Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 562: How to Get Over Rejection | Florence Williams

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

This is the last episode in our four-part series where we’re counter-programming against the way Valentine’s Day is often celebrated, and examining different kinds of relationships including romantic, friendship, and family. Today we’re probing a mystery: Why, from an evolutionary standpoint do we take heartbreak and rejection so hard? It can send the body and mind into a vicious spiral. As one genomics researcher has said, “heartbreak is one of the hidden landmines of human existence.“ There are countless pieces of art dedicated to heartbreak. Songs, movies, poems, the list is pretty much endless. But what does science say? Why does this happen to us? How exactly does the body react to a bad break up, from a romantic partnership, or a friendship or even a job? And what can we do to get over it?These are the questions the writer, Florence Williams decided to tackle after her own 25 year marriage fell apart. And the answers are fascinating.Florence Williams is a science journalist and author, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine. Her latest book is called, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey. It is just out in paperback, and has been nominated for the PEN/Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. In this episode we talk about:The passage of time as a way to heal all woundsThe role purpose plays in recovery William’s three part heartbreak recovery toolkit (calming down, connecting to other people and finding purpose)The connection between openness and resilienceHow to become more open to a lack of closureThe good and bad news about heartbreakAnd, rejecting some of the conventional approaches to heartbreakFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/florence-williams-562 See 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, hey, we're probing a mystery on the show today. Why from an evolutionary standpoint, do we take rejection and heartbreak so hard? It can send the body and the mind into a vicious spiral. As one genomics researcher has said, heartbreak is one of the hidden landmines of human existence. There are countless pieces of art dedicated to heartbreak, songs, movies,

poems. The list is pretty much endless. But what does science say? Why does this happen to us? And how exactly does the body react to a bad breakup from a romantic partnership, a friendship, even a job? And of course, this question, how do we get over it? These are all questions that the writer Florence Williams decided to tackle after her own 25-year marriage fell apart. And the answers she found are fascinating. Florence Williams has a science writer and author and a contributing editor at outside magazine. Her new book is called Heartbreak, a personal and scientific journey. It's just out in paperback and has been nominated for

the Penn Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing, which is a big deal. In this conversation, we talked about how men and women react differently to heartbreak and rejection, a medical phenomenon called broken heart syndrome. Why Williams believes we can feel heartbreak individually as well as collectively, whether heartbreak is an evolutionary feature or bug. Why some people don't get over heartbreak very easily. The health impacts for both the dumper and the dump-e, contagious trauma versus contagious resilience, and the many, many things Williams tried in her own effort to recover from heartbreak, including talk therapy, spending

time with other people who are experiencing heartbreak, EMDR, which is eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing, visiting the museum of broken relationships and embracing nature. Just to say this is the final episode in our two week Valentine's Day counter programming series. If you missed the prior episodes in which we explored friendship, family drama, and the myths of love and sex, go check them out. 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 the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Florence Williams, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Downs, great to be here. It's great to have you here. I, as a fellow memoir writer, I really appreciate the conceit for your book. I think it's just a brilliant setup, although I know that may be a little glib since it involved a lot of pain on your end. But having said that, I'd love to get you to describe for the listeners how you got interested in heartbreak. Well, unfortunately, I didn't exactly seek out the topic. I would say the topic sought me.

Yeah, I was 25 years into my marriage. I had actually met my husband when I was 18 years old. We'd been together for actually three decades, married for 25 years. And I think as a lot of marriages do, we had sort of grown apart. And it was really my husband's decision to separate. I wanted to keep working on it and he didn't. And so I had never experienced romantic heartbreak before. Having met him so young. And I think when my friends underwent heartbreak, I probably wasn't very sympathetic.

I think I was one of those people who was like, eh, obviously, it wasn't meant to be, get over it. You'll be fine. But then when it happened to me, I was like, oh, now I see why everyone is so melodramatic about this. This really is a lifequake. And my body started changing. All these things started happening.

And then of course, the science journalist in me was like, what is going on? I would like some answers. The way you pose the question, or the series of questions is really interesting. You point out that there's so much art about heartbreak, but you were interested in finding out was there any science or any sort of validated protocols

for treating heartbreak? Yeah, that's right. I mean, there are obviously so many songs, there's so much poetry, there's theater, there are all these ways that people express pain over heartbreak and talk about it. But I wanted to know why my body was feeling it. What was going on in my cells, what was going on in my heart tissue, what was going on in my immune system, because everything started feeling really whacked out. And I think it just surprised me.

I mean, obviously people talk about, oh, yes, stress affects our immune systems, but I guess I had never experienced it to that degree, and I was really roiled by it. And I also, you know, I think that this sort of human side of me thought that if I have a project, if I have this professional journalism project to find out, it gives me something to do every day on a reason to get up. And I found it sort of therapeutic in that sense.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's, I think, what I was pointing at when I talked about how much I like the conceit for this book. I have a former colleague when I used to work at ABC News. There was a woman named Robin Roberts who I worked with for many years and she's been on this show a bunch of times and she likes to say make your mess, your message and that is definitely what you're doing here. But since you brought it up, you've brought up

sort of what heartbreak was doing to your body a couple of times. Well, what do we know about what heartbreak does to our bodies? Well, we know that if we've been in a long kind of bond, attachment bond with someone, which is what humans are really supposed to do, or supposed to sort of bond with each other, when those bonds break,

we end up feeling extremely disoriented. We end up feeling in some ways threatened because this person that we've been attached to, if it's been a relatively good relationship, this person has been kind of our safety figure. We know that when we live with someone, our bodies really co-regulate. So for example, our gamma waves in our brains move in sync with each other. We know that our cortisol levels move in sync. They rise in the morning and they fall at night and they do this in synchrony. And so, when this person sort of leaves, when they disappear, our nervous systems on

some really unconscious level know that something is very wrong. And our nervous system breaks out. And that's why we fill these health effects down the road. You talking to book about a medical term broken heart syndrome? Yes, Tucketsubo cardiomyopathy. So this is what happens when we undergo some kind of major emotional drama. Our bodies put out so many stress hormones that it can kind of stun the cells in the heart, especially in the left ventricle,

one of the main four chambers of the heart. It ends up ballooning out, not being able to pump efficiently. And to the person undergoing this, it feels like they're having a heart attack. They go to the emergency room, they are in a kind of hard failure. About five to seven percent of hospital admissions

for cardiac failure are this talk at SUBO. And we've seen it, especially in post-menopausal women who may become widowed or even if they lose a pet. We see it sometimes in men. There are some examples in the literature of men who watch their favorite soccer team lose in the finals. They go into this cardiac arrest. So in some ways, it's the metaphor made real.

