Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 231: Parenting in a Pandemic | Susan Kaiser Greenland

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

We're in the middle of one of the greatest tests for parents in modern memory. Tens of millions of us, cooped up in our homes with our kids, as a consequence of the coronavirus. Susan Kaiser Greenland can help. She's a former corporate attorney who transformed herself into one of the world's leading experts in meditation for kids, teens and parents. In this episode, she delivers tons of practical tips for formal and informal meditation practices -- for all age groups. She also talks about practices that can help parents not turn on one another in this excruciatingly stressful time. Plugzone: Website: https://www.susankaisergreenland.com/ Previous episode with Susan Kaiser Greenland & Annaka Harris, episode #121 Teaching Mindfulness to Kids: https://radiopublic.com/ten-percent-happier-with-dan-harr-WwE9m8/s1!e8765 Other Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: We'll be streaming live on YouTube at 3PM ET every weekday. If you miss us live, you can catch the episode here at www.tenpercent.com/live or on the Ten Percent Happier app. Email address for health care workers who want free access to the app: [e-mail] Full Show Notes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/susan-kaiser-greenland-231 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, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. We got a big show today, but before we dive in, I want to get into some items of business four of them specifically. I think they're going to be of high interest given this moment of high anxiety we're in right now. Because of all the anxiety, this is a moment where we at 10% really want to step up.

And so we're going to offer a bunch of free resources that I want to highlight before we dive into our guest. First, this podcast is now for the foreseeable future to the best of our ability. We're gonna go to twice weekly. We're gonna be digging in on all aspects of coping with this crisis. Today we're doing parenting, but we're also gonna talk about how to work from home successfully,

how to maintain your romantic relationships under deeply suboptimal circumstances. We're gonna talk about the loneliness in this era of social distancing and much more. We're also going to just bring on big name meditation teachers to let them blast us with wisdom at a time where we very much need it. So if you have ideas for people you'd like to have on the show

or topics you'd like us to cover, hit me on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Second thing we're doing is a grand experiment that we dreamed up and turned into reality in a matter of days called 10% happier live or TPH live. It's every weekday at three Eastern noon Pacific, we're gonna do a live sanity break where I'm gonna be speaking with one

of the world's best meditation teachers. We start with five minutes of meditation led by the teacher and then we take questions from the audience. So if you want to tune into this, it's 10% dot com slash live T E N P E R C E N T dot com slash live. We'll put the link in the show notes to this episode or you can just go to YouTube and search for 10% happier. You can find it. And when I say we've got big teachers, we really got big teachers. For example, Thursday this week, it's Sharon Salisberg, Friday, it's Jack Cornfield, and

we're in conversations with amazing people to come on the show, again, for the foreseeable future. We're just going to do this while we're at this moment of anxiety. The third thing I want to tell you about is that we've got a whole bunch of free meditations and talks specifically designed to help you right now. We're going to drop some of these meditations and talks. And by talks, I mean just five to 10 minute

kind of mini podcasts from all sorts of experts and meditation teachers on a whole bunch of useful practical topics. We'll be dropping some of them into this podcast feed, but you can also access all of them either in the 10% happier app where they will be available for free or if you go to 10% com, you'll see a quick link that we're highlighting very prominently on the page. You just click that link and it'll take you to all of the stuff and you can go back and check it frequently because we're updating it all the time.

Fourth and final thing I want to tell you about is if you are a healthcare worker or if you know one, we are offering the app for free for six months. First of all, I just want to personally thank you for your work and your bravery if you're a healthcare worker. Second, I know because I was raised by health care workers in a married to one that you need to break sometimes. So that's why we're giving the app away for free for this period of time. So hit us at care at 10% dot com. Care at 10% dot com. That's a neat just send us an email there. Again, we'll put this

email address inside the show notes. Care at 10% .com and we'll take care of you. Okay, our guest this week is Susan Kaiser Greenland. She's a former hard-charging corporate lawyer who transformed herself through a lot of very deep meditative training and a lot of hard work into one of the best-known most qualified experts in the world when it comes to teaching meditation to kids, teenagers, and parents. She wrote a whole book about this called Mindful Games, which is filled with all sorts of practical meditation tips for kids and parents, and we go, we dive very deeply into those practical

tips here. This person is a font of wisdom. She has the ability, as you're about to hear, to get super practical, about techniques for teaching meditation to kids at all sorts of different ages, from very young kids to teenagers. And these are meditation techniques that can be done sort of formally and informally, same with parents, formal and informal practices. She also has thoughts about how to work with kids who have ADHD and thoughts about how parents can deal more successfully with one another while we're on this kind of lockdown here. But beyond the practicality,

she also has an ability to kind of transcend the details and talk in, I think, deeply fascinating and useful ways about this moment in human history. One final thing to say before we dive in, just a quick audio note here. In the name of social distancing, I'm now recording from home and I don't yet have all the systems up and running to do so at the highest quality. So in this interview, you're going to hear that my audio is not perfect. It's totally, you can hear it. It's just not going to be as good as it

normally is because we usually record in a studio. Susan, however, happily has a big fancy mic, so she sounds great. And I promise we're gonna get better at this as we go. So thank you for your four-bearance, and here we go, here's Susan Kaiser Greenland. I don't think in my lifetime,

