Saturn Returns with Caggie - 8.9 Prioritising Rest for Better Health with Poppy Jamie

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

The lessons we learn during our Saturn Return can be extremely challenging, deeply personal and hard hitting. But ultimately, they’re there to teach us how to live our most authentic and fulfilled lives. In today’s episode, I delve into the inspiring journey of Poppy Jamie, a recognized Forbes’ 30 under 30 luminary, UN Global Goals advocate, British wellness entrepreneur, TV host, and best-selling author on a mission to empower mental wellbeing. At 25, Poppy was running three businesses, splitting her time between New York and LA, as well as keeping up with friends, family and socialising. But by 29 she was hospitalised with chronic fatigue and was forced to slam on the brakes. Poppy takes us through her quest to decondition her attitudes towards her own working habits. From addressing the guilt she faced if she felt she hadn’t done enough, our need for perfectionism, to observing the ways in which stress and exhaustion was manifesting in her own body. Deconditioning created space for flexible thinking and new and healthier ways of living her life. She talks about how movement such as walking and dancing has been essential for good mental health and how she now prioritises rest above all else. A concept which may seem quite alien to most of us but something I think we can all relate to needing more of. She discusses the global impact of her mental wellbeing app, Happy Not Perfect, and her latest role as co-founder of a stealth start-up. Poppy also opens up about the power of female friendships, her personal and professional growth, the challenges of life in Los Angeles, and her battle with orthorexia. Sharing Saturnian lessons learned while launching three businesses, she touches on the cultural attitudes towards therapy in the UK and US, the struggle for identity in entrepreneurship, and the vital shift from overworking to the art of unwinding. Lastly, Poppy reflects on the importance of spiritual practice and embracing vulnerability with a good dose of humour. --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Keggy Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. I wanted to check in with another member of the community and so we are going to hear a little note from Harriet from Nottingham. Hey Saturn family, my name is Harriet and I'm really really excited because the new episode of Saturn Returns has just dropped. I really like to listen to the episode when I'm having a bath. It's an hour of self-care that I carve out for myself every single week I know that I'm going to run the bath have my candles and listen to the episode and just relax so I hope you enjoy it as much as I do bye I used to have so much guilt if I didn't feel exhausted by the end of the day because I thought oh well I could have done more I could have worked harder and actually I've had to really decondition this idea of working harder

is not smarter working longer doesn't necessarily mean better work great ideas can sometimes come when you're walking in the middle of the rain and life can't be as quantifiable as I was making it out to be. Today I'm joined by former TV host, best-selling author, Forbes under 30 and UN Global Goals advocate and British entrepreneur Poppy Jamie. Poppy is on a mission to empower people to look after their minds and their health and in this conversation we reflect on how long we've known each other which is a very long time we were friends from 16 we were out partying together and we also were in LA at the same time so we kind of reflect on that chapter of our lives and what I found really interesting about this conversation was you know the importance of female friendship and Poppy explains how

sometimes female friends have been the greatest loves of her friendship and Poppy explains how sometimes female friends have been the greatest loves of her life and I completely agree with that and also how to navigate entrepreneurship and business and I know that's something that a lot of you are experiencing and I love how honest Poppy was about the mistakes that she made and everything that she learned from failing and and getting things wrong but also from the outside like she's achieved so much so young she was way ahead of the curve with the wellness space she was doing it before it became fashionable let's say and I loved how she shared so much about those experiences and the successes as well it was really fascinating to hear also this notion of

working harder isn't smarter this is something that I'm trying to remind myself of it's not about working harder it's about working smarter and she shares her own personal shift from the need to constantly work to prioritizing rest and discovering the art of unwinding. Discovering the Art of Unwinding. Hello Poppy. Hi Kagi. Welcome to the Saturn Returns podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm a big fan. I feel like there's so much synergy between what you've created and kind of a lot of the sort of, yeah, the ethos of Saturn Returns and everything. And you and i have known each other i came to your 16th birthday party no you didn't was that the one that was a yeah the pheasant tree oh my god so that's how long we've known each other yeah oh my god that to be fair for a 16th was pretty good it was an amazing party it was amazing I know so going on a good 16 years I didn't realize it had been that long yeah and we also had LA that's yeah in common yeah I know well this is what I find well this is why I loved your book so much because I was reading your book

thinking oh my gosh I remember crisscrossing you in that time and in that time and wow god I was feeling so many of those thoughts too and that's just what's so funny about the human experience is that we often are all struggling with the same things and yet we just don't talk about them I know because I remember seeing you in LA I think when I you might have just moved out there and I was maybe visiting was I having a breakdown you seemed actually really like you loved it there and LA I think more than any place gives the impression that everyone's got their shit together but just underneath the surface is a different story but without kind of going too much into

that for those that don't know you would you be able to explain a little bit about like the work that you're doing because I feel like you were so ahead of your time and so much of what you created so I'd moved to LA because I was in television at the time and I was a tv presenter so I moved out there to work with MTV and launched this talk show called pillow talk with poppy where. And it was so cool. And it was so long ago. It was like 2014. It was the first ever show on Snapchat.

