Life Uncut - HOW TO BREAK UP WITH FRIENDS with Neuropsychologist Dr Hannah Korrel

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Let's be real. We are all going to go through a period in our lives where we come across some sort of hurdle with a friend. Be it a disagreement, growing apart, having emotionally draining and toxic friendships to full blown friendship breakups. It's all part of this crazy thing we call life. Every week we receive multiple questions about navigating friendships and hot dam we do our darndest to give you the advice you need. But because of the good humans we are we decided to go above and beyond this week and have a professional weigh in to give you some much needed and very qualified advice.Enter Dr Hannah Korell.Hannah is both a Clinical Neuropsychologist and a Registered Psychologist. She completed her university training and PhD in neuropsychology at the University of Melbourne. Hannah has spent over a decade becoming an expert in why the brain makes us do the things we do (and sometimes the things we don't want to do!) Fierce mental health advocate, Hannah brings and psychology together to explain common life dilemmas, minus the BS. Part of this no BS approach was releasing her book HOW TO BREAK UP WITH FRIENDS. She get into the nitty gritty on what makes a real friend, toxic friendships, how to attract good friends, the effect is has on your health and navigating a breakup.You can find Hannah at @nobullpsychIf you loved the episode please hit subscribe, 5 stars and join in the discussion on our Insta page @lifeuncutpodcast.... and share the love, because well, we love love. xSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

hey guys and welcome back to another episode of life uncut i'm britney and i'm laura and happy Tuesday and here we are again in your ear holes man the Tuesdays come around quick don't they it's been a little while since I've done that also guys sorry that we missed our Ask Uncut episode last week but our Tuesday episode last week which was with India Oxenberg talking about the NXIVM documentary holy dooly guys it went bonkers it went freaking off so if you haven't listened to that episode yet but I'm gonna say by the downloads probably most of you guys have no but if you haven't definitely give it a listen and if you haven't watched the documentary still you guys have to go back and watch that even if you've listened to the episode and you

haven't watched the doc they go hand in hand 100 but I mean like I knew it was going to be a big episode and it was the one that I was really really proud of and you know it's it's one thing to tackle something that was such a huge topic for us and and such a sensitive topic as well but I'm so grateful for everybody who listened to it and for everybody who got something out of it and for all the feedback that we've received from you guys but you know what that was last week leave it in the past you didn't even finish your sentence bro yeah i did no you didn't you were like the reason we didn't do it you were sick oh you got so sidetracked what the fuck are you talking about okay so ask uncut the reason that we didn't do ask uncut last week was because yeah i

was a bit sick but i'm back i'm better i'm still complaining about being pregnant sorry not sorry do you know what it was it wasn't just that she was sick it was that she literally woke up and had no voice she was done we had I was voice memoing her and she would write the text back to me because she physically could not communicate and then we had like so we had booked a babysitter for the first time in forever and Matt and I had this like really special dinner plan to go to icebergs and we were going to treat ourselves and so I was like should we just cancel and reschedule it for another day and Matt was like no absolutely not this is the perfect opportunity so we went out for a romantic dinner and barely spoke to each other do you know what I love most about that

is when you lost the back of your earring why don't you tell everyone what happened at dinner so if you didn't see this on my stories this is just like a little this is like a little life hack for you all which I have actually I am going to use that because that happens to me all the time if you are ever out and you lose your earring back so your earring falls out of your ear and the problem is is like often if your earring falls out of your ear the first thing that you want to do is that you go and put it in your handbag or in your wallet and that is the worst thing to do because as soon as you put an earring into a handbag or into a wallet it gets squished and then the spoke will fall off it and like as a jeweler i know when somebody has put their earring

in their handbag and i'm like i know what you did here this is not faulty you fucked it you're not returning this bad boy you did this so instead of doing that and risking damaging your earring you can just use a really really really crispy bit of bread like the the crust cut a bit of crust a tiny bit and then use that as the back of your earrings so i kicked around icebergs being bougie as fuck with a bit of bread in my ear so how important is the bread type if like could i use a sourdough does it have to be turkish bread i mean toasted can be fresh well if you use sourdough you could end up with a yeast infection i don't think that's a thing is it i don't know guys we want to keep this intro very short and sharp because we have such a great episode for you

today. We're interviewing a woman named Dr. Hannah Correll, and she is a neuropsychologist who specializes in friendships. And the reason why I'm so excited for this episode is because we speak so much about toxic relationships, and we speak so much about how to end toxic relationships with your partner, with a loved one, romantic toxic relationships. But I reckon one of the most common questions we get secondary to toxic romantic relationships in our Ask Uncut episodes and like you guys sliding into our DMs is in regards to friendships. When you're no longer getting what you should out of a friendship or when you know that a friendship has kind of run its course, how do you break up with a friend? And that is what we're going to

be talking about today. And it's such a good interview. Dr. Hannah Correll has dedicated her studies towards really understanding and really unpacking what it means to have friends, what is a good quality friend and what it is to walk away from a toxic friendship but before we get into that let's do our favorite segment accidentally unfiltered oh I'm gonna go first you have said you have a great one again this week so you can absolutely go first I just feel like I find little gold mines and then I get really excited about and I think about it all week well you guys like send them into our dms and they're so great but if you have like an accidentally unfiltered that you have been sitting on that you're too embarrassed to share just know that once upon a time my dad

accidentally sent me a dick pic so like there's nothing that could be possibly worse than that so please please slide into our dms at life uncut podcast and yeah it'll be great i will keep you anonymous no one will ever know it's you no one's ever gonna know half the time it's us and we just say that we've a listener wrote it in okay hit me with this one this actually happened a few years ago now but i was house sharing with another girl and we were both going through our healthy smoothie phase you know the one everyone went through we had pre-bagged all our bananas in the freezer one afternoon I came home and she had made a smoothie how are you laughing at your own joke already it's not mine it's just like I know it's coming

one afternoon I came home and she'd made a smoothie as she was drinking it she realized that it didn't taste that great and simultaneously she apologized to me for stealing my frozen banana she realized it didn't taste like hers at which point she showed me where the bananas were and i said no no no they're not my bananas because i ran out of my bananas yesterday so she was like well this is where i got them from i went over to the freezer door to look where she was pointing it was not frozen banana cubes it was the ziploc bag of raw chicken breast that i had frozen she was actually having a raw chicken smoothie that actually makes me feel physically sick is so fucked it's actually so

fucked like that's also one way to get salmonella and die oh my god i was not expect that really you really bait and switched me but how would you feel uncomfortable but she was also drinking to the point where she was like it doesn't taste right but she continued to drink it she was like oh the bananas are a bit off but no it's frozen chicken do you know my pet haters my pet haters when someone matt's done this to me before and we had a full-on fight about it so when someone makes something and or like they get the milk out or something and they think it might be off and they're like hey can you just try this yeah it's like if you think this is rotten why are you making me try it as well you try it so i just remember this one time when matt got the milk out of the

fridge and he was like he made himself a coffee and he was like hey babe can you try this and i thought he was asking me to try it because he was like like this is good that you should try it like That was the inflection I was getting from him. You were testing if he was going to die? It was so off. Like it was like nobody needed to try that to see if it was off. It was like chunky coffee. And I was so dirty out of here.

It's like my greatest fear is eating raw chicken. I would rather cook my chicken to a point where it's so dry and inedible than potentially eat raw chicken. It's one thing to eat raw chicken, right, that like you've cooked and a bit isn't cooked. but purely raw and frozen into cubes. And you put that in your smoothie with just ice and milk. She had a frozen chicken, ice and milk.

I physically can't. I'm going to die. But how, at what point, like this is so clearly not banana. Like how could you think for a second, oh, maybe this is just somebody else's banana because it doesn't taste like my banana. All bananas taste the freaking same. Or like one is like, even if it was like 1% more ripe,

it's not going to taste like dead chicken. This could be the top five about accidentally unfiltered. for me this is up there this is a really good one i just wasn't expecting it usually like with these accidentally unfiltered sometimes i know the way that they're gonna go like i can pick it before the end you didn't know this bad boy no it got me good okay all right i i reckon i have two today i'm gonna just let's see let's fill this out i'm gonna go for one and then if if it feels right it might go for the other one or am i hold on to it for next week keep you guys guessing wanting more you never know okay anyway last night i was heading to bed and i went to the

room to give my mum a quick call before I went to sleep but you know I always say goodnight to my husband before I go to bed so anyway I was on the phone to my mum and I was under the covers having a chat the lights were still on the bedroom we were just talking about her day and I was updating her on the grandkids and all of a sudden my husband who I'm guessing must have assumed that I had just headed to bed without saying goodnight flings the bedroom door open whilst yelling you better not be asleep because you promised to suck my dick tonight needless to say my mom shortly hung up on me and i did not suck my husband's dick that night hey you know what surely as parents you must be happy to know that your kids have a healthy happy

sex life surely there's a takeaway from this yes but there's probably a nicer way to ask for it you know like hey babe you promised to suck my dick tonight yes i did honey come on down to dick sucking town let me just let me just get off the phone to my mom i'll just wrap this up real quick and then I'll go down sorry mom I have to go how do you feel you feel like you're gonna give us another one or you feel like you're gonna hold on to that okay all right I have one more and this one is like really messed up it's like actually maybe more messed up than it is funny but I'm gonna share it anyway oh you're such a sicko no this is this is actually pretty gross but I feel like it's not one that we would normally get and so I'm gonna go with it and like let's just see

