Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 181: Dr. Jennifer Ashton, Life After Suicide

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

With suicide being the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, the likelihood is that nearly every person in this country knows someone who has died by suicide. In just the last couple of weeks, we learned of the suicides of three people linked by American tragedies - two survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the father of a child who was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Jeremy Richman, a recent guest on our podcast. ABC's Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton has witnessed firsthand the impact of a loved one's suicide. When her ex-husband killed himself soon after their divorce, her world - and that of her children - was shattered. In a quest to provide comfort and solace to the countless others who have had to face the aftermath of suicide, Dr. Ashton joins us this week, not as a medical professional, but as a person whose family has been rocked by suicide, who found the courage, community and grit to move on with her life. The Plug Zone Website: https://jenniferashtonmd.com/# Book: https://jenniferashtonmd.com/book/life-after-suicide/ Social: @DrJAshton See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Before we start, let me just get one quick piece of business out of the way. And that business is this. I can't believe it's come to this, but we are now at the fifth anniversary of the publication of 10% happier. The original book came out in March of 2014, and the fifth anniversary edition of the book is coming out on April 16th.

So coming up soon, and you can pre-order it right now at hc.com slash happier, Harper Collins, hc.com slash happier, HarperCollins, hc.com slash happier. And there's a new preface that I've written that's in there. And also there's an expanded list of guided meditations in the back of the book from 10% happier app teachers, including Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzburg. And if you buy the book, you get free access to audio versions of those meditations in the 10% happier app and if you're already a subscriber to the app then you'll get them anyway.

So go check that out if you're so inclined. Alright, that's the item of business. Now let's get to the show and it's, this is a heavy episode, I'm not going to lie to you. I was blown away and not in a good way by a piece of news that came over the Transome recently, which is that a former guest on this show, a man who sat right here in the studio in the chair that I'm looking at right now, Jeremy Richmond recently committed suicide took his own life. He was the father of a little girl who was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown and handled the

aftermath in an extraordinary way by creating a foundation called the AVL foundation named after his daughter AVL, and it was all about looking into, he used his background as a, in neuroscience to launch a foundation to look into what goes wrong with the brain that would cause people to resort to unbelievable levels of violence. If you go back and listen to the episode just a few months ago on this show, I mean, he was an incredible human being, just radiant, really, despite his grief about which he was extremely open. So he did not strike me, and I don't think he'll strike you you if you go back and listen to the episode of somebody who is in denial in any way. Had really done you know taken tremendous steps to create meaning.

In the face of this overwhelming suffering at the he had happened to him the worst thing I think that can happen to anybody, in my opinion. And he, as I said, just handled it beautifully by being constructive in the wake of this disaster. And also went on quite, you know, he talks about this very in a very moving way in the podcast interview that I did with him a few months ago, went on to have more children. And so I was shocked when I heard that he had taken his own life. And I heard from a lot of you about it on Twitter. And so I wanted to do something in his honor and also to do something educational and meaningful on this issue of suicide, where we are in the United States right now seeing record levels of suicide.

So what's going on here? What can be done about it? And so my mind immediately went to my colleague, Dr. Jen Ashton, who is the chief medical correspondent and health editor here at ABC News, and she's a friend and somebody I have an enormous amount of respect for. She's a board certified OB-GYN has written several books. She has a new book that's coming out in April. And I normally would have waited until April to interview her about this late April when the book comes out. But the book is called Life After Suicide. So I got in touch with her and asked her if we could speed things up

so that I could talk to her about her book, but also Jeremy's case. Because as you'll hear, she knew Jeremy. She'd met him, and that's a complete coincidence. So anyway, she's written a book called Life After Suicide because she had a horrible thing happen to her Which is that shortly after her divorce from her husband Rob was also a physician. He took his own life They had two children together. It's been obviously extremely difficult for those children and This was a couple of years ago and she's gone on to in my opinion very bravely write this book life after suicide which is in part a memoir about her

experiences but also tracks the stories of other folks who've endured this as suicide in in the family or in their close circle of friends and so I wanted to have her come on talk about about her story and also to give all of us some hopefully useful information in the wake of this disaster that's hit our little 10% happier world here. So we talk as I often structure these conversations, we start up by talking about Jen's history with meditation. And she does have a lot of history with meditation, the meditation practice, and then we talk about what happened to her and her husband and her family.

She's very open about that, and then we talk about Jeremy. And yeah, I'm very grateful to Jen for coming on and opening up in the way in which she did, and for doing it in an expedited fashion. So thanks to Jen, and here you go. Here she is, Dr. Jennifer Ashton. Nice to see you. Likewise.

Tough topic, but always great to see you no matter what. Let me just start before we get into suicide. Let's talk about your history of meditation. How did you get to meditation? So you and I have talked about this on set when we have like whopping 10 seconds, where we're not working. And I feel like meditation is kind of like a club.

Do you ever feel that way, right? Like when you meet someone who meditates, you're like, oh, what do you do? What do I do? And so I think you and I were like that too. And I think when your first book came out and we started, I was shared with you my experience, which was, I had always been curious about meditation.

Because I describe myself as a relentless self-improver attempt. So I'm always looking for ways to be healthier, especially as a doctor, right? And I kind of got to the point in my life when I was in my early 40s where I thought, well, I'm doing everything pretty well from the neck down, and I was totally ignoring the neck up. Right? I mean, not uncommon. Not uncommon at all. And so I had met a bunch of people coincidentally or maybe not coincidentally, if you believe in the cosmic universe, which I totally do, who had learned meditation and they were like you, you know, it had changed their lives, it had benefited their lives in so many ways.

And finally, it was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back and I met one last person and I said, okay, that's it. The universe is trying to give me a message I need to learn. So I am so type A that I had to learn a method, a technique, because for years people had said, no, there's no right or wrong way. I don't, I don't agree with it. Right. You don't. Well, I mean, there are lots of techniques, but you can sit and close your eyes and think about what you're going to have for lunch and think you're meditating, but that's not meant exactly. But I didn't know that. So as a complete novice,

as someone who is completely naive to meditation, when I would hear people say, no, there's no right or wrong way, there's no method. I, as a student, a perpetual student just thought, that can't be like that just doesn't make sense to me, right? It doesn't make sense to me either. What are you going to do just sit there and hope, you know, it's a, I would fall asleep. You're the music of the spheres. I'm not, yes, you definitely need a technique in my opinion.