Nobody even knew at that time if anybody was ever going to watch content on an app. And obviously the world has proven that we only want to watch content on an app basically. But at the time it was so new and I was like, oh, I guess I'll do it and see if it works. And suddenly we had 10 million people watch this little show and Snapchat had built me this bedroom inside the office. And it was just a bunch of 20 somethings trying it out because obviously Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, was 24 at the time as well.

But what was so interesting about that experience was it connected me to so many people around the world and it was a bit the experience I was kind of talking about when I read your book I suddenly started to realize that actually everyone's lives felt very similar to mine um the secret lives that we that we that we hold and on the surface if I looked on instagram it was really pretty pictures, filters, everybody having a great time posting highlights, reels. And then on Snapchat, every message would delete. And so there was this level of honesty.

I never actually went on Snapchat, but I remember in America it was humongous. It was like the thing. And so I used to get thousands of messages and there'd be people just saying, I'm feeling really stressed saying I'm feeling really stressed I'm feeling really anxious I'm really worried about this I don't know what to do about that and um and my mother's a psychotherapist so I remember calling her up and going well what

should I what should I respond to this person or what should I try to say to this person and what advice would you give because obviously you're the therapist and so she'll say well maybe say this or maybe suggest that and in that moment I thought well I wonder if I could put a psychotherapist in an app and so that was the idea for my second business happy not perfect which was this idea of how do I put a therapist in an app because so many people don't have the confidence to go to therapy especially in 2015 um it's expensive and also often you need to talk to your therapist at the moments when you can't get hold of them like 3am in the morning it's quite inaccessible really yeah yeah it is and and and again like the uk

is way behind in therapy culture to the us america kind of people had therapists and it was as normal as personal trainers um and so I teamed up with the neuroscience department to look at how we could gamify psychotherapy in a digital format and I was you know I look back and I was so young I was like 25 such a humongous beast of a project to kind of take on at that age and stage and I think it's like that naive optimism that you have at 25 which is great where you're like I just didn't know what would go wrong I was like this is amazing like this is going to be great and at that point nobody was setting up businesses I wasn't able even to say mental health in a in a pitch meeting to an investor because they immediately you know my

investors who I bizarrely found these investors who wanted to invest in a 25 year old and one of the reasons they went to America was because I remember thinking nobody nobody in England is going to take me seriously because I because of your age no because I found that and I found the English culture people and it's changed I think a lot now but people are hesitant to accept you as somebody different to when to how they first met you yeah I know that and I was the tv reporter I was the person that interviewed people and like giggled and fell off her chair and everything went wrong and like Bridget Jones and that was your lane so in the UK it's kind of like you can't

step out of that whereas the us one of the brilliant aspects of it is like you can be whatever you want to be you know and so there's a lot more opportunity within that as you know even now it is really difficult for women to raise venture capital i think it's still only two percent of venture capital goes to women founders. And so to go to a first time founder who had no experience apart from hosting a talk show on an app. I mean, that would have just been ridiculous. People would have laughed me out the room. But in America, everybody was like, oh, if that's what you want to do, this actually looks like a good idea. Let's go.

And so I started building this app. But I guess kind of the irony was it made me so unmentally well building it. Because I was so overwhelmed, I made so many terrible decisions. And it was Yeah, it was a real journey. So to talk about Saturn return, like that, my Saturn return kind of framed this time of launching launching because I launched a fashion company called Pop and Suki the year before then I launched this mental health company and then I launched my own podcast and while I was launching everything at the same time there were so many things dying and and I actually ended up in hospital with chronic fatigue and burnout um and yeah and that's kind of like what brought me home to kind of rebuild yeah okay I want to talk about that but bringing

it back for a second because you you mentioned your mum was a psychotherapist how much did that play a role in you wanting to do this kind of work? Because you must have had that experience growing up where you probably communicated with your mum or she communicated with you in a way that was very different from, I guess, the norm, right? Yeah, so I think that's probably why I was so fortunate to be so ahead on terms of, you know, being very familiar with mental health and, you know,

and the language. My father has been meditating for 30 years. My mother was a Reiki healer when we were 11. So even growing up, we saw energy healing. We would see our animals be energy healed by my mother. Suddenly we'd have, you know, the parrot that would fall asleep because my mother's hands would go near it. So she's a healer as much as a, yeah.