how we feel at the end okay gross like eating raw chicken gross or gross like shit the bed gross gross like you probably shouldn't masturbate with this gross oh okay okay all right all right this is from quite a while ago however i thought that it was worth the share please keep me anonymous this one night i was feeling a little bit horny and i decided to use a cucumber with a condom on top as a dildo as at the time i'd been staying at my parents house for quite a while and didn't bring any adult toys with me so i grabbed a cucumber from the fridge grabbed one of my condoms and went to town oh it's a lot I didn't even know people did that well apparently they do after I finish playing with myself I take off the condom and then I go and discreetly dispose of the

condom in the bin in the bathroom however I know I can't throw a condom however I know I can't throw a cucumber in the bathroom bin so I walk downstairs with the cucumber and this is where the fuck up begins I know it's wasteful but of course I was just going to throw the cucumber into the garbage in the kitchen, because that would make the most sense. As I'm throwing it away, my mum comes into the kitchen to start dinner. The first thing she asked me is to hand her the cucumber for her to start cutting the salad. So of course I pretend to drop it and I'm like, oh, it's dirty. I'll just put it in the bin. My mum's like, no, why don't you just go and wash it? So anyway, here I am at the kitchen sink, furiously washing my cucumber. Whilst the whole

family sits down to eat it over a beautiful crisp salad. She's like, I will never get the thought out of my mind that I ate my cucumber dildo with my whole family she's like it's not that big a deal I made sure that I really washed it thoroughly she's like however I will literally never get the thought out of my head could you imagine your dad eating that okay to be fair in her defense she used a condom I'm assuming none of the unprotected cucumber touched the vagina this is what she's saying look it would have been a relatively sanitized cucumber it's probably the most washed cucumber that you've ever seen I mean think about all the people think about all the people who touch cucumbers in the shopping center in in the okay this is just getting real weird that

would be dirtier in the grocery store if you take a cucumber home and don't wash it that's probably dirtier than a cucumber that has been like seriously vigorously washed however the thought of like really going to town and then sitting down and eating that with your dad is a is a lot I didn't know people actually masturbated with, like, fruit. But I think it's a bit taboo. Surely. Like, I always thought that was just something in the movies they laughed about. Like, you know on American Pie where he masturbates into the warm apple pie?

Do people do that? I think this is taking me back to being in, like, health ed where we would learn to put condoms on bananas. This is literally where I'm at right now. Let's do a poll. Okay. I don't think we should do a poll. The shit just got really weird.

I'm sorry about that, guys. I wish I'd just brought one accidentally. I wish I'd just brought one. I take it back. there's always one that takes it too far it's always Laura anyway guys let's just like leave that one there and I apologize Brit tell us what this episode is about give me the rundown guys let me introduce you to Dr. Hannah Correll now Dr. Hannah Correll I'm just going to call her Hannah from here on in because we call her Hannah in the interview or hand dog no no not hand dog

she's still a doctor yeah sorry Dr. Hannah Hannah is a clinical neuropsychologist and a registered psychologist so like long story short she's super smart she completed a university training she has a phd in neuropsychology and she did that at the university of melbourne she spent over 10 years becoming an expert in why the brain makes us do things that we do and why it makes us do shit that we probably shouldn't do too hannah's a fierce mental health advocate and she brings neurology and psychology together to explain things that happen to us every day common life dilemmas but she takes away the bullshit part of this no bullshit approach is the releasing of her book which she very aptly titled how to break up with friends now the reason we're so stoked to have

Hannah on today is because we get so many questions from you guys about all things friendship related how to break up with friends how to escape friendships how to deal with issues within a friendship how to fight healthily yeah and also like how to get over a friendship breakup I think one of the big things is that you know we have all this information and we allow ourselves to really grieve the loss of a romantic relationship. But sometimes when friendship breakups, we're left without understanding why that's happened or why that person drifted away. And we don't get the closure that we really want from this. So Hannah is so interesting because she's really dedicated her studies to such a niche part of relationships, which is friendship. And I think it's a really

under-talked about topic, which is why we were so excited to do a whole episode focused on this. Look, we always joke about that. We give you guys advice that we're probably not qualified to give but that's why we bring people on to the podcast that are probably overqualified that's why we're so excited to have Hannah on today so let's get into the interview. Hannah welcome to Life Uncut we're so stoked to have you. Thanks for having me Brittany it's such a pleasure to be here. Oh well look I was like I'm here too guys and Laura thank you for having me. Hannah I don't know how much you've listened to Life Uncut before I'm not going to hold it against you if you haven't But there is a segment that we do at the start of the episode.

We do it ourselves, but we also get all of our guests to jump on board. It sort of breaks the ice a little bit and we get to know a little bit more about you. It's called Accidentally Unfiltered. Now, it's literally just an embarrassing story. Do you have one? Yes, I do know about this segment and my heart is racing just a little bit. Thinking about what am I going to tell them? You're like, what level of embarrassing do I go?

Do you go straight to the top or do you just stay to the top? Stage five. well I think this is one probably people can relate to like I recently went home for Christmas and I saw my family for the first time in you know it's been months because of COVID I haven't been able to see them so my little sister had sent me a beautiful video of my niece who's just one year old and it was this gorgeous like I was walking through Woolies I was feeling really like alone and like oh I miss my family so I was getting a little bit oh I'm watching the snapchats of the babies you know saying bye Hannah and blowing me kisses and stuff so I was a little bit emotional

and I walked out of Woolworths it was like 10 o'clock at night it was quite dark walked out of Woolies got in my car and I just watched these videos on repeat of my little niece like blowing me a cute kiss and saying goodbye and I'm you know you know guys when you're traumatizing yourself yeah sounds great a little bit emotional getting a bit teary and I'm like oh maybe I'll just put an Instagram story up to be like it's okay to be emotional guys it's okay to not be okay so I'm like it's okay to not be okay posted this Instagram story I was in the car for like 15 minutes and then all of a sudden this man opens the boot of my car and I was like oh because it's dark and I'm like oh my god there's a guy at the back of my car and I like opened the door and I

was like um excuse me what are you doing this guy just looks at me and he's putting his groceries in the boot of my car and I'm like oh my god guy was freaking out what's he doing is he gonna like mug me what's happening I was freaked out because I was all alone in the car park and I'm looking at him and he's looking at me and he's he's just looked so perplexed and confused and and he's like this is my car and I'm like I look around and my car has like got these red leather seats you know very specific look and I look around the car and there's a baby seat in the back I don't have children I was sitting in the wrong car so I'd gone up to this other car and it the door was obviously open and I just had absent-mindedly opened the door sat in the car and

started weeping into my Instagram and this poor man was just so confused so that was that was pretty rich yeah that actually happened to someone that I know no it happened to my auntie she got in she was doing the shopping at the local shopping center and she got in her car and you know when you get in your car and you put your bag down you start to fiddle around for 10 minutes before you drive off so she's feeling around and she gets she smokes so she got a cigarette oh that's so bad in the car lit the cigarette smoking the cigarette for like 10 minutes the whole cigarette was gone then she went down to start the car and she was like oh my car's not a push start i looked around she was like oh my god i've just had a durry it's someone else's

car i'd be so dirty if someone got in my car and smoked a ciggy how perplexing for the person that owns the car that gets in the car and they're like why does my car smell like what did this I ended up doing was he just like are you okay and do you need a cuddle he was just perplexed and polite about it I think because I'd stunned him so much I was like immediately like this is my car and he's like it's my car so he was like but it's my car and so then when I realized I just hightailed it so quickly out I was like bye like I'm so sorry so were the cars the same car like was it no i was hoping they were completely different brands but it was dark they're both dark cars you're like and i was emotionally distressed that's his four wheels so how was

i to know i have a super embarrassing really quick one if you want to oh my god oh yeah yeah do you know this thing it's called milky foot have you heard of it it sounds disgusting um i have been sent two packets of it to try after because it says you can't use it when you're pregnant they're like socks that make your feet shred right almost immediately regret so there's this thing called milky foot i can feel myself going red already yes that's exactly right so you put it on your feet what like a glove yeah they're like a bag and it's got chemical stuff in it and essentially what it does britney is it makes it makes your skin like a shed like a beautiful caterpillar cocoon and then your foot turns into an amazing butterfly silky milky foot

skin underneath and it's all lovely fantastic but the process of getting there is that your your feet peel in like three to five days your feet will like all of the skin will come off of your face it's like doing a hectic peel to your face where people don't leave the house for five days or seven days but it's to your feet yeah and my recommendation is don't do milky foot three to five days before a date imagine if he goes for the foot rub did he please tell me that happened well i'm uh oh god so i i've just recently started dancing salsa and bachata so my dance partner and i like obviously there's a lot of emphasis placed on the feet so a lot of looking at the feet a lot of checking the moves of the feet a lot of flinging your feet around a dance floor and there's just

like chunks of skin. I think we should change the topic now. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? What you've studied? I'm a doctor of neuropsychology. How did you get into specializing about friendships? So I suppose that there's two answers. There's my, my science-y answer, which is I love the brain. I love relationships and I'm a big fan of the neuroscience behind relationships. So what happens to your body when you are perpetually and chronically exposed to someone who's toxic? And the reverse of that, when you're exposed to someone who's good to you and kind to you is actually amazing as well. The second answer is that I'm just a real person who has experienced some toxic friendships in the past. And so many