I have ever seen a situation quite this extreme that pertains to families across the board. But I think that provides both a challenge and an opportunity. You know, I'm not going to pretend that this is a good thing. I'm not going to pretend that it's not going to be very, very difficult for families to navigate for anyone of a hundred reasons that we could go through. But I think that this is something that those of us who have been meditating have in some

ways been preparing for on the cushion for as long as we sat on the cushion, or for those of us who practice mindfulness in the dropping brief moments of awareness throughout the day, that's also been excellent practice for this. Because the challenge that we have is to contain anxiety, our own, and that of those around us. And the opportunity we have is to put into practice in a very concrete way these themes and these principles and

these methods that come from classical contemplative training that are intended to do exactly what we need right now, which is to become aware, notice when our nervous systems are ratcheting up a little bit, when we get a little bit overly upregulated, and to integrate real world strategies that we know that are mindfulness-based and awareness-based that help to downregulate our nervous system. Because what happens is when we are up-regulated a little bit too much, there's

something called an arousal curve and we need a certain amount of nervous system regulation to be up at the top of that curve and then we're open receptive ready to learn. And that amount of nervous system regulation we need to get up there varies depending on the person and varies depending on the day per person. But if we get a little bit of overly regulated, then what happens is we slip down on either side of that curve. We either slip down into the fight or flight mode, which is something we're very familiar with seeing,

when kids are with parents start getting snappish and agitated, or we slip into the other mode, which is free, where kids start withdrawing, or sometimes they look defiant. And we see, especially teenagers, we'll see a behavior in them that we think is defiant, but actually is really just overwhelmed. So these mindfulness-based strategies

are an opportunity for us to implement compassionate and wise responses to the nervous system activation that was seen Not just in our kids, but also in ourselves and also at the grocery store with our partners or With our professional colleagues. Okay, I have a million questions Well, first of all, my primary response to what you just said is really grateful for you for coming on because I think you're gonna help a lot of people

by doing this and I happen to know that you've got a lot of incoming right now in terms of requests for help, so very grateful to you for making time at this time. I wanna make two little comments to amplify some of the things you've just said and then I want to pivot to a question. One of the things you talked about is the opportunity we have at this moment. And I like that you didn't try to sugarcoat it. This is a difficult moment. It reminded me of something I heard, the meditation teacher

or in Sofir, say the other day when we were doing a live guided meditation, this new initiative we've launched called 10% happier live. We're doing every weekday. Orrin was quoting another great meditation teacher, the very famous TickNot Han. We talked about sort of the sort of viral nature of anxiety that a TickNot Han compared it to a bunch of people in a boat navigating through a storm. And if just one person on that boat can stay calm, that can spread.

And that really is applicable to the family right now. And then the other thing you talked about is the sort of anxiety curve. We did a podcast the other day with an anxiety expert at Harvard, Luana Marquez, who is talking about something called the Yerks Dodson Law, which is this curve. Baseballer point is anxiety is adaptive. We need it to a certain extent. And the right amount of anxiety gets you to the top of the curve where you're optimally engaged with the world dealing with the problems.

But too much, and you get into panic or overwhelming too little, you get into denial and lethargy. So I really appreciate everything you said in that opening answer. So now let me pivot to the question, which is I suspect a lot of people listening to this, especially the parents are thinking, okay, though, that sounds great. How do I actually do that? Especially now when my kids are just attached to my hip at every moment of every day. Yeah, well, it's never been more important to be able to practice this idea of dropping brief moments of awareness into what you're already doing throughout your day.

So there's a general principle for the mindfulness-based practices, all of them, well not all of them, but most of them, that are used to downregulate. And there are some that are used to upregulate, but I doubt that we're really going to need those right now. So let's stick with the downregulation once. And the idea of the downregulation strategies is that we And the idea of the down regulation strategies is that we become aware, because remember awareness is key, awareness is the starting gate for mindfulness and meditation practices. And once you're aware of something, your relationship to it will change. Awareness doesn't get rid of things, but it does change your relationship to things. So let's say that you have a lot of incoming,

as you said, which is perfect. You got a lot of incoming. You start to notice energy bubbling up or fears bubbling up or frustration or anger bubbling up. But you start to feel snappish. The awareness can interrupt that automatic reaction. And then what you do is you move your attention away from whatever it is you're thinking about to a neutral or pleasant present moment experience.

It's that simple. These are called anchor practices. And they're called anchor practices because we focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else. There's different types of awareness practices. We can talk about those at another time, but right now, the key for nervous system regulation and the idea of taking your bandwidth, which narrows, necessarily narrows, it's a survival mechanism, when we get upregulated to focus more on the difficulties, and we have to work to broaden that mental bandwidth so that we can also take in the big picture. So how do we do that? We move our attention away from our thoughts because our thoughts tend not to be

our friend at that time to a present moment experience, often a sensory experience. Just feel the feet on the ground. Just for a second, if you feel your feet on the ground. Scan your body a bit and notice where there's tension and see if you can just soften it there. If you can feel your hands on your on your lap, if you're sitting, if you can feel your breathing, if you can expand your awareness just to listen to the sounds of your outside. That simple process of moving attention away from your thinking mind into a present moment experience preferably sent a sensory experience, but doesn't have to be that has a grounding effect. If the sensory experiences aren't working for you,

sometimes that brings you too much inside and then that can be a little bit up-regulating too and nervous making too. You can do simple things like counting. I'll never forget in your book, and you talk so often about being on early retreats and that handy tool in, out, in, out. Just that's focusing. That's an anchor practice. You're focusing on one word in, out, in, out. Just that's focusing, that's an anchor practice.