Right. So the only technique that just coincidentally happened to present itself to me through these random people that I had spoken to about it was happened to BTM or Transcendental Meditation. So I took my four days of sequential lessons and my teacher said, I said, okay, so do I just start doing it? And he said, yeah, you know, ideally it's 20 minutes twice a day, but if you do once a day, that's fine too. And you know, if you don't feel any different in two weeks, just stop. And I said, what? And he said, yeah, no one doesn't feel different in two weeks. And he was right. And then, and that was it. But. But this was probably five years ago now. And so, you know, I was pretty consistent for a couple of years and then when Rob died,

I actually at the time I probably needed it the most is when I stopped and I just got re into it, you know, beginning of 2019 and just as, you know, that example that I just shared of what the, my teacher said about feeling different. I mean, I feel a night and day difference in a good way. So I'm very glad I'm back in the practice. I want to hear more about how it's made a difference right now, but let's just go back in time to when you first started doing it. How did you feel different?

And what, what, what were the important things in your life that you wanted to, that made you want to feel different? Well, what was funny is that my kids who are, well, then they were just middle teenagers. Now they're later teenagers, you know, older end of their teenage years. They saw a difference in me immediately. And when I said to them, oh really? Like, what do you see?

And Chloe, my daughter, who I think was 15 then, said, oh, you're much more relaxed. And I said, well, how uptight was I before that? And she goes, a pretty uptight. And I didn't even know. So I think that's super interesting that they noticed a difference. But what I feel, and this is just my kind of how it registers

with me all the time, is when I meditate, I feel a completely different degree of mental energy. So I feel focused, I feel mentally energetic, I feel positive in my mood because you know we all can get kind of like down on life or the world or some person or an event or whatever. I notice that much less and I just feel like it gives me a buffer. A buffer. Yeah, like a cushion. Right.

I'm probably on a bunch of levels. Oh, yeah. Yeah, in a moment by moment level, it can give you a cushion between something happens, like whatever you get cut off in traffic, and your response to it, that's an important cushion. But then there's, I think, maybe what you're referring to, I'll also just generally speaking on a macro

level, there are lots of ups and downs and to have some sort of psychological money in the bank gives you a cushion against the forces that are buffeting us constantly. Totally. Or money in the bank or gas in the tank. That's how I feel it. And the mental efficiency is really interesting to me because at baseline, I generally feel pretty mentally efficient. However, when I meditate, I feel like I'm supercharged, but in a calm way, if that makes sense. So I feel like I don't have the chatter of my own inner head,

you know, saying, oh, well, what about doing that or what about doing that? Or do you really feel like doing that? Like that voice, which we all have in our consciousness, as I've learned more and more about kind of our psyche and consciousness, that voice is not as loud or as distracting when I'm meditating. I would imagine the voice for you at baseline is reasonably loud. I mean, you're a kick ass OB-GYN with a very... You have risen pretty fast in the cutthroat world of TV news while maintaining a medical practice. You have, how many kids do?

Two. I couldn't handle more than two. Well, who knows? But you've got two teenagers, and this is before the Fiasco with Rob. So I'm just projecting here. I can imagine that that meditation would be particularly useful in your case. Oh, I think it's been the secret weapon in a lot of ways. I mean, just like the reason I draw that comparison

to the below the neck health and above the neck health, and I use that all the time when I talk about mindfulness, mental health, spirituality, anything that's going on in the brain, right, is because nothing below the neck is going to work well if the stuff above the neck is not working well. And the same way that I talk to friends and family and patients and our viewers on ABC about what they can do for their below the neck health. You know, like I say, listen, sleep is not a luxury. It's a medical necessity.

People ask me all the time, oh, how do you do whatever you, you know, you do, you get up at five in the morning, you go to GMA, then you go to see some patients, then you come back. I'm off in at ABC at seven o'clock at night. I'm writing my segment until eight o'clock at night. I'm working out and they go, how do you do that? And I say, I get seven to eight hours of sleep a night. I'm writing my segment until eight o'clock at night. I'm working out and they go, how do you do that? And I say, I get seven to eight hours of sleep a night. So I'm, I have energy for that day. How do you find time to do everything you just listed plus seven to eight hours of sleep a night plus 20 to 40 minutes of meditation a day? Oh, I have no social like no. I know. No, no,

well, now I do. Thank God. But I mean, it's time management. And I think that's where meditation and sleep has really helped me be efficient with my time. And that doesn't come from outside that comes from within, if that makes sense, right? That comes from not being distracted by the voice that says, maybe now's a good time to text your mom or maybe now's a good time to reach out to that person. It's all kind of what we say in medicine and in media triaging, right? So at any given moment, I'm like, how should I use this minute, this hour to its maximum kind of benefit. And that's different at different times of the day, but my ability to manage my time comes from the fact that I'm not sleep deprived,

comes from the fact that I exercise my body, which is the only hour of my day that is purely for myself other than my 20 minutes of meditation. And it comes from the fact that I don't waste time when it's time for me to go to sleep to get my seven hours. I'm not flipping through Facebook or watching something on TV. And that's what I mean kind of when I say like, well, you know, my social life, like not that those things can't be fit into people's day. It's just that my day, they don't usually have time. I mean, look, I mean, you know the studies better than I do, but there's been, there have

been studies showing a link between social media usage and depression. Totally. So, and anxiety. So, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression among young people today who've grown up in this area. So I don't think you're missing much by. Right. Although I do want to just say one thing about that, which is kind of interesting. And we've talked about this as well, which is, you know, this fake kind of Facebook or Instagram perfection in life. I think there are two sides to look at that, you know,

two different perspectives. One is that, well that's not realistic, right? No one's life is that perfect all the time. No one looks that good all the time. Why are we only seeing like the victories and the celebrations? And then the other side is, you know what, it's, it would be like watching the happy channel kind of like, yeah, it's sometimes it's would be like watching the happy channel, kind of. Like, yeah, sometimes it's nice to just see like, oh, well, that's nice. And that's nice too. And that looks pretty. And that guy looks good.

