Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 169: Oliver Burkeman, The Power of Negative Thinking

Episode Date: January 9, 2019

Oliver Burkeman writes about social psychology, self-help culture, productivity, and the science of happiness in This Column Will Change Your Life for The Guardian. In his writings, he challenges "The Power of Positive Thinking," and in fact argues for the benefits of contemplating worst-case scenarios. His new book, "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking," explores the benefits of negativity, uncertainty, failure and imperfection. Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. The Plug Zone Twitter: @oliverburkeman Columns: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/oliverburkeman The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking https://www.amazon.com/Antidote-Happiness-People-Positive-Thinking/dp/0865478015 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUT I'm Dan Harris. This guy is so interesting and he kind of checks so many of the boxes for an ideal 10% happier guest. Not only is he a meditator, but he's, he, you write to weekly column for the guardian called

this column will change your life. It's all about social psychology, self-help, productivity, science of happiness. He is also an avid and ardent and very effective critic of the power of positive thinking and the secret and all this junk. In fact, you wrote a whole book about it called the antidote, happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking in which he explores the upsides of negativity, uncertainty, failure, and imperfection. My kind of guy. His name is Oliver Berkman, he's really smart. And in this episode, we talk about positive thinking, we talk about

meditation, we also talk a lot about productivity, he's writing a new book about all these productivity hacks that have become so popular. Well, he's really skeptical about book about all these productivity hacks that have become so popular. Well, he's really skeptical about a lot of these and what he had to say, I found to be deeply interesting. And we talk about something that some of you on Twitter have been encouraging me to take a look at, which is stoicism. Some day we'll do a whole episode on stoicism. I have a guest in mind for that, but we talk about it a little bit in this episode, so that'll make some of you very happy. So Oliver's coming up first, one item of business, and then your voice mail. The item of business is very quick. I just want to point out that we have, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, a new teacher

on the 10% happier app. Her name is Diana Winston. She's based out of UCLA. She's a phenomenal human being, and she's got a new meditation on joy, which has just gone up in the app. So go check that out. Let's do your voicemails. Here's number one.

Hey, Dan. This is Paul from Uschester County. Thanks for the podcast. My question is about a concept I think I heard you talk about before, which is that for people who want to be productive go getters, and I'm a business leader, being self-analytical and even self-critical can be quite helpful. We make a delta between what the plan was and what happened and in listing what didn't go perfectly as helpful in improvement.

But at the same time, we want to feel good about ourselves. It's important not to attach that criticism that are sort of self-worth or love for ourselves. And I think I've heard you talk about the trick is to disassociate yourself. So to watch it like a movie that you're not in, which sounds easier than it. And I'm curious if you should get more advice on how to do that successfully as a habit. And if there's any materials you could point us to on that. I'd be grateful. Thank you. Yes, I have a specific answer on a technique that I found useful. But let me just set the table a little bit on the issue. First of all, thank you for the question, Paul. I really appreciate it. This is something that anybody who's ever listened

to the show knows before is a big area of exploration for me. There's no question that being, to a certain extent, self-critical and analytical can be very useful and how are you gonna improve at anything if you're not learning from the mistakes you've made. So all of that is, of course, you have to do that. But at the same token, you don't want to be so wrapped up in self-criticism that you're just turning yourself into your own punching bag and I think that lowers your resilience, lowers your effectiveness and also just not for nothing makes you pretty hard to live with.

I say that all from personal experience because because I've done all of that, and to a certain extent, continue to do all of that. So it's really about finding the balance. And I'll tell you just for me, one of the things that I've found useful recently is self-compassion as a practice. Now, every time I talk about compassion practice, I always say the same thing,

and I apologize if this is tiresome to some of you, I always say the same thing and I apologize if this is tiresome to some of you, but I feel the need to say it, which is that it can be pretty annoying these compassion practices. There's just no two ways about it, but they work in my experience and their science to suggest they work. So self-compassion as a practice is usually taught as a, you know, in a classic Buddhist way. It's usually taught as, you know, part of an overall loving kindness or friendliness practice where you envision beings, people, or animals, and you send them, well,

wishes. May you be happy. May you be safe. may you live with these, may you be healthy and strong. And I found that directing that to yourself as a formal practice on the cushion can, it feels really weird. And often you're, you know, many of us have difficulties with ourselves. So it can be, you know, it can be tough to muster that self-compassion, but it doesn't really matter in my experience What you're feeling on the cushion. It's the overall vibe that it creates in your mind in your life writ large That is helpful and it's helped me Walk this line that we talked about between

being Ruthlessly self-critical when it's required and then just beating yourself up so much that you are beating yourself down into a grinding yourself into a fine powder and you're just not useless to anybody. You're not useful to anybody. And so just overall having a friendlier attitude toward yourself, seeing that everybody makes mistakes, everybody has difficulties, it's not that big of a deal, that I think allows for greater resiliency over time. So there are self-compassion practices available in the app. I suspect if you Google self-compassion guided meditations,

you could find them for free on the internet as well, if you don't want to subscribe to an app which I get. So yeah, there are ways to do this and also plenty of, you know, in the most recent book I wrote meditation for Figuity Skeptics, Jeff Warren, the meditation teacher with whom I wrote the book has a great meditation about that which has profanity the title, so I can't give you the title. So lots of ways to go for this, and I've found again, and it's not so much about sitting there, hugging yourself and feeling this boundless self-love. I mean, maybe you get there, some people have reported getting there, but it's more about just having a different inner climate, a bombier, whether pattern internally that allows you to bounce back from your mistakes

and to engage in the self-analysis without engaging in self-flogulation. Okay, thank you Paul. Here's voice mail number two. Hey Dan, my name is Ryan here at Gilbert, Arizona. I'm a big fan of your two books, your app and podcast. And I've floored it with meditation for close to 15 years and was never able to get to consistent with it. That changed, once I stumbled upon 10% happier. Now reading your story, I immediately connected with your interest

in meditation and your initial petitions towards a practice. Now hearing again the numerous mental and physical benefits of meditation, I recommitted myself to daily sessions in the morning. And so far, you know, the lessons on the 10% happier app have really helped to increase my focus, my ability to catch my incoming emotions and respond, not react to them. And most of all, really be more present. Like after a long day at work I now find I could be much more present with conversations with my wife. So I really first of all want to get this out of the way. I want to thank you for really re-igniting my interest in meditation,

really for providing such great content through your new book mostly. And then of course the great app that you have that I'm really enjoying. So this is me to the question. I was hoping that you could address this on your podcast while meditating and focusing on my breath. I've gotten better about catching my thoughts as I pop up and really bringing my focus back to my breathing. The trouble I'm having is that sometimes those thoughts, I find a really useful idea as an insight that that could really potentially

solve lingering issues in my work or finances or marriage. Like one of those kind of eureka-type moments that you typically would have in the shower and your subconscious really comes out. So I'm finding I'm having more of those now that I'm becoming more proficient in meditating. So my fear is that when these thoughts come up, I'm letting go of them so fast and refocusing on my breath that I fear losing some of those ideas once my session is complete. And then that fear of losing some of those great thoughts that come up or ideas or even tasks that I forgot about that, all of a sudden rumbled up that I need to make sure I get

completed. The fear takes over my meditation. I get seriously off track. So that's my question. Sorry for such a long message, but I wanted to see if there's any helpful solutions to this. Thanks, Ryan. No need to apologize.