You're focusing on one word, in, out, in, out with the breath. That's down regulating. Or you can focus on a picture in your head. Just bring to mind a picture that of a place where you feel happy and safe. Now, the visualization aspect, bringing mind a picture in your head isn't so useful when you have a child grabbing your hand, but the idea of staying with a sensory experience is a little bit down-regulating. Also that's

where these tools, maybe you've seen them, whether it's a glitter ball or a snow globe, a really handy, or now they've got these very cool things that look like lava lamps. They're about three inches tall and they're plastic. Having those on your counter, on your desk, on your kitchen counter, because in that situation, when you start to feel like you're getting a little bit agitated and you want to ground yourself, but you have kids, you grab the snow globe or whatever the prop is that you're using and you shake it up and you say, Mommy's mind looks like this right now. You see all that snow? Mommy's mind looks like that. It's a little hard for me to see clearly. So can you do me a favor? Can you just help me? Can you stay with me? Let's watch the snow settle. Let's feel our breathing and

then see if that makes us feel a little bit calmer. And in doing that, you do two things. One is you've got, you're engaging with the child so that the child, you're not disappearing from the exchange. You're right there with them. and we know that our nervous system is Regulating and co-regulating theirs. So just that healthy present attachment is huge huge huge for helping keep us all calm And you're also modeling. Mommy's mind gets a little cloudy too. Mommy gets a little bit agitated too And this is what we do So those are ideas for managing right in the moment, how to deal with the nervousness or the anxiety

that is just natural to bubble up all the time. And not even in a pandemic, but we are in a pandemic now. So it's, you might see a little more. So I actually, you can see this because we're talking via video chat, but the people at home can't see it. But I actually, my wife got me a Buddha snow globe that you can shake. Actually, I have to shake it quite a bit apparently.

And it's right on my desk. And I haven't used it the way you describe, but I could just let the, all the dust settle and use that as an analogy to my mind. It next time my son is being innovating. But back to the sort of in the moment thing you were talking about the touching base with your senses. Let's just get super granular about that.

Sorry, I'm getting slightly paranoid because I have a jumpy cat that is walking up behind me. Let me take that as an example. So I'm stuck at home with my kid. He's freaking out. My boss is emailing me. A cat is wiping its butt on the rug. And I'm maybe have had a few turbulent conversations

with my spouse. All of this is happening at once. And while you're not offering some miracle cure, the thing that I think you're describing is like a circuit breaker is just for a second. Just tune into what does it feel like to have your feet on the ground? Can you take a deep breath?

Can you do anything to just stop the momentum of anger, frustration, anxiety, so that you can respond with a little bit more calm. Yep, and at times like that slogans are really helpful. And listen, not everybody is okay right now. So this is a difficult time for people and some people on the very front lines are not okay right now. They have been diagnosed and they're quite sick. But assuming that your listeners are one of the lucky ones like you and me and right now we're okay. The slogan

right now I'm okay. So that is like sometimes the first circuit breaker right now I'm okay. And then we can get caught in thinking, do I have enough toilet paper? Do I have enough supplies? What's gonna happen? How is my wife gonna get in with my son from, I know your wife is traveling?

Our mind is going to naturally go there and we need it to be able to go there because we need to plan. But we can't go there when that nervous system bandwidth, when our mental bandwidth is narrow because remember that first principle we talked about, we have the capacity to have a nice wide open big picture bandwidth, but when we get up regulated as a survival mechanism, our bandwidth necessarily narrows. That's what our minds are supposed to do, but we have to work against that tendency when we are okay to broaden it back out. So that first circuit breaker, right now

I'm okay. And then sometimes if you can just scan your body starting from the top down, but very simple, not a detailed granular body scan. Start noticing places in your body where you're holding tension. Because remember if your mind is tense, almost always you're going to find tension in your body. So if you again move your attention from what you're thinking, move your attention away from your mind to the area in your body where you find tension and relax, then very frequently your mind will relax too. Minds change bodies and bodies change minds. Fundamental, foundational

principle of mindfulness and meditation. So if we're having trouble settling our mind, move it to the body and find the area's attention and relax there. And with that, I bet you, you'll start to feel Bet you you'll start to feel that Openness that we're talking about in the mental band with starting to broaden again And that's what we're going for so we've been talking about sort of on the go in the moment or what I call free range meditative techniques But then there's also formal meditation and something I hear from parents all the time is I hear hear this from everybody all the time, is how do I find the time to do this? Do you have any thoughts on A, the value of formal meditation even if just for a few minutes and B, how we can find time to do that?

You might hear an answer, it's a little different for me than you hear from many of your meditation teachers. But remember, I came up in this world, my kids are in their late 20s now. So I came up in this world when there was a sense that we all needed to really be legit, you had to practice formal meditation for long periods of time.

And that was rough, because I was a young mom and that just didn't work for my family. I was lucky if I could get away for a few days on a retreat. I think that formal meditation is extremely important. I practice quite a bit and I go on retreat, but I do not elevate that over. Brief, dropping brief periods of meditation into your day throughout the day. I think the two go together. I bet that we have a shared experience that we know people who have spent a tremendous

amount of time on long retreat and then come back and you don't see it integrated in day to day. So I think the two together are equally important and I would not elevate one over the other. That said, there's never been a more important time to practice formal meditation. Formal meditation, you've got to just think about it as going to the gym. And frankly, right now, there's never been a more important time

for all of us to carve out some time for exercise too. Get out in the light, get some exercise. These are very important things if we're going to kind of hunker down for the long haul. So figuring out how to create a routine that has time for formal meditation. And, you know, I'm going to add exercise and good nutrition in there too. And sleep. And sleep, yeah, absolutely. And the meditation and the exercise and the good nutrition stay away from sugar. And I hate to say it got to go a little easy on the wine is going to be easier for sleep.