people around me had been reporting the same thing. And I just got to a point one day where I felt like really compelled to sit down and start writing about it. It's actually so interesting because obviously we have covered a lot over this podcast about toxic relationship that is something that we get so many questions and so many people who write in who have you know relatable stories but I would say the second biggest tier of questions that we have that come in are around friendships and you know they're the two biggest relationships that we navigate in our life whether it be our romantic relationships kind of our family and then our friends and yeah we've had so many questions over the past year and a half that have been very friendship related and so

was one of the reasons why we're so excited to have you come on well because we always answer it the best that we can but we are super unqualified and we do this all the time we're like this is our enthusiastic yet completely unqualified advice and now we actually have someone who's qualified to tell you this shit guys so listen up just out of curiosity before we jump into the whole toxic friendship and how to break up with a friend and things like that is it your advice similar if you were breaking up with a partner in a relationship as to what you would with a friend like if you're finding a relationship toxic do you find the process of ending that and removing yourself from that very similar? It's so interesting that you bring up

the parallels between toxic partners and toxic friends. And I think in society, we're getting a lot better. We're getting more woke at realizing mental health matters. So we have like, are you okay day? We have the subtle art of not giving a fuck and the life-changing magic of not giving a fuck. And we have this new movement towards mental health being more recognized. And we're really good at standing up for ourselves and it being acceptable to walk away from a toxic partnership so women are much more empowered now to walk away from relationships that are not serving them anymore friendship is one of the areas that we we still are yet to kind of tackle and we have different societal norms about friends and a friend is always a friend once a friend

always a friend and you should give and never expect anything and that's what is a truly altruistic friend and it's a good thing to give and give and give and you're so noble and lovely if you do that so we still have these societal norms about friendship that keep us stuck in toxic relationships with friends but ultimately it kind of boils down to as you say it's a relationship whether it's with a partner or whether it's with a friend it's about recognizing what are the boundaries what what's okay and what's not okay and then laying down the law when someone crosses that line so they are quite similar it's funny you say that because toxic relationships i mean i've been in them before obviously i feel like everyone has to an extent and i stayed in it

for a long time but now i recognize it as soon as something there's a red like i mean we joke that i'm attracted to red flags but as soon as they're a seriously toxic trait yeah like it's a fucking volcano but as soon as yes it's a running theme very boring now guys great no but as soon as it's actually a serious issue or something that's i feel like is properly toxic and reminiscent of what I went through in the past I will completely exit that relationship straight away but I've had toxic friendships and I have stayed in them because well I don't know why and I think that's why it's interesting to talk to you because it's sort of the too hard basket you're like oh they're not in my face 24 7 so I guess I'll just put up with it when they're around yeah and I think you

just nailed it with that exact little piece of information the thing is is like when you're in a toxic relationship it's all consuming because you spend all your time and all your energy thinking of them texting them talking to them feeling betrayed all that sort of stuff but when it's a friend you can kind of get that respite and that like you can compartmentalize it a little bit and be like okay well I only have to see them once a week or once a fortnight or once or whenever or maybe it is every other day but like you're not in it a hundred percent all the time and so that's kind of why we have we are able to put up with it a little bit more but I do also think that there's a lot of guilt attached with breaking up with a friend yeah you've got to be absolutely

certain that you're at that point where you're like okay I can't do this anymore and then there is sort of a level of betrayal but I think we're going to get into it as well there is like a right way to go about this and a wrong way to go about this as there is with every single type of breakup but something I want to go back to and we hadn't really flushed it out as to where how we're going to get to it with this conversation but you started on it at the very beginning and said the parallels that run between being in a toxic relationship and being in a toxic friendship and what are those similarities? Essentially all behavior kind of boils down to like I'm a neuropsychologist so I'm all about behavioral modification really being very objective about

this is a behavior and this is the consequence of that behavior without attaching judgment without attaching assumptions or opinions about why someone did what they did but just being quite categorical about you spoke to me this way or you treated me in this way and that wasn't acceptable so figuring out what your boundaries of acceptable behavior is you know somebody is not allowed to swear at me they're not allowed to call me names they're not allowed to disrespect my time we kind of can boil it down to its fundamentals which is is this person crossing a line and a boundary and do I walk away from this interaction feeling worse than before I entered it and we can get confused in the minutiae of well they're my partner or they're my friend that I see once a

week or once a fortnight or whenever it is and that can confuse us and maybe sometimes you see them they're quite nice to you and they're friendly to you and they're lovely and other times you see them and they're horrible to you and you never know you're going to get the Jekyll or Hyde like who am I going to get this time and those little technicalities can confuse us they confuse the hell out of us and that's what sometimes makes it very difficult when we want to end a relationship with someone because they change their behavior and one minute they're treating us badly the next minute they're treating us well and it means that we're left going should I actually break up with this person should I actually do this so in relationships we go will I find someone else

or will I be lonely so we're afraid to break up with them and with friends we have lots of there's a whole chapter on the mentalities why we might stay with toxic friends and some of them include things like I'm terrified that if I break up with this person that I'll be left with no friends I'd rather have a toxic friend than no friends but what we're not realizing is the cumulative effect of the exposure to those toxic people is having a very tangible effect on your body on your health the research has actually shown it's it's as bad for us in the long term as obesity and smoking so if you keep a toxic friend around and that's specific to friendship it's as bad for you as obesity and smoking so it's terrible what are some of the things because you said you've mentioned

that twice now but we haven't actually jumped into it but what are some of the things that happens to your body what are some of the physiological effects that happen to your body when you're having a fight with a friend or you're you have this high anxiety about a friend have you guys heard the fight and flight response yeah i'm constantly in i'm fight so in your brain you're amazing amazing brain you have this you have this nerve it's called the vegas nerve very similar to like viva las vegas that's nerve cranial nerve number 10 Sounds like a party nerve. I like that one. I know my cranial nerves.

Oh, very good. So it switches on and off different systems in your body. And one of the systems that it turns on is your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight and flight response. So essentially that means that your body is flooded with stress hormones like cortisone, adrenaline. It suppresses your digestive system. So you might get terrible tummy aches. You might have very poor sleep you might have very tight muscles in your back and generally feel quite crummy shaky and just not okay you know those feelings where we just feel scatty and shaky and anxious I guess that's why when you're having it makes sense like when you're going through a breakup or a really big argument with a loved one whether that is family friend partner you know when you do physically

feel sick you know when people like I physically feel sick I can't eat back in the day I used to be like that's a load of rubbish like of course you can eat but but science says otherwise there's a reason you physically feel like that it's so interesting to me yeah and it's all about your body trying to protect you from danger so the vagus nerves job is to send out this alert like a alert alert alert when somebody is like when somebody is a danger and a threat to you it turns on this system so if you've got a burglar in the house if you have a fire in the house it turns on this system that protects you and keeps you safe so you run away from the danger you can you can fight your way out of the danger or you can freeze as well so you might faint or helpful

very helpful that's great to try to play mine it gets turned on and like my vagus whatever it is gets turned on and i'm like what is this oh i'm probably in love with the guy i should stay with him for another seven years that's what mine is mine's very confused the really interesting thing that we've learned from neuroscience and the leading researchers in the area are suspecting is that your vagus nerve is like a muscle which can lose its tone its muscle tone if it's sent confusing signals so if you have somebody in your life who is supposed to be someone who takes care of you somebody who loves you somebody who protects and supports you like a partner or a friend but they are making you feel insecure crappy hurt emotionally rejected essentially they're making

you feel that emotional pain from the the behavior that they're engaging in that actually can confuse your vagus nerve so it doesn't know who's a friend and who's a foe and it starts firing randomly and it can be really difficult for your brain to make sense of who is a kind person to me who supports me and who is somebody who treats me badly i guess it also i mean this like so perfectly ties into the conversations we've had around being in a relationship with someone who has narcissistic personality disorder and this idea of how much it can make you question your sense of self and question the right from wrong and gaslighting yeah completely you know and you and you get stuck in this cycle where you're like oh maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought it was because now they're

being nice to me yes and I think friends can gaslight each other just as much as relationships and partners can as well we just have a little bit more acceptance for it when it comes from a friend I think you get well I know I did I got to a level where I was conditioned to it once it's happening to you all the time you there becomes a level of expectation you're like oh well that's just sort of how it is now and you spend a few years where it becomes your normal it starts as abnormal other people will look at you and they're like why are you in that relationship why are you putting up with these people in your life but for me I was like oh no that's just how that's just how it is that's just how he treats me that's that's his way of showing love and I think that's

why people stay as well because it becomes their new normal and there's a layer of society so we have these things in society called norms which is expectations of how things go in society so some norms you might have heard is you know big men don't cry and a woman's place is the kitchen which of course we know i'm the worst cook ever we all know those things are you know ridiculous but another societal norm that we're sort of not yet breaking down and not yet fully aware of is the expectations we have around friends and there is this notion that you know what I said it before once a friend always a friend and a friend is a friend is a friend and some friends are good more friends are better and this idea that you should always stay with a friend and you should

only give to a friend and you shouldn't expect anything in return and that's really beautiful it's very altruistic which means you know you give and you expect nothing back that's a lovely sentiment and a lovely mentality but what that does is it sets you up for a very one-way interaction and ultimately burnout where you're giving and giving and giving and you're not getting anything back. And it's totally okay and acceptable to expect something from a friend. You expect them to act like a friend. We're not talking about them buying you a yacht or something. We're saying this person should act like a friend. And some of the pillars, the fundamental pillars of friendship are things like, can you trust them? Are they supportive of you? Do they respect you?