We are suffering from a broken heart. And I think it was Sir William Osler, who was a long ago medical doctor who said the tragedies of life are largely arterial. It's not just a metaphor. I like that. You brought up men and women, and another thing you talk about is that men and women tend to react differently to a broken heart. They can. Yeah, it seems like if men are rejected and love, if they're the ones who are dumped, sometimes they do respond

with rage and with violence, unfortunately. We know that domestic violence is often a result of men feeling rejected or abandoned in some way. Women tend to, I think, internalize some of their pain a little bit more. They may become very anxious, depressed, develop eating disorders, things like that. If they do act out, many of us act out, I think after breakups, we drink more, we may have less impulse control, we eat more, we may more likely to have unprotected sex,

things like that, we sort of lose some judgment in our prefrontal cortex, as our amygdala, the fear centers of our brains really come online. Are there evolutionary explanations for this? I mean, you've touched on this a little bit, but I wonder if there's more to say there. Yeah, absolutely. I think in some ways, you know, as humans were wired for love. And so we take the loss of love very, very seriously, and talk about rejection, and sort of being dumped, what happens when people feel dumped, what happens in their brains. And rejection is something that we are very keenly wired and attuned to feel. Our success as individuals really depended on our ability to get along in a group.

We found safety in numbers. It was when we were cast out into the jungle that really terrible things could happen to us. And that's why I think that feeling of abandonment can lead to sort of a state of threat. Where who's going to attack me now? Which predator am I going to find? Am I going to hurt myself stumbling through the forest alone and heartbroken? And that's why our bodies really respond to that. It's an emergency from an evolutionary standpoint. You quoted Genomics researcher as saying heartbreak is one of the hidden landmines of human existence.

Yeah, I have to say that discouraged me when he said that, but it also made me feel really validated Because it felt like a landmine. It felt like something really serious was happening to me and he justified it But also made me realize, okay, I have to get better. I don't want my life-long health to be affected by this romantic event. I want to hear a lot more about what you did to feel better, but let me just ask sort of on a definitional tip here, how do we understand heartbreak? And is your understanding of it limited to the romantic sphere, or can we have our heartbroken if a friend doesn't want to see us anymore? Or you get fired from a job, you, you could get rejected for a sports team. There are lots of ways to get rejected or dumped in life.

Yes. Do those all qualify as heartbreak? Unfortunately, that's true. There are many ways to feel heartbreak. And that's misdute observation. You can feel it after the loss of a friendship. You can feel it after the death of a loved one. I think you can also feel it now in a time of catastrophic

environmental change, you know, watching these geographies of our childhood or our communities fall under fire, these big storms. We can feel heartbreak individually and we can also feel heartbreak collectively. So you're taking a broad view then of heartbreak. I do take a broad view of it, but of course it's, I think, mostly illuminated by my particular experience, which is romantic and thus enmeshed also with these feelings of rejection, betrayal, and so on, that make it a little bit more of a singular and particular experience, but the grief and the sense of anger and rage and loneliness,

all of these things can happen after many different kinds of heartbreak. I was going to ask, how do we delineate between grief and loneliness and heartache? And it's just, it sounds to me like grief and loneliness, depression, anger, those are all, or can all be component parts of heartache, but they could also come with lots of other life events. That's right. And unfortunately, they can sort of build on each other and cascade. You know, I had a kind of chronology to the book, and then followed the chronology of my heartbreak, which was first these hormones and these expressions of shock, really. And then following that is sort of the grief, and following that is the loneliness. And then following that is sort of the grief and following that is the loneliness. And then of course the impulse to try to get better.

From an evolutionary standpoint, why is rejection so hard to get over given that it is part of life? That seems to be a design flaw. Well, actually, it's not. It's very adaptive because when we feel the rejection so acutely, we're really motivated to try to come back. We want to come back into the group. We want to find acceptance. There are actually all these interesting ways that love and experiencing love kind of change the brain in ways that make us more sensitive to heartbreak after it ends.

And we know this from other lab studies. I went to visit these labs. There's a researcher who's studying what happens to voles if they meet and then you sort of separate them, you cause this little vol divorce. And we see that there are certain stress hormones that are upregulated. Even as soon as we fall in love, they're sort of like waiting at the ready so that when when the separation happens, the little sad vol is freaking out enough to try to go find the partner again, try to find a new partner, let's get to a place where we're safer.

And so in some ways, we kind of need the heartbreak to motivate us. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen for everybody. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. I feel like some people don't get over heartbreak very easily. It really can affect their health for the long term. And yet there are things we really can do to feel better. So the reason why this isn't a design flaw is at least twofold. One, the brain is rewarding us for doing what is in the best interest of the species, which is coupling up and then at least

potentially passing our DNA onto the next generation. And two, it's creating an incentive system via pain for breakup that then hopefully incentivizes you to try to find it again, like a kind of something of a healthy addiction. Yeah, we think that that's the idea. Unfortunately, there are other kind of downstream effects of heartbreak that don't seem so adaptive, and this gets back to the immune system. And to that immunologist you mentioned, Dr. Steven Cole, who I worked with at UCLA, he actually invited me into the lab to look at what was going on with my cells in my immune system at different time points after the split.