All of that will improve sleep. So that's my general sense is that yeah, we need both. We need both the formal meditation and the dropping it in. But I think your question was how and when. And we need to, as parents, and frankly I'd say as anybody, we need to create routines. And that's key for our kids if we're going to have them at home. And try to stick with those routines. Routines provide a container. They provide clear expectations for what we're going to do and they contain anxiety. If you and have a partner who is raising your child with you, it'd be great if you guys could

figure out, I don't mean you Dan, but if our listeners could figure out a way to carve out a little bit of time for each of you to get your practice in and also to get your physical exercise in. Well, one other, I totally agree with everything you just said and I think a lot of people are gonna feel relieved because I think there's a sense of guilt that a lot of people have about, you know, I'm not doing enough formal meditation and I'm not going on retreat

and I think we need to give ourselves a break. That stuff is all great and important and it is exactly like going to the gym and in that it makes you, in my experience, it makes me better able to apply meditative concepts and techniques in the moment if I've got a base of formal practice, but we need to also be realistic about what people's lives are like, especially right now. I would just offer one other practical tip, which is to think about bedtime, you know, if your kids are young and you're putting them to bed, that period of time where you're either lying in the bed with them or sitting in the room with them while they're

falling asleep, that's a perfect time instead of spinning off into your to-do list or you're running through your grudges. That's one of my go-to's to maybe use that time as a meditation, even if you're lying down or spooning with the kid, another is right before you go to bed. I do this every night, right before I go to bed. It just winds me down before I get into the actual bed. There's evidence here that that is a good way to sleep.

So I would recommend those two techniques. Let's turn to meditating with the kids, because that's really something you've done a lot of really valuable work on. I, before we launched into this interview, I went on Twitter and asked people for some questions and I, we got really good questions. So let me just read a few of them to you

as it pertains to the kids in meditation and let you answer them in any way you want. So one is from Ali's Srenchko or syrenko. Her question is how do you get kids interested in meditating? And then I'll just layer on top of that a few similar questions. Zach Pachucha, 10% happier is a phrase that intrigues otherwise skeptical adults like me to get past the stigma of meditation, is there a similar intriguing phrase that might be better suited for an audience of children or busy parents

that don't have time? One of the things that's tough about talking about mindfulness and kids is that it's so age-dependent. So what we're doing with little kids is going to be different than what we're doing with with older kids and with teens. But generally, the first question is far as a second question, as far as a similar phrase. I think you can use anything that is in plain English, that is in your own family's vocabulary, the kind of things that you do yourself.

I would encourage people to stay not to focus or use the word mindfulness all the time. Because what happens is the kids start rolling their eyes very quickly and we're even seeing this now happening in schools that have had mindfulness programs throughout the elementary years and then the kids get to middle school and teenager and they hear mindfulness and they just know, please, you know, keep that away from me. So I'd encourage you to use what we, what teachers use, which is describe what you're going to do in plain language that is consistent with what your family does as opposed to say, oh, we're going to play a mindful game right now. We're going to play mindfulness right now. So, for instance, you can say, let's find a way to really feel, you know, if you're feeling upset right now, let's see if we can do this to feel, to calm down a little bit. And then you bring in some of these very specific purposeful breathing tools to help settle. So that's just describing what you're doing rather than doing it. You get kids

interested. Bion comes when they believe that this works. Bion doesn't come when they just get told about it. So that's why it is good to have kids in groups practice because kids are going to learn and believe the other kids more quickly than they believe us. And so that's where the buy-in comes from. And how you get buy-in, though, if you're at home, is again, and you don't have the benefit of these classes where kids are modeling for one another because you'll always have eager kids who to try it and to tell you how great it is.

And then that starts the modeling process and the kids buy in from each other more quickly than they'll buy in for us. But at home, if you're not, don't have the benefit of that. How you get buy in is by showing kids how this works. So instead of calling it mindfulness, when somebody is extremely upset, you just say, breathe in a little bit and breathe out a whole lot. Breathe in a little bit and breathe out a whole lot. Or you do things like square breathing where

you trace a square with your index finger and you count into three, four as you go up one side of the square, hold two, three, four across, down two, three, four. You know, so you in, hold, down, hold, four counts at a time. So when you start dropping those in to your experience, when they are needed, when they're appropriate, then you later, when the nervous system is settled. Remember, when that bandwidth has gone from narrow to wide, you can talk about what just happened and say, hey, if we practice those kinds of activities,

if we practice those kinds of tools, when we're not upset, then we can just pull them out and use them when we are. So I would suggest that sort of buy. And the other way that buy-in works, if you're not talking about mindfulness, just as a nervous regulation tool, is to bring it into the family and practice together. So the parent may not get too much of his or her own practice in that moment, But if you just sit with the child and practice together for a short period of time and create that as a regular thing to do, the bedtime idea you had

is an excellent one. If when the child is going to bed, you perhaps lead them in a guided meditation, you know, a special star meditation where they are feeling the beams of the warmth, light of the star kind of down their body as a body scan. If you start leading kids in those kind of practices of rocking a stuffed animal or a plush toy on your tummy with your breath, that sort of thing. During bedtime, that's a way to start bringing practice in without having to ever tell them that they are practicing mindfulness or meditation.

Can you say more about both the special star technique and the rocking of stuffed animal technique? The special star technique is a lot of fun. And again, it's using the same strategy that we were talking about earlier in the podcast where you are scanning your body with your attention and moving your attention away from your mind. I find it very important to practice like this with children with your eyes open, sitting next to them.

And if they start to feel, if it becomes obvious that they're starting to feel uncomfortable for any reason or that it's just not working, then just cut the practice short. You can build it over time. But how that basically, and also don't require, don't insist that your child lie on his or her back. The child can be in any comfortable position. The child can be lying on his side and fetal position. The child can be sitting up. The child can be in any comfortable position. The child can be lying on his side

and fetal position. The child can be sitting up. The child can be standing. Because there's a lot of really healthy and understandable reasons why kids may not want to lie on their back flat. So give kids a choice. Choice is really important as far as their posture

and give them a choice with respect to whether their eyes are open or their eyes are closed. But with that basic caveat in place, it's really simple. You just imagine that there's a star in the sky and that every one of us has a special star and it's right up there. And then you ask the kids to use their imagination and imagine what it looks like, what color is it? They might want to tell you, is it polka dotted?