and are they affectionate towards you and we can often get lost because we we might have elements of friendship there but we don't have the critical elements they're not all there and I think like reliability is a massive one as well I do think that like every single person that I know has been in some sort of friendship where they've been friends with someone who takes takes takes or their problems are always the bigger problems like you know you have that person that you call up and you're like hey this is happening to me I'm okay but I'm feeling pretty sad and they're like oh well this happened to me and there's always a competition about whose life is worse or who has something worse off and you know you can sometimes feel like you're not being listened to at all in

those relationships I mean we've talked a little bit about what is and defines a bad friendship what do you classify as like what makes a good friendship and are you sitting here judging Laura and myself as a clinical neuropsychologist are you judging this friendship right now and tell us what you're saying like this is a terrible working relationship guys we should talk after the show yeah you're like it's gonna cost you 150 come to my therapy session i feel like we're in trouble with the principal talk to you after the show no no you guys are fantastic so good friendship i always say like because we could be here all day talking about the elements that make a poor friendship the elements that make a good friendship it's always kind of say stick with the feel go

back to the feeling that you have when you walk away from an interaction so if you're walking away feeling better feeling positive feeling enlivened feeling inspired ambitious whatever positive emotion it is then that's an indication that whatever that relationship is it's feeding you in the right way if you're walking away feeling worse than before you entered the conversation you feel like you're walking on eggshells you feel like you're in trouble all the time you feel you'd be you're made to feel ashamed of yourself or embarrassed or humiliated about something put down in some way then that's an indication that it's not a good friendship and something's wrong there so it's kind of simple but it's not simple because it's really hard to

actually enact this in real life but it's is this person showing me that respect is this person showing me that level of trust are they affectionate or are they more like a wet mop when they're around me do they want to be around me and are they supportive of my life I guess there's this aspect as well of there are always going to be times in friendships and relationships and with any connection with anyone in your life that they're going to be going through something that's really troubling and really traumatic for them and they're going to be having a really hard time and there will be a time where they will be draining on you emotionally maybe even physically you'll be doing a lot for them and you'll be listening for them but you have to differentiate

I suppose if is that just a time of their life that they need you and they're making you feel like that or is this something that's happening all the time over and over so I guess that's really hard to navigate too if it's one one off or one little period of time maybe we need to be a little bit lenient with that because everyone will go through those times yeah and it's like any relationship when you think of like your romantic relationships there's times where you're not on your best behavior and you're a bit shit to the people you love that will happen that can't be the norm and that can't be acceptable behavior and you obviously need to know when to say sorry and when to make amends and all that sort of stuff we have to have the same allowances for our friends

to like not be 100 their best person all the time but we still expect the best from them you know and we still expect them to do right by us my job there's actually a section in the book we talk about friends who might be experiencing you know hardship or they're going through a rough and tough time you may not be doing your friend the biggest favor by letting them get away with treating you poorly so if they're going through a rough time and maybe they swear at you maybe they waste your time maybe they cancel on you last minute maybe they're rude to you and passive aggressive to you and they're doing it over and over and over and over and it never ends it never seems to end there's always an unrelenting crisis there's always something that gives them an excuse

for why they can treat you poorly by allowing them to treat you poorly you might actually be teaching this person that it's okay to treat people like this so you're not really doing the many favors in the long run yeah you're setting the standard of behavior which is what we see in relationships all the time you know if you especially in the beginning of relationships if you accept bad behavior over and over again you're setting the tone for that relationship yeah you know and and also saying like I accept this I accept being treated like this something that I read when I was doing my little research about you and it really surprised me because I didn't know that this was a thing how many friends can your brain actually handle because

Because I didn't know there was like a limit before your brain started to frizzle and implode. But it's like your brain frizzles. That's the science term. You have too many friends and your brain is frizzling, girlfriend. I mean, like I do have a degree in science too, guys, but whatever. No, but is that a thing? Literally, how many friends can your brain handle? Some of the leading researchers in the area has examined the neocortex of our brain.

So essentially the big juicy part of your brain, the big front bit. The part that would frizzle? The part that might frizzle, yeah. Is this the part that they would do lobotomies on? is that like the big is that the front of the frontal lobe smack it around with a nice pick some of the researchers who have investigated close relationships are suggesting that the closer the relationship the more complex the relationship the fewer people your brain can handle on that level so for example the super super super super close relationship so that

might be your partner and maybe your your mum or your child so the very very first layer is two people so your partner and perhaps your mom or your sister and these are the people you share everything with intimately with the second level is people who you're close with who would you know maybe maybe siblings maybe the super best friends who will walk in on you while you're in the shower and ask your opinion on their outfit um you know the really close friends so that layer sorry i'm just wearing my undies and i'm like fine i'm not wearing any you're like i just literally wet my pants and i don't have pants on so you do the math the super super close friends so that layer is supposed to be five they suspect it's about five people and then as you get further and further

away in terms of intimacy and less closeness you can handle more people on those levels so it goes out to 15 and 50 so less close equals more people on that level so essentially if all of your friends or all the people in your life are cruisy happy supportive everyone's loving you could have heaps of friends but if they're really like draining on you and their hard work your brain can't have as many friends is that like the layman's terms of what you just said yeah that's kind of an example of like I suppose the complexity of the relationship if it's really demanding and it's really complex like you think about your calendar right we're all super busy we have so much to do every morning you've got to work out you might need to take care of children you might need to

take every partner go to work etc etc you only have so much time in the day you only have so much time in the day to dedicate to the relationships in your life and this number five the Dunbar number they call it that's not just for friends it includes family members as well and children and work colleagues so it's any relationship so these are the people who are so close to us we're interacting with them potentially on a daily basis so there's only so many people you can actually have time to do that with and I know that for a lot of people it seems like a cop out especially if you don't have kids yourself it's like you know your relationships and friendships change so much after you have children I was always someone who was like no like I'll be the

exact same person just with a kid I'm gonna nail life it just doesn't happen like oh yeah physically the amount of hours that are needed to then parent a child take away from the things that I used to do which was socializing and being there and being a really active member in my friendship groups and I you know I still have the same key people who I'm really close friends with but do I speak to them as much as I used to no I used to be on whatsapp all day to my girlfriends in a whatsapp group I physically can't do that anymore because the other aspects of life at this point in my life are more demanding like trying to work trying to keep a kid alive like all of those things so I think that like friendships do kind of have to go through that 100% that flex and flow as well

you know and and that can really damage friendships because if you're if your friends are a different life stage to you and they're still expecting that same level of commitment it can be really hard it makes you feel really guilty because it makes you feel like you're not doing a good job of anything oh laura what you've actually just described is there's a theory about that it's called didactic withdrawals so what you're talking about is different life stages so you're absolutely right our relationships and our circles of friends are going to ebb and flow depending on the stage of life we're in so when you're at uni it might be all about daiquiris at the bar with your uni mates and a bit of bombay sapphire guys i was enamored a sour girl actually

that with a bit of passion pop meets together yeah have a good friday night so so you're really close to these people in your life because you have you're going through similar stage of life and then when you get into different stages of life like career for example your career is taking off or you get married and you have children and parenthood especially involves a huge shift of didactic energies which essentially what that means is the energy that goes into your identity your identity so for parenthood for example you are now creating a new identity as a being you know a mother as creating a family unit and the literature tells us you will recluse and your friendship networks will retract as you come in on your very very tight network of support which

might be your partner your child your sibling your mum a very very small network of people and in fact they also say neighbors because they're close proximity with us totally yeah and and that can last up to two years even longer that you have this change in these didactic shifts in the energy you put into what you are identifying as at that stage of your life one of the things as well this is something that I've had a conversation with with my girlfriend who now also has a child as well but at the start I kind of had to explain it because I was like I'm not doing this because I want to spend every second of every day playing tea parties I was like that's not what's rewarding it's just that there physically isn't the hours in the day and it's not that I don't care about

what's going on in your life I do I just don't have the time and not only not the time but the physical energy when you're exhausted when you're sleep deprived when you're like already don't feel like you're doing a very good job when you're stressed and like feeling constantly not yourself to take on somebody else's energy when they've got something going on and I know it sounds selfish and I get it because I felt like I was being selfish but now looking back on that first year of being Marley's mum I'm like it's all I could do I was surviving you know and unfortunately that definitely impacted some of my friendships but the ones who are true friends and the ones who understood me the most kind of came through that journey and we're on the other side

of it now we're probably going to go through it all again in two more weeks it's funny though because I was speaking to a friend yesterday exactly about this I have a girlfriend that's not that far behind Laura in pregnancy it's her first child and she made the comment about another girl that she's like she's not very close with at all but she was like oh we'll probably just spend a lot of time together now and we'll probably get close because we're both having babies and exactly that it's just a shared experience where you know you're going into another part of your life that a lot of other friends aren't going in and I think a lot of people probably don't realize this with Laura and I we're obviously such great friends we see each

other all the time we talk all the time but we almost never have seen each other outside of this work relationship because we're both aware that we're at different parts of our life we have different things going on like we don't hang out we don't we don't celebrate stuff we don't go to dinner we see each other all the time but it's in this environment and that's because i respect that laura's like a fucking hurricane most of the time and she's like just trying to keep her head above water and she knows that I've got a life in a hospital and I have other stuff and I'm like dating like a fiend so but you know what like we found a relationship that works for us in that like we still I mean we communicate we speak all the time we are such good friends but there's