We wanted to know how my immune system was responding. And as he puts it, we have these cells that listen for loneliness. And unfortunately, what they do is not very helpful because when our body knows that we've been rejected, when it feels like we're abandoned, it assumes that we literally are stumbling through the jungle alone. And so it pumps out our immune systems pump out more inflammation. In other words, it's sort of getting ready

to be attacked by a tiger, which sounds like maybe a good idea if you literally are stumbling alone through the jungle. Unfortunately, if we continue to feel lonely and feel rejected for weeks and months and in some cases years, we're pumping out a lot of chronic inflammation, and we know that leads to a whole host of diseases downstream. But at the same time,

our immune systems, and this is really interesting, our immune systems can't do everything, right? So while it's up-regulating for inflammation, it's down-regulating for the ability to fight things like viruses, which are spread in groups. So you don't need to fight viruses if you're alone in the jungle. But in fact, we do need to be able to fight viruses and we need to be able to do that now more than ever. Turns out. Aren't there breakups that are liberating? And I've had breakups where I initiated it. It was the right thing to do. I guess that all comports with everything you're saying because in those cases, I'm not heartbroken, and so it can feel liberating to have a breakup.

Yeah, absolutely. And we know that bad relationships are also bad for our health. So if we're in a relationship where we feel like we're stock or worse, right, it can be very helpful and helpful to get out of it. Unfortunately, we know a lot less about the brains of people doing the dumping than we do about the people who've been dumped. So, for example, I spoke to Helen Fisher, who's a

biological anthropologist, and she's one of the few people who's actually imaged the brains of people who've been dumped. And, you know, she sees these changes in different brain structures. We just don't know as much about the people who are doing the dumping. But I think that often for them, there's also a lot of pain. There's a lot of discombobulation. There can be a lot of guilt, especially if there are children involved, if it's a long relationship, they know they're hurting someone potentially. So I think no matter who you are, it's a disruptive life event and it can have consequences. Yeah, I was just thinking about that.

I remember in a specific breakup after a long relationship where I was the initiator of the breakup, but it took me weeks, if not months, to get over it. Even though I knew it was the right thing to do, I felt really sad because I was hurting somebody. And I also missed the companionship, even though I knew it wasn't the right companion. Absolutely. And your body knew you were missing kind of the safety and familiarity of that person too.

So even if it's not the best relationship, you may still feel some measure of safety and comfort. Your nervous systems are still enjoying that connection. And so, yeah, you'll notice the absence, for sure. Okay. So let's talk about the many, many things you did to try to get over it. I'm going to just tick off, and this is a long list, but it's a very interesting list. So I'll just go through it.

One of the things was talk therapy. That's not going to be a surprise. Some of the later tactics will, I think, be more surprising. But I'd be interested to hear whether talk therapy helped you. So helpful. And we know this from the science too. When we feel rejected, our brains cycle into these stories of what losers we are, right? On some level, we must have deserved the loss of love.

We just, we have these stories. We tell ourselves we become consumed with our inadequacies that all may be happening. And it's just really helpful to have a professional say, and actually, you know what, everyone experiences this. And that's actually not who you are. And you're actually a very relational person. I think you'll be happy in a future relationship. You might actually find love again. You know, you kind of tell yourself you never will. So it's just helpful to have someone say you straight, I think. It reminds me of one of the key components of self-compassion, which is something we talk

about a lot on the show. Christa Neff, who is the progenitor of self-compassion, which is something we talk about a lot on the show. Kristen Neff, who is the progenitor of self-compassion. One of the key components, according to her view, is what she calls common humanity, which is just realizing that the suffering you're doing right now is shared by many, many other people, which can, in a way, lighten the load. It's such a huge point. When we talk about heartbreak. We feel like when we are going through it, we're sort of the only one who's ever experienced this.

That's what it feels like. And it's because even though heartbreak is a universal experience sooner or later, it only happens maybe a couple of times in a lifetime. And so in your particular friend group, you may not actually know anyone who's going through it. I felt like that. All my friends were still married. They were still long married.

I felt very alone. And it was very helpful to me to find out, no, actually a lot of people have gone through this. It is universal. And there are these actually very predictable things. You may feel like it's very singular, but there are these predictable things that happen. And guess what? You're just going through it. So along those lines, you made a point of spending time

with other people who have been heartbroken. I did. I think that's one of the tips that I would have for people. Seek out people who not only have gone through it but have thrived, ideally, or are in the process of thriving. So you're not just stuck with people who are complaining all the time, but people who actually can model the growth, I guess,

that is possible after an experience like this, even though it feels like that's an unlikely outcome for you, maybe at the time, that, yes, anything you can do to remind yourself of the universality of this, we're all in it together. So are there support groups for the heartbroken? I think there probably are. I know one of the therapy modalities I underwent was a group session of this kind of therapy

called EMDR, which is a technique where you sort of use bilateral eye motion or other bilateral sensations in your body to decouple the memories from the cute pain. So it's a way to kind of take the storm, I guess, out of the system in terms of remembering the things that may have traumatized you during the breakup. And I did that in a group session. So that was one of the things I did in a group session. I also did some reporting where I spent time

with people who had PTSD, not necessarily from romantic breakup, but in this case, I took a backpacking trip with survivors of sexual violence who were trying to find comfort and healing in the natural world, which was something that just appealed to me as someone who'd written a lot about healing and nature. I found their healing to be very inspiring and moving.

There's this idea of contagious trauma, and sometimes health care workers or people in the profession of helping people with trauma undergo some of this contagious trauma. But there's also something called contagious resilience. When we see people recovering, that's also contagious and very inspiring. I'm just trying to think about the practicality here, because if I'm a regular person, I can't. I don't know that I necessarily would know how to seek out support from people who have survived heartbreak and or to find contagious resilience by finding a back-backing trip with survivors.

Sure, but you could probably find support groups. Your therapist might be able to recommend some. Another thing that I did was as a tourist, I went and visited a place called the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. And it was started by a man and woman who had been in a relationship, had broken up, felt terrible about it,

realized that there just weren't a lot of cultural rituals that we have for sort of marking these kinds of life events. And so they started this museum and they encouraged people from all over the world to send them objects that symbolize the relationships that were broken. And then to write a couple of paragraphs about what went wrong.

