Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 527: How To Handle Dread | Saleem Reshamwala

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Today we explore the entire dread spectrum with Saleem Reshamwala, who took a deep dive on this very common, very uncomfortable emotion. What is dread, exactly? What evolutionary purpose does it serve? Most importantly, how do we deal with it? What are the antidotes?Reshamwala has worked for The New York Times, PBS, and also TED, where he hosts a podcast called Far Flung. He is also the host of More Than A Feeling, another podcast here at Ten Percent Happier. Saleem and his team recently launched something called The Dread Project - we shared their first episode kicking off the series last week. It’s a five-day series that investigates dread. Each day of the challenge, listeners tackle dread in a different way. You can sign up for The Dread Project at dreadproject.com.In this episode we talk about:Dread-management techniques, including: journaling, drawing, and welcoming your dread to the party inside your headHow to face dread when it comes to climate change And the biggest dread of all— deathFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/saleem-reshamwala-527See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, have you ever woken up in the morning and felt just a wave of dread sweeping up at you from your feet? Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night in cold sweat? Or maybe your dread is not so existential. You just have a mild dread about going to work on Monday morning

or looming dentist appointment. Today, we're gonna explore the entire beautiful dread spectrum with a journalist who has taken a very deep dive on this very common and very uncomfortable emotion. What is dread exactly? What evolutionary purpose does it serve? And most importantly, how do we deal with it? What evolutionary purpose does it serve? And most importantly, how do we deal with it? What are the antidotes?

Selim Roshemwala has worked for the New York Times, PBS, and also Ted, where he hosts a podcast called Far Flung. He is also the host of The More Than a Feeling podcast, which is produced by 10% happier. Selim and his team recently launched something called the Dread Project. It's an amazing title and we actually shared the first episode of that series recently right here on this feed. It's a five day series that investigates Dread each day of the challenge.

We give you tools to tackle Dread in different ways. We're gonna tell you how to sign up for the challenge at the end of this episode. And if you wanna do it right now, there's info in the show notes. Meanwhile, in this conversation, we talk about a lot of dread management techniques, including journaling and drawing and welcoming your dread to the party inside of your head. We also talk about how to face dread when it comes to climate change and when it comes to the biggie, death. I assure you, though, even though we're talking about a deeply unappetizing subject,

Salim does it in a way that is extremely fun and interesting. So, we will get started with the mighty Salim Reshimwala right after this. 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%.com.

All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from?

And where's Tom from, my space? Listen to, baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Salim Rushing Walla, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's so good to be here. It's great to meet you. I've listened to your voice so many times. I feel like I kind of know you. Yeah, you know, in the same kind of podcast that work here, listening to each other's stuff is good to actually get the real Zoom connection happening between us. All right, so let me ask you an obvious first question,

which is why and how did you get interested in Dread? Yeah, that's a great question. So it's funny because when people are asking about the project, they're assuming that it's all darkness, the doom and gloom. And there was an element of that in what started it, but we get really fun email smart listeners on our show about all kinds of emotions.

And in season one, I put a call out for folks to reach out with things they were interested in. And somebody wrote us with an email asking about dread and it was this really poetic email from a listener named Bras who said that they remembered as a child waking up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they might fall between stars and that was kind of their introduction to existential dread. And that kind of struck everyone on the podcast team. I personally have been interested in feelings of dread for a bit.

Without going into specifics a few years ago, my family was in a situation where we received some medical news and There wasn't really anything we could do about that, you know, you just know something's gonna happen in the near future and It can feel a little paralyzing, you know at the same time We met some friends who had been in a similar situation and had figured out ways to find little pockets of joy even though something real challenging was in their future. And that was intriguing to me. What do you do in these situations where you feel almost paralyzed, where you might have something really heavy weighing on you that you know is coming down the line

or something you're afraid of. It would be so many things that you can just make that all magically disappear or magically flip a switch all that and just have it all be sprinkles and happiness and all that. But we all got to get by in the face of things in the future that are increasingly within our sphere of knowledge, right? Like there's so many more places to get information about what might be coming in the future. That we gotta adjust and we gotta figure out ways to live life and be human and feel good,

even with those tricky realities that either might happen or we know we're gonna happen in some cases. So you've got this sort of medical sort of damnically hanging over your head and you're feeling dread as a result of that. And yet at the same time, confusingly, but also maybe helpfully, you're able to find, as you said, pockets of joy in the midst of it. Yeah. And a lot of it was once we heard how other people

had been dealing with dread, dealing with things that they're worried about in the future. You know, you start seeing that, oh, there's more information that could be shared about how to get through stuff. When you are dealing with something by yourself, you can feel really isolated. A recurring theme that we found when we started talking to people about dread

is this feeling of like a looping thought that's just like hanging and you keep coming back with almost like a default thought is this worry sometimes, you know? And so how can you stop having that default thought? And maybe, maybe stop having is the wrong phrasing. How can you introduce other thoughts? How can you without trying to make something go away? Because dread can be useful. Dreads giving you information and alerting you to something being an important thing to wrestle with, their deal with, their think about or prepare for. Everything from like these heavy things that