I like the long message, and I really like hearing your story, and I appreciate it a lot. The question's a great one, and I feel you, I get it. I, this happens to me, it's kind of beautiful if this happens, you're in meditation and great ideas come or what you think are great ideas come. And it's really tempting to get up and write it down

or act on them. I'll tell you what I do, this doesn't mean you have to do it, but here's what I've done. I'll tell you what I do. This doesn't mean you have to do it, but here's what I've done. Is I just trust that if it's a really good idea, it will still be there when I'm done meditating.

And thus far, I've... Well, how would I know? I mean, I don't know. Maybe I did have great ideas in meditation that I've totally forgotten and that I never wrote them down and that they're lost forever. But I usually, I feel like, again, I can't say this with 100 percent certainty, but I

feel like usually they're there, if not immediately at the end of the meditation, they just come back to me at some point during the course of the day. And I find it really interesting to notice, okay, this idea has come up. Now I'm really agitated about holding onto this idea and then watching my mind and making a little mental note of the agitation, the restlessness, all of that is really important to see. Because again, one of the main things we're trying to do here is just to see how turbulent and tumultuous our minds are so that we're not owned by the aforementioned turbulence and tumult the rest of our lives. And so this is yet another opportunity to do that.

So again, I'm not telling you what to do. If you disagree with me, I think it's probably entirely kosher. If you keep a notebook next to you while you meditate and write things down, I wouldn't rule out myself even doing that at some point in the future. But what I've done thus far is to just trust that the idea will come back to me. And I haven't been burned, but again, I admit I wouldn't know whether I actually have been burned. But bottom line is I think the fact that you're getting into a situation where the discursive

thought, the habitual thinking, thought patterns are quieting down enough so that new ideas can emerge, I think that's really cool and does show that you're getting somewhere in meditation, although the idea of getting somewhere in meditation is a bit of a dangerous concept about which I could say much more at a later date. But thank you very much for that question. It's really excellent. And also for your story. Let's get to our guest this week.

Oliver Berkman. I really enjoyed this conversation. As mentioned, he's a columnist for the Guardian. He wrote a book, ruthlessly criticizing the power of positive thinking for which I will always love him. And I do wanna say one thing before we get into this. You will hear me talk about Adam Grant here. Adam Grant is a business school professor at

Wharton University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Who wrote an excellent book called Give and Take, and I expressed some frustration about the fact that Adam Grant has publicly criticized meditation. We taped this before, then we taped the interview with Oliver Berkman before I actually ended up meeting Adam Grant and recording a podcast with him, which has already been posted, in which I work this through with Adam directly. And in a very, and I found, I found Adam to be awesome in dealing with my criticisms of

him and really thoughtful and just awesome generally as well in many other ways. So you'll hear me talk about Adam Grant, but just know that there's a happy ending here in that I go on to meet him and talk this stuff through. So that being said, here we go, here's Oliver Berkman. So I always ask the first question, the same first question, which is, how did you get interested in meditation? Wow. I just sort of stumbled into it through some book that I can't even remember years and years ago.

I write this column in the Guardian newspaper where one of the things I do is read, review, try to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to self-help techniques and books and stuff. So it was just inevitable, I guess, that I would get to get to meditation. It's a, do you decide to do it just because the science was suggesting you should? Well, the whole column is just an excuse for pursuing my own therapeutic project under the, under the guise of... Just for everybody so they have it with the name of the column.

Oh, the name of the column is this column will change your life. It's meant to be a joke and to this day I'm still dealing with people who maybe don't don't see that but anyway yes it's meant to be a joke although you know depends how you define change I suppose. I think that you know the whole reason I stumbled into that in the first place was that this great journalistic excuse that you can you can say that you're doing things for research purposes that you would otherwise find weird or embarrassing to get involved in books you might want to read, workshops you might want to attend, and it's this kind of alibi to be doing it as a journalistic project.

I don't know if that resonates with you. It does, fully. But what do you think is, undergirding all of that for you, what's going on that you would have wanted these resources? I think wanting to be happier and less stressed and less anxious and calmer is pretty much universal. It's just that lots of people, maybe especially lots of British people, I don't know, don't want to come out and say it. I think that's changed a lot in recent years.

Well, meditation is certainly pretty big in your set at the pond. Absolutely, and it's not, you know, that's not an embarrassing thing to talk about. I don't think any more, at least in the circles I mix in. So when would you say you actually adopted the habit of meditation? How abiding is it? What do you, how much do you do? These questions, yeah, I mean, at the moment, I'm getting a good sort of 40 minutes sit in every day. That's pretty big.

Why not, it's only a third of what I hear you. Yeah, well, I'm not that yardstick. No, but I also feel bad talking it about it, in those terms just because that's like, when I say lately, I've been doing that, I mean mean like the last few weeks. I've been fairly consistent at getting at least a small chunk every day probably for the last nine, ten years now and I've been twice on a week long silent retreat which both of which were kind of really amazing. You wrote about it?

It's for me. Yeah, well the first one I went on I wrote about in my book about why positive thinking is bad and negative thinking is good. And I sort of exploring this idea of meditation as a kind of opposite to positive thinking, this idea that it's about sort of learning to be with all the negative stuff as well, instead of trying to stamp it out, which I think is really what's going on with a lot of the self-help industry. It's a kind of form of avoidance.

I remember when I was, I remember having the insight that, which is clearly not an original thought, back when I was writing my first book, that meditation is like the opposite of the power of positive thinking. It's the power of negative thinking. You're just kind of, It's power of negative thinking. You're just kind of, that's the little glib. But you're basically leaning into all the stuff that arises as a way to, to instead of being yanked around by it to see it clearly so that it doesn't own you.