times where I feel sad and like not sad it's not the right word but I feel like I'm missing out on something because like Britt's able to go out with her other girlfriends and she has beautiful dinners and stuff and I'm at home being like that's right I used to do that in my life and Now I sit at home and don't do anything with a baby who's asleep in the other room. Then there'd be times that I would sit at home alone being like, I wish, I'm sad because I see Laura with a baby and someone that loves her and takes care of her. And it's like, I think that's why it's so important for people to remember that you can still have these friendships and these connections with people in different stages

of life, but a real friend is going to be very respectful and very understanding of where each other are at. I've always been a person with friendships. I've always had a small group. I've never been one of those people that wants to be friends with everyone when someone wants to be my friend I get a bit I'm like I don't it sounds bad I'm like I don't have this is awkward because I'm gonna ask you for a coffee later I have enough friends I'm back and I will bring you into the inner circle don't worry you made it in but no but I my immediate

thought is fuck like I don't know when I have the time for that it's not that I don't want it it's that we at this point of our life and i don't mean we as in us i mean we as in humans in this age yeah you're so you're you're spread so thinly already and you want it and i have so many friends that always like can we catch up and i'm like yes in four weeks 2023 i have a slot on a tuesday on the second affair this is realizing your time your energy and your money is really valuable what's the main issue that you get from people or that you have found when you were writing your book the reason people want to retreat from a friendship what's the main thing is it that they're not getting what they receive or is it that there's a power mismatch it's there's so

many different like we go through in the book you know why are friendships so effed up these days and we go through the different mentalities of why you might stay with a friend it might be about you you might be staying with a toxic friend and it's something that's going on within you that's keeping you tied to that toxic friend whether it's a fear that you won't make new friends and you're going to be alone so you stay with them or it might be something about that friend and the way that they're treating you which might come down to jealousy or envy or maybe they've got some toxic masculinity going on there and we talk about all of those different things in the book it's so idiosyncratic it's so dependent on those individuals as to what might be the particular

dynamics of, you know, why you're staying in the relationship or why you want to leave the relationship. But I've tended to find with women, usually some issues with communication and issues with being emotionally hurt by the behavior of the person you're with. And I think it's really important to note that we can often dismiss emotional pain as not real or less valid in some way. Like if I, you know, kicked you in the shin, not that I would, but if I kicked you in yeah about that coffee yeah if you were walking around with like you know your leg in a you know a bandage or something we would be really aware of that and we would acknowledge that and we wouldn't expect you to come up the stairs or lift the heavy bags we would have that acknowledgement

of the pain that was caused to you physically emotional pain is not something that is given the same recognition it's invisible pain and that means being rejected from something being excluded from something being spoken down to having someone treat you passive aggressively that makes you just feel insecure in your heart you feel awful about yourself after that interaction now the really interesting thing is in your brain we have this thing called the anterior cingulate gyrus that's where you experience pain so if i kick you in the shin that part of your brain lights up when you feel physical pain the same part of your brain lights up when you feel emotional pain when you feel emotional pain yeah so they say it can be when someone treats you

badly emotionally verbally not necessarily physically it is just as real just as valid as if they had kicked you in the shin i guess one of the things is is like we look at physical pain because it's so easily quantifiable like we all can say oh you've been punched well i know that that would hurt because i can see that but we all respond to emotional pain differently and we all have a very different almost like a sensitivity bar do you know what I mean like what might offend you might not offend me and what might make somebody else feel hurt and vulnerable it could be because of their past triggers or something else in their life so like it is so subjective that it becomes so hard to completely understand and I think like understanding is a huge part of

friendship right like really understanding the people that you're in that you're close with and knowing like what triggers them what makes them feel safe what makes them feel loved and just because you think something's fine like it doesn't upset you doesn't mean it's not going to upset somebody else mic drop yes 100% and and Laura what you're kind of tapping into is are we communicating those sensitivities to one another are we communicating those needs to one another and Brittany before you ask you know why might someone want to leave a relationship leave a friendship oftentimes especially women I find we we have this issue with assertively communicating when something's not on and when something wasn't okay you know the idea of saying

to somebody please don't speak to me that way please don't treat me that way is so intimidating that it can give up make a heart race just to think about a hypothetical situation where we actually say please don't do x to me which is just communication yeah I'm the worst I would rather not say anything and just put up with it for a long time I just don't like confrontation with friends or with partners or with anything I never have I would rather be quite passive in it and it's not something I'm proud of and it's something I've definitely worked on and I'm more assertive now as I but I'm still I would still be very I would still beat around the bush with it and I would still be like really polite about it and then I'd still be like love you heaps whatever

but um in terms of the pain as well just something to add to it I remember going through a breakup and I was so upset that I remember feeling the moment this sounds so crazy that my heart broke like the pain in my chest physically was indescribable it's like someone was stabbing me in the chest and I was like wow the heartbreak like you know in inverted commas is actually a real thing there's a reason it was labeled that and that's because the pain that you get from your physiological responses is physical so yeah I think people don't ever underestimate what can happen with emotional pain absolutely and I think the really cool thing about society is we're slowly starting to learn it's okay to say to somebody don't treat me like that again because it hurt

my feelings we're learning that it's okay to say that and that you're not detonating some kind of confrontation awkward bomb when you say those words you can say them I had to say it to a friend not that long ago in the first time ever and I had an anxiety an anxiety attack I couldn't leave the house for days because I knew that I had to say that I didn't like the way she was speaking to me and I could I tried to avoid it no first of all I went for avoidance I was a part of this and I was like girlfriend I was like I would be calling that friendship off right now I was I went into avoidance and then but I know that she's an amazing human as well and she was going through her own stuff so I was like I'll let it slide whatever and it just

kept going and going and going and when I knew that I had to send this message and let's talk about that too because I did it via message which I think is like the cowards way I don't know at least it's been said well it's definitely a thing isn't it like whether you call she was like we need to speak in person meet me at the coffee shop I had an anxiety attack and like pass out the floor I was like I cannot do this I was like I can't put it off and she's like at least take my call and I was like wrong I'm sending you a text message but so let's chat about that for a second. What do you think is the best way for anyone that wants to approach a friend right now? Do they have to see them in person? Can they shoot them a message? Do they have to jump on

the phone? Do they have to send a carrier pigeon? How do we do this? There are a lot of people who have strong opinions about how to deliver a personal message. Back in the day, you remember those Seinfeld episodes where they were like, he texts me or sex in the city. She broke up, he broke up with me over a post-it note. It used to be really taboo to write something in a text message. This is a different day and age now. Text and messaging is integrated into everyday life and we have very personal communications over text now and we can have really deep and meaningful conversations over text messaging. I say in the book, you know, you need to go with what you feel comfortable with and what you know that that friend is going to respond the best to. So if

you're talking to somebody who's very hot-headed and you can predict what's going to happen and they're going to perhaps lose it and start airing all your dirty laundry for everyone to hear in the coffee shop then maybe it's not the best idea to meet them in person maybe it is better to put something in writing and I think that the critical part of that is just owning it you know you can own that you've put it in text you can say I'm sorry I didn't do this in person my mental health wasn't in a place where I felt that I could speak to you in person about this and that's why I've put it into a text message I said exactly that too and I knew that she is the kind of person that wants to deal with it in in person or on the phone but I also know that me personally

would retract and shut down I can't have that conversation I just know I can't I wouldn't get across what I wanted to say because I would just want it to end so I would be like you know what you're right I'm sorry but I just know me when you write something for me and again it's personal for me I can sit there and put down what I want and then I can re-look at it and make sure I've set it in the way I want make sure it's concise make sure it's not hurtful all of the above so for me that was that's my best form of communication I went through a proper friendship breakup like a proper my best friend from school who we'd been inseparable with and we had like one of those really intense friendships which was like we were dating you know I'm sure that it's weird because I

think everyone can relate to it where you like have that person in your life where you're like oh like we were dating like she was pretty much my girlfriend except none of the sexual stuff but we did we spent every day together we talked about everything and it was actually a really interesting situation because there was three of us and two of them had already gone through the breakup so like it was originally three of us and then two of them had stopped speaking and I still remained good friends with both of them at the time and then after a really bad holiday and then me getting into a relationship where I felt really unsupported we ended up me and one of them ended up having the breakup as well but it all transpired over email because we just couldn't have it face

to face without feeling like we were attacking each other and and like the emails were attacking enough i mean at the time i was her maid of honor so i was uninvited to her wedding it was a big it was a proper breakup yeah it was a proper breakup but i just it got to a point where i was like i feel better about not being involved in this at all and i know that she felt better about me not being involved either that it was just like it was the only way forward for us and we we are civil to each other now like we've seen each other a few times and we're friendly but like i didn't need to bring it back into my life it was just so much drama all the time and i think that sometimes you get to a point with friendships even with ones that are really

intense where you feel like you've had that soul connection where you go okay i need to step away from this and it is so fucking hard yeah it's a proper breakup it's devastating well there's a loss in your life it's still a loss just because it's not a lover it's still a hole that was once there you filled your days with that you had someone to go to chapter eight acknowledging the hurt yeah literally a chapter in the book because it bloody hurts it bloody hurts and good on you and this is why you know in the book I say there's a whole there's a whole big section on how to do it how to reach the point that you've made the decision that you want to do it and whether that's just pulling back on your effort levels or an overt conversation about it I think the big big