And they're doing nice things because there's a lot of bad stuff that we're exposed to as well. So, I mean, I think that it's not one over the other. It's just two different perspectives for that. But yeah, I think too much is just, I just don't have time for it. That's the bottom line. Yeah. I think the deleterious effect of it is that it, well, I don't disagree with anything you just said. And I'm not like blanket anti-social media. I'm on social media. As are you, I'm just, I just think it fires up what in the meditation circles is, is referred to

as the comparing mind and can make you feel isolated and inferior. And yeah, it's tough. Anyway, so I know this is an uncomfortable thing to talk about. We talk about, yeah, what happened with Rob? Yeah. So in February of 2017, the father of my children, Rob, who I had been married to for 21 years, took his life. Were you married at the time? We had been divorced for two weeks. And it's interesting. I just wrote an article for a popular magazine and they wanted it in 800 words, a description of what happened. And the way I described it is, you know, we had gone through

marital counseling therapy. We had what I called and what he would call if he were sitting here and evolved divorce. So there was no screaming, there was no viciousness, we weren't loyered up, we weren't trying to eviscerate and destroy each other. It was evolved. It was just, you know what, we can do this differently. We just didn't want to be married to each other anymore, but we were still friends, we still loved each other anymore, but we were still friends, we still loved each other, and ironically, we were always the best as co-parents. And so literally two weeks before, two and a half weeks before Rob's death, we were in

a courtroom finalizing, you know, what you have to do in the state of New Jersey, you have to show up in court, finalizing our divorce and we hugged each other afterwards. And we were texting the day before Rob killed himself about our son who had been home sick. And his suicide came out of the blue. It came without warning. He was a doctor, obviously I'm a doctor. There were no none of the classic warning signs. And I mean I had never,

even though I had known, of course, like sadly most of us do, people very close to me who had died by suicide, the thought that it would ever strike my family was like totally incomprehensible, totally. And to understand what that was like for me, I think you first have to understand that, you know, and this is ironically a little similar to your story when your first book came out and you explained your TV moment, right? It's part of why that was, I'm sure so hard, is because on the surface, it looks like you have your f*** together, right? Like always.

And you have a major job and you're attractive and you're smart and you're doing, and then until you're smart and you're doing it, and then until you're not. And that basically encapsulates what I was slammed and confronted with when Rob died by suicide, because I had done a really good job in my life of putting a lot of time and effort into things that paid back, so to speak, with success. And I don't mean financially. Like, you know, if I decided to get a degree in nutrition, I got a degree in nutrition. If, you know, I had two children exactly when I wanted to in medical school and graduated at the top, you know, 20% of my class.

And I did that. And I, you know, and everything on paper looked perfect. But inside for 10 years, I was in a really unhappy marriage and not the war of the roses unhappy marriage. Like that's the thing is that there was not any fighting. Our kids never saw fighting. Our kids never saw fighting, our friends never saw fighting. It just was two people that grew apart.

And I for so long, Dan, walked around literally and this was the, this is what I said to myself. Well, Jen, you can't have it all. You've got two great careers, you have your health and you've two great kids. So you don't have a relationship. Everyone has to deal with something. And I was literally resigned to the fact that that was going to be the rest of my life. And when it, when our marriage counseling didn't work, and when we finally decided that we would be, it was kinder and more loving and respectful to each other

and to our children to live apart and to end our marriage. Is when I really kind of, I had a bigger epiphany that I had a responsibility not just to my children, but to myself as a human being on this planet to live the best life I could live. And that involved not faking it through an unhappy marriage. So I kind of dealt with that, which took a lot. And I thought I was in the clear. I literally thought like, wow, we did this. Like we went through our year of getting divorced and our kids are good and we're good and we're civil and we didn't like try to rip each other's throats out and then two weeks later he killed himself. And did you think yourself? It's my fault? Oh totally, totally. It's the first thing I said to my brother when my brother arrived at my apartment an hour later.

And he's, and my brother, who's also a doctor, said to me, Jen, you're a doctor. You know that divorce doesn't cause suicide. That if Rob was going to kill himself, he would have killed himself, married to you or not married to you. And to this day, there are, you know, if you divided up my brain, probably 90% of it would know that that's true. And the 10% emotional part still feels like it's my fault. And I think that's probably, unfortunately, a universal pain that anyone who's been affected by the suicide of a loved one feels.

I'm just guessing now, but concurrent with self-blaming, was there also anger? I mean, I imagine this is horribly painful for your children. Well, you know, it's funny because anger, blame, guilt, shame are kind of the four emotions that I talk a lot about in my book life after suicide and obviously I've talked a lot about those four emotions in therapy and my children have as well. For us, well, if first let me tell you myself, I felt like I had processed my anger towards Rob in the last five years of our marriage. So I kind of had ridden that out before he ended his life.

And to this day, not really angry at him as much as I am incredibly sad for him and for my children. Even my protective instincts for my kids don't register as anger. It registers as pain. I feel tremendous pain that my children are from the ages of 17 and 18 growing up without their father. I feel tremendous pain slash sadness that one of the like maternal feelings that I think will always be with me. And you know this as a parent, every parent that there is a gut parental instinct to protect your child from pain, from anything that's painful. And even though I know the specifics of the fact that I couldn't protect them from this, I feel like I have failed doing the most important maternal job I had, which is to protect my children from pain. And there's to watch them, even though they have been soldiers and so emotionally mature

and insightful in their journey so far, I feel like I would have thrown myself in front of a bus to shield them for what they have gone through and what they have to go through for the rest of their lives without their father. So it's for us, it really wasn't as much anger. And I will also say that in terms of anger, I think we all, all three of us, myself, Alex and Chloe, did not, anger isn't really as hardwired into our DNA. Ironically, because I'm Jewish and Italian, so you would think I have like a double dose of anger. I might be homozygous for the anger gene.