Is it, does it have sparkles? Is it big? Is it small? What kind of feeling is coming out of it? Is the feeling warm or is it kind of cool? Is it pleasant? All right, now let's imagine that special star is up in the sky right now.

And it has a way of focusing its attention, the star light, the focusing that star light in any way that it wants to. And right now it is beaming a soft light onto your, the skull of your head, right onto the top of your head and right onto the top of your head and see if you can feel it. Now imagine that you've got a cap. You know those knit caps and Michigan, we called them chooks. And imagine that that cap,

the light of the star is like that cap. It is just coming down over the top of your head to your skin, you feel that. Now leave that cap of attention right there and watch the starlight and feel the starlight move down over your eyes. See if you can soften around your eyes and your jaw and your cheeks.

And now to your neck and your cheeks. And now to your neck and your shoulders. Just see if you can really feel the light of that star. It's your own special star. And now to your chest. Sometimes it's nice to put your hand on your heart and feel your chest move up and down. See if the light of that star warms up your hand too. Now your upper arms, your lower arms, your hands and your fingers. To your

middle if you want to put your hand on your tummy right now and feel it move. If you do make sure your shoulders relaxed. Now the light of your own special star is moving to your upper legs, to your knees, to your lower legs, and your ankles, feet, and your toes. That was just live for a second in the light of your star. So while we're talking actual techniques, and by the way, we should point out that as of right now, the kind folks at Amazon and other online booksellers are still delivering, so you can order Susan's book, Mindful Games, which has a lot of this stuff in it.

But just while we're at it, can you talk about this rocking a stuffed animal, a technique that you referenced before? Mindful breathing in this particular case is an anchor practice. That's when we were talking about anchor practices before, where you focus on one thing in Nordistractions. So you take any, if it's a child, a favorite, a favorite plush toy. If it's a older child, if it's a teenager adult, just take any kind of weighted soft surface, like a bean bag, or if you have a

meditation cushion, a meditation cushion or something. The reason we put some weight on the tummy is because it is easier to focus your attention on the movement of your tummy moving up and down if there's a soft weighted object on there. And if it's a child is great if it's a stuffed animal. If it's a very young child we lead this a little bit different than for the older kids. And so we've been focusing for the last couple of minutes on meditations that are aimed at younger kids but what if I'm cooped up in an apartment or a house with a teenager? How would I go about either broaching the subject without meditation, without having them reflexively reject it because it's coming from me, their parent?

And if I can get, if I can successfully broach the subject, how would I introduce the practice? It would be best to do it with them, or would it be best to do it with them or would it be best to buy them a subscription to an app? Well, in a perfect world, it is always best to practice with your child because, you know, we really, I'm sure that there is a benefit to these practices from the app alone, but there is an additional, you know, quantifiable benefit to the relational component of practice. So being with them and practicing together is extremely important and with young kids as well when you think of how we regulate and co-regulate one another. So it's

fantastic if you can practice with your teenager or child or partner of, you know, regardless of age. Now that doesn't mean that teenagers can actually want to practice with you. So in that situation, there's a lot of terrific apps out there including yours. And so I think encouraging apps and also seeing whether you can creatively set up a group meditation with child with teenagers online. So I'm not suggesting we are in person to person contact at this particular point in time. I think we're all in different cities where are the recommendations for getting together are different but where I am in Los Angeles,

you know, we're all pretty close to self-isolating, but that doesn't mean that we are isolated and we can be connected by electronics and so by a FaceTime or whatever. So if you can somehow get some kids together to start their own group, I think that would be fantastic so that they're not doing it on their own. Stay tuned. More of our conversation is on the way after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short, with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to

deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it?

Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. So let me pick up on this thing with teenagers because I just want to go back to this idea that, you know, the job of a teenager is to, teenager is to ignore your parent or to separate from the parent. It's a hard time to bring up a new idea like meditation, especially since tensions already may be running high since you're locked in. In terms of starting this discussion with a teenager, what do you recommend?

Well, let's go back to the very first thing that we talked about because I think it's the starting place for all of these conversations around how do we respond to people in these trying times. And remember what we talked about with respect to when we start to get agitated are banned bandwidth narrows and we can slip into fight flight of freeze. We're all pretty good at identifying when somebody is getting snappish or when somebody's getting reactive. We're less good at identifying and this is something that is really key for working with teens. We're less good at identifying when teens are shutting down and it looks like they're defiant.

So just if we can reframe that, when you see or in exchange with your teenager and it feels as if they're pushing back to you and it feels as if they're being defiant, see if you can broaden your perspective to think this might very well be an indication that he or she is overwhelmed. And that shift again, that awareness, remember we talked about just awareness alone will change your relationship to something. That awareness quickly shifts so that you go from being irritated with them to compassion. It just shifts and opens you up to compassion.

And when we can love these kids and be compassionate with these kids, even when they are acting out with us, all sorts of benefits and soons. So that's the first piece when you starting to have to navigate life with a teenager who seems to be defiant. This is what their brains are telling them to do now.

Anyway, they're supposed to be separating. They are pushing back against authority. This is their job right now and here they are stuck home with their parents. So with that bit in mind, with teenagers first just invite them and also show them. I mean, it's very tough to get a teenager to buy into meditation if they don't see that you're doing it. And it's very tough to get a teenager to buy into meditation if they see you're doing it and you're still running around like a nervous Nelly. So again, it goes to how our own practice is key. Before we start preaching it, we really need to integrate it and when we are not perfect, which we will not be.