So very into sort of holistic wellness. Yes. So we grew up, they were almost like new age hippies but would never ever admit that or I wouldn't I wouldn't even say now that they would now more so I think they've been comfortable with kind of going yeah I guess we are a bit hippie-ish because it's different now as in people it's far more you know encouraged or invited now. Whereas like you say, probably when you grow up, how did you find it as a child with parents like that? Well, so my father suffered from chronic mental health. So in a way it was, it wasn't a choice,

it was completely necessary. And my mother was a physiotherapist. And so I remember when she swapped and she was teaching us at the same time saying, you know, I look at all these bodies and I see these hurt backs and I see these tied muscles. And I've started to realize that all of this is a manifestation of people's mental health and these emotional traumas that they've gone through. So I'm going to retrain as a psychotherapist. And my father was an entrepreneur and it was really up and down. Like, you know know one year the

company would do well one year it wouldn't and for some reason as children we were deeply aware we knew everything that was going on and so that was really unstable for us so I think we've always had like a family that I've worried and so I think my mother's she really kind of like her duty was like okay guys we're gonna look after our mental health I can't have all these like three deeply anxious children at the age of eight worrying about their father's business and so they were always really open to kind of all these different like new therapies and so I think that's kind of one of the reasons that I was even though my two brothers now they're open to it but they don't really kind of practice it um it was so central to the family and also entrepreneurship it sounds like yeah yeah it was it was like go give it a go go set up something go build and i

think that's like you know that was all like the light side and then i think also what we learned from our parents which was one should be working all the time even though they have always been like poppy stop working you're such a workaholic stop working stop working like where did i get it where did i get it from yeah because it was this it was that kind of you know pretty subtle messaging that i think we all took on which was just work harder just work harder and um that's probably what ended up in suddenly building this mental health company, entrepreneurship, but then resulted in like complete chronic exhaustion. So at that point in L.A., when you started the company, it was going well. What was that kind of process like to recognizing that you were on the verge of burnout or at that point?

Was it like a slow thing or did it kind of? Was it L.A.? i find it was a really hard place and it's still now a difficult place i find i was there a month ago and i just like going back um it definitely is easier but i do think la in a nutshell celebrates everything that is in some ways like so deeply superficial about the world and i think that i mean i wouldn't say i'm like totally healed because it's a deeply triggering place in many ways because it's so obvious in the you're worthy you're not worthy um type of kind of the way they treat people well beauty is a commodity and fame is like a religion and that's kind of the way they treat people. Well, beauty is a commodity and fame is like a religion.

And that's kind of like, I feel like when you go there, whatever conversation you're kind of eavesdropping on, you can feel this sort of sense that people will be discarded if they're not valued in that way. And that is so deeply rooted in the sort of entertainment industry and Hollywood, which I do think yeah it doesn't like almost I went back and it was it felt like a place where you're not like allowed to age and stuff like that you know what I mean so I can definitely relate to that

experience and also it's so separated and so lonely I you know spent six hours in a car and it started to make me realize how much I appreciate walking cities which sounds like such a small thing and it took me a while to recognize that actually because I was like why do I feel so isolated and lonely here and actually it is that it's like just to go anywhere or see anyone you have to get in a car so you feel this disconnection all the time and that's one of the things I love most about London is just being able to potter around and just go to a different part of town and go over to see someone so walking is also so central for your mental health as well right I'm obsessed I'm obsessed I'm obsessed with walking it's like my meditation it's the first thing I do when I wake up um I often probably walk before I go to bed as well I find walking yeah I remember you saying

that that the first thing you do is get up and walk yeah the first thing I do more than morning and to be honest more than morning pages more than meditating if I do not get up and just see daylight and move my body it really affects me mentally so that's like your number one kind of mental number one and and and you know there's lots of science kind of reinforcing why that's important because often so many of us are deficient in vitamin d we don't realize it and it's because we spend so much of our time on desks inside obviously because most of us have you know office jobs on a laptop or whatever and so it means that we aren't exposed to any sort of daylight and it doesn't even need to be sunny in order for you to kind of be able to receive that

vitamin d and also then being integrated into your body i find that if you so if you're someone who dreams a lot and i have such an overactive imagination and just an active subconscious that I need to reconnect with my body when as soon as I wake up otherwise my energy can be so out of sorts and my brain can run away with me and so just the practice of walking like reconnects me I'm able to shake off any sort of kind of stress or tense thoughts or anything that's kind of arisen um and I'm back in regulation within half an hour interesting because I actually go through phases of doing it but I recognize how much it impacts me but it just feels like such a simple thing but London doesn't always cater for it because it rains a lot do you just walk regardless yeah I walk in the rain or I put a cap on raincoat on