And people send the funniest things. I mean, one woman sent in a scab from her lover, another person sent in an exercise machine and said, this is where my girlfriend had an affair with someone else, right on this bicycle. And it was really funny in a way to walk through these objects. And there's something in the act of, I think, sending in the objects and writing about them, and then seeing them as other people, all this kind of helps facilitate, I think, some closure. Did it help for you, like, to just... It goes back to the common humanity piece.

It really does. And I think it also... It was comical in some ways. You see that people get so histrionic. This teddy bear just represented everything that went wrong. And you think, oh God, that's so dramatic. And in some ways, it's a little bit perspective giving, right? It's like, oh yeah, we all do this. We all make this huge drama of our problems.

And then we realize, oh, actually, we all have these problems and And we get over them. Let's go back to EMDR therapy because I feel like I didn't allow you to give that the love it deserves. We've had previous guests who've talked about EMDR, but can you just give us the basics and talk about how it decouples the emotional charge from the difficult memories? Sure, I can try. I think a lot of people don't really understand how this works, but it seems to do very well in research studies.

It does seem to help people get through traumatic experiences, especially if they're traumatic experiences that they underwent as adults. I think it's less successful with a child to trauma, as is the case, I think, with many modalities. But the idea is that you're asked to remember, we call, painful events. So for me, it was certain moments in my marriage

or certain moments during the break up that were very upsetting to me. And then at the same time, in this particular group context, what we did was we tapped our shoulders, first our right, then our left, then our right, then our left, as we were recalling these events, and then we actually drew pictures before the tapping and after.

And in these pictures, we would draw with very large crayons, it wasn't supposed to be artwork, but we would draw what those emotions look like to us. And the amazing thing is that, yeah, after tapping, I did feel a little bit less provoked by the emotions I was having. It was like, oh, yeah, this is a memory. This is a bummer, but I'm less worked up about it as I was when I got here. Can you remind me what is EMDR stand for?

It stands for eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing. And I guess the woman who discovered it, I think actually discovered it on a walk where she was having some painful memories and she was looking right, looking left, looking right, looking left, and then of course walking, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. And there was just something about that bilateral movement that helped her sit with the memories a little bit longer and not feel quite as activated by them. So you were tapping though not doing eye movement stuff at least from what I can hear.

That's right. There was no eye movement in this because it wasn't one-on-one with the therapist. It was sort of a bunch of us in a room. And so we were tapping. And it's kind of neat because researchers are trying to think about how they might be able to translate this therapy to large populations, for example, after a natural disaster. A whole community might be traumatized during a war, things like that. So, this tapping is one way you can actually work with large groups at the same time.

Is there evidence to support EMDR? There's a lot of evidence. Yeah, I was a little bit skeptical of it because it sounds kind of weird. Why would tapping on your shoulders make a difference? But yeah, I just went with it. I was willing to try a lot of different things. And the evidence is pretty strong. Bessel of Andrecoke talks about this quite a bit. There are more and more studies coming out all the time. Definitely worth trying. I don't think it works for everybody, but it can be helpful. So the next thing on this list here, you've already made a reference to it, but I think it also bears some further

love and attention. You embrace the modality of nature, sometimes even on your own. Yes, absolutely. You know, I had written this other book called The Nature Fix, which is about how being outside makes us happier and healthier and more creative. I was very predisposed to think that nature could just fix my heartbreak. And maybe I needed really big nature. Maybe I needed to go into the wilderness.

And I decided to spend 30 days on a river trip. I have a lot of experience canoeing and running rivers. So I planned this 30 day river trip down the Green River in Utah. And I decided actually to do half of it alone. So low, which I had never done before. I had never spent a night in the wilderness alone, but I felt compelled to do it because I needed to learn how to be alone. I had never lived alone in my entire life. I needed to learn how to be self-reliant. I wanted to try to access my bravery again

because I felt so anxious and afraid about my future. So that was the motivation. Did it help? No, you're gonna ask that. You know, I really wanted it to help. I wanted it to cure me. I wanted to write this book and be done. I was like, okay, this river trip's gonna cure me.

It's gonna be great. It's gonna be this great dramatic ending. I'll be all shiny and wonderful afterwards. And that's not what happened. I had a good river trip. I think I did access bravery. I think I did learn how to paddle my own boat. I think that metaphor was real and helpful.

But we measured my immune system cells before and after the river trip. And they were kind of the same. Like, my body was still putting out a lot of transcription factors indicating a state of threat. And in fact, I said to Steve Colott, UCLA, I was like, oh, do my cells look like those of a lonely person still? And he said, yes, I'm afraid they do.

So it's like, okay, now there's more to this book. I have to keep going. And I think why it didn't work is that when we're alone in the wilderness, we don't feel safe. You know, and we're not supposed to feel safe. Like you're constantly looking over your shoulder. You can't screw up, you can't hurt yourself, you can't tie the boat in wrong, you can't light the beach on fire, you have to really, you

have to pay attention to stay safe. And that's just not a relaxing state of mind. So does it cast any doubt on the commonly held belief that nature is, if not a cure, at least a balm for whatever else? Well, I want to balm for whatever else is. Well, I want to be careful to say no. I don't think it indicates that at all. I think that during the times I was in nature

with other people, especially healing still and helpful. For me, being in nature is usually a very calm activity. I can listen to the birds, I can see things that are beautiful. I can get out of the soundtrack of my mind a little bit and into this place that psychologist called the soft fascination of nature. You see a butterfly in front of you and you notice it. You can't help but notice it. So in general, I think it's still a helpful place to be, but that kind of impulse to do the solo wilderness trip, not the best thing for me at that moment. So, not the best thing for you at that moment, and yet for listeners, an important thing to tune into is that nature can have a lot of benefits. Would you mind just saying a little bit about what the data show on this score?