And in the middle of my writing, my literary agent sent me your book, which had just come out. And it would be so angry because your book, the antidote, right, is called the antidote with the subtitles. The subtitle is happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. Right. And so I remember reading this book. I don't know how much I even read of it because it was making me so angry and anxious

being the middle of writing my book and to get yours. But yes, I mean, certainly that is a big, a big realization, I think, for people. Can you say more about why that was important and powerful for you? Yeah, I think there's this general principle that holds true, at least for me, which is that all sorts of negative thoughts and negative experiences, they get most of their energy, or a lot of their energy, from being thought. And if you give them space, if you let them sort of play themselves out, then you learn that they're actually, you know, they seem, you cut them down to size, you get some measure

of autonomy with regard to them. A thing that really works for me as well that I talk about in the book is a stoic technique, you know, from ancient Greece and Rome, this idea of really deliberately visualizing the worst case scenario when you're anxious about something, when you're worried about something, that instead of taking this positive thinking root of trying to sway yourself, that everything is going to go really, really well, you actually think through in a very sober way, okay, what would actually happen if it all went as wrong as it could go?

And there are two benefits to this. One is you almost always realize that the answer is not as badly as you were thinking, it could go. And even if it would be really bad, you know, there's a level of mental preparation that comes from sort of disarming these thoughts. They're no longer enemies who are squaring up to you to combat. They're just there and you've seen them and you've got the measure of them. And I think really meditation in my experience is that on a grand scale.

It's just that with all sorts of thoughts. Maybe sounds a little bit like what I'm doing in meditation is following trains of thought when of course what I'm aspiring to do is not follow trains of thought, but it just leads I suppose to this general relationship to negative thoughts, which is one of like, okay, I see what you are now. I don't need to be completely governed by running away from you or trying to stamp you out. Well, for what it's worth to me, everything you just said makes complete sense. It sounds right.

Oh, cool. I mean, I wouldn't call myself some sort of the all-end-all authority on these issues, but I think those are two separate techniques you're talking about, but I see absolutely how they work together and how meditation could be the sort of grander version of that in that what you're doing is giving, as you said, the whatever negative thoughts or emotions or even the positive ones enough space to exist without us fighting them or feeding them and then we see it clearly and we have the sort of freedom there to make some choices that are saner and wiser in the face of all the stimuli internal and external in our lives.

But I just want to go to the stoic technique that you talked about. I don't know. I mean, I have read enough of your book. I read the stoicism part of your book. This is years ago, so I'm really straining my memory here. So I might have incorporated, I might have been doing this naturally or I might have stolen it from your book, but this technique is something I do all the time because my, I mean, I'm sure this is true in every line of work, but it's definitely true in my line of work, but there's definitely true in my line of work. But there's so much insecurity, so much competition,

and any data point that can come over the transom of like, oh, so and so is getting some assignment that I wanted. And I go directly to, I mean, this is a Buddhist term here of this term, proponsha, where you, you know, some, something happens, and you immediately make this horror movie in your mind of how horrible everything is going to be because this thing has happened. So somebody will get some assignment that I wanted

and then I'll project myself into the brain of my boss who's thinking, you know, Harris is lame and old or whatever, fat, whatever, and how I'm gonna be living under a bridge, inexorably as a consequence of this one development, which may or may not mean anything. But I find actually, going, I find dealing with it meditatively, which is seeing it for what it is.

Oh yeah, this is proponsha, is super helpful, but I feel like the cognitive approach that you describe in the Stoics where again ancient Greek philosophers came up with of actually just like reckoning with So what would this be like? What would it be like if I lost my TV career? What would be like if my bosses came to me to me while I'm on a contract now? So they'll be problematic for them But what if they came to me I I renewed the contract in the fall.

And there were some moments where like, I got nervous and I mean, not that my boss has did anything wrong, but I'm paranoid. And so I started thinking about, what would it be like if I don't get another contract and I don't get another job? And what would it be like?

And having big conversations with my wife about it and it was so comforting to do that. It was actually the opposite of anxiety provoking. Once I really sat down and reckoned with, what would this look like for real? It was just knowing that I had a backup plan was massively useful. Do you find that's true with you?

Yeah, no, I mean, this is, you're talking about how I navigate life too. I think a one really interesting way of seeing it is to look at the flip side and to look at the idea of reassurance, right, because what you would be doing otherwise, if you were taking the other approach is trying to reassure yourself that everything is going to go fine. But every time I think you reassure yourself or you try to reassure a friend or a child, you know, that everything is going to go fine, You're so optically reinforcing this kind of shadow idea that's implicit there, that it will be absolutely terrible

if they didn't go fine. So, not only does reassurance need constant replenishment in a way that I find that worst-case scenario thinking doesn't, but it just builds the horror of what would happen if you turn that to be wrong. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm all the time asking myself, you know, this podcast, what's the worst thing that could happen in how I do here? And it's not that that wouldn't be bad for me or for your listeners. It's that it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad as what my sort of anxious mind is, is, and my

anxious emotional state is likely to. So we tend to assume that everything is basically on the level of a, of a nuclear war. Nothing bad is going to happen to you in this podcast. Nothing bad has ever happened to anybody on that podcast. I'm really glad to hear it. Uh, but, but you know, yeah, so we just think that everything is a huge catastrophe and as soon as you step through that, I mean partly I got this from Albert Ellis, you know, and from old sort of... I don't know who that is. He was a very influential cognitive psychotherapist who was heavily influenced by stochism. And he actually took it further.

He advised people to bring about the negative circumstances that they were that they were fearing. So he would tell you if you had a great fear of public embarrassment or something you want to do this. I did this. Yeah, no, I did this. It was it was excruciating. But you know, you tell us what you did. Okay. So he originally advised that you did this on the New York City subway, because he was based here in New York, but I did it at the time on the London underground. And all you do is you, you travel in the, uh, in, in the train car, and you speak out loud, the name of each station, as you get to it to everyone else in,

in the train car. And like, whenever I'm, it's a great section in your book. And this, by the way, I'm speaking from this must be six years ago when I read this. So, well, thank you. I'm glad it, I'm glad it stayed with you. I mean, there's, there's something, there is something so weirdly horrible about thinking about, about doing this. Oh, I would not want to do what you did. But it doesn't make sense that it should be that horrible, right?