we're kind of alluding to to like lighter questions that are you're like Sunday scary's about going to the office of Budday. Well, okay, that's Tony, there's something about the office that you can process and think about. So I just started getting really interested in what people were doing that was working in those situations because Dred's in his universal, right? Like everyone's dreading something. And so whether it's like one specific big situation

or a tiny thing, there's some similar things happening we found when we talk to people. So we chatted with the podcast team, they were really intrigued by this email that we got. And it seemed like an area where we could start reaching out to experts and that's what we did. And it's an area where even when you're reaching out

to experts, everyone has a personal story. So it's not a thing where you've only felt dread, which we're kind of looking at as like fear plus time. These anxieties that are about something that's not immediately in front of you yet. Everyone, once you start talking about it, has some story related to that. And anytime there's something where people aren't talking Everyone once you start talking about it has some story related to that and

Anytime there's something where people aren't talking about a problem or aren't talking about a feeling that they're having But people are finding solutions Then it's good to share some of those solutions or tools. I'm saying solutions It's not about making something go away magically, but things that allow you to keep living your life I like that definition, fear plus time. And you've also kind of, usefully and healthfully taxonomized dread and you reference this a little bit in what you just said, which is that there's existential dread,

what's our role in the universe, how do we wrestle with our own mortality? And then there's, I don't want to go to work tomorrow or I have a dentist appointment on the calendar. So it really runs along a spectrum. Yeah, yeah. What's you start getting into the feelings and talking about like how your body might be reacting to that

once you start describing those things? You start fighting all kinds of things that trigger that. And you kind of alluded right there to it being a spectrum. And it could run from everything from you're walking down the street and 200 meters away from you. You see somebody who, oh, you had an awkward encounter with, and you've been dreading bumping into them for months to existential dread, which I think all of us, it's very human to have some kind of doubts or fear around death. And that spectrum holds so many things. You know, we, we did a thing where we set up in a coffee shop and just filmed for a

day, friends and strangers coming through and talking about dread and hearing them list things out. You know, they mentioned soccer games, but it is a person who loves soccer, but it's like, even a thing you love, you could dread some element of it as you're like, in the lead up, they mentioned work, somebody mentioned first dates,

but in almost anything, there could be some step of negative anticipation on that road, on that lead up. You on the show have some experts come on and talk about the utility of dread. And you referenced this a little bit earlier, but we've got a clip of these experts, or at least one of them talking about it. Can you tee up the clip?

Yeah. So, we talk to Dr. Oli Motu, who is a clinical psychologist. He's an anxiety expert. And he just let us know that we shouldn't dismiss dread as just a negative thing to get rid of. That dread exists for a reason. And if you think about dread throughout the history of human kind, you didn't want to be a person who didn't anticipate things. It didn't have some kind of feel that something bad might be happening or approaching? That's where I think it's important to remember why we even

have this emotion. In so many ways, it's such an adaptive thing. The purpose of dread is not to paralyze you. The purpose of dread is to help prepare you. Is to help you think about what might happen, it's to help you take actions that you can right now. Oh, interesting. A healthy amount of dread is needed to show up to work and to make a earthquake preparedness

plan and all of that kind of stuff. And that makes total sense. I mean, on the savanna in evolutionary times, if you were a dreadless human, you're probably about to be eaten by a predator. A hundred percent at so many practical things, you know, you think of an ominous sky as a phrase you hear sometimes like, if there's a storm brewing, it's okay to feel a little bit of anxiety around that and have that prompt you to take some action. That's a great thing. But again, the trick is how to, and this is the balance, how can we extract the good part of dread without letting it overwhelm us? And you very healthfully in this dread project

that you've launched have a lot of practical advice, which brings me to another clip I'd like to get here to tee up and this will start the practical section of this episode, which is the first piece of advice is journaling. Can you tee up this clip? So we spoke to Dr. Hala Alihan, who's a clinical psychologist, a writer,

writes absolutely beautiful poetry is published in the New Yorker. And we chat with her about journaling, which is one of those practices that I feel like many of us know are useful for things, but it's really hard to just keep going. I don't know if you've experimented with journaling, if you're a regular, but even folks who are professionals in the media are often talking about wrestling with trying to write every day, she had a great note as

someone who is literally a published poet in the New Yorker, et cetera, as all these books that we can all be a little easier on ourselves when we're thinking about our own journaling practices. The biggest thing I can say is, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The thing that I often see happen around self-care practices that is so just counterintuitive, and unfortunately, I think just discourages people from doing them

is that there is an expectation and a really high standard that people attach to even their self-care practice. And that's a very quick way to make yourself miserable doing something that's essentially hopefully making you feel better. Can you say more about the how-to aspect of journaling because I realize that now that we're having this conversation conversation we've never actually done an episode on journaling so how would journaling help with dread and how do we journal.