and I'll be in the pouring rain even if it's freezing cold and and your fingers are like practically falling off I'll still be walking now I'm dedicated I'm so dedicated because it may it is the difference between a good day and a bad day for me wow and to kind of bring it back because i've gone on a bit of a detour with that but in terms of like that feeling that you got in la and was finding it difficult what bought on was it a rock bottom i mean it was such a rock bottom um and it was my health health that gave way first and how did that manifest terrible digestion and so it was a year of really bad digestion like to the point where i was constantly bloated and my best friend would be like yeah you like you're really and i kept saying

i'm so bloated i'm so bloated and so I then would start thinking that it's because of what I was eating so you know I went dairy free when I did full LA essentially orthorexia I would read something I would then diagnose myself as well I must be intolerant to that yeah and just to define for those that don't know orthorexia is when you become like obsessive over eating healthy right yes because i had all these digestion problems so i thought oh it must be because you know i'm i'm eating nuts or i'm eating gluten or i'm eating wheat or i'm eating dairy or i'm you know and after a while i i was basically thinking i was eating nothing that was going to be inflammatory inverted commas and i was still so so so i mean i looked like I was about four months pregnant I

was so bloated and I was so uncomfortable because clothes were uncomfortable it's really like uncomfortable sitting and that was the first sign I'd call up my mum I'm like you know I'm so bloated and she'd say you know I just think you should maybe slow down a bit and I'm thinking to myself I can't slow down what are you talking about I had a fashion company I was building this mental health company I was deeply overwhelmed I was learning how to build a tech team I was learning for the first time how to design an app I was writing science content I was trying to get basically a PhD at the same time and at the same time obviously I was 27 28 29 like desperately single thinking that I need to be in a relationship, also need to have friends and have fun.

And my body completely broke and I was so ill, so poorly. And I remember taking myself to hospital because I didn't know what else to do. I was like, this is just unbearable pain. And- It was mainly digestion. Digestion. And then it went everywhere. I was like aches, pains, could barely walk, barely walk like throbbing headache like couldn't really speak because

at this point i had strapped through on top of this i just remember lying there in this hospital being like oh god how did i get here and that was when i started to realize that all of these aches and pains were just such a reflection of this really messy mental health that I'd got myself into because I was even though I was writing all of it and thinking all of it through to help other people I wasn't practicing it and weren't embodying it no and that's what I realized you can know everything about wellness you can know everything about mental health but if you're not doing the work it doesn't really matter that's so true that's so true and i think there's probably worse than ever now in terms of a lot of people preaching but not necessarily practicing right yeah and

then i was quite embarrassed because i thought well yeah because you kind of your face was attached to this brand they were so intertwined and you're like in hospital like having a sort of breakdown here that must have been so mortifying i was like i can't tell anyone this is so embarrassing which then adds a layer of shame which makes it worse and probably made you feel sicker right yeah so bad and uh yeah and then i had to laugh and i had like a friend of mine who was a comedy writer he was like she's australian this is hilarious the wellness founder who was unwell i was like oh great you're like wonderful it's a disaster and then what happened life had to change life really had to change and um and this is this is you know why your book resonated so

much with me because um it was my Saturn return like it was you know Saturn came in and it just went boom um and I moved from LA I moved to New York because I thought naturally New Yorkers gonna be the I'm LA was the problem it wasn't me it's because that's the environment I tried that many times it wasn't like it wasn't me I was not the problem um so I'm gonna move to New York because obviously that is where all my solutions lie and I obviously got to New York and and it was slightly better because I think actually I had that like movement walking piece but it wasn't long before like walking is amazing but it's not gonna so you know it's not gonna solve everything and then and then the world kind of took over it was like that kind of saturnian um influence basically said well if

you're not going to change we're going to change all of this for you and so pop and suki which was the fashion company i had and at this point i was traveling between la and new york i do basically half the week one half the week in the other and timeline we're now in we're kind of now in 2018 um and i and on the surface it looked so glam i'd get so many messages being like wow your life because it would just be i mean i remember coming to one of the parties in la and i was like oh my god this is unbelievable i have to say that was a great party that was really sad that was bad i mean to kind of it was a classic la just how people imagine it to be in the movies like pool beautiful people you know drinks and i was like oh my god poppy is fucking made it yeah i'm like i'm having a break down so all of that was happening simultaneously yeah god i remember that so clearly like we had this fabulous party like everyone in hollywood

came and behind the scenes it'd been like a bit of a disaster because we'd filmed this brand film that had gone so horribly wrong that this this one with the car the old car and stuff yeah with the old car because we'd a director had hired. And this brand was all about celebrating female friendship. You know, Suki was my best friend in the entire world, still is. And so it was, you know, Pop and Suki was, you know, a manifestation of my heart. I loved the brand so much. Anyway, so we agreed to do this brand film. And we started filming it.

