years with every person who
comes through and there's no chance I'm ever gonna win,
so we're not playing this.
Maybe we could play Candyland,
but we're not playing like a strategy game.
You learn what you like and what you don't like.
You learn what feels like play to you,
and it's gonna be different for every person.
And yes, you can go back to childhood
and think about what felt like play then,
because sometimes that's like a more pure vision of ourselves.
Or it's like when we had less maybe distracting us, and we just kind of gravitated towards
what we liked.
I'm curious for you as a kid, like what were your favorite forms of play?
Music.
My parents are really into what we would now call classic rock, although at that time I
don't think they called it classic rock.
So just current rock them, you know, the Beatles, the stones, Creedence Clearwater, I was born in 1971, the band.
So that definitely scaled up to me learning the drums as a kid and still,
you know, my son who's 10 plays the drums.
And so there's that definitely joking around.
It's a huge part of my life storytelling.
I keyed in on the thing you mentioned before about like being on the swing and then jumping off. I'm not that, definitely joking around. It's a huge part of my life, storytelling.
I keyed in on the thing you mentioned before
about like being on the swing and then jumping off.
I don't do enough of this,
but there's something about that we feeling
that biking, skiing, rollerblading, skateboarding,
all have that to them.
And I can see it a little bit.
I was on a beach vacation with my son recently, we were
boogie boarding. That sensation is, I think, really powerful.
I love that. So this is reminding me as I was thinking about this this morning, I remembered a
CS Lewis quote that I wrote out and had taped on my bedroom wall when I was in high school. And it
gets at this and I wanted to read some of it to you. So he says,
you may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread.
You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put
it into words. But most of your friends don't see it at all and often wonder why liking this,
you should also like that. And I'm fast-forwarding here.
Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction of something not
to be identified with but always on the verge of breaking through? The smell of cut wood
in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side. Are not all lifelong
friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being
who has some inkling, but faint and uncertain,
even in the best of that something
which you were born desiring,
and which beneath the flux of other desires
and in the momentary silences
between the louder passions night and day, year by year,
from childhood to old age,
you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
I like that a lot. childhood to old age you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
I like that a lot. Yeah, and I think for me it would be something around humor.
Humor, and the we, I love the we thing.
Like that is a common-
Yeah, the we thing.
That's a common thread.
And you can think about what else might get you there.
Is it a physical thing thing like roller coasters?
You know, do you like that feeling of physically being suspended sort of in the air?
Or is there like a mental thing that it's like, it's a loss of control, but like a controlled loss of control?
Yeah, this is really interesting things to think about.
Let's just close on this. controlled loss of control. Yeah, these are really interesting things to think about.
Let's just close on this. This is another tip for play.
And this comes from Katherine Price, who has been on this show
and is a friend of mine and wrote a book about play and gave a great Ted talk on the subject.
And she, Katherine, has this acronym that stuck out to you, SPARK, S-P-A-R-K.
Can you walk us through it and why it stuck in your mind?
This is from an episode that was reported by Julia Furlan.
She's a journalist here in New York.
And I really liked this bit of it,
because I don't know, acronyms,
they just, they help you remember stuff, you know?
So I love an acronym.
The S, so it's Spark.
The S is make
space in your life for fun. It's like we fill up our lives with all kinds of things
and some of them aren't actually nurturing us. For me, that's social media is often
not nurturing me and it's taking too much of my time. A lot of the things that go on
in my phone, online shopping and just even activities that feel obligatory
but actually aren't.
The people that you don't really vibe with that much,
but like you keep going to that meetup
or you keep hanging out and you're like,
actually don't have to do this.
I don't have to invest in this connection.
I can say no to that to leave space
for other things to grow.
I think that's really important.
And not always rush in to fill the space. Like let it happen. P is for pursuing your passions. So again,
what is that? Look for that common thread that we were talking about. The smell of cutwood
in the workshop, that wee feeling when you're jumping off the swings. Those things that
for some reason it resonates for you in here. The things you're jumping off the swings, those things that for some reason it resonates
for you in here, the things you're really passionate about and you don't have to try
to become expert level at them necessarily.
Like you're just doing them for the joy of doing them and maintaining that passion.
You don't have to monetize them either.
The A is attract for attracting, attracting fun, and that's really about developing an attitude
that's open to it.
And again, I think it's that playful mindset.