Yeah, sure. There's loads of data suggesting that when we are outside and what we consider a pleasant, not threatening, and situation outside, so a pretty setting that we feel drawn to. We know that our heart rate can slow down, our respiration slows, we start taking deeper breaths, our blood pressure drops. And in fact, we know even our blood sugar can sort of drop after just even 15 or 20 minutes outside. So it's really great for our nervous systems to be out in nature. We know that when we can open up all of our senses, when we can smell the flowers, when we can feel the breeze on our skin, feel the sunlight, feel the cold air, you know, the

ground under our feet. When we can tap into those senses, our animal brain, if you will, sort of wakes up and our cognitive brain kind of dials down. And of course, we know, we know from meditation that that's that's also really helpful when we can sort of like get out of that prefrontal cortex, get out of that ruminative brain and sort of open up to what's with us right now around us. Coming up Florence Williams talks about more of the things she did to beat heartbreak, including meditation, writing down some good things about her ex and psychedelics,

which might have been the most helpful. She also talks about the science behind how social connection can be part of recovery and the correlation between addiction and a lack of social connection. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast

from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there.

We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. You brought up meditation and mindfulness. That was another thing you tried in the wake of the heartbreak. Did that have a beneficial impact? Yeah, I think it absolutely did. So many people told me, Florence, you need to meditate.

And I was a little bit resistant at first, but I actually feel like I did learn how to meditate much better during that wilderness trip. So that was another benefit that came out of that. We're so quiet out there. And I could access a state where I could be very aware of the present moment. I could hear the birds. I could hear the breeze. I was doing a lot of sound meditation. And I actually got to a point where I could hear the inside of my head. And I had never experienced that before. I mean, have you heard about this, Dan? It's

just, it can be kind of off putting it. First, you're like, wait, do I have tonight's, what is that kind of high-pitched sound in my head? And I was like, oh, that's weird. But I got to a place where I felt comfortable with it, and I still meditate now, this is years later. So it was very helpful to me. I'm out of my depth on the hearing the inside of your head thing. What I can say with some confidence is that lots of unusual things happen as the mind gets concentrated and the level of discursive thinking goes down. Yes. And I think for me that just experience of paying attention to my mind and noticing my

thoughts really translates to the experience of heartbreak where you again you want to sort of tell yourself the story about who you are and what's happened. And the more you become familiar I think with paying attention to your mind, the more you realize this is one story that I'm telling myself in this moment and the story is going to change very soon. As it always does. Yes. I mean, that lands well with me. You're in a situation where you're dealing with a rejection, you're telling yourself a story that you're unlovable, you screwed up, or whatever, and then you can catch yourself through mindfulness and recognize, well, this is an uninvited thought coughed up by an unfindable ego. I don't need to take it seriously.

Exactly. And I think there's also this sense that you become aware of how transient every thought is. And even if you feel stuck for a while in this place of pain and rejection, at some point you start to, I think, internalize all the messages that you get as a student of meditation that this isn't going to last forever.

Okay, so there is actually, in meditation circles, we tend to denigrate stories because they're often egoic yarns that we get caught up in and can't really see the truth, or at least can't even see another angle on a situation. However, you did, at least according to this list, I'm looking at harness the power of narrative in a healing sense by sort of writing things down, specifically writing things down that you disliked about your ex.

Yes. Yes, as a writer, I'm a fan of narratives of all kinds. I did read a study showing that negative appraisal of your X can be very helpful for healing. So you write down all the things you didn't like about that person instead of just pining for them, right, which is something that some people do after they've been dumped. They sort of romanticize the relationship. Maybe they think that person was actually really great and they want that person back. They sort of forget the bad things.

So, yeah, so I wrote down the negative things. I was like, oh, yeah, I really hated it when he did this. I hated it when he did that. And are there data to support this approach? Yes. And there's also data in terms of narrative writing about what you're learning from this experience. Psychologists in a study will ask participants to write down what went wrong in

the relationship and in the breakup, and then in another group, they'll ask participants to write, what are they learning from what happened, and where do they want to go from here? And it's the people who wrote in the second study group, but not the first, who reported feeling less depressed, less anxious and more optimistic afterwards. So, you know, there are different questions that we can ask that help take us to a different narrative. And I think that's important to remember. Another technique was psychedelics, including MDMA and psilocybin.

How did you come to that and what was alike and was it useful? Oh, boy, yes, big questions. Well, as someone who writes a lot about nature, I was very interested in this emerging science of awe. And the ways in which when we experience awe, again, it sort of takes us out of the soundtrack of our minds, out of our kind of roomed of mode, and makes us feel more connected to the world around us. Makes us, in fact, feel more connected to each other, makes us feel more connected to the universe. When we experience awe, our ego becomes less significant

in this way that turns out can be very healing for people. And so I went to talk to kind of V-Dude, who studies awe, DAC or Keltner University of California, Berkeley, next to his new book, About Aw. And we were talking about these things. I've known DAC for a while and I told him about my divorce and he was like, oh, I'm so sorry, sorry to hear about that.

And I guess at some point I just asked him. I was like, DAC or you know, I feel like I get aw from nature, but I feel like I need big aw. Like this isn't necessarily totally working. I need like Techn get awe from nature, but I feel like I need big awe. This isn't necessarily totally working. I need like technical or awe. Should I try psychedelics? Do you have an experience with this?

And in fact, he shared with me that one he, I guess, was in college, which is back when everyone did psychedelics. His parents were going through a divorce. And he was heartbroken about that. And he said that taking mushrooms, magic mushroom psilocybin was incredibly helpful for him. And he said one of the ways that it was helpful was that it just reminds you that you are connected to this larger world that it's not just about these kind of emotions that you're having at the moment that you may feel like really

dominate your personality, this feelings of rejection or sadness, but that there are all these other possibilities out there that you can suddenly see sometimes when you are having these experiences, when you lose your sense of self and there you go. And he said, yeah, you should do it. So with that endorsement, I thought, okay, if Dacker says it's okay, I'm going to go look for some big technical or through psychedelic assisted therapy. Just to say, Dacker, Kelton has been on the show a couple of times including most recently talking about his new book on awe. Enough of Dacker, I want to hear about psychedelic assisted