And I said, well, what's the storyline for the brand film? And the director said, well, well you're gonna kill your best friend you're like do you know what this brand is about that's what I was like um do you know what this brand's about it's like best friend brand is like pastel pink I just think this like dark storyline that I kill my best friend is not really the vibe i can hear your friend who's in comedy being like this is genius like that whole scene of you being like um i don't really want to kill her it's like i don't and so and he's like trust my artistic vision right this was way before even the me too movement happened when suddenly like female founders wouldn't necessarily have this like deeply male director kind of like bringing

his kind of yeah girls kill each other kind of and have sex at the same time honestly the video the video opens with me killing someone while I'm having sex with them like it was so I'm thinking about it now oh my gosh it was so bizarre the whole thing and because I was so stressed with everything going on I remember I was completely unhinged talk about kind of stress just not helping you have balanced conversations that delivers your point in a calm way and it resolves it instead i had a meltdown i start screaming like you know this is ridiculous i mean i'm so embarrassed even thinking back at it oh my gosh and this the face of mental health and i'm screaming and i'm screaming i'm having a full-on meltdown

i'm so cancerian that i'll feel and i will just explode and then i'll go into deep shame and guilt well i should never have said that i'm now sending apology letters i'm writing emails at 2 a.m. apologizing. I should never have communicated like that. And Suki has always, the reason why we get on so well, she is just so calm in a crisis. And she has seen me just dissolve. What star sign is Suki? She's Capricorn. Okay.

And she's so amazing at just bringing me back to centre. And so then we had this huge party that you came to. And on the surface, it was just fabulous. And the projector had broken. The whole film had completely dissolved. And the brand had still paid for it. So we had to cobble together some sort of music video. Oh, God. It was cool. was cool thanks babe it was a disaster it was a disaster

probably it was better than you having sex and getting your best friend i mean i want to see where that film's got i, I'm going to send it to you afterwards. We ended up dancing on the beach as a kind of an ending because I refused to kill her. But yeah, but it's just so, it's so funny. I mean, the outside reality couldn't have been more different from what was actually happening. So you had that going on, then you're in New York, but you're kind of...

I'm in New York and then our co-founder decided to sell pop and suki and we also had signed contracts way back when where we didn't have any control of the business basically so we learned a ton of really hard life lessons about contracts how you set up companies we so saturnian oh and so the company was sold without us having any consent over it and so that felt like we were we were losing our names yeah and that was really tough um and then out of nowhere um somebody asked to actually acquire happy not perfect so out of nowhere i kind of had put all my energy into these businesses and like your baby which my babies and then basically they were being sold off and you know

on the surface that's great every founder wants an exit and you know on paper it does it's amazing I was able to sell two companies um but the emotional journey of that it was the middle of the pandemic I came back to London and just kind of dissolved into a heap, really. Which was harder sort of letting go of? I think Pop and Suki actually was really hard to let go of because Happy Not Perfect had a really happy ending. Because the app that I'd built was being able to be given to 90 million teachers, parents and students. And so I felt that that had the ending I wanted it to have because the only reason I set up happy not perfect was to share emotional health education and bring

cognitive behavioral therapy to more people science-based tools and science-based tools and so I was so happy that that had just had this you know it felt like my baby had gone to nursery you know it was suddenly going to be shared and um and it really found the most amazing home but I think Pop and Suki was sad because A I'd like I guess had half my name in it and it was something I shared with like that you know and I remember reading your book about the power of female friendships you know it's been like one one one of my greatest loves of my life you know my best friendship and so it kind of felt sad in some ways that we weren't going to work together in that way again because we can

laugh at those moments when poppy popped off at the director about killing her best friend and you know and and those parties actually they were hilarious um so it just felt a real end of an era and also i had overly attached my identity to both of them so I suddenly thought I had to really grapple with who was I without all of these things if you say looking back one of those big moments and find you know coming back to London finding your feet here having to establish like healthier foundations what would you say is one of your biggest lessons and learnings from that experience to do with Saturn return um gosh uh so many learnings um it's some sad learnings which don't sound overly positive because I think I had such a rosy

rose-tinted glasses kind of attitude about the world so I think my Saturn return told me actually to kind of be slightly less trusting the fact that I signed all these contracts and I just thought no one's gonna screw me over what are you talking about and I remember when I was first raising capital people would ask me to be on my board and if anyone has a company you'll know that board seats are really delicate because you're gonna have to work with that person pretty much forever more and they have a huge impact and influence on your business and i generally thought that it was like inviting more people to a party i was like yeah like the board seats come on add another one join in but the thing is how would you know and this is