Because you're not picking a fight with people, you're not even just like you're helping them, really, because you're telling them which station they're getting to. But most people, including myself, hearing about this idea, are sort of thrown into kind of gut-twisting state of anxiety. And so Ellis said, well, then there's only one answer you gotta do the thing, you know, because then that's the best possible way of confronting, of forcing a confrontation

between your ideas and your emotions and reality. And you know, it's not fun to do this on the central line of the London Underground, but you very quickly learn that it's not anywhere near as excruciating as you thought it was going to be. What was the worst part of it? The looks you get from people? No, the worst part was all in advance.

None of the actually doing it was as bad as the prospect. It's like that. I'm gonna mangle it, but the Mark Twain quote, the worst things that ever happened to me never actually happened. Right. It's the anticipation that kills you. No, absolutely. And what happens when you do it is that people do look up at you and, you know, they think there's something wrong with you, but they go immediately back to their phones or their newspapers, because, and I I mean this is another really important lesson I think when it comes to anxiety and stress and all sorts of negative emotions like that

is that you know almost everybody is completely obsessed with themselves. They do not have brain space to be worrying about and judging you and there's something incredibly liberating about remembering that. So you you know, one way to tell that no one is paying any attention to you is to bring attention to yourself and see how quickly they stop attending. It's a hugely liberating realization. You wanted Ricka Water, you drink, and I'm going to fill a buster, although I wanted to say what I was going to say anyway. So, say what I was going to say anyway. So there's a great expression or a great nugget of wisdom imparted to me by my former boss. So I guess he would be like two

ABC News presidents ago, David Weston. And David had had some negative articles written about him. One in the New Yorker that I thought was actually, I mean, again, this was in like the year 2000, but I remember I think he was really unfair. And everybody, you know, everybody kind of on some level wants to see their boss suffer, but even by those standards, I thought it was really unfair. And I'm years later where I was standing at a group conversation and somebody was asking David about this.

And he had this, he said, when you go through some sort of public embarrassment, it's like being seasick. For you, it feels like the world is ending, but for everybody else, it's only just mildly amusing. And that's exactly right. We're all the stars of our own movie. We have some bandwidth to pay attention to other people.

Yeah, we like watching reality TV shows and things like that. So we do want some mild titillation or the benefit of comparing ourselves to other people in a positive way, but we don't care that much. So that's actually a huge thing to know in terms of like all the amount of worrying we do

about how we're gonna look. Absolutely, yes. It just starts at a level that is completely disproportionate to the reality. There's some very famous social psychology study that involved. They figured out in some advanced study that it would embarrass a whole bunch of college students the most if they were wearing Barry Manelot T-shirts of all the different T-shirts they could wear and they sent them off into the cafe, the canteen at their university and asked them to estimate how many people were noticing that they were wearing this Barry

Manelot T-shirt and then they pulled the people who'd been in the restaurant at the time. And of course, you find an enormous discrepancy, like almost nobody noticed you were there, and people assume that a very large proportion of people noticed and were thinking mean thoughts. There's a big lesson there. So the book, and again, this is, you've got a lot of, you've got another book

you're working on and a bunch of more recent columns that I also want to talk about, but since we've been talking about the book, the book in part is anti-positive thinking Jeremiah. So I'm familiar with why the power of positive thinking is such a pernicious idea and the culture and I talk about it all the time, but will you hold forth on the merits of the power of positive thinking? Sure, yes. I mean, there are lots of different layers to this.

There are political objections and objections having to do with the effect on a broader societal level. But I think right down at the psychological root of it, there is just this fact that the human mind is not the kind of thing where if you give it a certain instruction and you know you're really relentless about it it will follow that instruction especially when it's the same mind that's dispensing the instruction right. So if you tell yourself to feel happier if you tell yourself to ignore negative things that are happening, you get this, you very reliably get this ironic backlash effect where all you can do is think about

the stressful and negative thoughts you're supposed to be eliminating from your mind. All you can do is constantly monitor your internal experience to see if your attempts to feel happier are working. The analogy that I start off with in the book is that old thing about where you challenge somebody to not think about a polar bear for a whole minute. And they've actually done this now in that sort of psychology labs, right, where they try to get people to narrate what they're thinking of in the minute that they spend not trying to think of a polar bear. And some people have a certain amount of success for a few seconds by sort of flooding

their mind with other alternative things, but always comes back to polar bears, because as soon as you're trying not to think about a polar bear, it's all you can think about. And I think that works as an analogy for all kinds of positive thinking and other kinds of self-help intervention. And they've shown, again, there's research that if you, people who try not to feel sad about sad news or who try not to feel grief after a bereavement, you know, and all these kind of contexts. That's when they get into real trouble with with sort of much more serious forms of

psychological suffering because they're trying to not feel these very natural emotions that are normal part of human life. So how does this become such a popular idea? emotions that are normal part of human life. So how does this become such a popular idea? That's a really interesting question and my book is not mainly a history. I mean, I think there are, I think on the one level it's just very appealing, right? It will be really nice if the answer to the challenge of human well-being were just that you could really sort of make a very firm decision. Well, you're right. Right, that you were just going to do it.

I think there's also something that can't be ignored about individualism, and I think this is partly why it's such an American tradition. This idea that it's all down to, it's all on you, that your social economic situation is not determined or necessarily even that important in terms of your ultimate success and your experience of life, that it's all down to just like really, really, really trying very hard to feel good and to achieve the stuff you want to achieve. It doesn't have the same kind of tradition in parts of Europe where I think people culturally tend to be just more sort of resigned to their fates, which is not, I don't think, very

useful alternative to positive thinking and it's not what I'm trying to advocate, but you know, there's this idea of, it's very, I think it's very linked to like the American dream, the idea of self-made people. And that partly is to do with the idea that it's like not society's job to transform your circumstances. It's an individual thing. Do you feel like the power of positive thinking, the secret, all the stuff is as big now as it was?

I feel like when the secret came out and the mid-Auts, I think, it was huge for a minute. Do you think it's still out there in a bigger way? I feel like this other, I mean, I'm not taking any credit for it, but I feel like this other way of thinking about things is really on the rise, and I don't think that things like the secret have the hold that they did back then. It might just be because I spend so much of my time sort of connecting to people and reading stuff and writing stuff from this other viewpoint, but I think that so much of what's happening

to the world, politically, economically, geopolitics, environmental, whatever it is, it's just incompatible with this idea that everything's basically going to be fine as long as we think happy thoughts. The idea that we're going to, if we're going to stay resilient and do some useful and important things, we're going to have to learn to accommodate shocks and surprises and uncertainty and unpredictability. I mean, that's just, has always been true of everybody's life really, but it's kind of unenorable now on the, on a world scale, I think. So I think that might have something to do with it. Although it's interesting, because I don't know if I've ever heard Donald Trump talk about the power of positive thinking, but his pastor was, I'm forgetting his name, but I think he was the guy who wrote the power of positive thinking.