therapy for you. How did it go? So I have to say, for me, and again, I don't think this is necessarily something I would recommend for everyone. I mean, it's very important kind of how you do this, who you do it with, the so-called set and setting that you hear a lot about. For me, it was strangely helpful. In fact, it may have been the most helpful thing I did. I can say now, looking back, and I wouldn't have necessarily expected that. But what I did was I, again, with a therapist, I started out with a dose of MDMA,

otherwise known as ecstasy or Molly. And then, I don't know, maybe an hour after that, took a dose of psilocybin. And I had these like pretty big trips where I was kind of, you know, I was not myself, but I was a particle in the universe amongst other particles. I saw the basket weave of the sky and I couldn't tell where my fiber started

and someone else's ended. I felt like I was part of this amazing world. And I also saw, at some point, I saw a very clear, I saw a lot of different images, but I had these specific questions, you know, and one was, how do I think about my ex and how do I maybe establish a friendship with him and sort of forgive him. But the trip had, I think, another agenda, which is that it was really more focused on

my relationship with myself. So I think one of the things I saw was this tree. I was the tree. And my ex was this kind of strangler fig that was wrapped around my tree trunk. And in this image, I said to this vine, the strangler fig, I said, you need to get off of my tree trunk

because I need to grow. And I'm not gonna grow if I feel like you're still constricting me. And so I literally had this image of pulling the strangler fig away from my tree trunk. And then I looked up and I saw these beautiful leaves, the canopy of the tree was able to grow into the light. So it was this kind of, you know, it sounds really strange to use these terms like, oh, I was a tree, but it was very real to me in the moment.

And I think the metaphor was so clear. It was like, actually, I need to grow now and it's time for me to let this thing go. Maybe I've done too much meditation or hosted this podcast for too long, but I love that story. I loved it too. It was beautiful. It felt so true.

And I guess one of the amazing things, not only did it allow me to sort of, I think, finally say goodbye to this relationship, but it made me just less afraid. That was like, oh, there is beauty in the future. And I can get there. That in and of itself is beautiful. and I can get there. That in and of itself is beautiful. Speaking of all, I mean, I'm kind of in awe that these molecules can do this to our minds. That how and why did that happen? I did a lot of research about what the brain imaging studies

showed and how are these molecules working. I think scientists are really still trying to figure this out. But one of the things that I think is most interesting is that these substances seem to create a window of opportunity. The sort of a window of learning that when we're under the influence of these, we're able to kind of reassess the world and reassess ourselves in this new context, and gain this whole new perspective. So there's something about this opening of learning that I think is at the key of it. One of the knocks on psychedelics is that, you know, it can be a big experience, but you just forget about it over time.

And it's hard to integrate it into your life in a way that like with ongoing and abiding meditation, you really are re-upping the experience all the time. Yeah, that's right. And that was a message that my therapist gave me and also I had heard elsewhere that you can help prolong these insights through meditation. And it was very motivating to me to continue meditating so that I could try to access that state again and be like, oh, yeah, now I get it. Now I know what all these Buddhists are talking about when they talk about losing the ego, losing the self. It was like, I now I get it.

It actually is possible to access that frame of mind. So yeah, fascinating. I'm going to make a connection here that may be inappropriate as I work my way through the long list of things you did and the wake of your divorce. But you talked about the experience on mushrooms or psilocybin as the ego wall coming down and feeling, and this is such a spiritual cliche, but interconnection or oneness. And yes, that can happen in deep meditation or in a psychedelic experience.

But there's another thing you did that's much more, and I don't mean this in the majority of mundane, easily accessible, that I think in some ways does a similar thing, which is getting more deliberate about spending time with friends. This social connection can get us out of our heads. Am I making a connection that resonates for you? Yeah, absolutely. If heartbreak leaves us sometimes in a

state of loneliness, makes sense that seeking social connection would be a cure for that. And the brain is wired to reach outward to have these connections with other people. We know that we have these opioid receptors in our brains that are activated by oxytocin when we're in close relationships with people and that can be friendships, it can be family, it can be your dog. But our opioid receptors want to be filled and social connection is a major way of getting them filled. Well, speaking of opioids, one of the points you make in the book is that there seems to be a correlation between places

where there are high levels of opioid addiction and lack of social connection. Yes, that's right. A lot of experts have posited that one of the reasons we're in this opiate crisis now is because of loneliness. We're seeking ways to feel love. And when we're taking opiates, that's it on our opioid receptors.

It does fulfill that sense. And we know this from animal studies too. If you look at mother and offspring chimps, for example, if you give the youngster a kind of opiate, they no longer crave calling out for their mother. Their receptors are happy. They don't need the love. And so, the opposite side of that is that if you're trying to heal from an addiction, one of the cures is to provide a sense of belonging, a sense of community, a sense of connection as part of the recovery process. Coming up, Florence talks about the passage of time as a way to heal wounds, the role

purpose plays in recovery, her three-part heartbreak recovery toolkit, the connection between openness and resilience, how to become more open to a lack of closure, the good news and bad news about heartbreak, and rejecting some of the conventional approaches to heartbreak. Two more things on my list here or your list in your post-divorce adventure odyssey. You got electrically shocked while looking at pictures of your ex. What's the deal with that? So that that was not supposed to be actually a cure.

What we were doing there was trying to find out if my nervous system was in fact still afraid, still feeling threatened by my ex, not in a sort of safety way, but just feeling like I was unsafe in the context of that relationship, just emotionally unsafe. And so I looked at pictures of my ex, I also looked at pictures of what they call a social support figure for me that was my dad, and then I looked at pictures of a stranger. And during all these different scenarios, this is at a lab at UCLA, I was given an electrical shock while looking at these pictures. And then my nervous system was monitored through a sweat response and I think through my heart rate. And I guess this was maybe at least a year after my split.

And when I looked at pictures of my dad and I experienced the shock, it was like, yeah, my nervous system felt the shock, but it didn't prolong the response, that nervous system response. But when I looked at pictures of my ex, my nervous system really stayed activated for longer. And so my body, even though I might have felt like, oh, I'm over this divorce, my body was saying, actually, you're not.