big thing to point out is don't do anything in the heat of the moment you know if you're five cocktails down and karen has just insulted your outfit do not break up with karen at that point in time have a think about it everything that you say and do keep in the back of your head this word integrity so that if i see this person walking down the street one day i can hold my head up high because i know that everything i said and i did i did with integrity i'd be the person that quickly turns around and puts sunglasses in from the shop like to cover up like you're trying to do you do you think that we can ever just expect too much from our friends like do you think that sometimes there's an imbalance in in pure expectation on what one person can give and

what one person's willing to give totally and and this can be a hard lesson to learn the difference between a reciprocal relationship and a transactional relationship so I did and that's a really careful differentiation to make one is where we have this expectation that I did this for you and I expect you to do this back for me like I flew into state for you I bought you this present I came to this and I did this for you and you didn't you didn't do it back for me you have to think about why you're doing certain things for friends why are you doing this big favor for them why are you going bending over backwards for this person is it because you're trying to elevate the friendship to be closer than what it actually is are you giving way too much to the friendship way

too much time way too much energy way too much effort and then knowing that this friend is going to disappoint you because they're not reciprocating on that level and you're upset because you're thinking well I did this for you and you haven't done it back for me and that's a question of you reflecting what am I expecting from these friends am I giving them something to try to buy their affection to try to get them to be closer than what they actually are with me because they're not giving me the friendship that I need if you're talking about yes I've I've gone to their special events I've supported them for their special events I've been there for the good days and the bad days. And now I'm asking you to come across town to have a coffee with me and you can't do

it. And you keep canceling on me. That's very different. So there's a difference between a transactional expectation and a reciprocal friendship. I mean, I don't, I haven't seen it so much in my thirties, but I definitely experienced it in my twenties. I have definitely had situations where this, maybe this is going to make me sound like an asshole, but I'm going to say it anyway, where I had met someone and I was like, yeah, like they're great. We're acquaintance friends. You know, we're not best friends, but we're acquaintance friends. We can hang out. We can have a good time we can go out for dinner or we can go out dancing partying but we're not going to be the you're not going to be the person I'm going to confide my inner secrets to but they want

it to be a best friend relationship and they're pushing that agenda and it's like of course there's going to be disappointment there because it's not mutual and I think that you know a big part of that comes down to like managing somebody else's expectations but you can't sort of say to them oh look hey I don't really want to be best friends I want to be friends with you but I don't want to be best best friends with you whereas like you can do that in a romantic relationship you can say look hey I'm having fun dating but I don't want to be boyfriend and girlfriend with you and it's kind of the same thing and I think that there will be some people listening to this being like oh yeah I definitely have that friend who wants to be best friends with me and I'm not there like

I don't have the same connection with them or I don't feel the same like level of that we're on the same page you know I think for that listener you do you you know you do you be respectful be kind be polite turn down the invitations that you can't afford the time the money and the energy for and say yes to the things you can but for the listener who's giving too much effort time and money to the friendship hoping to elevate it to be a higher level of friendship that person you need to have a real think about what you're doing in that relationship and who you're giving your precious time energy and money to and whether you should be investing that energy into somebody who does want to be close friend with you and it's about learning to value yourself so the value

that we place on ourselves is the value that others will place on us too so so that that person who's giving giving giving they're the ones who need to sort of have a think about you know fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me you know if you keep doing that and you keep pushing as you say pushing that agenda whose fault is that really totally and it doesn't make either the person a bad person it doesn't mean that the the person who's saying like okay I'm giving this friendship the level of commitment I can doesn't make them bad it doesn't mean that they're treating you bad either it's just that like there is a mismatch in expectations here and I think we all have to check what our own expectations are in friendships like I think sometimes when you think

about it there is a bit of blame from column a and column b you know if you're constantly saying I'm the one putting in all the effort I'm the one that's doing this and they're constantly canceling well then that's a reflection of where you stand in their level of priorities so there's only so much time and energy that you can keep on pushing into that until you get to a point where you're like I'm going to take a step back and maybe wait until the next time they organize something adjust the effort levels and I think one sciencey point I'll just like let people know the listeners to I feel like this gives a lot of reassurance to a lot of people there's so much pressure in society to have lots of friends you know if friendship is like how many friends have

you have on facebook how many likes do you have on instagram you had that friends list didn't you and you used to put them up to the top remember on myspace you had your favorite friends and you put them up top every week some listeners are going to be like what is my space but others gonna be like fuck yes innocent yeah so you know there's a pressure we have like this you know you can collect friends and you can have lots and lots of friends and there's pressure with guest lists and with attendances and with photos in front of gallons of balloons and and personalized personalized cupcakes totally there's a bit of a competition with how many friends do you have i have to scratch my head when i think of an invite list i'm like can i scrape together 10

people we're doing we're doing our wedding invitations now matt and i and we're like everyone's like how on earth are you guys gonna keep it small and we're at like 77 people that's our wedding perfect and everyone's like oh have you had to do a big call and i was like nope that's everyone i like yeah no that was actually reaching out to some people all of our friends even some of the acquaintance friends but like we have a really small closed circle of like really close great quality friends but my acquaintance friends have dropped off over the last few years and I'm not sad about that it just shows that I'm in a very different phase of my life what the literature is telling us is that when it comes to friendship and the negative effects of having a toxic friend

in your life versus all the amazing health benefits of having a good friend so like they're shown to improve your financial success your academic success it goes as far as things like saving off dementia you know there's so many health effects to having good friendships they increase oxytocin and endorphins they make you more likely to make even more friends if there's amazing benefits to friendship and the literature is quite clear on this point it is not about how many friends you have thank god it's about the quality of the friendship the quality of the friendship so don't feel the pressure to have oodles and oodles of mediocre friends because fewer true friends is worth more than having lots and lots of mediocre ones but also the important

thing with that is like if you have a smaller group of friends you can give them the time and the energy and the love that they deserve and then your friends feel valued and they feel cared for and you're kind of like hitting all those key milestones together when you're in uni it's easy to have lots of friends because you know you're going to all different classes you're spending lots of time together you don't have as many dependents or responsibilities uni it was plentiful like you know I was doing lots of sports I was doing all these different courses and I had friends all over the place I was doing salsa dancing and now I think you know my my circle is so much more closed but it's so much more intimate and I'm so much closer with the friends

that I have around me and I know that they're always going to be there even if I'm not able to see them for a few weeks or a month or something you know is happening has taken me away from those friendships for a little while nothing changes when we see each other again there's no resentment there's no it's almost like doesn't skip a beat you know see I think I must be I think I've always been I guess like an extroverted introvert because I'm always I mean we all know I'm loud I can talk to anyone I don't get shy love to be alive at the party love to make people laugh but i've always had minimal friends and i've never wanted to go and do that it's just like when i'm in that situation i can hold it but even at uni when you were like yeah we all had heaps of friends

at uni i had one friend one friend and that's not because i couldn't make friends like i can make friends i just have never ever felt the need and i i liked it that i was like that i've never felt the need to have these half-hearted friendships but this one friend we went all through uni with and that was it i've been through like that since i was in kindergarten i want to get into some hard stuff for a second something that's definitely a sensitive topic we get it a lot it might be hard to answer hard to navigate but we get a lot of questions on and this goes into relationships like loving relationships and friendships is how to deal with someone and I guess pull away from and break up with someone with a mental health issue now I know that that's such a broad question

but it is something that we get a lot and Laura and I have never been in the situation that we have felt we can actually give advice on that because we're not trained in that we haven't really dealt with that so can you give us any sort of guidance on if you have a friendship that you don't want to be in anymore but you feel guilty because you know that they have their own problems and their own issues how do you or can you extract yourself from that without feeling guilty that is such a good question and and I have a section on the book about you know that's just the way they are and maybe they're you know going through some self-sabotaging behavior maybe they're going through a really dark time in their lives maybe they're struggling with um

you know depression anxiety and so many of us do it's like one in four so it's not unusual for us to meet people in our lives who are going through those those times and we ourselves can go through those times as well i keep coming back to the bottom line which is is that friend providing trust support affection and respect or are they crossing your lines are they crossing your boundaries? Are they speaking to you rudely? Are they swearing at you? Are they being passive aggressive to you? Are they flaking on you and wasting your precious time, money and effort over and over and over again? These are two separate issues, them and their personal circumstances, their psychological issues and how they treat you as a friend are two separate things. You cannot be

held responsible for somebody else's life, somebody else's feelings and somebody else's behavior. You can only be responsible for your own life feelings and behavior. Now, if you can separate those two things in your mind, it's a little bit like the girlfriend who's like, I can't leave him because he just lost his job and he's going through such a rough patch and I can't leave him now. It's not really helping anyone for you to continue to sort of forge a friendship that it's based on, you know, an untruth. The fact that you're really not enjoying being with them because they're treating you horribly psychological issues do not give you a whole pass to treat somebody with disrespect with aggression with bullying behavior if they are bullying you

then they're not a good friend and that's different there's two separate things what if it's not so much as a bullying thing but just that time and time again when you leave their company it is so draining because because they are in such maybe they are in such a dark place but it's been over such a long period of time that the friendship is so incredibly one-sided that you're like I give I give I fix I fix it's always about their problems I don't have time to have a problem because I'm always like having to worry about their problems theirs was always the most important what do you what can you do in those situations so again we come back to the bottom line is the friendship reciprocal and in that case you're walking away from that interaction feeling