Great question. So the single biggest thing that writing does that people mentioned was get stuff out of your head right so even the active putting something on paper can sometimes stop something from looping because you just wrote it down. Now it's down on a sheet of paper. Another benefit is that you can start getting it on paper outside of you and then it becomes this other thing that you can look at and think about in different ways, right? So now that it's not just something that's spinning in your head and causing you anxiety and causing you frustration You can look at it as a written idea and you might say oh shoot That's not as serious as I thought is one possibility If it is really serious you might say oh the way I've been processing it

Isn't the most useful way to process this very serious thing there might be an action you could take when it comes to how to actually do it Color release just that you could do it with just to scrap a paper a big pen It didn't need to be some like super fancy Beautifully leather bowed journal. I actually use this app that you could Google the most dangerous writing prompt And it isn't it is a website that as you type for 15 minutes is the setting I use, it will delete everything you've written if you stop typing. And I know that's ridiculous to read on. But for me, it helped me like figure out like, okay, cool, I'm going. I got to go for 15 minutes. I get it all out

of my body, you know? So that thing of getting it out of your braids, any place other than your braid, and working out it that way. Well, so then just keep coming up. It's good to know that we don't like to light a candle and have an altar and the best possible notebook and a quill pen or whatever,

that we can just do it on a scrap of paper. It's also, I think you're putting your finger on something incredibly important here, which is getting the story out of your head. And there are many ways to do that that we're going to discuss. And the second way to do it that we are going to discuss it right now, I hope, is drawing about dread. What's that all about? Sometimes you might not want to put something in the words in a certain way, you might be hesitant. We talk to a clinical art therapist about this.

Her name is Naomi Cohen Thompson. She mentioned you can kind of create metaphors with drawing that you wouldn't actually encounter otherwise perhaps. Like I drew with Naomi, I drew with Jeff Warren, who's a writer and meditation teacher, and while we were drawing each time, by Dread came out completely different,

completely absurded childish each time, but it looked different every time I drew it, and it just made me realize, oh, this is a really useful tool for seeing things with different metaphors. You mentioned Jeff Warren. He's a good bud of mine. We wrote a book together about meditation and he's been on the show a bunch of times. And I know you have a clip of him that I'd love to get you to tee up. And as I understand it in this clip, he gives you a piece of advice that he has

given me in the past that I will say for me has been utterly transformative. So let me shut up and let you tee upF. Jeff. Yeah, you know, somewhere to you, like I'm constantly in conversations with people about this kind of stuff, but it's hard to actually let all different kinds of emotions in or all these different feelings happen that you might not always wanna have happen.

And he had this great metaphor for how to think about each feeling as it comes to the top of your mind. This idea of welcoming everything in your experience as a guest, it makes it kind of fun, you know. It's going to be a party in there, you know. Sometimes some parties are fun, some parties are going off the rails. Sometimes you really don't feel like you have the energy for another party season, but guess what? You don't always get to choose. So it's like, just taking that out breath and reaching down and finding that inner resource that's going to allow you to open, genuinely let all the characters be there. Even if some of them are raiding your fridge and falling asleep on the couch and

Rating your fridge and falling asleep on the couch and making a mess in the bathroom or whatever party guests do I Mean this little mantra I use it all the time. I'll be sitting in meditation and then you know They urge to plan a homicide or you know whatever will come up in my mind and it's like all right Welcome to the party. I didn't invite this thought. It's just some ancient neurotic program trying to protect me unskilledfully. And instead of fighting it, which, by the way, only makes it stronger, it's like shooting at the Hulk. You can welcome it to the party, which is not indulgence. It's just an acceptance, patting it on the head gently, whatever visitor has come, and then you can move on in a sane or fashion. Anyway, that's how I compute it.

How do you compute it? What's fun about the specific example is I heard this example from Jeff just as we were doing a prompt that was like, draw your dread as a character. And Jeff drew a character that was based on judge dread. I don't know if you remember this like. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he dropped your based on Jeff and I were both old.

So I will get all of his cultural references. He drew a character based on that. And that immediately framed the way that I thought of this idea of welcoming the party. It was all these creatures just seeing these feelings as little beings that were in the room that were allowed to just vibe out. Didn't mean I had to elevate them to President of the party or anything like that, but just to let these creatures in and Imagine them in the same space just doing their thing, but that doesn't mean, you know, if someone rolls up to your party,

it doesn't be that they're in control of you, you know? It doesn't be that they're leading the party, but they're just a guess. They're just in the space. They're just interacting. Yeah, and I think you can have affection, you know. This may just, I don't know, it must maybe sound a little weird to people, but my principal demons are anger and selfishness. And if I'm looking carefully beneath the anger and the selfishness is this swirling undersea monster of fear. And fear is driving, I think, most of my inner activity.

But that big undersea monster has this, you know, soft, opalescent underbelly, meaning that it has a positive intention, which is it's trying to protect you. And so you can welcome the dread or whatever obnoxious party guests are arriving in your mind, not only with a with gridded teeth, but with a sense of, yeah, thank you for your service. But I'm going to take your gun away, though. Yeah, that's a way of reframing it. That's, you know, Naomi actually mentioned reframing what she described the activity. And we can listen to her words all that, if you like.