I try to live in that playful mindset and one that's very like, I meet new people,
I ask them what they've got going on in their lives, I make connections.
I'm trying to learn the drums, but a different kind of drumming.
I love Bomba music in Puerto Rico.
My dad is Puerto Rican.
So I just went and saw like a group of female Bomba drummers
and I say that because traditionally it's the men who play
and the women dance.
But yeah, so it was all women playing the drums
and I got the number from a guy there of his daughter
who lives in New York and teaches bomba.
So it's like, whatever it is about percussion,
I'm really feeling it. It feels right to me.
It aligns with some other things that I like.
And when I show up in that space, I had an open attitude.
I talked to this woman who was dancing,
because I thought she was beautiful,
and I thought her dance was, like, really incredible. And then she introduced me to this guy who had the, because I thought she was beautiful, and I thought her dance was like really incredible.
And then she introduced me to this guy
who had the daughter who teaches the drums.
So you gotta come at it with like not knowing exactly
why you're saying hello to this person or whatever.
You just like it.
You like what you see.
You like what you saw them do.
You're curious about them.
And then R in the Spark is for a little gentle rebellion.
So like, it's doing something that might feel kind of rebellious, like you'd get in trouble for it
if you were in high school. So going roller skating in the middle of the night or jumping
into the pool with your clothes on or something like that. I know our sleep is very important to
us, but like we could spare one night for some shenanigans,
some whole, some shenanigans.
And then the K is about keeping at it and just like,
I guess it's like, it's not a job.
We don't wanna make it into a job,
but having fun is something that you should consider
a basic human need and work it into your day-to-day life.
Just to pick up on the K, play,
you don't wanna make it into another thing
on your to-do list,
but you also don't want your whole life
to be your to-do list.
And so that's the balance.
Yeah, totally.
I try to leave space now too, especially when I travel,
to not really program it, to just be like,
yep, I know I'm going to this place,
I'm gonna stay in this one space
and I'm gonna bop around.
I'm gonna go to the beach this day,
I'm gonna go to the beach that day.
I don't wanna have another list of things to do
and it lets me follow the breadcrumbs a little bit.
Yeah, yes.
Marielle, it was a huge pleasure to get some time with you.
Yeah, I love this.
Just before I let you go,
can you remind everybody of the name of your show
and where we can find it, how often it comes out,
the types of things you cover?
Just, I know this makes some people uncomfortable,
but plug away, please.
Okay, let me do it.
Yeah, so the show is called Life Kit.
It's from NPR.
We're a service journalism show,
which means we talk to experts
and then give you research-backed advice.
We do a lot of different kinds of stories
on health and money and life skills.
So some of my favorite episodes are the ones that could potentially save a life.
The ones about breast cancer screening or how to do CPR or how to prevent kids from
drowning like the things you can do ahead of time to make it safer.
The money stuff, we love saving people money.
How to negotiate
down a medical bill, for instance, was a really helpful one, I think. And then we do stuff
on life skills, like relationships. We're about to do one on how to ask people out in
real life because everybody's tired of these dating apps, fun stuff like that. Or even
like how to make a turkey for Thanksgiving, things that people can take home and use that day. You can find us across platforms. So the
podcast you can hear wherever you get your podcasts, or as Alexi Horwitz-Ghazi said yesterday,
wherever the pods are cast. I thought that was cute. He's one of the hosts of Planet Money.
the pods are cast. I thought that was cute. He's one of the hosts of Planet Money. And then we also have a radio show which you can hear on your local public radio
station on the weekends. And we have an Instagram which we post all kinds of
lovely videos on. It's at NPR Life Kit. And then we have, you can go to npr.org
slash life kit and we have written you can go to npr.org slash life kit
and we have written up versions of stories,
digital versions that have beautiful art alongside them.
And I'm Mariel Segata.
Mariel, thank you very much for doing this.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
This was really fun.
Thanks again to Mariel Segata.
Awesome to talk to her.
I also want to remind you to visit danharris.com for more information on how to get all of
the bespoke Get Fit Sanely meditations from Kara Lai in your inbox.
As mentioned, we're doing tailored meditations for every episode this month, all of the Get
Fit Sanely episodes.
And if you're a subscriber over on danharris.com,
they come to you in your podcast feed and in your inbox. Finally, just want to thank everybody who
worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleonora Vasili.
Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is
our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our executive producer,
and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.