There's no such thing as the perfect practice. And wisdom does not come from being perfect. It comes from being present. So when we notice we're not perfect, then we are present and all we need to do with these kids is repair. All we need to do is go back to them and say, hey, mom lost it. I'm really sorry. I apologize and I want to make sure you know that I'm sorry about that and then see whatever else if anything needs to be done to repair. So practice, practice, so the general recommendations for teens don't just automatically assume the defiant behavior is some kind of acting out. It could very well be a sign of overwhelm. Practice

yourself first and embody those practices. And then third, just invite, invite them to join you in your meditation and if not introduce them to some of these terrific apps or other online resources and see if they can engage with them. And if at all possible, see if there's a way for them to engage as a group with other kids online or with other kids doing these practices and you know, somehow checking in with one another by text. Yeah, this is this is all great and I just wanted to follow it up with a question from

from Twitter. This is from Lee Clark. What practice or words can we offer teenagers who are overwhelmed with the uncertainty they're feeling? Remember Remember we were talking a second ago about those models that are very helpful. There's two models that are very helpful. One that teenagers have long identified with, which is, this is what it is right now. And the other model that I find very helpful is that right now I'm okay.

So those two models are in a very short practice embodying significant foundational themes of the practice of mindfulness and awareness. This is what it isn't right now, in and of itself models acceptance. We accept that this is happening. We're not going to deny it. Now, accepting isn't the same as giving up.

We still need to do our research and take care of ourselves, but we also accept that right now, this is what it is. But the right now clause in that model is very important because it implies that this is going to change. And that keys in again to the foundational principle of mindfulness and awareness of impermanence. Same thing right now, I'm okay. So that's a matter of bringing our attention back into the present moment.

So it keys into that foundational principle of mindfulness of present moment awareness and I'm okay is a way of accepting what the situation is and working to because remember with our brains and with our survival instinct to focus more on bad news and good news we have to work to broaden that perspective to include both. So I'm okay now helps us broaden our perspective a little bit. So I think those two slowins are very helpful working with anyone, but especially with teams. Yeah, I like that the idea that the clarity, seeing things clearly understanding, accepting that this is the truth of the situation right now, is not synonymous with resignation. In fact, it just calms you down so that you can take more effective action once you've taken in the facts of the situation.

But let me move on to a question. We have two questions. One from Rebecca Brahmels, the other from Jessica Concepcion about ADD, specifically what are strategies for kids with ADHD and as it pertains to meditation? Yeah, that's an excellent question and it's a great question across the board and not just for kids who have diagnosed ADD, but restless kids and we're going to be seeing a lot of restless kids who are at home in the house. And remember all of these practices,

these mindfulness and these meditation practices are not meant to be solely sedentary. So movement is key. And there is a, and you'll see these again, if you buy either the mindful name, mindful games book or the activity cards that I did with Anika Harris, you'll see these games where you use movement as a way to self-regulate in many respects. And there's a very simple principle here as well. And if you read a great book by Peter Levine called Trauma Proofing Your Kids,

you'll read a little bit more about this, that if we do practices where we toggle between movement and stillness, that has a calming effect. So if you are a parent, you have probably seen kids start to run around and you think this is great. They're they're burning off nervous energy and then it gets more and more ratcheted up until it ends in tears. That is what happens when we just allow kids to blow off the nervous energy without some structure.

However, if you toggle between periods of movement and then stillness and grounding, and movement and stillness and grounding you can skillfully release nervous energy and then settle back into a grounded place. And these kind of moving activities are key for kids who are on the attention spectrum on the less regulated side of it. And they're also key for absolutely all of us, because what we're talking about, when we're talking about anxiety, is really an increase in up regulation

in our nervous system. And remember again, I'm sounding like a broken record. When that happens, our mental bed with necessarily narrows so that we can focus on what seems to be the danger in front of us. It's a very useful survival mechanism, but we have to work hard to be able to get that something dangerous might be happening, but to broaden that band with so that we can

see the full picture. And often sitting still is not going to do the trick, white knuckling at the meditation isn't going to do the trick, but controlled moving activities, especially where you're toggling between movement and stillness. That will be helpful. We've talked a lot about how parents can stay sane and keep their crap together. We've talked a lot about how kids at various ages can be helped through mindfulness and meditation. What we have not talked about is relationships between parenting partners.

This is a tough time on that front too. We're going to do a whole podcast on this issue, but since I have you, do you have thoughts on this area too? Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it is a tough time, you know, and also on parent, you know, on, on partners and on when you have a group of adults in the house, for some reason, if you are self isolating, and it's more than just to, uh, people, I mean, in our house, we have three adults right now. We have my daughter in her late 20s and my husband and me, and it is a matter of all of us trying to figure it out. So I go back to these exact same principles that we're talking about, but I'm going to add one more. And that is this idea of the law of reverse effect, which is sometimes called the backward

law, and which when I teach, I call, drop the rope, and I did a series of 30 guided meditations for parents for sounds true, and a number of these concepts are in these guided meditations for parents, for sounds true, and a number of these concepts are in these guided meditations if you want to listen to them. But under dropping the rope, it's just how many times do you find yourself in a exchange? You can be with your kids, but also with your spouse, where nothing terrible would happen if you just dropped the rope. where it's just some kind of a power struggle, and it really doesn't matter too much. And the reason to drop the rope isn't just random. The reason to drop the rope is that there's something out of classical practice called the Law of reverse effect. And what that actually means is sometimes the harder we try, the less likely we are to be effective. So that

shows up in our relationships and that shows up in our meditation practice as well. So let's first start talking about how it shows up in your meditation practice because when you start to understand this viscerally through meditation practice, then it's easier to do in the moment when you find yourself in a tug of war with your kids or with your spouse. So when you're practicing, often you'll find yourself trying hard to empty your mind or trying hard to work with thoughts or trying hard to make strong emotions workable. And usually, if you just let go and again, move your attention away from the working part into relaxation, that is the law of reverse effect.