I would say reframing is often really helpful for people when you're allowed to kind of like almost take all of these different parts of how you're feeling and thinking about something, it allows us, I think, to root ourselves in what is being felt just in a new way, just in its newness. I think that it just shifts the way that someone is able to think through the same idea.

I like this reframing, and I see how you're connecting it to Welcome to the Party. It's this cognitive shift of instead of having an aversive reaction to this very unpleasant feeling of dread, it's to see it in an entirely different way as trying to protect you and all of a sudden the monster is at least temporarily defanged. 100% and that's part of the benefit of this theme we keep coming back to of getting it out of your head. Because it's hard to reframe something that's just like

stuck in your head looping and looping and looping. It seems like the only thought that's there, right? But getting it out as a silly drawing or a character or a stick figure, then you can look at it and be like, oh, this is outside of me. Let me think about what other way I might view that. Stay tuned for more of my conversation with Selim, where we both try drawing our dread. Dalad meant to me the whole drawing thing struck me as a little bit, I don't know, out

there, but I'm actually convinced now. So you'll get to hear us. Do that, and we'll talk about perhaps the biggest, scariest source of dread, death. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories

about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Bornnaked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons

and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. We're gonna do this draw I get to size and I would emphasize we're not trying to create art here. We're just trying to create something.

So let's time how about two minutes draw your dread I'll draw my dread and then we will show each other our pictures and describe it to each other. Dear listener as Selene and I do our drawings we're not going to make you sit through two minutes of our terrible scrolling, or at least my scrolling will be terrible. We're going to fast forward right to the results. I don't want to rush the artist. Oh shoot, but you know, if you don't rush it, sometimes it doesn't get done. Okay.

Well, I'm done. I'm done. Let's do it, I'll start. Okay. Just reminding myself that we were gonna do this activity in the moment, just now made me realize that I was dreading something that I hadn't even realized I was dreading, I don't know if you can see this on the zoom, but this is the back of a car,

requires some interpretation from me to explain this. I'm about to go out of the trip and I got a lot of work to do before the trip. I am dreading packing for this trip so the car itself, the boxes are beasts and that's me, tiny on the side, trying to deal with a couple of work problems falling from the sky at me as I get ready for this road trip. What you got? I am dreading. I have mentioned this on the show before. I have been experiencing and extremely destabilizing and inconvenient resurgence of claustrophobia.

And it's been making elevators and airplanes really hard. And the treatment is to do exposure therapy. So you have to like go expose yourself to stuff you don't want to expose yourself to like elevators and airplanes. Actually, I was with a friend last night to expose yourself to like elevators and airplanes. Actually I was with a friend last night, shout out to Corey and she and I were going to an event and the only way up to the event and down from the event was on an elevator. So she had to hold my hand.

So here's my undersea Leviathan of fear. He's got big sharp teeth and a scary slimy body. But the key point is right here, I wrote the word underbelly and put an arrow right up into this monster's gooey. I put one of my least favorite signs there, a heart, right on the underbelly of the monster because the truth is, I mean fear, panic, anxiety

is incredibly uncomfortable. And yet it is the organism trying to protect itself. And it's the brain computing danger where there is none. And yet the intention beneath all of it is, you know, barfing unicorn gooey. It is really trying to help you out. It's just screwing it up. So yeah, that's my drawing.

The teeth on your drawing are terrifyingly large. One of the things that is helpful for me with this, you know, I'm looking at this drawing right now, I'm not actually going to get eaten alive by creatures while I'm packing this car. You know, it helps me sometimes see where my brain is overemphasizing something that maybe it's not a life threatening danger in this particular case, you know? Yes, yes. Okay, but there are dangers that are genuinely life threatening and we don't want to minimize that.

So let's lighten the mood now and talk about death because you do go there in a pretty robust way in the course of the Dread Project. So what did you learn about the Dread of Death? Yeah, we spoke with Rachel Menzies, who's a clinical psychologist on author and a postdoc who has written multiple books on death. And she spoke about the concept of memento-mori, which you just mentioned exposure to fear. This is kind of a similar thing. The idea that being exposed to death, remembering death actually helps you and is actually more, it kind of normalizes something that's happening to all of us and is going to happen all

around us. Avoiding thinking about death as humans who are mortal and are gonna die is actually not really possible long-term. We're gonna be faced with a death around us. We're gonna be faced with something that reminds us of our own mortality. So Rachel brought up some of the different ways that even other cultures approach death that can be beneficial in a way. You know, for me, I spend a lot of time living in Japan and one thing you'll see there, for example, is these little statues sometimes by the side of the road, sometimes that side of temples that are symbols of when someone's had a miscarriage or an infant death sometime.

And that's something that recently is being talked about more in the US, but is often seen as kind of a taboo. And yeah, it's an example of a form of something related to death that having a ritual around or a visual symbol can be helpful with for a lot of people. Here's Rachel. One of the most helpful ways to do that is to start surrounding yourself with what's called memento mori, little symbolic or visual reminders to keep death at the forefront of your mind. These are things which are specifically trying to help you remember that time is finite and you've only got so much of it and use it how you want to use it.