But rather than repress it, I feel like we kind of intuitively decided that to become angry at life or even at Rob and his memory would be to cause a secondary tragedy in his death and none of us wanted that. That's very wise. Not. It doesn't sound easy. It wasn't intentional. I literally think it was an intuitive response. Why did you decide you wanted to write this book? I didn't actually. I didn't really decide and I didn't really want to, which is interesting. I had been approached by Harper Collins less than six months after Rob's death to write a book telling my story. And that was the summer of 2017. And I cried

through the entire meeting. And I said to the wonderful people who were there and very kind and sensitive, I said, I will never tell the looking back story. I'm not going to be, I'm not going to give people like a voyeur's look into Rob's life. He's not here to talk about himself. I have two children that, you know, I am, they're my primary concern. And I'm not looking back. I'm not a, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a mental health professional. I'm just not writing the book that you want me to write. I'm not going to, this isn't going to be a tell all inside the Aston family, you know, suicide story. And so I thanked them and I left. And it was a year later, when, as you remember, the tragic death of Kate Spade by suicide hit the

news and the right. And we, in our world here as ABC journalists, obviously have to cover a lot of really tragic stories that the whole country is talking about or hearing about. And we have to explain those stories. And the day that Kate Spade's suicide hit the news was a Tuesday, and I was actually leaving my medical office. I had been seeing patients, and I was flying out to LA to be on a panel about parity issues and women in medicine and health, and it was going to be in West Hollywood. And I was taking both the kids with me because they were already out of school.

And I'm sure this has happened to you in your career as a journalist. I was literally boarding the plane in my phone rings and it's one of our producers at Good Morning America. And very sensitively, very kindly said to me, Jen, would you feel comfortable talking about Kate's fate suicide tomorrow? And I said, and she said, and I before you even give me an answer, if the answer is no, you do not have to qualify it. That'll be it. Yes or no? And if it's no, it's no. And I said, well, two things. First of all, I have to check with the kids

because if it's not okay with them, then it's not okay with me. And second of all, I would only consider talking about it if I were not speaking as your chief medical correspondent, but just as a person whose family has been rocked by suicide. And so I hung up with her and I went to the kids and I told them about her request and they both without hesitation said, Mom, you have to do it. You have to talk about it.

And that scared the crap out of me because now I had my kids kind of saying, you should do this. And I was kind of hoping that they would say, no, like we're not comfortable and give me the out. And I had never spoken about it publicly before. And as I had said to you with this like perfect facade life that I had tried to cultivate as a way to kind of make myself not focus on any pain or hurt that I had

in my past. Now it was like, you know, the moment of reckoning and I was going to have to talk about just how imperfect my life had become recently. And so I was terrified. And the next morning, you know, there I sat in our Glendale Bureau. So you flew to California? I was, yeah, yeah. I was in LA for this speaking event. And as you know, a crack of dawn for GMA. And I did not know if I was going to be able to do it. I was so terrified down.

I mean, again, it was something I know you can relate to. And I had gotten an email from one of our senior producers in the control room that morning. And she said, Jen, basically, we have your back and we will take our lead from you. And if you start to lose it, we will get you out. And I just knew that, you know, I couldn't be in better hands. I mean, and so I did this interview with George Stephanopoulos and really spoke about our family's experiences. And as you know, it was maybe two minutes long. And I wasn't even off the set yet. And my phone just started blowing up with tweets, emails, texts from people I knew, people I didn't know viewers.

It was 100% positive. And by the time I got back to the hotel, and my kids were up waiting for me, and I showed them some of them. And they both looked at me and said See mom so many people are hurting and you just spoke for them and I I just was blown away by it. I was totally blown away and then Sometimes soon thereafter Harper Collins Re-approached me and said now will you write a book and I said Well and said, now will you write a book? And I said, well, there are still two conditions. One, the same thing I told you a year ago, I'm not going back, I'm not telling you secrets about Rob that, you know, is anything titillating or disrespectful or negative, it's not going to be that book.

And the only other criteria is that I don't just want this to be my story. I want it to be the stories of other people whose lives have been affected by suicide. And they said, fine. And I went on like a blitzkrieg to find, you know, about 10 other people who had been emailing me since Rob's suicide. And some of them I've reached out to unsolicited and told them what I was doing and said, would you share your story? And while every story is different, every story also has similarities and it was just,

it was unbelievable. What are the most important learnings for you and by extension for the rest of us. You know, I think for me, what I learned from the book is, I mean, I always use the term filter and we use that term a lot in media and in journalism and in life even. And the filter for me with life after suicide is that, first of all, unfortunately now, suicide being the 10th leading cause of death in the US, the likelihood is that almost everyone unfortunately now knows someone who has died by suicide. And the estimates from the CDC are that for every person who dies by suicide, 135 people and their immediate circle are touched. So that's millions and millions

of people. And so one of the filters is suicide. Like what's the journey like? How do you find a road to healing and recovery through that particular type of grief, because death by suicide is different than other types of death, and it's different than other types of grief. But I also feel like the bigger filter is dealing with any tragedy that rocks your world. And, you know, how can you get through it? So, I mean, I think that those are kind of the two levels and I mean I Dan I've learned so much from talking to these people not just about their stories but about myself. How do I mean we live in a universe where we

everything's out of our control mostly. So we're all going to experience difficult things whether it's suicide or something else. So what did you learn about how we can deal with the vicissitudes of life? You know, I think what I learned, and I'm obviously still learning it, literally like yesterday I learned something every day, hopefully I'm learning something about how you deal with the pain that life brings. Initially, right after Rob Suicide, one of my patients actually, who's a 75-year-old woman with a PhD in education, and she's a deeply spiritual woman with a tremendous amount of faith. And she said to me, you know, the purpose of life is not

avoiding pain. The purpose of life is living through pain and learning from it. But as you said, no one gets through life without pain. So that really stuck with me two years ago. You know, two days ago, I read an incredible book called The Untethered Soul. Did you ever read that? It's recommended to me a lot by people on Twitter that I should have my single show. Yeah, you definitely should. And I actually listened to the book. And there's a big part in there about pain. And the imagery, and this isn't a direct paraphrase of Michael Singer, but the imagery that he describes, which really resonated for me, is that, you know, we all have pain or hurtful experiences in life. And most people, and I was so leading the pack in this maneuver, it was ridiculous.

Most people respond by putting up a wall, putting up our defense mechanisms, and one voice in our heads says, never again, I'm never going to let myself feel this kind of pain again. This was too much. I will never allow this to happen again. So we barricade ourselves, we put up this fortress, right? We wall off that area that's been hurt to protect ourselves, we protect, we defend. And what Michael Singer basically says in the book is when you put up that wall and you close those shutters and put the bars on the windows so you don't get hurt again, you're also blocking out the sun. And I thought, oh my God, that is so true.