So just to amplify your clarification here, this was not a therapeutic, this was a diagnostic. Exactly, this was a diagnostic, this was just a way to look at how our nervous systems respond to social loss. One last therapeutic thing I want to ask you about, and this one is not optional. The passage of time. Yes. The poets were right. Time does heal all wounds, at least for most of us, most of the time. Just as we are hardwired to grieve and to experience heartbreak, we're also hardwired to get over it. Eventually, we have to be

able to sort of come back to the group, take care of the people we need to take care of, get on with what we need to get on with. And for most of us, we're very resilient. So where are you now? most of us were very resilient. So where are you now? Yeah, where am I now? You know, I would say in some ways I'm a different person from who I was before this divorce. I have felt bigger emotions than I ever felt before.

I think in my marriage, which was pretty good. I didn't really want to look too far right into my soul or too far into my heart because I think I didn't really want to know You know that things weren't always rosy. I was very good as many of us are conditioned to be I was very good at sort of putting my head down and not spending too much time on riding the waves of emotion. And I think after the split, I had no choice, but to look in my heart and to feel these feelings and to realize that I could feel these feelings and then get better, and that actually feeling them in some ways made me feel more alive.

I feel like sort of experiencing this pain and suffering at such a cliche, but it does break down the walls between you and other people to become vulnerable. Other people respond with their vulnerability. I feel like it's made me more able to connect deeply with other people. And I think that's an amazing bonus. It's wonderful. Have you found love again? I think, well, first of all, I would say that there are many ways to find love, and I think it's important to say that because not everyone who makes it through heartbreak wants romantic

love again or finds romantic love again. I think in our society again, there's such an expectation that being in a long-term committed relationship is the destination. And I think that it would be myopic in some ways to assume that that's what should happen. I think a lot of people find love and purpose through their families, through their work, through their communities. All that is really great for your mean system. Wonderful. I am lucky. I am in a relationship now. And I feel like I'm showing up in a more honest way in that relationship.

I feel like I'm more open to love than I ever was before. And I think all of that is wonderful and surprising. Well, first of all, I'm glad you're in a happy and healthy relationship. And I do take your point that that isn't necessarily the happy ending that everybody should expect or needs. So just wanted to give you acknowledgement on that. You did mention the word purpose,

and that seems to be a really important part of your story. It is, and I'm glad you're asking me about that because when we looked at my immune system with Dr. Stephen Cole, and I looked at his research and to actually what makes our immune systems healthy, what improves those immune cells, you know, if our cells are listening for loneliness, you would think the solution would just be other people, find friends, find a new partner. But what he has found in his research is actually that the single biggest

determinant of what improves our immune system is actually finding a sense of purpose. And that really surprised me wasn't what I expected. I thought that was fascinating. And he's done a number of studies looking at various interventions. You know, what happens if you volunteer, what happens if you find a new partner, what happens if you do this or do that? And it's really this kind of more ineffable sense of purpose that's gonna really make us healthier and live longer. You've said that there's a three-part toolkit that you've come around to in the wake of your heartbreak.

Calming down. Yes. Calming the nervous system, connecting to other people and then finding purpose. Exactly. I think if you can do those three things, however it is that you do them, you mentioned connecting to people, but I think connecting to nature is actually also a really big one for many of us. Anything that will make you feel a little bit less alone and sometimes nature actually does

that. Any way that it is you calm down, For some people, it might be meditation. For other people, it might be joyously dancing or singing or exercising. And then yeah, that purpose and meaning piece surprisingly strong. One trait that you talk about in the book that isn't intriguing to me is openness.

What is openness and why is it important? Openness became in some ways a guiding star in my journey at a park brake. That's because one of the first psychologists I met with, Dr. Paula Williams, the University of Utah. She studies resilience in people who have undergone stressful life events. And openness is one of our core five personality traits, along with neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness. People who are high in openness seem to be more resilient. And I thought that was really interesting.

One of the things she told me that she looks at is openness to beauty, openness to awe, pronest to feeling awe. If we're open, we're likely to be more curious, we're likely to be more flexible, we're likely to, in some ways, think outside of the box of our own ego, we're able to feel connected to the beauty around us. And so that was one thing she said that I was interesting,

but what really made me lean forward in my seat when I was talking to her, was she said, openness is the one personality trait that we can actually move the needle on. We can learn how to become more open, and we can do that by sort of consciously seeking beauty, consciously seeking awe. It doesn't have to be driving to the Grand Canyon

or flying to the Grand Canyon. We can actually learn how to sort of micro dose awe, if you will. And it's a practice, just like all these other practices where we become better at it over time. When I just, I found it wild, the hopeful. It was like, okay, I'm going to learn how to become more open. I'm going to experience beauty, and, I'm going to learn how to become more open. I'm going to

experience beauty and hopefully I'm going to become more resilient. And I think it worked. I wonder if this openness also applies to an open mind to other people's ideas, even if they're ideas that you don't like, or even if they're people you don't like. don't like or even if they're people you don't like. It looks like yes, openness, if it makes you curious, then you are naturally open to other people's ideas. I think you're a better listener. You're less likely to expect a certain outcome, right? If you're someone who's a little bit comfortable

with mystery and a little bit comfortable with ambiguity, then you don't have to have closure all the time. And I felt like that was one of the main lessons of heartbreak too. Like I wasn't gonna find total closure. After something devastating happens to us, we don't necessarily go back to who we were before. There isn't neat closure.

And I think if we learn to become okay with that, we learn that that's part of the fluctuations of life and part of the emotional fluctuations that we are supposed to experience as humans, we can just become more accepting if not fully convinced that we have arrived at this definitive place of total healing. Point well taken. I want to stay with Openness just for a second because I think you'll agree that many of the lessons that you learn in this process are applicable to all of us whether we're experiencing heartbreak or rejection right now, you know, your three-part toolbox of calm connection and purpose.

That's just a recipe for a good life, no matter what stage you're in, post-traumatic, pre-traumatic, mid-trauma, whatever. So just staying with Openness for a second in the spirit of applicability and universality, we live at a time where people are really shut down to anybody outside their tribe where we've got these curated information silos where very quick to otherwise and encourage to do so by media and in particular social media. And it seems to me like openness on a macro societal level seems like a really important antidote to much of what ails us. Does any of this land for you?