I really see the wisdom for sure of the momentum, we've got some Mexican handicrafts around the house that I picked up when I was doing some reporting in Mexico that are skulls which's a big motif in Mexican art. And as I get older, I've noticed that a very prominent memento, Mori, is called the mirror because every time I look in the mirror, I'm like, Oh, man, that dude's old. And it reminds me I was watching TikTok the other day. And there was some kid interviewing people in the street and he interviewed an older guy. And the guy said he was 67. And the kids said, what's it like to be 67? The guy said, every day, I wake up and it feels like I played a game of tackle football yesterday. And I walk around and I'm sore all the time. And then at some point during the day, I look in the mirror. And I actually think that's a really healthy way to go because death is non-negotiable. And so what do you want to do?

Spend as much time, you know, whistling past the graveyard and trying to overt your eyes from the abyss or do you want to get comfortable with this thing that is coming down the pike at all of us? Yeah, you know, I know you spent a lot of time, investing in certain aspects of this, it's surprising how folks who have regular contact with death are not necessarily dark, sad beings, right? You know, I want to be careful and not make light of like the real challenges of things, like for example, during COVID, the ways that healthcare workers had to suddenly be surrounding it in a way that felt very out of their control for a lot of situations and things like that.

But there's people who are able to approach it with intentionality because of either their careers or their belief systems. We had a conversation with a death doula named Elua Arthur. And, you know, what our producer reached out to her, she wrote back and was like, this is going to be fun. Which is, you know, pretty surprising response to, are you up for talking about dread of death? But she's been around it so regularly and built so many rituals about it that she sees it as a thing that teaches her about life. I don't know how much time I have. I want to take time to look at the hummingbirds in awe and

listen to my niece laugh and look into the eyes of my beloved and feel loved. When we're talking about death, we're bringing our entire lives into focus. Talking about death to me is one of the most enlightening things that reminds me that I'm so very present. I'm so very much here. Now, how can I fill up all the edges of this very limited time I have here? I love this idea of thinking of life as a container to fill to the edges. Brim, make it bubble over. How do you actually get to that mindset though? I'm not sure what happened,

but I do know that I've seen a lot of it. I've been with a lot of sick people, dying people, people right after they've died. And to consider a body that once was animated with a spark of life, now just an empty vessel of tissue and bones with no life inside of it, to think that this person will make no new memories, they won't speak any more words, they won't walk anywhere ever again. Like the profound stillness in a dead body is something that is jarring.

When I see that there is a finite end to life, then it encourages me to be here in it for as long as I've got it. Yes, it's coming. But until that day, I'm gonna live. I'm gonna live. That was one of those interviews where there's a line that just sticks with you and loops in the best way possible and that line of her saying,

brim, make it bubble over, talking about kind of the cup of life. She's not saying at all that death isn't sad and that it won't involve sadness and that, you know, she's not denying permission to be sad and grieve. But noting, I think, that someone in a job like hers often ends up reminded of life and of its shortness. And you know, it almost every tradition, whether tradition that talks about it here after or not were reminded that our time on earth is relatively short in a lot of ways. And the idea of just trying to pack it as full of joy and connection as possible.

I mean, that one just hung with me. I totally agree. And I just had a bunch of responses to listen to that clip. One is that people don't wanna look at death. They feel it's morbid or whatever, but it actually is morbid, but in the best possible way. And Alua Arthur is walking proof of the fact that looking at this forbidden truth is extremely, extremely helpful

in liveening. It reminds you of what's important. And that's why it brings us back to Momento Mori, the reminder of death because we are programmed for denial. We are programmed to get caught up in stupid shit. And so having as many reminders, whether it's your mirror or some Mexican skulls or a stone you carry in your pocket

or a meditation practice or volunteering in a hospice or whatever it is to remind you that this, that pregame is over, this is all zipping past. And it's now literally or never. I think that's incredibly important, the reminding part of it. The other thing I was going to say is that is interesting coincidence. I was in the same room with Alua Arthur last night. The event I referenced where my friend, Cori, had to hold my hand was a premiere of a TV

show that's by the time this episode is posted, will be airing on Disney Plus, starring Chris Hemsworth, who's best known as Thor. And the TV show is called Limitless, and Chris tests his limits in all sorts of ways. And the final episode is about death. And it features a Lua Arthur, who then came on and did a little Q&A with the audience. And she's just extraordinary. And the final thing I was going gonna say after listening to that clip, and this is just supportive of the argument that people who were around, and you made this argument earlier,

people who were around death are often counterintuitively quite lively. I made a really close friend, this guy, Roddy Getter, who was sent to a hospice where I was volunteering. He was sent there. It was told he had a couple days to live. He ended up living for five years in this hospice where I was volunteering. He was sent there. It was told he had a couple days to live. He ended up living for five years in this hospice and to the point where they actually sent him home. He ended up dying after a year of being at home with this sister

Ernestine and Anyway, one day I hang out with running a lot. I just remember one day I bought him some hot wings He liked hot wings and he turned to me. He was eating them and he said, this shit is spicy, it'll remind you that you're alive. And that line has never left to me. And this guy, Ron, he was living in a hospice, his neighbors were dying all the time and he was one of the most lively, alive people I've ever met because he didn't take anything for granted.