And that's how you get more effective. And a great example of how this works is if you think about floating. If you're teaching a child, or remember when you learned to float, the more you've struggled while you were trying to stay on the top of the water, the more likely you were to sink. But once you learn to just lay back and relax, all of a sudden, low and behold, you were floating. And if you have a few minutes and want to Google instructions to float, you're going to find that those instructions on how to float look almost exactly like meditation instructions. You know, find your center, lay back in the water,

relax, and you'll float. So that's true with meditation to the more we struggle often, the further way we get from that open expansive stance of awareness. When we start feeling that happen in our more formal meditation practice, then we start seeing how to apply that in real life. And in real life, I can't tell you the number of times I find myself going back and forth with a colleague, with a child, with my spouse, with my grown kids, and I realize why am I keeping this conversation going? I'm just going to let it go. And I drop the rope, and it is a very effective strategy. It usually throws somebody off guard. It surprises them, and then it often ends up just with laughing

and with a sense of humor about it. So that would be my primary suggestion as a first out of the box thing with spouses is that when you find yourself in a power struggle, just end with your teenagers, just ask yourself, is it necessary that I make this point, or I've already made it once so good now, can I drop the rope? And when I'm talking about drop the rope, I'm talking about tug of war.

Yeah, no, this is something we talk a lot about, you know, among the leadership that 10% happier, like, is this the hill I want to die on when we're in a power struggle? But the trickiness and the titration here strikes me around, you don't wanna drop the rope, you don't wanna confuse dropping the rope with giving in and being trampled. Yeah, well that's the key with all of this, right? But remember, these practices, when properly done,

and to be properly developed, these practices are practiced within community and within, you know, a support structure of other people who may have practiced a little bit longer who can help because when properly practiced, these practices build healthy boundaries. We need to have the healthy boundaries, especially with kids. Our role with kids is in a perfect world, we want to in some ways disappear when we're talking to them about any social, emotional aspect of learning or any meditation. It's just like if we are facilitating a meditation group, we basically want to disappear and allow the wisdom to come from them. If we ask the questions in a way that is inviting

and they start talking among themselves, they're going to come up with the answers that we're hoping that they're going to come up with. So our role as a facility is to try to disappear, as a parent, try to disappear and let them tap in to the wisdom that they have inside and the compassion they have inside and let it come up and grow. That again, you're asking about buying, that's how buying happens. But we have another equally important, possibly more important role in that circle, which is to keep the, to contain the anxiety and to keep it safe. And for that, we need healthy boundaries and we need strong boundaries.

And again, when you're asking about formal meditation practice, that again is where formal meditation practice comes in very, very handy because just as in going to the gym, it's through the formal meditation practice that we develop the capacity to be able to hold strong emotions and not react to them. And so that's again why it's so important. If you can, to carve out time for formal meditation and if you can't, don't beat yourself up about it, dropping brief moments of awareness in throughout the day is an equally important aspect of the practice.

Okay, final question. Well, there are two final questions I want to ask because I'm sensitive to your time. One of them picks up on the phrase you just use, which is don't beat yourself up. You sent me a list of bullet points of things that are on your mind these days. One of them I was not surprised to see

was self-compassion. Do you hold forth on that in this context, please? There's nothing more on top of my mind right now when I'm running these small groups for parents and caregivers than self-compassion because we are all really struggling to manage the potential overload that we have coming in from all fronts. It's coming in from all over the place and how are we going to manage it. And so we really need to go back to these basic principles that wisdom is not about being

perfect. There is not a perfect parent. There is not a perfect parent. There is not a perfect spouse. There is not a perfect coworker or boss. That's not where the wisdom is. The wisdom comes into being present and then being able to integrate self-care into your routine.

And also, when you notice that you may have not been your best self to know you can always circle back when you're feeling a little bit more steady and repair, whether whatever that repair might look like. So there are self-compassion practices that we can do to help ourselves chill out. And those practices do mostly involve stopping whatever we're doing and interrupting what we're doing and really keen into a present moment experience. Whether it's you feel the cup of tea in your hands, whether it's you soak in the sunlight, whether it is that you go outside and get a fresh of breath of fresh air, staying six feet away from all the

people around you, except those in your immediate household. Let's not all just a hole up inside. We still need to get outside. We still need to get light. Carve out your day. Create a routine that's manageable. Don't expect yourself to become your kids, SAT tutor and math tutor and all of that, do the best you can create realistic manageable expectations for the whole family that we can be successful

for, create choice in that schedule that you're creating so that people have choices in what they're going to do during the day, routine, and those are the things we need to do to take care of ourselves and get ready for the long haul. Final question, is there's a sentence you wrote in the aforementioned memo you shared with me in which you were sort of typing out some of your thoughts on this moment? And I think it's related to what we've just been talking about, but I want to get you to explicate a little bit. Don't fight your

experience. View your tendencies as strengths rather than weaknesses, even if they don't feel like strengths right now. Yeah, that's key because, you know, there's no better time to beat ourselves up than during a pandemic. You know, we can beat ourselves up for any one of a number of the things that we haven't done or that we don't think we can do. And this is not useful. Nor is it really consistent with these principles of awareness that we're talking about. All of us, all of us, have a reservoir of qualities inside that we can tap into to give us the potential

to be our best selves. We know that it is tougher to tap into those that reservoir of qualities that are inside all of us when we are overwhelmed or when we're up regulated. So again, that's why mindfulness first, mindfulness is the first step to get us to the point that we can tap into them and recognize those qualities. So let's say, for example, you feel a little bit compulsive. You're one of those people who feels you need to control and you've got to get, you're going to control the situation as best you can. And that is a narrowing of the band with, you can just feel your body relax, your body tends up.