drained feeling exhausted you can see that you're giving giving giving it's okay to know the scope of our abilities it's okay for you to know the scope of your abilities you are the person's friend you're not their counselor you're not their psychologist you're not their mom you're not their punching bag and in you need to acknowledge that within yourself that if this is at a level where it's consuming every conversation it's consuming all minutes of your conversation with this person and your interaction with this person then maybe it's gotten to the point that it's beyond a conversation you have in friendships and they need to go and speak to somebody who's properly qualified to have this conversation so can you what do you suggest that they do do you suggest

that they literally have a sit down and say i love you and i want to be there for you but i physically can't because i i leave feeling like this like what should they actually say to this person yeah so i'm a big advocate for communication uh and i think that if you bring things out of the darkness and into the light and you say them out loud you take a lot of pressure off each party so being able to say to somebody exactly that was beautifully worded britney saying to someone you know i'm aware that you're going through a really rough time and i know you know you know i want to be there for you and i want to help you but i actually don't know how to handle this maybe the best way that i can help you is to help hook you up with your gp i'll take you to the gp

office we get you a mental health care plan i'll sit with you in the gp office we can arrange i'll google with you psychologist and book in a time with you i can help you call them up so help them in the way that you can help them and sort of set the boundaries on what you can and can't chat about and the first time you say it you can be you know pretty gentle and and sort of explain this is now beyond this you're not coping like mate whoever whoever it is you're having a really tough time I can see that you can see that I think we need more help with this because I'm feeling like I can't just have this conversation with you it needs to be a conversation with somebody else so helping them to help themselves and then the next time they do this to you continuing to repeat

that message of you know this conversation is it's too much for me i'm not sure how to answer this and i think this is something this is you know did you see the psychologist this is the kind of thing you'd have a conversation with the psychologist about and reiterating you know we need to have conversations about other things not just this topic and also having like also having sense of self to not feel guilty about having boundaries like I think that you know sometimes we we like if we are afraid of confrontation we're afraid of setting those boundaries but you need to set boundaries in all relationships to ensure that you're being respected and also that you're not putting yourself in a place that compromises how you feel and so that you're

leaving every interaction being like a bit exhausted or feeling like you've been criticized or used up absolutely depleted by it because that's not what friendships are about friendships you're supposed to leave and feel like oh my love cup is so full and that's the whole point of them they're supposed to add to your life and you make your life better not make you feel exhausted every time you spend time with somebody all right i have a question come at me brah is it for me no it's a question well no i think we can all try and chime in but we will ask the professional no this is something that somebody wrote in and i i mean we've got so many questions that were written in for you but i like this one because i was like oh i don't know i don't know what advice

i would give i'm in love with my friend's ex they were together for two years but they were not suited they have been broken up for a year now and we have strong feelings for each other i think we could really work she doesn't know can we date or is this really that wrong so this goes to like down that girl code track i don't know how i feel about it because maybe they are penguins and maybe they are two humans that are supposed to be together and who knows that they might get together and be together for 20 years but there is this fact that for two years he was in a relationship with your friend so like what she loves this guy what can your face says it all your face is like don't touch it oh look look I'm all for like I'm a single gal I get it I get it

if you meet somebody and you're like oh my god this could work you want to chase that like you want love everybody wants to find that that person and that's a beautiful thing good on you I hope that it works out but but I I think it's it's again I feel like I'm so cliche I'm gonna say the same thing again communication like this is the eyeball roll it's not a it's not a miraculous answer it's not a magical answer it's it's a very pragmatic answer communicate like so just go to the friend and say yo I love your ex well look I think it's a conversation you mean firstly have a think within your own self what if they say no I don't want you to date them are you going to go ahead and do it anyway what if they say yes I give you my blessing then obviously you're going to go

ahead and do it you need to think about whether their answer is something you don't want to hear what are you going to do then so think carefully about what you communicate to them it might not be that you're asking for permission because you're going to do it anyway so you're not actually asking for permission unless you want to highlight the fact that yeah there is something there what's the real question here are you are you is the person saying you know I if my friend says no then I won't date this guy is that is that true or they're just going to turn into the forbidden fruit and then you really want to date them and I guess the thing is is like like we say with everything is you can only control your reaction to something you can't control somebody else

so in this situation you can't control how your friend is going to feel or react to this and it may be at the sacrifice of that friendship you have to be okay with that yeah cost benefit analysis 100% like if you're gonna if you're gonna pursue this then know that I mean I'm gonna guess that if they had dated for two years x amount of time ago this is someone who you've been friends with for a really long time do you want to sacrifice that friendship for a potential relationship is it worth it up to you this actually happened to a friend of mine she her partner now he was in a relationship for two years and they were all in this like friendship group so she only met him through the friend yeah and there were obviously some underlying feelings that nothing would ever

happened because she's like you're with my friend but they split up and probably only within six months she started to date him and it was she lost that friendship but they were together 10 years with a child so it's like they ended up being right for each other and she lost the friendship but she was with someone that was maybe she was supposed to be with yeah I think it's important to note as well our networks are quite small so the people that you're exposed to you know we we meet the people around us based on our friends so you meet potential partners based on your friends so it's actually not that uncommon to meet somebody through a friend and maybe that they were an ex of that friend in the past and you do get that in those really long-term friendship

groups where you know they they all date one another and and that's not welcome to bondi everyone's dated everyone in bondi i think for a lot of people like it's a reflection of maturity that like if there's no feelings there anymore and there's nothing that's like i mean i have friends who are now in long-term relationships with somebody who at one point in time dated the other person you know because the friendship group is big and it's spanned over many years but I think it's different if it's like that was someone who you thought you're going to spend your life with and you're not over that relationship yet and the only reason why they met is because that was your boyfriend like for example if Matt and I broke up and then

in two years time Britt was like hey Simon that's a really great guy his name is Matt and I think I'm in love with him I'd be like probably not gonna work out like there's got to be friendships where there are boundaries like that would never happen Use your judgment. I think this is where you need to trust yourself and you need to be real with yourself. Like, again, I use the word integrity. Don't be flippant with someone else's feelings.

You can use your wits to figure out how serious was that relationship? How bad was that breakup? And what's an appropriate amount of time for me to, you know, potentially broach this topic. Oh, Matt walks in with his shirt off and I'm like, avert your eyes, avert my eyes. You walked in and I'm getting changed the other day.

You were like, hey, Matt, what's going on here? No, I was like, hey, Matt, you got undies on he's like yeah i'm like okay come here but i also think and this is actually ties into a question i want to ask you like around jealousy because i think like even in relationships we can feel we even if we don't have any romantic connection to our exes we can still feel a sense of ownership over them and a sense of like jealousy towards towards like one of our friends you know girl code all that sort of stuff i think there's levels to that but what about jealousy in friendships which is a massive thing and I think it happens more so in female

friendships than in male friendships but this feeling of you're my best friend you're not allowed to get another best friend so in actual fact we can go to the Dutch to help us with this particular issue with friendship and jealousy and envy and there's a whole chapter in the book and there's a questionnaire in there as well to help you with jealousy and envy and whether you might be feeling it too love a questionnaire me too so the Dutch help us with different terminology for this feeling of jealousy and envy the problem with it is when it slips over to being malicious so they've got two words for envy one is beninged which i'm probably butchering that sounded so beautiful say that again and this is a my panties just went on

so this is a type of envy which is where you're you've got admiration for the person and what they've achieved and that they've succeeded in life and that you want to have that success too and you admire them and there's nothing wrong with that that's a beautiful beautiful thing the other type of envy is called aft gunst aft gunst even sexier I know which is it's as oh as you know the definition is as full-on as what it actually sounds like aft gunst and that's called malicious envy and that's where there is some form of harmful intent to the envy we're actually taking steps to affect the success of the other person to affect how well off they are so it's not just that you feel admiration and you feel it's okay to feel jealous it's okay to feel

envious but when it slips over into resentment where we actually start doing things taking steps to bring the other person down and attract their success in some way that's when it's toxic that's when it becomes toxic so one of the questionnaires in the book is helping you identify whether you might be feeling benigened which is this nice admiration for your friends and a love for your friends that you love them so much you just want all their time which is a type of jealousy and that's okay it's okay to acknowledge that versus when you might actually be starting to treat that person poorly and it's actually making you passive aggressive it's making you aggressive it's making you do things that you probably shouldn't be doing so it's very tricky for us one to realize

are we being the jealous person and we need to have some accountability here sometimes we get jealous and we can act a bit shitty for sure and we need to be accountable to that and other times they might be the jealous party and the envious party it's really difficult to accuse someone of being jealous it's a little bit goes into gaslight territory like oh i i didn't do anything wrong you're just jealous like be careful with that be careful with that well that's never gonna land well is it no one ever said to me if i was jealous if someone's like you're jealous i'd be You're making an assumption, aren't you? You're, you're, unless they tell you I'm jealous, you're making an assumption about their motivation. So forget about that. Don't,

don't make assumptions about why they're doing what they're doing. Just go back to the pillars of friendship, trust, support, affection, respect. Are they being a good friend? Are they crossing lines? Stick to the behavior. Please don't speak to me like that. Please don't treat me like that. and then you're focusing on inappropriate behavior rather than labeling them as I think you're doing this inappropriate thing because you're jealous so I think to wrap up because we've been speaking about friendships for a very long time how can we attract friends and good people with good energies into our life because I know this is a part that you have written about and we all want these good people to flood our life yeah what do we do do I have to like light a fire in my lounge room and