what's so hard for you know i think especially women in business it's not just women but particularly because we don't have the sort of same networking or conversations about this stuff and i think a lot of people presume that everyone knows and you go into it and you don't necessarily want to ask or seem silly so you're just kind of navigating it blindly and therefore inevitably you're going to make mistakes along the way yeah and I don't you know I think that I probably didn't ask for help when I should have asked for help I kind of I almost had too much trust in people and um and then I had to learn my main lesson I had to learn how to rest and understanding that rest and sleep is the foundation for all health and this this compulsion to be busy is so conditioned into so much of us and yet I used to have so much guilt if I didn't feel exhausted by the end of the

day because I thought oh well I could have done more I could have worked much guilt if I didn't feel exhausted by the end of the day, because I thought, oh, well, I could have done more. I could have worked harder. And actually I've had to really decondition this idea of working harder is not smarter. Working longer doesn't necessarily mean better work. Great ideas can sometimes come when you're walking in the middle of the rain. And-

Walking is the best for inspiration and ideas. The best, the best. And life can't be as quantifiable as I was making it out to be so I mean and about a million a million others but um I would say those two were quite pivotal I feel now more than ever I don't know about you maybe it's always been the case but it feels just more present to me at the moment that things are sort of speeding up and because we are digitally more connected than ever a lot of people working from home but rather than that mean oh I have more time

to just chill out it's like I'm going to work until I close my laptop and then I'm going to go straight to eat whilst watching tv whilst on on my phone, whilst sending emails because nothing really turns off anymore because everyone's kind of going at this rat race. And you do feel kind of, I mean, I always find it when I get sick and I got sick recently, that forces me to slow down. But I feel so uncomfortable about it that I'm like, everything's gonna fall apart. And I think especially when you do run your own business and a lot of it is kind of spinning plates that you feel like they're all gonna fall. So how have you kind of learned to combat that now?

I think through really simple daily practices and to be constantly reminded of what I want to unlearn um because it is so easy for me to be inverted commas busy and it's so easy for me to to move into workaholic mode I have to constantly listen to it's like a spiritual practice I think is actually learning because you know for my podcast I interview a lot of authors and you have to do a lot of research I go to a lot of research and that's actually a spiritual practice it's constantly being having my most interesting dinner party through podcasts so even if I haven't seen like that many friends I actually find that listening to podcasts feels to me like I've

just had dinner with a really interesting friend and so that's really I mean I know you've had her on your podcast but I just read Elise Lunan's new book it's honestly one of the best books I've ever read she's sending it to me I cannot wait to read it it's genuinely I think every woman especially should read it because she goes into the history of how women have been conditioned in the way they have been. And when I read her- In The Seven Deadly Sins.

In The Seven Deadly Sins. And when I read her book, it gave so much clarity to, I think, what I am unlearning, which is- What particularly? If there was one thing you had to- So one of her Seven Dead seven deadly sins is sloth this idea of like you know we cannot be lazy we've always got to be doing i mean all of them might

deeply relate even um one thing that's that stands out that we that we that we talk about is um she really encourages to understand that anger is just an expression of our needs not being met or not being heard so rather than saying like i'm just feeling so frustrated about this it's actually saying i'm feeling frustrated because i feel my needs are not being met by i mean i'm an i'm emotional person but i would say that all the spiritual practice I've done and the flexible, I have, I wrote a book all around flexible thinking and all these science-backed tips I really do engage with have enabled my recovery time post like triggering moments to be a lot quicker. So I still feel emotional about things, but I'm able to recover so much quicker now than i ever yeah ever have been before would

you say that was something you struggled with before yeah i could stay in an emotion for a lot longer which which would you know it's so tiring for me but also so tiring for the people then I have to call up and kind of process everything live sorry for attacking you last night I know it's 2am yeah or my poor mum he's like oh great what's poppy you know stressed about now um and so now I'm much better in morning pages something I mean I love Julia Cameron's work yeah I'm obsessed with her Although if anyone ever found them Because it's like Such I always get conscious About writing them because it's so

It's just a stream of consciousness So it's mad right I left my diary At this random person's house That's my worst nightmare That's my worst nightmare Because you know That they're going gonna read it right I actually have a terrible story about actually what happened to me basically I didn't have my journal so