No, I'm Vincent Peel. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Although, you know, you, that might be surprising to some people because this is the president who in his inaugural dress talked about American carnage. Right. But he actually, from what I can tell, and I'm out on a limb a little bit because I haven't read this stuff for a while,

but he actually was kind of raised with this. You can kind of see it in his style. This, this, and you can kind of see it in his style. This, you know, he's willing to kind of create his own reality, willing and able in many cases to create his own reality. So it's surprising to me, therefore, that we haven't seen a resurgence of the power of positive thinking, notwithstanding all of the negative forces in the world these days that might disobey people of the notion.

That's interesting. I mean, I think it might well be important in terms of his personal psychology, which is an endlessly compelling topic. But I think when you look at the sort of phenomenon of his election and the reasons that we understand for his election, it's much more to do with like people confronting and interpreting bad times in one or another different way. And I think, to some extent, wanting to get out of those bad times wanting to, I mean, I guess it's a desire for the positive in some sense, but I don't think I think in general this idea that you can think your way or sort of believe and use affirmations to force your

way into a state of happiness. I think it's sort of really on a downturn in general, and I can't say that that part of how things are changing in the modern world are objective. There are others. So back to you in meditation. So you said 9, 10 years ago you started doing it. What has it done for you? I think about this a lot because I kind of a difficult question to answer. I hang out with and know a bunch of people who are very serious

about this stuff and who have sort of, you know, ascended various ladders of insight according to different traditions. And I feel like I've got no, I'm just like still trying to figure out how to put the ladder on the ground. You know, um... Well, you're in good counseling. So in that sense, I can't sort of claim attainments or anything, but I think that, um, and actually, I don't even necessarily enjoy it much all the time. Or even thank you. I don't either. Right.

Really? That's not the point. Okay. Or even necessarily finish and feel better than when I started. What's another point? Let me see if you think this is the point. I don't know what I do find is like a really weird and completely Undeniable correlation between how things go in general When I'm doing it in general and how things go in general when I've

Fallen off the wagon interesting like how things go Objectively in your life. I mean, it's not objective because I it might just be pure placebo effects There we go, but I say bring on the placebo effect. That's fine fine. Yes, I just mean that you know a few days after various times in my life when I've completely Fallen off the wagon I will suddenly realize that you that I've been getting mad about stuff much more often or I've been spending an hour on Twitter for every two

hours of useful writing or something like that. And at some point this correlation is just sort of undeniable and then you have to do it. It's been challenged recently because we have a 16, 17-month-year-old, 17-month-the-hold at Sun. Congratulations. Thank you. What's the name? I'm trying not to give him a public profile just yet. I'm sorry to be quite about that, but maybe he, you know, that's as you know, that that throws an interesting

variable into sort of rituals and routines and. That's the time to give yourself a break. Yeah, I mean, I did for a while, but then I realized that actually it was a thing that was worth finding the time for. Yeah, that's right. That's right. But I don't know how hard you need to be on yourself. It's a double bind because in some ways you need it more in this period.

So I do think it's great to see if you can carve the time out. But there's for some people it's truly impossible to get 40 minutes, you know, even five. So I want to give people a break. Oh no, totally. So I want to give people a break. Oh no, totally. I think what I found in my own experience after the first few months was that any idea, as long as I was hopefully being decent with my wife in terms of the time that it takes and the fact that I can't be looking after the baby at the same time,

the idea that it was some sort of indulgence just isn't born out by, like I'm so much better to get along with. Does she see that? I think so. I haven't sort of a cross-questioned her about it. She definitely sees that I'm sometimes easier to get along with than other times. And I'm telling you that it's partly to do with when I'm meditating. Well, I believe you asked before if I thought this was the point. I definitely think this is the point. When people ask me, how do I know my meditation is working?

I answer, I just learned today that I'm not allowed to say this word. My producers have me no tell me. I'm not allowed to say this word. So let me just say, are you less of a word that starts with A and ends with an E? Is that okay? I'm looking at my producers who are laughing.

Are you less of that than used to be to yourself and others? And your answer is right squarely in the bucket there of, like yeah, you feel like things are going better, The answer is right squarely in the bucket there of like, yeah, you feel like things are going better, which is just a kind of another way of saying your life is more easeful, you're relating to internal and external stimuli in a more easeful way, you're not getting so clingy

around everything, and you're easier to the people around you, and so that to me sounds like it's meditation that's working. I don't have any attainments either. In other words, I haven't, I'm not enlightened that I know of. Right. I always wondered like one might not know. Maybe not. My passing understanding of the various Buddhist maps suggests that it's possible I said it gets to be pretty far along and not know. But again, I could be wrong about that too. But I don't see it in some ways not fully relevant in my view. The point is, are you easier to live with for yourself and others? And it sounds to me like you are. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. You had a good column recently about why meditators really annoy some people.

Can you say more about that? Yeah, I was just responding. There was another, I don't remember the details, but there was another bit of research or I think a meta-analysis suggesting that a lot of the science was not as firm. It was a science. It was an article that, or what they call it, a meta analysis where they review existing studies and make a conclusion, and the conclusion was meditation

does not boost compassion, I believe. Right, yes. And since that appeared, and since I wrote about it, I have been made very aware that there's also lots of other, you know, not just that there's lots of other evidence suggesting meditation is beneficial, but that there are kind of meta analyses of a similar stature that find the opposite. So I did not try in that column to sort of adjudicate what is right and what is wrong,

but I was sort of responding to this idea that whenever that happens among certain scientists and certain journalists, especially, there's a kind of enormous amount of glee. Like there is something that's a certain sector of people love about the idea that meditation will be a huge waste of time. Because I have, I read this, your column

was real satisfaction because I have a Google alert set on the words meditation and mindfulness. So anytime there's a big... Let's get about a thousand days of that. Well, every day at 11 o'clock at night, I get two emails that compile all the articles. Wow. And when this meta-analysis came out, there was just a deluge of headlines about how meditation is baloney, and there's so much glee. But you sort of talk about why you think that glee exists in the face of negative news

about meditation. Yeah, I think, you know, and I feel like I know what I speak about here partly because I've spent plenty of time being very sarcastic and print about sort of new agey things and things that I'm sure are very important spiritual practices to the people who do them and now I feel a bit bad about that. I think one of the things is this implication that you sometimes get from people in the meditation world that they have found secret to human happiness. Especially then, certain teachers and proponents whose whole bearing, whose whole affect and tone of voice and everything, suggests actually that they live in a state of perpetual monotonous calm that I think most people don't actually aspire to as a form of

happy life. I mean, I'm not saying that's what they're in a lives I really like, but the vibe that you sometimes get is that the answer to happiness is just to completely detach from all kind of experience of human pleasures and sadness. So I think that gets some people's nerves. I think that anyone telling you to do anything is problematic, and it's especially problematic with something like meditation because not trying is somehow part of what you're trying to do. So it's kind of like you should do this, but there's also no goal to it.