put some spells in there and like do i have to know but also i think that this is probably the most important question and we get this so often from from women and also from men who are like how do i make friends yeah you know making friends as an adult is difficult it's really hard and i think that that also is what leads into the fear of feeling like well if i leave this friendship i'm not gonna have any friends so i'm just gonna put up with this shit because it's better than being alone? I suppose I'm going to give you the, the inner nutshell and you need to fast forward the emotional processing that goes with this. So it's coming to a place where you realize your own worth, right? If we look at the stats of loneliness in Australia, 50% of young people are saying

they're lonely. So every second person that we're seeing is reporting that they're feeling lonely. That's so sad. Well, you can, you can look at it as a sad statistic or you can flip it on its head and look at it as a positive statistic that means every second person you see is longing for closeness and connection and that means that there are 50 of the population is looking for more friendships is looking for relationships with other people a lot of people looking for the same thing exactly so i will say number one you need to make the space for there to be a good friendship so if you are saying tied to toxic people because you're afraid you won't make friends well there's no space in your calendar for new good friends so you need to value yourself

enough to detach from those friendships invest in yourself do what you enjoy do what you love and that might be scary because it might mean for a while there are no friends for a while there's one friend for a while it feels lonely and you're getting to know yourself again you're investing in yourself again and through that process you meet new people so number two is actually putting the effort in to making new friends from a place where you have better value of yourself I'm not going to let anyone treat me poorly again like what you're saying about bad boyfriends in the past Brittany I'm not going to let as soon as I see a red flag I'm going to walk away from it oh yeah I feel sorry for my future partner because I'm like these are the rules nothing else goes these are my

expectations you set high standards for yourself and that's really important in all relationships yeah and in adult life often we have all experienced maybe crummy friendships in the past so we're coming to the party valuing friendship even more so the person you meet will probably also value friendship and value your friendship there are actually groups there are ways you can make new friends so just like it's in vogue now to use dating apps like tinder and bumble and things like that to meet potential partners there are apps as well that are designed to make new friends so we have meetup we have bumble friends where people get together and they do shared interests you know go and pick up litter somewhere go and do chess club go and do

salsa class and if you put if you actually actually put the time and the energy into looking for these people who also want to make new friends you will meet them go to a life uncut meetup guys just gotta say we've had so many people make really good friends from our life uncut discussion group absolutely yeah which you know what and i think that the core message in that is like finding people who have a similar belief system and have like similar ideology and like want the same things out of life enjoy the same types of discussions like that's where a true friendship is going to be born from and it's not going to be manufactured or something that you have to like oh I'm gonna go spend time with you know Amy but like literally have an emergency call in an hour

to evacuate me from the friendship yeah totally and I think you get to an age as well like I mean I definitely know now being almost 35 like I just don't have time for shit friendships yeah I don't have time for friendships that are like a bit tiring or not even tiring but like we just don't vibe on the same frequency you know like you're a great person I like you but you know yeah it's a bit vanilla for me like I want really inspiring friendships where I walk away from them and I think like fuck I really enjoyed that conversation because I don't get to have many adult conversations so I don't want to have forced ones I want to have ones that make me feel inspired it's a friendship revolution we're not defaulting into friendships at this age we don't we don't just longevity does

not equal quality I love that it's a friendship revolution yeah come on girl yeah that could be the name of our live show we're not just saying you know I've been friends with them since high school so I'm going to stay friendships with friends with them and give them a hall pass to treat me crummily and not enjoy our time together I'm going to be selective about the people I spend time with I'm going to go out and meet people who equally want to make new friends and we're both going to come to the party knowing what's acceptable and unacceptable behavior because we've learned we've learned from our beautiful 20s what's toxic and what's not toxic and there's so much paralysis around this idea of being on your own i fucking love it guys i know and this

is the thing that we constantly want to advocate for it is better to be on your own and not be made sad by somebody else than to be in a relationship whether it be a friendship or romantic relationship where somebody else has the keys to your happiness like it is not fucking worth the time and energy that you're putting into that. So be alone, be lonely for a little while. Sure. It's going to happen, but that is going to be a much shorter lived period of time than the time that you're investing in trying to make something better when that other person isn't meeting you at the table. Well, I think we all are going to have this very, very strongly about that. We're all going to go through a point in our life where there aren't a lot of people around

you at that time. Maybe you're single and maybe your really good friendship group have just gone and had babies. And all of a sudden you're like, oh shit, like there's not a lot of people around for me I think it's really important to embrace that time maybe that's when you start to jump into your exercise a lot more or group classes or you start running and you put a podcast on like life uncut where you feel like you're with your friends but if you can get through that point and be okay there's only something better on the other side there's a beautiful saying it's like we learn a quality of something from a person who lacks that quality so from the unkind we learn how to be truly kind from the impatient we learn how to be patient and from people who are unfriendly

we learn how to really be a good friend oh that was i reckon that's where we're gonna end that's i think that's it thank you for coming guys welcome to life on card yeah that was a really great sign off we didn't even script that thank you so much for coming today this is actually we have spoken for the longest amount we have ever spoken for because we're obviously very passionate about it and laura and i we do this is one of well it's one of the things we get the most from our listeners too they always want to know about relationships so i hope that we've helped you guys out i hope you've learned something from this i hope you've taken something from hannah she does have this amazing book how to break up with friends from friendship to friend split love

that tagline as well we're gonna put all the details in the show notes as well but honestly hannah thank you so much for taking your time to share your infinite wisdom but also to like really empower people to take control of their friendships not be passive participants in the relationships that they have in their lives and choose better yeah know that you if if any you walk away from anything from this conversation know that you're not alone in feeling this way it is time for our favorite segment which is suck and sweet it's just the thing that we do at the end of every episode hannah where we just say our highlight and our low light of the week best and worst thing that happened to you can be ridiculous or could be huge so laura do you want to kick it

okay so my suck this week is as you guys know i lost my voice which matt was very thrilled about i'm sure that was his sweet of the week but it was my suck um so i'm really sorry that we couldn't bring out our uncut episode for you guys last week but yeah i couldn't really speak properly so that's kind of why my sweet for the week is that despite the fact that i lost my voice we had booked a babysitter and we had organized dinner at icebergs so we went and had a very quiet dinner and watch the sunset and you couldn't even talk with no baby and it was honestly the first time it was the first time in I think seven months that Matt and I have just been to dinner by ourselves without any children or like friends or anything so we had one of our really good friends

offered to babysit for a couple hours which was interesting in itself I came home and like I mean Molly's 19 months now and you put her to bed at seven and she stays in her cot I came home and it was 9 30 and she was up watching i'm a celebrity running around the house with some balloons and i was like what the fuck is going on here anyway should be expected so fucking worth it i don't even care so anyway yeah that was my my second most sweet all right hannah what's your suck of the week so i go to salt i go to go dance salsa and my teacher rafael who is of course he's cool as he sounds he's as cool as he sounds he's like teaching us these amazing like maneuvers and it is just oh my god milky foot the girls the women out there who understand I don't need to go into

any more detail but that sucked okay but tell me what your feet are like now let me touch them they're like they're still peeling keep your crusty feet away from me Hannah because you can follow the crusty yeah you'll know I've been here oh so gross uh yeah and I suppose my sweet is that you know I get to do this amazing podcast with you guys oh stop it stop it keep going no don't stop keep going all right brit what is your suck and your sweet girlfriend my suck would be um i kicked i broke my toe years ago in the jungle and i feel like it never healed you just sounded like you're on i'm a celebrity then when i did

i broke my foot in the amazon jungle chasing wild pigs years ago and because typical like i mean totally understandable everyone does it yeah but because i was because i was in the jungle you don't walk around in a boot you don't get treatment for it you don't go to the doctors so like my sister used to carry me around the jungle and i had to keep my foot elevated and my point is it never healed properly and i kicked it the other day and i cannot tell you that you know when you kick your little toe anyway yeah it's like a 10 out of 10 unreasonable amount of pain you're like this is not stubble skin like you are not worth this cut it off so think of kicking that but when the bone was already like broken and not healed and anyway it was a nightmare that was my suck

for sure my sweet is probably this is a lol k no i don't see it but this week i had probably between 10 to 20 people write to me on instagram because i've just recently done my hair blonde like i've always been dark 10 to 20 people write to me and tell me that they think i look like jennifer hawkins i'm sorry but i'm gonna fucking take that you're like this is my fucking highlight guys nobody writes to me saying i look like jennifer hawkins i mean it's hilarious to me but the fact that there were so many people is like I'm gonna I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna announce it to Australia so thanks it looks beautiful I haven't even brushed it but thank you you're a hottie you can take that that is it from us we hope you enjoyed the episode we hope

you got something from Hannah Hannah thank you so much we've absolutely loved having you where can people find you on Instagram at no bull psych no bull psych like psychology or if you can't find it guys I'm gonna put it all in the show notes anyway so it's all gonna be there but also her book how to break up with friends you can get that from uh all good bookshops so like dimmicks big w etc and if a bookshop doesn't have it it means it's a shit bookshop just fyi it's online it's on audible as well if you love the episode you know the drill tell your mom tell your dad tell your dog tell your friends and share the love because we love love always like you're so fucking weird

We'll be right back.