Can't block out just the bad side. Right. You're just going to block out everything. And so he says, you know, the point, and this is also a very kind of Buddhist-ish way of dealing with life, is that you should actually welcome pain because it makes it's part of our range of emotions, but you should let it go through you. You shouldn't hold on to it. And I think that kind of brings me to one of the most kind of the biggest way that when people ask me

how am I different today than I was before Rob Suicide, I say it's kind of like the Charles Dickens line. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. There are times where I feel like I've never been stronger and then there are times that I feel like I've never been weaker. And luckily, most of the time, I feel the former. I feel like I am stronger now because I have a different philosophy about life. I have a different appreciation for the range of my emotions and the depth of pain that I can feel and still recover and heal and laugh and love and find joy and happiness. But there are also times where I feel like when I shattered that I was glued back together

again and I might be more fragile. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with like that dichotomy. Again, that it's more on the better side than the weaker side. But learning literally every day is part of the process. You said this thing about, I think it was a patient who was 70 years old, who's a woman of two-fade. It got me thinking a little bit about a book that I'm almost done with, is recommended

by a recent and repeat guest on this podcast, Gretchen Ruben. There's written a bunch of excellent books about happiness. She recommended that I read a book called Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, who had survived several concentration camps during the reign of the Nazis. And I hope I'm going to faithfully restate one of his these which was that, you know, in a world where we're all going to suffer, it's the people who do the best and particularly in the crucible of a, in his

experience in the crucible of a concentration camp, but the people who were able to get to frame their suffering through the lens of meaning, to make it meaningful. It sounds to me like that's what you've done, not only for yourself, but also through writing the book. And I would imagine even though the book's not out yet, available for pre-order, I assume that there's meaning in helping other people, which by the way is your job, is both of your jobs.

Right. Right. No, I mean, there is, there is meaning in helping other people, which by the way is both of your jobs. Right, right. No, I mean, there is meaning in helping other people. And a lot of the people that I interview in the book, whose stories are in the book, talk about that. And talk about that as a major means for their own recovery and healing, is doing something for the greater good. And that's not new that that's therapeutic for people.

I mean, we know that from life, from communities, from medicine, from science. So that was a part of it for me, but a bigger kind of meaning in life and how and why this happened to me and how I will deal with it and how my children are dealing with it and what I've learned from them

because as you know, even though your Alexander is very young, our kids teach us as much as hopefully we teach them. And my kids who are now 19 and 20 have taught me massive life lessons through the way they have been living since their father's suicide. And you always want to be your best person for your children,

right? Because that's the kind of ego involvement. And you not only want to be a good role model, but you want them to be proud of you, but it's really a circle. And so that's been, that's been a really, really interesting experience for me, which I really didn't ever have before. And I think the biggest one and the bigger one to refer back to what I said about a filter of, in general, how you deal with a crisis or a tragedy in your life,

is that in the book, I give the visual analogy of when Rob died by suicide, I felt like I shattered. I was a plate that had shattered into a million pieces. And to glue them back together so that it was a functional plate, there were going to be some ugly pieces that I had to look at and handle. And before this happened, I really had tried my best to not look at any ugly parts of my life. And that's, I realized that that's not real. And you don't really grow as a person if you only want to look at one slice or one angle of something. And so I think for me that being comfortable with those imperfections and that vulnerability, not just to the world at large publicly, I mean, that's kind of secondary, even though it's hard, super hard for me, but for myself, that was massive. And you know, it's much easier for me.

I mean, as I just wrote in this article for this magazine, you know, I believe I was put on this planet to be a healer. I am so much more comfortable taking care of you than having you take care of me. And so when I started to recover from Rob's suicide, I really had to lean on people, and that was really hard for me. It was really hard for me. It sounds like I'm hearing you correctly that this traumatic experience forced you to open up in ways that were really painful, but it also, it sounds like exhilarating and

deeply meaningful. I think so, yeah. I mean, that is literally how I'm looking at it now. I feel like I have learned so much about myself and about, and it has changed, you know, my whole view on life, really. I mean, in a way that, to be honest, I was always jealous of other people having this before this happened. And, and usually, ironically, we see it a lot with people who have had a disease like cancer or near death accident or something

like that. And I would know these people. We would all hear them speak and hear their stories. And I would always say, yeah, that's not really how I feel though about life. And I wish I did, but I didn't. And you know, when they say like, now I understand really what matters to me, or I don't sweat the small stuff, or I really cherish every day. Like all these principles, and we get so jaded to them, right, because they're these sayings.

And now I lived it. So I really, really feel those things, like deep in my core, I feel them. But I think a lot of it had to do with hitting rock bottom and having to put that plate together and starting from scratch, which ironically, for a different reason, you did too. Yeah, in my experience, it's hard to live out these, first of all, clichés become cliché for a reason because they're true largely. And second, it's hard to operationalize these clichés in your life if you haven't, if you haven't learned the hard way, I think for many of us. More of our conversation is on the way after this.

Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears.

When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on Amazon music or the Wonder App. You said before that one of the ways that people,

you said it's not new, but one of the ways that people make meaning out of horrible things is to turn around and try to help other people and to do something constructive in the world, which brings to mind somebody who did that, Jeremy Richmond, who it was because of Jeremy's recent suicide that I wanted to have you on. Normally I would have had you on, right when your book came out,

but I wanted to bring you in early because, and you very kindly agreed to do it on incredibly short short notice because I'm hearing from a lot of people in our audience who listened to my podcast with Jeremy a couple of months ago and are just kind of mystified and upset as a consequence of the news about him. Just a little background on him. You know, he lost the daughter of Yale and the shooting in Newtown, which I covered, and turned around and started the Aviel Foundation, where he was trying to use his background in neuroscience to see if he could really understand what goes sour in the minds of some people. And I met him because I spoke to I did a

speaking thing at one of his the foundation events and was so obvious that he's this kind of radiant man I know you you met him radiant guy and he seemed so resilient and and and had got he and his wife had gone on to have more children he just seemed incredible and in a background in meditation was really interested. So I really wanted to bring him back on. And I did. I see sat in the chair you're sitting in right now. And we tied this big long, really inspiring, very difficult

conversation about his personal experiences and how meditation had played a positive role for him. I am obviously as the 10% guy, not of the view that meditation is a panacea. Nonetheless, notwithstanding the horrible circumstances in his life, I was really surprised to hear that he had taken his own life. And so I just wonder if you can free associate a little bit about this case. Well, first of all, again, I said before that I am a believer that there are no real coincidences in life.