I thought I'd just open the notes on my phone to kind of just where is this going just I'm just wondering whether I should even share it. Please share it. I opened up the notes on my phone. And I was just journaling. And I think it was about being upset about a boy. And I then was in the conversation with the boy. And we started to get on to this subject of, oh, you should. Sorry, I'm replaying this. The this the going like oh this is so embarrassing so we were in this conversation we were talking about how random notes are and like how random it is what you write in your notes and like if anybody

read your notes like how weird it would be and like you know wouldn't wouldn't make sense and so i said oh let's look at we've written our notes when do you ever say that in a conversation when do you ever say oh guys let's open our notes and i open this i open this note and it is mortifying everybody's reading like this deep diary everyone well it was like three people it was like three people it was three people it was like this guy and he's like two girls and they and because i open my phone but oh look at my notes it's in person in person and and my friend just squeezes my hand because everyone realizes that it is the most embarrassing diary entry note that anybody could read and this person it's about is standing there was it too late to kind of close oh everybody had read it like i i just i froze i didn't even

take the phone i just completely froze and i was just i was dying i just wanted the earth to swallow me up being like this is so mortifying and i then then i put the phone down and i thought oh what am i gonna do do i explain this do i not do I explain that this is practice called warning pages no like I'm usually a cat I'm not gonna understand this is so embarrassing and so we're all in silence for then a good couple of minutes and we're watching this music show so we're all just looking at them at the show and i'm thinking to myself everyone's thinking the same thing which is fuck bye poor poppy like this is so embarrassing what did it say well it was going on about how it was basically going on about kind of like how i liked this boy and he didn't like me back oh my god mortifying and um but that's quite sweet though well no because then i have to explain to him that it wasn't really about him just said his name i just used your name because i needed to name this person

yeah i just used your name it was a projection this is all about the inner work um i i was so mortifying i was like i was actually trying to explain to somebody else like and i had to basically i just dig a hole and and i think we should talk about the fact that i don't fancy you and i i remember saying i said no no i know you don't i know you don't wait he said that yeah he said that to me oh no yeah i said that's fine i know you don't i know you don't oh no that's all that is awful i know i'm so i'm actually so and then you're like it's not about you anyway this is not about you anyway this is like my internal conscious thoughts this is about me expressing my rejection and really healing from romantic rejection in the past did he did he buy it i guess i mean let's

just hope he bought it i think we've all got those stories and experiences i don't think it's that bad imagine being told to your face though that he's like i just don't fancy you or i just sat there i don't fancy you either oh my god have you ever seen him again barely barely this was years ago just pretend i know and let's hope he doesn't listen to your podcast so for example I wouldn't have recovered from that for ages so I was so mortified for weeks on end whereas now if that happened and actually a similar event did happen and I just had a giggle like I could just laugh at the just hilarity of life and what do you think that's a result of truly so something i write about

a lot is this idea of flexible thinking and this idea that you know our thoughts are malleable and our feelings are malleable and understanding that and i interviewed a woman called dr joan rosenberg who actually scientifically found that our emotions last 90 seconds and they come in 90 second waves and so when we start to realize that our emotions are just waves and actually there are kind of interventions that um that that are open to all of us like breath work like moving the body dancing i dance a lot and i'm not a good dancer at all this is like unskilled dancing kind of in the kitchen type stuff and then this idea of well I have a choice on the perspective I want to take on this and you know when you really boil down what is therapy therapy is a practice where you're

able to explore different perspectives that that you could take on the same situation and we so often jump into assumption mode where we assume you know take that scenario I just assumed that he would think I was this really embarrassing girl but I'm sure he just felt a bit sorry for me and actually well he was like really flattered or really very sweet yeah exactly but you know the age of 29 i just wouldn't i couldn't i really struggled to get to get to that perspective because i was so engrossed in my own self-shame and blame and guilt and so flexible thinking is this idea of like oh it's all so malleable our reality is so malleable and where we place our attention is is is often actually within our control and what do i want to focus on and what do i want and i um i explored a lot of um

i explored a lot in the uh field of psychosynthesis which is a really interesting kind of subset of psychology it's an approach to psychology that really focuses on the super conscious as much as the subconscious so Freud and a lot of therapy can often say let's go back let's go back to your childhood let's go look at kind of these let's look at pattern matching which is really often what the self-work is about to begin with and then the super conscious is understanding that yes you are all the experiences that you've gone through, but you are also your hopes, wishes, and dreams. And your hopes, wishes, and dreams also make up your psyche.

And then you've got the transpersonal, which is the collective consciousness. And then all of this built together means that we are constantly in flux and in flow. And so knowing how to get back to alignment, which is kind of, for me, like an energetic frequency, it often is like through the body first and then using these kind of like compassion exercises, gratitude exercises, role model exercises, whereby, you know, I think about, you know, three people that inspire me greatly. And I think to myself, well, what would they do in this situation and so it's a way to stretch consistently stretch my perspective rather than getting stuck on what I think I know about a situation and kind of going into that loop which then kind of starts spiraling quite quickly yeah because you you