Yeah, absolutely. When I was researching the science of awe, which is one of the things that makes us feel more open, when we experience awe, we feel more connected to each other. Some of the scientists are actually positing that awe may be one of the foundational emotions to our cohesiveness as community, as species. And if you think about it,

we don't experience awe the way that we used to. You know, we used to look up and see the Milky Way every single night. We used to see the Moon. We used to see the Sunrise. We used to see wild animals. We live in an awe-deprived state right now. And I absolutely think it's one of the reasons why we don't feel cohesive as a large community. Well said, speaking of charged relationships, and now we were just talking about relationships across tribal lines, but let's go back to the key relationship in this narrative for you, which is your ex. How does he feel about this book? My ex is a very private person. I think he would rather I didn't write a book about art frame.

But I gave him a copy of the manuscript before I sent it to my publisher. And I wanted him not to be surprised by it. I wanted him to have an opportunity to ask for some changes. And it was actually a really interesting experience because after he read the book, the first thing he said was, wow, I'm sorry. I didn't really realize how hard this was for you. And just hearing that was healing and unexpected. And then he also said, would you mind changing the scene on page 53, and also could you change the scene on page 465?

And I said, yes, that I can do. And I was not out to make him a villain in this book at all. It was really about what happens after heartbreak that I wanted to write about. I thought it was important to set up what was at stake, in the ways that I felt grief and loneliness. But I think ultimately, he supported this project and so I'm grateful for that.

That's great. Can heartbreak be avoided? Should it be avoided? No, you can't avoid it unless you never leave the little box of your heart and your room and you wouldn't want to do that. So no, it's part of life. And as Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist told me, she said, you, no one makes it out of love alive.

If you want to fill up, you're going to fill the other side sooner or later. So the only alternative is just to armor up in a way that Tina Turner knotted her head towards when she said who needs a hard one, a heart can be broken. Yes, that's another pitfall. You don't want to armor up either. So I think you just have to strap in for the ride. So the bad news is heartbreak cannot be and should not be avoided. The good news is there is such a thing as post traumatic growth. Absolutely. And I would even argue that without that suffering,

without that heartbreak, we wouldn't really understand the full range of what it means to be human. And that's a gift and a blessing. Speaking of the full range of humanity, are there people for whom the tools you've accessed and the lessons you've learned may be out of reach, you and I are upper echelons of the socioeconomic hierarchy and all of the luck that comes with that. Are there people who we ought to keep in mind as we have this conversation that some of this stuff may feel out of reach for them? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really important question. You know, when it comes to heartbreak as with so many things, there is a big social equity factor. We know, for example, that women after divorce

are much more likely to be impoverished than men. And we know that if you're a person of color, you're more likely to undergo divorce in the first place, and then you're more likely to end up in poverty. We know that some of the tools for healing are obviously going to be more accessible for people who, for example, live close to parks, you know, have access to nature, have access to beauty.

And I think that this is one of the reasons why actually we need to think about rebuilding our cities, bringing nature into our cities, increasing opportunities for connection to each other, but also connection to the natural world. I'm very passionate about the idea of improving parks, approving access to parks. We know that this is a critical part of feeling resilient and feeling human. That's just one of many examples that I think we need to improve on. So if I'm listening to this and I live in a low-income neighborhood without a lot of access to nature, and I'm unfortunately more

prone to what you were describing before about falling into poverty. What kind of agency do I have based on what you've learned? Well, I think no matter where we live, we probably do have access to some kind of nature. We probably have access to community, right? We have access to our friends, we have access to religious organizations, community organizations, but we have to work to access them. That's true no matter who you are, but making the effort, going out to sort of find the microdose of awe, to look at the sunset, to find the moon, walk along a tree-lined street. Those are critical to accessing this resilience. Final question from me before I asked my two traditional wrap-up questions. I couldn't find a place to ask this earlier, so I'm going to ask it now. But in

your process, you rejected some of these sort of conventional approaches to heartbreak, including the idea that you shouldn't form attachments too quickly in the wake of a heartbreak and the idea that you should learn to love yourself first. Yeah, that last one just made me roll my eyes a little bit. I think I didn't really, I didn't really feel like my problem was self-love. It was more like being afraid of the future and being anxious about it. Although in retrospect now, I can say,

oh, actually, yeah, self-love was important. Self-esteem was a factor, but at the time, it just didn't really speak to me. And then, yeah, I think one of the problems you hear about heartbreak is, oh, don't just jump into a new relationship. You need to take the time to heal before you find another attachment. And I thought, well, if that's true, you know,

it could be decades, right? I don't want to wait that long. And I felt like it was very important to me to feel intimacy and feel human connection, feel, I guess, the boost in my ego from having kind of a fling. And I, yeah, I saw that. I did find it helpful. And I'm happy to say that there are studies that back this up that when people do find a rebound after a breakup, it can improve their self-confidence, it can improve their self-esteem, and it can help them get over their ex more quickly. So there you go. I'm with you. Not that I'm in this scenario, but I just, I know plenty of people are and that that just sounds right to me. It's not going to be right for everybody, but for me, I was right. Final two questions that I always ask. One is, is there something

I should have asked you, but didn't? Yeah, I was wondering if the rebound was going to come up, so yeah, glad I did. And then the real fight of question is, can you please plug your book, your current book, your former books, anything worth plugging please? Oh, thank you for that. I'm pretty easy to find online, my website's florencewilliams.com. Find online my website's FlorenceWilliams.com. There are links there to my books, to audio material that I've done, retreats that I lead, all kinds of things. So thank you, point people there.

Awesome, great job with this Florence's pleasure to meet you, really appreciate it. Thank you so much Dan. Thanks again to Florence Williams. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard to make this show a reality two and a half times a week. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. Our supervising producer is Merce Schneidermann and Kimmy Reglor is our managing producer.

We get scoring and mixing from the great Peter Bonnaventure over at Ultraviolet Audio and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. 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 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.

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