Is an annoying thing to say to somebody. Adam Grant wrote a lovely column a couple of years ago now about being a meditation rebel and refusing to have. He couldn't move for people telling him that he... Yeah, I... Well, it's interesting you brought that up. I haven't, I wasn't thinking I was going to talk about this, but so Adam Grant is a, he wrote a great book. I want to have him on the podcast. It's called Given Taken. It's about, um, sort of givers and takers in a workplace

setting and how actually altruism, um,uitively be a really positive strategy, a really successful strategy. But he wrote, and he's at the University of Pennsylvania, I think. I think so, yeah. Really smart, guys. If he said something mean about you in that column, I can't remember. He didn't say anything mean about me. He's not, he's not like that.

I don't know him, but he's not, from all the work I've seen of his, he's not some jerk out there just like throwing bombs at individuals. And so actually I say this with a lot of respect for him. And again, he's somebody I want to have on the podcast, but that column, he wrote a column in the New York Times making fun of, I'm really complaining about people who lecture other people to meditate, which by the way, I agree with, I agree with what you're saying. Right. And you don't do, by the way, yes, I don't think you do do. So I try not to because I tried it at home with my wife

and it didn't go in pear shape quickly. So the point is well taken and the point of your column, of your column, that the glee that we see among people who are kind of meditation rebels or critics whenever there's negative headline, I think is fueled by the fact that those of us who do meditate can be very, very, very annoying in our proselytizing. So I don't actually disagree with what Adam Grant wrote in the column that you're referencing

the New York Times column, which was a couple years ago, which he just recently refashioned for a television column on CBS Sunday morning. Oh, really? And my beef with both of those things, and again, I say this as somebody who thinks Adam Grant is great, and so Adam, if you're listening, I want to have you on the podcast for many, many reasons. But it's, here's my beef, which is that somebody of his stature using a platform as powerful as the New York Times and CBS to make a case that actually will be detrimental to a practice

that we know is good for you, is a waste of time, and is in fact not a positive move. It is a minor point to say that people who proselytize for meditation are annoying. It is a major point to say that there are people out there. In fact, I would argue all of humanity who are in pain and are suffering and could use this thing. And I would argue that in service of making a minor point, he has done real damage to the major important work, which is waking people up to the fact that this is a practice that can be really useful for them. So if I were to use the New York Times

and CBS, or more likely in this case, ABC, to make the argument that people who lecture me about exercise are so annoying. Well, that's just a kind of a dumb move, especially since, I mean, especially so with meditation because it's in a much more precarious position than exercise. Exercise isn't an danger of any moment of like, you know, being thoroughly debunked. I don't think meditation is going to be thoroughly debunked, but I'm always worried that it's something could happen and it would take this thing that's still new and a consciousness and spoil it and give it such a bad reputation that we'd be back where we were in the 80s with the thing. In the 80s, sushi and yoga were weird and now they're okay. I think we're in that kind of tentative position with meditation.

So to use a platform like the New York Times and CBS to make this case, which yeah, technically is accurate. There's no question people who lecture you about the, you should meditate or kind of telling you you're defective. Yeah, that's all true. But to use a platform like that, I think is, I don't know, not, I don't want to go so far as to say it's irresponsible, but like I would just say it's not helpful.

I think that's a good argument that I hadn't considered. I think that the what I was coming from is that, as an act of expressing this irritation, I feel like that irritation is out there, it's okay to feel it. This idea that you are allowed to feel a little bit annoyed by some of the ways this message is communicated. I feel like at least in some people's cases that could make them less antagonistic towards the whole thing because it would just be a question of being like, yep, okay, you know, I'm not imagining it. There is kind of like a whole, uh, fad going on and that

sort of just grants some of the permission to feel that. But I accept that that probably is not the main, uh, effect of a piece like that. But what I was trying to say towards the end of my column is that there's a real sense in which none of this matters. There's a real sense in which the science does matter, both for credibility and because if you're gonna say, spend public money in schools or something like that, you've really gotta be sure you're doing something that does what you say it does.

But on a personal level in your individual life, or for me, the idea that I would ever stop because the, a stop meditating, because the sort of critical mass of failed studies, just got too great, is totally weird to me because the effects are there every day in my life when I'm doing it. It might be placebo but it's still in a real effect in my life. It would just be very strange to stop doing that. As I said, if someone told me that hanging out with my closest friends wasn't really making me as happy as I thought it was. It's like, what do you do with that information? You know, it's like, it's okay, but I think it does. And when it comes to happiness and to general subjective questions about the quality of life,

then how things seem is how things are? Because seeming is the whole game. So, you know, I would say, I would encourage people who are considering dipping a toe in the water to not see the science as kind of dictating their own what they do. And say that you're allowed to be irritated with the way some people talk about it, and that shouldn't stop you either.

Well said. Stay tuned. More of our conversation is on the way after the... So you're working on a book about time and busyness and time management. And why, I'm just quoting from an email you sent us and why so many quote unquote productivity techniques just make people feel busier and what we might do instead. So I have to say I don't use a lot of productivity techniques, but I do feel time starved. I do feel like I have too much going on and at times get crazy. So I would just love to hear you can say anything you want. I just love to hear why you do get interested in this. What have you learned thus far, etc., etc.

Sure. I'll give it a go. The really annoying thing I'm learning about working on a book on this topic is that any delay that I introduced to the writing process is just the cause of so many sarcastic comments from like my nearest and nearest. I know I get I'm writing process is just the cause of so many sarcastic comments from my nearest and nearest. Oh, I know, I get, I look, I'm the Mr. Meditation. So anytime I throw a temper tantrum, it's like, oh, you're tempered and have your name, blah, blah, blah, yeah, it's very annoying.