And I think that ironically, I had met Jeremy back in 2013. I did not hear his episode on your podcast. But I had met him because right after the Sandy Hook shooting, which I also covered for ABC, I had decided very privately because one of my patients at my medical office was so devastated she wanted to do something, I wanted to do something like so many people. So we hatched this idea that we thought we would never be able to execute and we sent a letter to the New Town City Council, I think, or Town Hall. And I have a picture, which I'll show you, of a long table of which they had like four such tables that were covered with tens of thousands of letters from all over the country and parts of the world, basically saying the same thing that my letter said, what can we do to help

you, or we're heartbroken, and someone from Newtown picked up my letter. And what my letter said was that even though I have a very public role with one of the world's largest media companies, ABC News, my friends and my community in New Jersey wanted to do something for them. We want to keep this completely private. There'll be no media involved, but we wanted to come up and plant 26 trees around their school, not the Sandy Hook Elementary School, but in their kind of center of their town. And it happened. You know, these incredible people, we started talking, we made it happen. And Jeremy Richmond and his wife were there that day, in April.

And so I have all these pictures with him. And in one picture, Dan, there's about 40 or 50 of us, including kids, you know, my kids were there, some of my patients' kids were there, who had come and spent this whole day digging in the dirt, planting 26 10-foot tall trees for these children and teachers who were killed that day. And in this one picture, there's Rob, my ex-husband, standing maybe five feet away from Jeremy Richmond. And I look at that picture and I think the same things that you just said, like, how do you wrap your head around? These two men, these two fathers, these two smart, educated, healing, giving souls who chose to get off this planet way too early. And, you know, in particular, this week with Jeremy's suicide came on the heels of two of the parkland students down in Florida suicide. So this concept of suicide contagion,

which I'm sure you know about, which we hear about a lot, which is that the more the media reports suicide, there are almost copycat suicides. But it, and that could have been at play with Jeremy, right? We'll never know. He could have heard about the parkland students suicide and it could have triggered a response in the sandy hook elementary school shooting and survivor

guilt at play and panic and we don't know. But I think that all I could think about was that this was a person who had chosen to deal with a horrible tragedy in a way that helped other people and you know may not have had any of the signs just like Rob had none of the signs. And I think that it's a reminder to me to us that you never know what someone's going through and that we should really be as kind and sensitive as possible to anyone we pass because not because you might prevent them from taking their own life, but because it's the right thing to do because a lot of people are suffering and you don't see it on the surface.

On cases like Rob and Jeremy, when there are no signs, does that mean there's nothing we can do other than just be as nice as we can to everybody? I mean, I think that's the million dollar question. We don't know. First of all, we don't know what causes suicide in the first place. Over 50% of the people who die by suicide had never been diagnosed with a mental illness. That's a CDC stat. So Rob was one of them. Maybe Jeremy was one of them.

We don't know. Right. Divorce doesn't cause suicide, but some people who get divorced wind up killing themselves. Right. You know, there are so many complex factors that we can't just make it as simple as a like a media sound bite and

say this is the one thing. I think that I'm starting to look at it kind of like the opioid crisis or like wearing a seat belt in a car, which is I think it's become so pervasive now for whatever reasons we don't yet understand that we need to start walking around with this consciousness and awareness of what's the talk hotline number. What do you do if you see someone that's struggling overtly? What should you say to them? What should you not say to them, what should you ask them? You know, all kind of the pro, like you would practice a fire drill in your apartment or home, kind of the same type of thing. I think it's just, it has to be awareness, has to increase, and no one can feel like this can happen to me or my family.

What are the answers to those questions? Well, the one answer that I learned way back in medical school is that if you are, if the thought crosses your mind that someone might be depressed and thinking of self-harm, you should ask them that outright. You will not be insulting them and you won't be giving them an idea. And if a person is truly depressed and you say, have you thought about hurting yourself or taking your own life or killing yourself that is literally no different than asking them, is it raining outside? They will give you a yes or no answer. And if they say yes, the next question that we're taught in medical school is to say, have you thought of a plan? And either way, yes, I've thought of a plan. No, I haven't thought of a plan, but I've thought of hurting myself.

That is a medical emergency. That needs to be that person can't be left alone. That person should be brought to a psychiatric emergency room. I mean, that is a medical emergency. And it can't be like, oh, I don't want to embarrass the person or I don't want to insult the person It's not it's not like that No more than it would be like if you were having a nose bleed and I said to you Dan you know your nose is bleeding But you know you we have to deal with it And I think just that is really important

And and unfortunately talking about it kind of in the what ifs is important. Unfortunately, when Robin Iweren couples therapy, our therapist asked both of us if we had ever thought of hurting ourselves. And Rob said emphatically, absolutely not. So what changes in the moment where someone like Rob or Jeremy Richmond decides they've had it? You know, my therapist, Dr. Sue Simmering, told us right after Rob's death, and this really stuck with me because when suicide is a foreign concept to us, it's impossible to fathom

how someone would do something like that. It's so scary and it's so frightening, right? But the way she described it, which really, really had such an impact on me, is, you know, a non-suicidal person, when things are at their worst, will say to themselves, this is going to get better. It's maybe tomorrow will be better. Or they look for the bright spot or they look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe they don't articulate it.

That to themselves, but it's in there somewhere subconsciously. A suicidal person, when things are at their worst, says tomorrow is going to be a thousand times worse. I have to get out now. Am I right that we are seeing levels of suicide that are unprecedented in this country? Yeah. So what do you think is driving that? I mean, God, so many, it's like if you ask me what's driving the maternal mortality crisis, I could give you six reasons. I think there are a lot of reasons for the spike in

suicide. Number one, life is more stressful today, right? I mean, you turn on the news or you're in your community and bad stuff is happening. But is it more stressful today than it wasn't World War Two when your kids were being drafted to go fight the Nazis or... Well, I mean, different and you and I were in a live then, so we don't personally know, but like, you know, different types of stress, maybe different exposure to stress and bad stuff. There's no question, right? I mean, you literally can't get away from it now. I think that's a factor. I think there could be environmental factors we don't know. Social isolation. That's know. Social isolation.