mentioned from you know there's obviously this theme that you experienced you know before and during your Saturn return of kind of being a bit of a workaholic, really? Did you find that you, your sense of self worth was wrapped into that? Yeah, I think that I had such low confidence in many ways. I think that it was it was wrapped up in perfectionism. I think that's where happy not perfect came from that I felt that I really needed to be perfect in order to live the life that I wanted to live so I think that I I think romantic rejection in my teenage years had such a had left such wounds that I thought well I must be super successful a certain size if I was ever going to be loved and be able to have a family and be able to have children. Which I think is such a relatable thing. Yeah. It's so sad that we feel that way. Do you know what I mean? Because then you actually take yourself out of the position of

being open to it because you're constantly telling yourself, no, I can only have that when. Yeah. And I was single for pretty much like seven eight nine years as a result of that yeah yeah because I worked all around the clock I'd get up at I when I moved to New York I lived with these two lovely gorgeous girls and I would get up at six I'd get up before they woke up because I thought oh I can't even I can't even have breakfast with them because I can't waste half an hour of the day so I'd get up at six I would go start working and I would come back at like 10 11 after they'd gone to bed and it's just it was so sad it's so sad I actually look back and I'm like it's so sad and so there was no time for a relationship and even if I went

to a party I was so exhausted I could barely have a conversation with anyone so I'd kind of go chat to a friend that I knew and then I would then I would leave. So your work now has really shifted to prioritizing rest, sleep and part of the ethos of Unwind with Poppy. Is that really about that now? Yeah, this idea of what does it mean to unwind? What does it mean to allow ourselves to rest? And a huge focus for me is now sleep. Like what does it mean for us to prepare ourselves for sleep because i think that so often we switch ourselves we expect ourselves to work like light switches

and we have a really busy day and then we lie down we go okay i'm ready to sleep now as if our body is being on the phone yeah after being after scrolling after watching some crime drama and we love it my boyfriend's like how can you watch this before you go to bed i'm like i did have a dream about a murdering clown the other night so i was like maybe i need to tone down the crime stuff right but i know a lot of people do really struggle with sleep i think probably now more than ever in many ways because of the screen time and all of the stuff that you just mentioned yeah it's I mean some of the statistics are crazy about 70% of people don't get enough sleep and sleep is the bedrock for our entire health so if we haven't

slept we aren't even able to function we're not even able to do all the things that we want to do we're not able to you know what i would never ever scream a director now i would not like because i'm well slept and i'd be able to still approach a situation that needed to be mended but in a completely different way because sleep gives you choice when you're sleep deprived you are so over activated your parasympathetic your sympathetic nervous sympathetic nervous state, the fight or flight state is so easily triggered that we lose autonomy of how we want to communicate, of our emotions. And actually sleep is the, it's not only the bedrock for actual health, our immune system, our digestion, the cellular body. the bedrock for actual health our immune system our digestion the cellular body but um for our mental health it is like the number one foundation if we want to have good mental health and yet it's something we don't prioritize i mean i think we all know how it feels when you haven't slept properly and the world just feels like a different place and everything feels unmanageable but I've always been quite a good

sleeper fortunately so it's really good very lucky so for anyone that's going through either their Saturn return or feeling like they're in a rock bottom or perhaps experiencing something similar with business what would your advice be slow down every decision you know what to do deep down you know what to do i completely lost trust in my intuition asking everyone and i asked everybody chronically and actually it was only when i slowed down can you even listen to what you what your intuition what your intuition is yeah it's so true and so much i didn't even validate my intuition there's so many decisions that even when I was deeply inexperienced at 27 I knew were wrong you know how we structured the company like it should

never have been this kind of UK top co US subsidiary deeply complicated like legal even though I didn't even understand it I knew that that shouldn't have been set up in that way and yet I discredited my discredited myself thinking oh well I'm just not experienced enough so other people know better and nobody knows better your therapist doesn't know better about your emotional health and your your friends don't know better about your relationships and business advisors often don't know better about your business I think it's important to listen but also hold it loosely and really investigate the advice that you're given for yourself because I think I lost my way because I I'd stopped listening to myself I just was taking different advice from different people and it's like a cake if you take an ingredient from everybody it's not gonna be it's not gonna be very delicious I love that I think that's such

powerful advice and it also really reminds me of the conversation I had with Elise which was this kind of idea about not subcontracting your authority which is such a tough Saturn Returns lesson but such a worthwhile one when you come out the other side so thank you so much for sharing that and Poppy thank you very much for joining me on the Saturn Returns podcast I have loved this conversation it's been so fun to have you oh my god I'm still giggling just just oh embarrassing notes and directors asked me to kill my best friend oh my god I think it's so relatable though people are gonna love it thank you thank you for sharing thank you so much for listening to this episode of Saturn Returns I hope you found it useful and

if you did I would love it if you could share it with a friend or write us a review or share it on social media whatever one floats your boat because that helps us get discovered by more like-minded people so thank you very much again thank you poppy for joining me and as always remember you are not alone goodbye