What I mean, my interest comes from the same place, I think, which is that I've written about this stuff in a journalistic context. And again, it's because I, you know, that was an alibi for being personally interested in wanting to, you know, get more done, feel calmer about how much I had to do all the rest of it. And in this case, I think what I've really come to confront is, sure, productivity techniques, that's like a thing that's like a subculture, but it's just kind of an extreme expression of something

that I think we're all as a society very locked into, which is this idea that like efficiency is the answer to having too much on our plates, that sort of pushing yourself faster, working longer hours, having more self-discipline, like this is ultimately the way to get on top of everything and to feel in control of time. And one of the arguments that I'm making in this book, there's a lot of different things I'm trying to look at, but is that in a world where the inputs are effectively infinite, where you could always get more emails, you could always have more ideas, you could always, your over demanding boss could always put more tasks on your desk.

Getting more efficient at doing stuff just means that you work even more in an even more rushed fashion through an infinite pile of tasks that you never get to the end of. There's some amazing and it's also affected by sort of social expectation, right? Because if you the the better and faster you get at doing things the more you expect to yourself, the more other people expect of you. To some extent, this is just the old idea that, you know, if you want something doing ask a busy person, because you're just going to attract more work, attract more emails. If you get really, really good at answering emails, I discovered this when I, for a brief time, achieved

the dream of inbox zero. If you get really good at answering emails, you just get more emails than if you were worth a bit because firstly you get a reputation for being responsive. So, you know, people come to you rather than finding some other answer to their question. And then secondly, you know, if you reply to an email, you usually generate a reply to that reply and on it goes. So in other words, the more you get good at getting through this, the busier you get. And I think that isn't just email. I think that works for all sorts of things in our lives.

And as I say, it works for social expectations too. There's some great research into what happened when so-called labor-saving household devices, washing machines and vacuum cleaners, started to become prevalent in North America and in Europe. People using them primarily at that time anyway, housewives and domestic servants, they got busier because the standard of cleanliness that was expected now that you could reach a higher standard of cleanliness just went up. So efficiency enables you to do more and then there's the expectation that you will indeed do more and to sort of ratchet that never stops. So I think that's one of the things I'm trying

to look at here is if you really turn to the truth of the fact that we live in this world increasingly of infinite inputs, infinite things you could be doing, infinite things you might be missing out on, you begin to see that whatever the solution to feeling at peace with time is, it's definitely not going to be climbing even more quickly up an incident mountain that doesn't have a summit. It's going to be some kind of really sort of facing up to the trade-offs that are required and deciding what matters so much that you're willing to let other things that are really important, but not as as important for by the wayside. I don't know, I feel like you must have figured something out about all this when I

look at the number of things you do and the number of good things you do. I would have thought you're not spending all your day answering emails that you don't really need to answer. You've figured something out. I haven't. I haven't. I really just didn't what you figure out. I mean, I do, I feel like I'm reasonably highly functioning, but I do feel crazed. And well, I mean, one little thing I do is I make to-do list, to-do list, not several. This doesn't work for everybody because we have everybody's different. But for me, when I walk into the office this morning, for example, I was,

I had this cloud above me. If I just know I have a ton of stuff to do, I find it really useful to write a list, to see it all there in front of me and to start with the easy stuff first and just start crossing stuff off. That really makes me feel like making progress. I have some control. I know what my priorities are, but that doesn't, I don't, I have some control, I know what my priorities are, but that doesn't, I don't, I'm in Sada, panacea.

No, and I think it has a lot of plus points, I think the idea of getting stuff out of your brain, which, you know, is a well-known sort of waiter, achieve a bit more calm about stuff, I think that's absolutely real. It almost has a kind of slightly kind of meditative sort of feel to the idea because it's something to do with just identifying from stuff and not having it knocking around only in your mind. But I think one of there are lots of negative consequences of that kind of approach too. One thing that I've always struggled with in my work,

and I'm getting a bit better at as a result of trying to write about this whole question of finding a more peaceful relationship to time, is this idea that of trying to clear the decks and tie up loose ends, and if you sort of take the attitude that you're going to postpone the stuff that really matters until you've got always kind of take the attitude that you're going to postpone the stuff that really matters until you've got always kind of annoying little things that are dragging at your attention until you've got them out of the way, if the supply of those things is effectively infinite and you're never going to get them out of the way, and then you're going to fall into what I call in my current draft of the book anyway, the importance trap where you get really good at doing the things that don't matter and you never get around to doing the things that do matter because they you think you need lots of time and the tension and you need to be fresh and that time never comes.

And that's another problem I think with all these kind of approach to time and all these productivity techniques is that it causes you constantly to live in the future and be thinking about like, you're trying to get somewhere, but you're never quite here now. And basically, I think that the path through this, you know, there are various individual techniques I could talk about, but I think the sort of high level path through it is ultimately something to do with sort of accepting the truth that we are incredibly finite, that we don't have very much time and don't have the capacity

to pay attention to many things at once. That just is the way it is, that you don't need to spend your life trying to achieve kind of escape velocity and become omnipotent with regard to time and productivity because you absolutely never will. When you fall back into that realization, I don't think it's a question of resignation or despair. I think it's that then you really are in a position to make the right choices, you know, to say, okay, I have this amount of time today. I am definitely going to disappoint somebody, I'm going to fail in some roles,

I'm going to not do something that it would have been good to do. That's a guarantee. So it's not like I need to carry on desperately trying to avoid that circumstance because it's definitely going to happen. So then the much more important question becomes, who am I going to disappoint and anger and annoy? What roles am I going to fail in? And then at least you get to make the right decision, or a good decision, or a conscious decision. I'm not saying I do this perfectly every day, far from it, but I do think what

it really comes down to is that the best time management technique is to decide what matters most. It's a bit of a joke, I guess, but you know, decide what matters most, make time for that stuff. Yes. There is no step three, you know, things will fall by the wayside, but they were going to anyway. So how do you know that everything you just said makes complete sense to me? But one of the things I've been struggling with lately is so I one of the probably one of the things that I've done that's just made my calendar a war zone is that I say yes to a lot of like I will do a bunch of interviews. You know, I'll have I'll be I'll do interviews for other people or I'll take I'll do a bunch of interviews. I'll do interviews for other people, or I'll put a phone call on my calendar, or whatever.