Okay, so that's just a vomiting up of responses to that great quote, but I do have a question for you. You've mentioned it so far in this interview that in the West, we have a way of sort of quarantining deaths. We don't have to see it. The sick go to hospitals and then we rush them off to funeral homes where we put makeup on them and make them look better than they did often when they were alive.

So there's a way in which we're protected from the reality of this. You come from two distinct cultures and the cultures and through which you've moved, one is often required sometimes to wash bodies. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah. In the Islamic tradition, it's not unusual to be called to help wash the body of a relative. And it's something that it's a process that I've been involved in. It's definitely, man, I mean,

you wanna talk about something that makes you really aware that it's real. You know, there's no, when you're that close to someone you know well, and you're literally touching their body, you can't pretend that death hasn't occurred. There's no more literal way to face it that I can think of. And in that tradition it's treated as something that's very good for a person to do, to be a part of that practice of assisting. And, you know, I think it's

something that after being involved in that process really did make me think a lot about how distant death is in daily life and how it's really happening. We're just not seeing it. Of course, it's not that it's not happening to everyone in the West. It's obviously happening to everyone, but it is far away. And when it's not far away, you can't help but think about your own life after that. And think about what you wanna do with your day, your year, if you're lucky, your decade, if you're lucky. It's a really challenging question, of course,

like how to think about the time you have, you know, you'd act differently if you have lucky. It's a really challenging question, of course, like how to think about the time you have, you know, you'd act differently if you have 10 seconds. You'd immediately call a loved one maybe, differently if you have a year, differently if you have 10 years. So I'm not saying it generates like an automatic magic plan, but it definitely causes a kind of attendiveness, if that makes sense, because immediately afterwards for myself, and I can't speak to other folks, the world around me was suddenly very, very present. And I was very, you see things in a different way. And that sounds kind of cliche, but sometimes cliches are just true.

Yeah, well, cliches achieved their status by being true. That's right, yeah. So I'm curious having had this experience hasn't had any impact on your personal dread levels vis-a-vis death? That's a great question. I haven't thought of it as something that shifted the way I think about dread, but almost by definition something that shifts your attention

or shifts the way you perceive the world around you, shifts how much time you might spend in a looping thought about death. Does that make sense? So here I'm not speaking as, I'm not the most culturally knowledgeable person about bio-traditions all the time, like all of us, the things that were raised in are sometimes our defaults, right?

But for me, anything that makes me spend a different part of the pie chart of our life, of our days, feeling more attentive to the people around us. That's taking me out of a state of mind where I'm being paralyzed by dread, you know? And that for me is a real value that's come from experiences like that. Just seeing your family differently,

your living family differently, after something like that. It didn't make me feel more fear, which again, I'm just speaking of my own case, was kind of surprising. And that was a recurring theme in folks we talked to as well, that being more connected to things surrounding what you dread, connected as opposed to just gaining information, right? Being more connected, even if it would seem like it would make you think more about that thing or dread something related to that thing

that you're now connected to, for whatever reason, didn't seem to cause that. It caused people to feel more human. Like it's not necessarily that it makes you cheerful. That's not necessarily the immediate outcome, but something about feeling more human makes you less scared in some ways, in some cases, or at least makes you more able to be with the people you're with and take action with the people you're with and interact with

the people you're with in a very present way. Yeah, I hear a couple of things there. One is that having had a real intimate exposure to death, you shift your focus in your day-to-day life toward what's actually happening right now and being grateful for the time you have, and that can't but reduce the ratio of stuck-in-dread time. And then the other thing I heard you say, and this is a bit of a projection of my part, is that it's a kind of exposure therapy, just like I have to do with my claustrophobia, riding elevators with my wife, which I now, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I do, to get comfortable with it. It reduces the fear. I've got to approach the thing I'm scared of. And so washing a dead body

can have a similar effect. Yeah. And, you know, I would emphasize too that different people will have different reactions to that experience. So some folks might, you can imagine, for example, becoming more connected to the idea of the hereafter, after an experience like that. But that also causes you to move through the day differently, and causes you to pay different kinds of attention. So that's the recurring theme for me with those kind of exposures is that they do change how you see the world and the way you move through it.