When you start going into that mental place, I'm feeling my body tends up now just talking about it. You notice that this strength, the strength to need to be in control, the strength to need to be in control, the strength to need to get absolutely every role of toilet paper you can in the garage or in your apartment so that you're safe. That's a very useful tendency.

That's a great tendency to have, because it involves organization planning, thinking ahead, great executive skills, but you just wanna keep it in perspective. So look at it as a strength. And then think, how can I redirect this to make it useful for what is actually happening right here in the moment, as opposed to what might happen in the future. And so that's an example of something that might appear to be getting in your way that

you notice, keep a sense of humor about it, and then you put on its head into a strength. I wrote a book with a guy named Jeff Warren about how to meditate, and Jeff is this incredible meditation teacher from Canada, and he advised me to do this thing that I thought was kind of dopey at the time, but has turned out to be very meaningful for me, which is to notice that, and this actually jobs with current psychological theories, notice that we have several that I, or we all, but in my case, who's talking to me, you probably have several modes that you're toggling between in your head. One mode might be sort of a self-centered, ambitious mode, another might be an anger mode,

and then there are also positive modes too, but those are easier to work with. So specifically, this had to do with the things that we don't like about ourselves. So for me, it would be anger or sort of a self-promotion ambitious thing or self-pity or planning all the time. And his idea was, you know idea was give these characters names, and then when they come up in your meditation or in your life, say,

oh, hey, Robert, welcome to the party. Then instead of doing battle with your demons, like you're giving the demons a hug, that's disarmament. I think that friendliness, that warmth, that sense of humor, that you reference can make a huge difference, especially, you know, in extreme situations like we're in right now. So I just wanted to put a fine point on that. No, that's beautiful. And you know, you can extend that to your kids too. You can have your kids if they have these demons inside of them, if they do start talking to you about those, you can label them again as animals or as weird Uncle Harry, and have them consider

think of these strong feelings or these tendencies as guests, like guests at a dinner party. It's a classical, it's a classical bit of training, And you know, some guests are welcome, some guests aren't welcome, but we know they're all gonna leave. So again, you can integrate into that this notion of impermanence. So I think that's great. And I love the part about meeting them

with friendliness and curiosity. So what was the last thing you wanted to say? The last thing I wanted to say, and I don't know if you're seeing this, Dan, but we're seeing it a lot here of people who are recommended to stay home and to self isolate, who are going out anyway. And many of those people are feeling that, you know, quite proud of the fact that they're going out. Some of them are going out who are in categories where they are strongly here in California, 365 or over, you have been asked to self isolate because they think that they are going to,

that they're going to be okay. This is a risk that they are willing to take. And I think this is another place that the classical teachings of mindfulness and meditation comes in very handy. You know, the reason we practice meditation is because we understand that by taking care of ourselves, we take care of others,

and by taking care of others, we take care of ourselves. And especially with caregivers, it's often very, very tough to get them to take time for that formal meditation you and I were talking about until you turn it on on their head and say, Hey, you're sitting and practicing for just a little bit. If that makes you a little less neurotic, if that makes you a little bit more open and compassionate, if that makes you a little bit. If that makes you a little less neurotic, if that makes you a little bit more open and compassionate, if that makes you a little calmer, that's going to have a ripple effect to help everybody around you. So you're not just doing it for yourself, you're also doing it for others. So the ultimate reason that we practice meditation is to benefit other

people and in so doing, we benefit ourselves. And I think we need to apply that to this idea of self-isolation and limiting contact. We're sure we're doing it to help us stay safe. But for those of you who are feeling like parents and caregivers so often do, I'm gonna take on this risk because I feel that I can do it. Please expand that idea to realize by staying home you're helping others. And there's also some resources

online. And Dan, you might be offering them too about flattening the curve. And that's because our staying home, while might seem like a selfish act actually has a ripple effect of benefiting others. So this idea of not me us, a foundational principle and mindfulness and meditation, along with interdependence, has never been had more practical application, I think, then now. I totally agree. As the hashtag on Twitter says, stay to F home. You are a font of wisdom, and I am very, as I said,

beginning and feel even more so now. Grateful to you for spending all this time with us. Thank you. Well, thank you, and I'm grateful for you to getting all this out there. People need to stay connected, and I love the way that you're making these offerings available for people. So thank you. My pleasure.

Okay. Big thanks. Again, to Susan Kaiser Greenland and a reminder, check out her book Mindful Games. It's actually both a book and a set of activity cards, which she did along with Anika Harris. Susan and Anika actually, when that book and the activity cards first came out, they were on this show. So you can go back and listen to that as well. Also worth pointing out that Susan did a series of guided meditations called mindful parent, mindful child, designed for busy parents. There are 30 guided meditations and they're available through a company called Sounds True. Before we go, a few other things don't forget to check out our new 10% happier

live every weekday at three Eastern, New and Pacific. You can do it at 10%.com slash live. The link is in the show notes. And we'll be back Friday with another episode that we're going to be, as mentioned at the top, we're gonna be doing this twice a week during this crisis. Big thanks to the team that always works so incredibly hard on this Ryan Kessler, Samuel Johns, Grace Livingston, and all the folks at 10% happier at ABC that are making all of this work possible during this time.

See you soon. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early See you soon. Go do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com Slash Survey.