Then my day is just destroyed, and I don't have any clear time to think about the really important things like my next book or whatever. So I'm trying to learn how to say no in a way that is actually okay. Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, I have a few. I think that, because that's what you're talking about the answer. Right, no, that's a big part of the challenge. Absolutely. And I mean, I think one of the one of the problems is that this whole idea that you need to know how to say no, which has become much more prevalent in the culture, I think, probably in the in recent times, it tends to get interpreted implicitly as how do you say no to all the stuff that you don't really care about, so that you can do the stuff that you care about. But I think this is, there's a lovely quote

that I don't remember the Baton from Elizabeth Gilbert, who says that the real challenge, obviously, is learning to say no to things that you really do want to do, and that really do matter, because someone in your position, you're not gonna get, if you look at someone in your position, you're not, you're not going to get, if you look at the things that come to you, the opportunities that come to you that are genuinely good, they're

not going to be perfectly tailored to the working day and then everything else you're getting us to do is obviously nonsense. You're going to get us to do more genuinely good things than there is time for. So I think you know it starts with this idea that like there isn't a way out here, you're going to be saying notice some things that really matter and you can do it consciously or you can sort of do it just by default because you're already too busy when something very very important if you're work or your family or whatever comes up comes up very, very important if you work or your family or whatever comes up, comes up that day. So you need to, I mean, I try to start from this idea that this is inevitable. I'm not, it's not a question of suggesting that you turn down good things.

It's start, start from the idea that every day you are turning down good things, every time you decide to use an hour for one thing rather than anything else, you're automatically turning down good things. There's an old cliched story in loads of time management books that I'm sure you've read at some point, where this idea of how to fit, it's about a university professor, I think, who presents his students with a jar, a glass jar, and then several big rocks and some smaller pebbles and some pieces of sand, and he challenges them to fit everything into the jar, and these students who are apparently in this example kind of idiots, they put all the sand in first and then all the pebbles and then there's no room for

the big rocks. And he then very smuggly dumps everything out again, puts the big rocks in first and then everything else fits around. The idea that the moral of this story is supposed to be that if you make time for the things that matter the most, first, then everything will fit smoothly into your life. But this is a total fraud, this story, because he's just completely rigged the example by only having a few big rocks. I think the main problem that we face today is that there are too many big rocks to fit into any glass jar. I hope that made sense.

It does. I'm with you. And you're going to have to take some, you're going to have to accept that there are some big rocks that don't get into the jar at all. Just one other thing, I think this is fueled a lot by this trend for kind of minimalism and decluttering and the idea of stripping things down to the essentials. The subtext of that is that, you know, if you get rid of everything that doesn't really

matter, you'll have time for everything that really matters. But the question is, like, what are you going to do if you don't have enough time for everything that does really matter? And you know, I mean, it's easier to say than to practice, but I as a say, I think we're already already practicing it. It's a question of becoming more conscious about it. Yeah, but I think a lot of that, all of it makes sense. The, I guess my, now is the time to tell me if some of it doesn't, because it's not too late.

I'm not hearing anything, it doesn't make any sense, but it just seems to me that there's a, there are two levels to this because there's the level of a big rocks is that you know I can only attack I can only have so many missions if somebody came to me today and said Dan I want you to like be you know I want you to devote a ton of time to making hockey as popular in the United States as is in Canada. I wouldn't be able to put that big rock in the jar because I just have too many big, big rocks. Um, so I'm making those decisions all the time. Somebody comes to me with, with one of the big rock.

I'm basically going to say no, I got enough. But then there's also just kind of the, the pebbles in the sand every day of, you know, maybe I should be doing the umpteenth interview on somebody's podcast, but no, I've decided that at some point, I can't say yes to everything, or I can't get on the phone for a half hour with everybody who wants to get on the phone. So I guess I'm saying there are two levels and we need to think strategically on both of those levels. Yes, and I think partly it's to do with pushing the bar that these things have to clear. I'm guessing

that in your situation it would be something to do with pushing a bit higher the bar that these things have to clear right because undoubtedly You do get podcasts requests or interview requests that It doesn't occur to you to accept that you're like that is just not a good use of my time So I think you know, it's it's partly a question of them of kind of you know Going a bit further than one is comfortable with in terms of where you set that cut off.

Like I call Derek Sivers, entrepreneur who's written some really interesting stuff online about all this, has this idea that's gained a lot of traction, that it should be hell yeah or it's a no. Which I think is doesn't work in every single circumstance and he wouldn't say it works in every single circumstance, but there is that kind of, there's that idea of kind of artificially bringing higher the bar, that something has to clear. I think that's provocative in a useful way. Right. Yes, I think that's exactly what he would say about it. And you know, this is a, there's a risk

in talking in this way of sort of falling into a way of talking that is people who, you know, get to do really fun jobs where tons of fun kind of opportunities come in the course of the day. And, you know, plenty of people could hear that and be like, I have to answer every email at my boss sends because that's otherwise, you know, that's a part of the terms of doing my job or, you know, any other number of ways of being overwhelmed in terms of time in your life where you really don't feel that you have that

kind of choice. I think the really important thing to emphasize, the thing that is universal is that you have a finite amount of time and you're always choosing. And you know, you might be in a situation where the choices you have to make are not between things that excite you. It might be that, you know, you really do just have to do a lot of things that excite you, it might be that you really do just have to do a lot of things that you wish you didn't in order to meet your basic goals of feeding your family. But it's the same basic idea that you're going to have to let some things go into a favor of higher things, things that matter to you more. And yet I think everything about the culture encourages us to think that if we drove ourselves

harder and found the right techniques, we wouldn't have to make those choices. Yes. No, I think it's a really good point. And I feel, I'll just say in closing, it feels to me like you're going to do for time management where you did for happiness in your first book. It's like there are people out there selling panaceas and happiness that's the power of positive thinking, in time management, it's these hacks, these productivity techniques that are like going

to make you infinitely effective, and you're actually saying no, no, no, actually, it's more complicated than that. Well, and also that if you turn to face certain facts about the situation that seem at first depressing, it isn't depressing in the long run because you are looking at the truth, and from there you can do all sorts of things in a much more empowered way because you're not deceiving yourself anymore. There you go, that's meditative. Quintessentially Buddhist. The final thing I always like to do is just do what I kind of jokingly call the plug zone. Can you just, where can we find your columns? Where are you in social media? Again, the name

of the first book. Give us everything. You can find my columns mainly at thegardian.com. I'm... And again, it's called this column will change your life. It's called this column will change your life. I'm on Twitter too much at Oliver Birkman, the URKE MAN, and the book is, the antidote happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. Awesome, thank you, great job. Thank you very, very much. Survived.

Yes. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast if you liked it. Please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren F.

Ron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Hey, I'm Ericia, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true

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