And anything that makes you take positive action or connect with community, takes you out of that paralysis and the negative side of fear sometimes that can happen when it thoughts just looping and looping and looping. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. And after the break, Selim and I are gonna talk about another common source of dread, eco-dread,

or the dread of the climate crisis. We're also gonna hear some listener responses from folks who have already done the Dread Project and we'll get a sneak peek at the rest of the season on more than a feeling. Let's talk about one last aspect here of Dread that you explore in the course of the Dread project, and that is eco-dread or fear of impending climate disaster. I'm impending might even not be the right word since it's already here in many ways. But what did you learn on this score? So I actually took a field trip for this one. I went to the Gwannis Canal in Brooklyn. The canal is infamously polluted

and there's a lot of jokes about the Gwannis Canal and it's a super fun site, which means the government's like, this is bad enough that we're gonna spend a lot of money cleaning it up. It is not at all a place I would think to help one's thinking about eco dread. It seems like one spot that would make one terrified perhaps, but I got a chance to talk to Oralia Casey, who is a nature educator. She's a youth program manager at the Gawannis Canal Conservancy and founder of Intercity Ranger, she does all these activities where she encourages people

to find positive aspects of nature. She talked about how connecting with nature and observing nature can take you out of just this, like, barrage of negative information into something that feels good, observing nature feels good. And that connecting to people who are working in nature can move you towards action. So I got to sit on a park bench next to her and I'll let you see what she described.

If you take a moment and you realize how hilly a place is, you take a moment and sort of look at the rocks and figure out how old they might be. You look at the trees and how broad they are, how tall they are. I also would encourage people to just look up what indigenous people used to occupy the space that they now live upon, the Lenny Lenape people, the Karnarcy people further down in Brooklyn, right? What it looks like here for them. We now live on this land, we now use it for multiple different things, but still our trees are still here and they still manage to survive. The birds still migrate here yearly.

You'll see new insects, you'll see insects that are native here. And then most importantly, you see people interacting, right? People are just walking through the space to get home or to get to the next destination. Or this is their destination. So that's where we are. That's the Guwana's Canal to me. I don't mind it.

I think it's cool. It's quirky. So let me see if I can restate this. The argument seems to be that connecting with nature while it won't necessarily fend off the climate crisis does give you a certain grounding and sanity and calm that will allow you to navigate whatever comes more skillfully. Yeah, you know, one of the people we talked to about dread in general was Dr. Ali Matu, who's a clinical psychologist, creator of the show called the psych show. He said this in kind of a lightweight. He was saying that often we think of the opposite of dread as being hope, but sometimes he thinks of the opposite of dread as being action. And just feeling more connected to nature helps you be aware of what's around you locally,

right? So one of the things that Arilia pointed to was, hey, you can write where you are at this very moment. Learn something about the land around you. Learn who historically the stewards of that land were, trying and research without too much work, you can find out what the land used to look like before it was covered in buildings. Now you can kind of be connected to the nature that actually is around you. You can take some pleasure in it, right? So taking pleasure in nature rather than just being afraid of the loss of it.

And you need to get to some kind of baseline before you could take action. If you're just like totally freaked out about climate change and reading negative tweets about climate change all the time. Again, that can come back to that thing. We keep coming back to a paralysis and Connecting the local nature is a step towards connecting to local activists around nature and just actual action that you can take and you know, we talked to a take. And, you know, we talked to a somatic therapist named Patty Adams, who had a really simple tip. And it was anytime you need to find nature, look for a sunset, because almost no matter where you are, there's going to be natural beauty at the end of each day. And so if you're feeling disconnected, if you're feeling like nature is just a thing that you're fearing losing,

but not something you're getting any pleasure from in your life, just stepping outside its sunset. Even if you're in the city, you're gonna see some natural beauty there, taking that moment, re-centering there, and having that first step to get you out of that loop of nature just being something

that you're afraid of losing. I think makes a lot of sense. Agency is an antidote to dread. Yes. Can apply to nature, but also our politics, you know, just volunteering locally to help your community, just merely voting all of this falls in the category of agency as an antidote to Dred. Before I let you go, I'd love to hear what kind of feedback you're getting on the Dred challenge. Oh, the feedback's been amazing. We've had it be really interactive.

We even had a local event here in my city in Durham where we had some of the folks that we've interviewed come and meet each other. And over the course of doing these five challenges, we got a lot of voice memos. Our first clips from a listener named Rachel. Hi, I'm Rachel and I live in England and I've just joined the Dread Project, which I just love the title of it. It just makes me laugh. And it's so nice hearing other people talk about their dread because sometimes it just feels as though it's just you and everyone else is living this extremely fulfilling

and happy and joyous life. And it's just you dreading, barreling towards death and etc. So it's so nice to normalize it and I'm also a psychologist and I think that there's this very strange idea that I have and other people have that because I'm a psychologist that I don't experience these very strong feelings and I absolutely do because I am just a humanoid like everybody else. So thanks.

It is not just her, it's not just you, it's just that, that just be barreling towards existential dread. So that was a recurring thing, as people just feel good hearing each other talk about it. You know, we also got people who shared what they drew since you mentioned nostalgia for certain time periods. Here's another. Hi, this is Diana from Durham, North Carolina. My drawing of dread is informed by day one's exercise

of writing to dread, where I sort of discovered that my dread is there supposedly to protect me. So my drawing is kind of like that big giant marshmallow man from Ghostbusters, but kind of fuzzy and maniacal. And he's holding me, supporting me in his arms, constantly poking me with lightning bolts and getting me to freak out. So that's how I see my dread. Thanks. I love the idea of a fuzzy, box-billow man being the thing that is terrifying, someone. We've also had people get pretty creative. We had someone who made an entire text exchange between them and dread. Jennifer Markovitz from Ontario, Canada.