That's right. Social isolation is a big one. There's an excellent newsweek article on suicide that I think was written in either 2013 or 2015. And it talks about the dangerous triad of someone who is at risk for suicide or suicide attempt. And it's feeling isolated or not belonging, feeling like a burden to your circle, whether it's your family, your friends, or whatever,

and not being afraid of death. So losing the hope in the future and losing the fear of death when people can have one of those things happen at any given time, but when both of them happen together, it is a very dangerous situation. And when you think about that, it makes sense, right? Because most patients, for example, like we want to do everything we can to stay alive. Most people want to do everything we can to stay alive. We're afraid of something that might kill us or result in our deaths. People who think about suicide are not afraid of death, and they have no hope for the future. So those two things together make it a very precarious kind of situation, but feeling isolated, feeling socially isolated, feeling like a burden, and like you can't belong, is something that seems like we should be able to address, right? Yeah, but loneliness is an epidemic,

and it kills, I mean, we were hardwired through evolution as social animals, loneliness actually could kill you on the savannah because you didn't have other people around to protect you. So it's a, yeah, it's a dangerous situation. Two more questions. One is, is there a question I should have asked but didn't. No, you always ask the best questions, Dan. You know, is there a question about suicide or life after suicide? I think, I think ironically it has to do with happiness.

And I think that the question is, can you be happy after suicide hits your life? And I think the answer is yes. Are you happy? I am happy now. But it's a different happiness, obviously. It's a different, maybe they're not all capitalized letters or maybe it's just different. As I said, I have a different appreciation for life and I have a different understanding of myself than I ever did before. I wished and wished that it didn't

or wouldn't have taken Rob's suicide to get me to that point. But I think my children could say the same thing and I think that was how that was kind of our way of recovering and healing is to look for that deeper meaning. And speaking to a lot of suicide survivors for my book, a lot of them, guilt is something that we all deal with. And we all say, how can you ask me, Dan, if I'm happy, when two years ago my children's father killed himself. And the concept that I learned from my amazing therapist is one called multiple truths. Yes, I can be happy with my understanding of life,

with my children's life, with my career, with my new relationship. I can be happy and I can be incredibly sad that my children don't have a father. One doesn't negate the other. And I think that's probably the most important piece of advice that I could give anyone dealing with either a loss from suicide or any crisis is that multiple truths does not make you a bad person does not mean that there's something wrong

with you or you know, And when you talk about being happy after someone you love dies by suicide, I believe that that's actually a tribute to that person's spirit. So yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the most important question. I'll say something before I ask my last question, which is, and the last question is super practical.

So it's, which is, and the last question is super practical. So, it's, which is, you know, your job as a doctor is to help people, your job on TV, is to help people. I think it's possible that through this book, you may have done your most dramatic and impactful work of helping people. It's possible. I hope so. It's ironic because most everything I've done in my life,

I really planned out. And this obviously, I did not plan any of it, even the book part. But the book, Life After Suicide, I do think and hope helps way more people than I've helped as a medical correspondent or even as a practicing physician, because there are a lot of people suffering in the shadows that I want us all to be brought more into the light. And I hope that the book does that. I really do. As we said, the book is called Life After Suicide. It's not out yet, but it's gonna be out soon. You can pre-order it.

It's pre-order. I didn't realize that pre-orders are discounted, but of course I'm sure you did. No, I didn't know that. But that's... So it's cheaper. Right. Other things, you know, if we want to learn more about you,

where can we find you on social media and all that stuff and any other resources that you want to just get out as I've been playing. So my Twitter and Instagram is at DRJ Ashton and I've heard a lot from so many people who have been affected by suicide, especially when I announced that the book was coming out and is available for pre-order. Obviously, I'm on ABC News, Good Morning America and World News tonight, often, if not almost daily. And the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is an amazing resource and for military

families' taps, which is the tragedy assistance program, is also an amazing resource. And there's a lot of help out there, but people oftentimes don't know where to ask for it or how to get it. And there's no question that access to mental health treatments is not where it should be, but there are people there who want to help and can help. It doesn't have to be expensive, but we need to ask for help.

Thank you, Jennifer, writing we need to ask for help. Thank you, Jen, for writing the book. And for coming on this podcast on an extremely short notice to help our listeners and me, I really appreciate it. Thanks, Dan. Big thanks again to Dr. Jen Ashton. As I said at the top of the show, we really appreciate her coming on in an expedited fashion.

So let's turn now to voice males. Here's number one. Yeah, and this is making from San Francisco after I read or after I listened to your book Meditation for Figuity Skeptics. I during a one hour sit, I, well, I'm lucky to get three breaths in a row where I'm focused on my breath. And then after some time I realized, oh crap, I'm not paying attention to my breath anymore. I'm lost in a rabbit hole of thought, and then thanks to you and Jeff Warren, I say silently to the thoughts, welcome to the party, and I begin again to focus on my breath. And thanks to you, Dan, I now know, and I'm so grateful to know that I might get one breath. We're all I all paying attention to is my breath coming into my body and going out of my body

or I might get three breaths, three even seven whole breaths in a row. We're all on focus dawn is my breath coming into my body and going out of my body. But your book, Meditation for Figuity Skeptics, really helped me understand that this is meditation and beginning again is the practice and I'm not doing it wrong as long as I begin again when I realize my mind, so out of luck, and my thoughts are racing and I'm no longer focused on my breath. My question, my question is, ever since my friend died by suicide, I have been meditating every day as much as my schedule will allow.

Every day for at least an hour, but often for three to four hours, just focusing on my breath, losing that focus, and getting lost in my thoughts, realizing I'm lost, and getting welcomed as a party, and beginning again. It's very soothing to me to meditate every day for as long as I can. And part of me wonders if I'm using meditation the way someone else might use a drug or alcohol, and I'm using it as an escape from the thoughts I don't want to have. Actually, I think that's exactly what I'm doing. My thoughts are too old. I don't want to deal with my thoughts or my feelings.

I just want to focus on my breath. Do you think this is harmful to me? Do you think I'm using meditation to avoid something I actually should be thinking about? Thanks for any guidance about this and thanks again for your work, your books, your podcasts. Dan, thank you very much. You've had an extremely positive impact on my life. Thanks.