Today I sent a text to Dred. I said, I'm a meaning to ask, what is it that you want from me? And Dred replied, I want you to feel suffering. To suffer is to be human. I serve to remind you. Seems cruel I replied. I know I am human. Seems cruel I replied. I know I am human.

I suffer. What's the point in reminding me of something I know and feel? Dread replied, have a notice I come visit when you're feeling blessed? I want to balance things and you make it easy for me to do just that. But you always visit, I asked. And Dread replied, that is up to you.

I mean, they're just writing theater for us. That's how deeply they're engaging, and it's been wonderful to see. So a lot of people listening to this might be now suddenly quite intrigued. However, the challenge is over. Can people join now? Oh, 100%. You can actually go to dreadproject.com and you can get an email every day that will tell you for five days, what the prompt for the day is. We're still here. We're at pod feelings on Twitter, but these activities are useful anytime that you could take a moment with them. And you know, I want to keep emphasizing the thing we brought up. It's not about every tool being a step-by-step exact thing that's going to magically cure every listener of dread, but it's a collection of tools that you can use to approach dread

and that you can try out and see which ones help you out and how they help you out. I want to say that if you want to go listen to the episodes, you should go over to the more than a feeling podcast and we'll put the links in the show notes for sure. Speaking of more than a feeling, the show, you've got some other non-dread episodes coming up and I just want to give you a chance to play a few clips so that we can get folks intrigued and over onto your podcast feed. One of the episodes is about one of my favorite topics. Favorite probably isn't the right word, but it's just let's just say resonant topic.

Unfortunately for me, grudges. If somebody says the word grudge, you immediately want to hear the story behind it, right? Like it's such an intriguing thing. And we got to talk to the author of a book called How to Hold a Grudge that's Sophie Hannah. And we also talk to Matthew Hepburn, who is a friend of yours as well, and a meditation teacher and had a wonderful description of what it's like to hold a grudge. There is kind of a like deliciousness in holding a grudge, like a sword in

your lap that you just sharpen, you know, aimlessly, but usually they don't really feel good. It's like the sword's in our lap, not in somebody else's lap. So every once in a while, you're trying to just posture as in you nick your leg, which is a brutal description. So true, totally true. You're also doing an episode on forgiveness. Tell me about that. Yeah. One of our reporters, Yasmin Khan has been friends with a woman who works in what might be called violence interruption.

She goes by Coco and is on the ground in Brooklyn just every day working in the community. And even though she's in what might seem like extreme situations, she's got a lot of concrete takeaways on how to use empathy anytime the stakes feel really high. You have to understand that when someone dies and someone goes to a tragedy like that on both sides, whether it's the perpetrator, whether it's the victim, everyone is hurt.

Right? Everyone is hurt. No matter what, they all feel hurt. So you have to understand that hurt and you have to respect that. Her. It sounds like you've got some incredible episodes coming up. And let me just say with regard to the aforementioned Yasmeen Kahn is the reporter on the episode about forgiveness. Yasmeen also hosted a podcast called Childproof at this point not producing new episodes, but there are a ton of her initial episodes, which are really a great listen, and lots of good advice for anybody who is rearing children right now, so we'll put links to Yasmeen's show in there as well. So to you, Selim, I want to say thank you.

Great job on this Dread Project, you and your whole team. Before I let you go, I just want to check in though, is there anything that you wanted to say that I can give you an opportunity to say? Mainly just that this project is an exploration. And as the person doing the exploring, it's been such a good reminder that there are tools that can help us feel better in all kinds of situations and that we can learn from each other. Even if all the tools don't work all the time, even if we are an intermittent journaler,

even if we have to voice mebo instead of getting a petted paper, even if we've never drawn that experimenting with things that have helped other people really helps me move through life and helps me. And I'm super grateful to everyone who's shared the way they've been dealing with dread with us. Amen. Again, great job on this project and a great job in this interview. Thanks for coming on, Celine. Thank you so much. It's been a joy to talk about it with you. Oddly, yes, it's been a joy to talk about dread. So thanks again. Thanks again to Saleem.

Great to hear what they're up to over on more than a feeling. You can find this special Dread Project mini-series with five days of challenges for working with Dread over on the more than a feeling podcast feed. If you want to make it official and get five days of emails that walk you through the challenge, you can sign up anytime at DreadProject.com and be sure to check out the rest of the season of more than a feeling for more episodes

that explore even more emotions. You can get all of that wherever you get your podcasts. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davey, and Lauren Smith. We had some very special help for this episode from the great Kim Baikama. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman, Kimi Regler is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Jen Poient. We get our scoring and mixing from Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio.

We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode for my old friend, extraordinary human being, Zen, priest, coach, and pale elison. I was gonna talk about many ways to do your life better. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ 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. you