Bye. an extremely positive impact on my life. Thanks, bye. Thank you. I'm gratified to hear that my work and the work of all the folks with whom I work is having a positive impact. I really appreciate that. Very sad, however, to hear about the death of your friend. I want to issue a caveat before I say whatever I'm going to say, which is that I'm not a medical professional, not a mental health professional,

and I, you know, so I couldn't diagnose you even if you were right in front of me, but I definitely can't diagnose you after a voicemail. So I, you know, I would say if you're dealing with the kind of trauma with which you clearly are dealing, I think this is also a question that makes sense to talk to somebody with actual credentials about. So I'll say a few things that I hope are useful, but under the umbrella of the aforementioned caveat.

So one thing is that I hope I've made clear in my various public utterances that I'm not a I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I don't think that meditation is going to solve all of your problems and I definitely don't think it's the only modality when it comes to well-being. I think it's something we should have in an arrow that's really useful to have in the quiver, but you don't have to do it, and although I think it's plenty of evidence to suggest it's really good for you, but that there are other things you should also consider. And I would say in your case, I think it's safe for me to say that talk therapy might make

sense. And you may already be doing this. So that's the danger of trying to give advice in this kind of context, because I can't have all the information. But I think given that this suicide quite justifiably, I would imagine is having a really traumatic impact, then meditation can be useful, but I would imagine it's not the only tool that you might want to access. So I would consider that.

And the other thing I would say is, the way you describe your practice, which is you say it and try to focus on your breath, and then you notice you become lost in thoughts and you say internally, welcome to the party, well, that sounds on some level to be the good practice, which is you're not fighting off the thoughts, you're okay with whatever is arising, sadness, frustration, anger, confusion, and you're truly welcoming it in. But you then went on to say that you are worried that actually you're using this to escape those thoughts. And it strikes me that I just wonder whether the welcome to the party that you're issuing in the face of your thoughts and emotions is sincere. That's just the thought that came up in my mind.

Do you really mean it when you're saying welcome to the party? Because if you truly are using the meditation the way it's generally taught, which is to allow in whatever is arising and explore it even in the face of the pain so that it doesn't have so much power over you. Then it isn't a form of denial or anesthesia or self-medication. It is truly, it's one modality for processing very powerful emotions. So yeah, I would take a look at that and I would also, I think, use, as I said before, talk therapy as another way of dealing with these very powerful emotions. I really appreciate your voicemail and I wish you nothing but the best going forward. It sounds like a really tough situation. Let's go on to voicemail number two.

Hi Dan, my name is Barbara. My question is, when I get into a group of meditating consistently, I start telling the truth more and not holding back so much in my speech. And you're sort of a role model for that for me because you seem to be really forthright with your guests. Like, if you don't understand what somebody is saying you just go I don't know what that means and I really like that I don't think a lot of people are willing to be so blunt but it seems when I when I open my mouth like that it feels like I'm not being a proper Buddha, you know I'm not being like

mindful of my speech or gentle enough or patient or something. There's something off. I don't know if there really is something off or if I'm just being self-critical. But I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about that? Are we supposed to all be like peacemakers? The way like the Dalai Lama is a meditator? Or can we just be ourselves as meditators? Can we let our speech not be so constricted all the time? Thank you a lot. Bye. That's a great question. Let me just say, I know I tend to do this. I say I'm going to give you an answer, but first I'm going to issue a caveat. I can't help it. So I'm going

to do that now, which is that I appreciate you saying that I have a role model in this way, but I got to be honest with you. I have a lot of work to do on my communication style. It's probably my communication style on the podcast is reasonably good because I know I'm being watched in a sense or listened to, but I think the rest of my life, there are times when my communications style is suboptimal. I've said before on the podcast that a couple of months ago,

I had a what's called a 360 review where lots of people in my life gave anonymous feedback and I was able to read that feedback and one of the things I was dinged for was being dismissive at times. So I've actually been working with some Buddhists who are communications, corporate communications specialists, not just within corporations, but just inter-personal and professional communications. And so I've learned a ton from them, and I will talk about it

at length in my forthcoming book, whenever it actually comes out, and on this podcast, and wherever else I get a chance to talk about it. So more to come on that for sure, but I just want to be clear, I'm not some sort of paragon of perfection when it comes to communication. But back to your question, can we tell the truth without being rude or un-buddhist or unkind? I don't know, just unkind. And yeah, so the model within Buddhism of quote unquote, right speech or wise speech, the Buddha talked about saying that which is true,

that which is useful and saying it at the right time. And I think that's a really, I don't, I mean, I fall, I run a foul of these guidelines all the time, but I think it's a North Star that's a really a great way to operate, operate, or at least aspirationally. So again, say that, which is true, is it true? The question is to ask for yourself, as you're about to say something,

and often we say things before we've considered it, and that's cool. Well, that's cool. Well, that's not cool obviously, but it's it's understandable. We all do that and I don't think you need to beat yourself up if you do it, but if you're mindful and you're on your game, the question is to ask yourself before you say something is is this true? Is it useful and is now the right time to say it? And I think that that does not preclude you from saying tough and honest things.

You invoked the Dalai Lama. He says tough and honest things, but I suspect that when he's on his game, it's what he's saying is true, useful and in the right context. So one of the things that drives me crazy about the meditation world is that there can be this way of talking that's a little precious and treacle and fake.

It's not, it doesn't happen all the time, but it can devolve into that. And so, I would certainly and I recommend that you walk around pretending that everything's rosy and you're an imperturbable peacemaker all the time. You also don't want to, however, be rude and just telling people you don't like their shirt, just because you feel like counting them that. Whatever judgment happens to flip through your mind does not need to then come out your mouth.

But I really like the, is it true? Is it useful? Is now the right time to say it? And it's a great lens through which to try to assess whether what you're about to say is the right thing to say. All right, hope that was useful. Definitely it was true, and hopefully it was the right time to say it to. Really want to thank everybody for the amazing questions. I want to thank the folks who work on this podcast who include Ryan Kessler, Samuel Johns, and Grace Livingston.

Please, if you get a second, go rate us, review us, talk about us on social media, all that stuff really helps. And I will be back next Wednesday with more show. Till then, see you. See ya. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

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. tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.