Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Can A Buddhist Want A Beach Bod? | Behind the Scenes with TPH Producer DJ Cashmere

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Starting next week, we’re launching a six part series where we’re going to talk to a vast array of experts on longevity, exercise, and diet — we’re calling it Get Fit Sanely.To kick the series off, I wanted to have our senior producer DJ Cashmere on, who’s the architect behind this project. You’re gonna hear him get really personal about how these issues have affected his own psychology, and you’ll hear a very thoughtful person talk about what he’s taken away from the months of research he’s done on these subjects. And, we’ll give you a taste of what it’s like here behind the scenes at Ten Percent Happier.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/buddhist-beach-bodOther Resources Mentioned:No Excuses: Race and Reckoning at a Chicago Charter School — DJ’s audio documentary about his time as a teacherAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How you doing DJ you nervous to be interviewed by this scary man? No, I mean, it's kind of weird, but it sounds fun I'll ask you the question I ask everybody do you have any questions or concerns before we get started? No, but I know the next thing you're gonna do I say I'll do the intro later Wait till you hear the shit. I say about you in the intro You know I get to edit this stuff, right? Yeah, that's true. But if you take out all of my insults, you know, like I'm gonna have Kimmy fire you.

So there's that. That's you do have final say I guess. I get to edit, but you go to fire. Yeah, I don't think I've ever fired anybody, so I wouldn't worry about it. That's good because we're about to move and I can't lose my job. Yeah, you're not gonna lose your job. So should we go for it then? Yeah, man,'t worry about it. That's good because we're about to move and I can't lose my job. Yeah, you're not gonna lose your job. So should we go for it then? Yeah, man, let's do it.

This is the 10% happier podcast, Dan Harris. Hello everybody, we've got a super special behind the scenes episode today. This is a really great conversation, very candid conversation between me and Ace Senior TPH podcast producer DJ Kashmir. That's his real name, DJ Kashmir. It's like you hear like an air horn in the background. You hear that name, DJ Kashmir. But actually, DJ is a very interesting dude. Aside from being an extremely smart and skilled journalist, he is also a deeply committed Buddhist practitioner.

He's the guy who comes up with many of the best ideas for episodes and series on this show that I then go on and, you know, take full credit for publicly. Recently, DJ came up with an idea for perhaps the most ambitious series we've ever done on this show, and it really grew out of some personal stuff DJ's been dealing with for many years. All of it around how he's been trying to develop a somewhat less dysregulated relationship to food, exercise, his body, et cetera,

all of which I can relate to deeply. So starting next week, we're gonna launch a six part series produced by DJ where we're going to launch a six-part series produced by DJ, where we're going to talk to a vast array of experts on longevity, exercise, and diet. We're calling it Get Fit Sainly. To kick the series off, though, I wanted to have DJ on the show. So you're going to hear him get very personal about how these issues have affected his own psychology and also his own marriage.

And you're going to hear a very thoughtful person talk about what he has taken away after all these months of research he's been doing on these subjects. Also you'll get a sense, a little, little taste of what it's like behind the scenes here on this show. What does it even mean to live a good life? Is it about happiness, purpose, love, health, or wealth? What really matters in the pursuit of a life well lived? These are the questions award-winning author, founder, and interviewer Jonathan Fields asks

his guests on the Top Ranked Good Life Project podcast. Every week Jonathan sits down with world renowned thinkers and doers, people like Glenn and Doyle, Adam Grant, Young Pueblo, Jonathan Height, and hundreds more. Start listening right now. Look for the Good Life project on your favorite podcast app. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, a baby that's a 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 whatever you get your podcast. DJ Cashmere, hello, I gotta ask you, this whole thing was your fucking idea. Why are we doing this? I think there are three reasons. One is about what it means to be a producer on this show and just sort of me doing my job. One is about my deep-seated neuroses and trauma's probably a strong word,

but just all the shit that happens into my mind. And then the last one is sort of an intersection of those two. So the first one is, you know, a big part of this job is pitching new ideas for episodes and series. And I took some time last year to think about kind of the biggest levers for health and happiness. What are the things that we talk about most often on this show? And I came up with kind of a list of like the top 10 greatest hits. And the first one was relationships. You got to have good relationships with other people. The second one is you got to have a good relationship with yourself.

And so that's where you talk so much about self-compassion and healing past trauma and stuff like that. And then you can kind of fill out that list with like exposure to nature and having enough material resources to function, work-life balance, time management. And to me, the biggest thing on that list that we haven't talked about much was health and fitness, what we eat, how we sleep, how we move, and we've done a few great episodes on those things in the past few years, but I just felt like given how important it is, it was an under-covered topic

on the show and we would serve our audience well by doing more. So that was the first one, which is just like me trying to do my job. The second one is the one I don't want to talk about. This is the good stuff. Right, right. I think for as long as I can remember issues around body image, health, fitness, have been really disregulating for me. Like I can remember really vividly and ACE grade, opening up my daily assignment book where I'd write down my homework for each class period

and writing down these like plans on Friday afternoons for how I was gonna, you know, do more push-ups and get bigger biceps. And I remember having this like really vivid idea that like I was like about a month away from like the body of my dreams, you know? If I was just willing to work a little harder. about a month away from the body of my dreams. If I was just willing to work a little harder,

and that never went away. I still think that. There was a time last year when we were talking about maybe doing a barbecue at your house with the staff and you have a swimming pool. And I remember as those plans played out and then ultimately didn't pan out, I was watching this whole monologue in my head

about how like if we were gonna get in the swimming pool, I was gonna have to start working out harder, you know? And I work on this show so I know that's ridiculous. And I was mindful of it, but it didn't mean it wasn't there. And this shows up everywhere. It's been one of the biggest sources of tension in my marriage. I have a three year old and I have to talk to her about, you know, eating her vegetables and do it in a way that keeps her healthy

but doesn't get her super dysregulated and I just, yeah, I'm constantly judging myself and everybody else all the time about how they look and whether they move enough and what they eat and I'm trying to heal that and a lot of my pitches are about stuff that I'm trying to heal and I sort of walk through life with the assumption that I'm probably not the only one trying to stuff that I'm trying to heal. And I sort of walk through life with the assumption that I'm probably not the only one trying to heal what I'm trying to heal. Those are the first two. I was just gonna say thank God for your neuroses because it's like a really good content.

I mean, everything you're saying, I'm nodding along. Yes, check, got that too, got that too. I love the thing about the barbecue. I don't know why that never happened. We ended up getting together in the city instead, but totally that's exactly the type of thing I would do is I'd be working out triply as hard because I knew some people would come over and we'd be in this moment. Well, absolutely. Yes. Nothing to say other than deep empathy and compassion. You want to go to the third? Yeah, sure. So the third is kind of like where those two meet. So as someone who works on this show

and has these neuroses, I've kind of been tracking how my relationship to how I eat and how I move hasn't hasn't changed since I started. What I've noticed is like, for me as someone who listens to most of our episodes, sometimes multiple times, I've been like not entirely convinced by the advice that we've been giving people. And so I think intuitive eating is like the best and most clear example of this.

For those who haven't heard those episodes intuitive eating is basically this idea that diets don't work. They might work short term, but they don't work long term. So what we should actually be doing is kind of healing our relationship to food, listening to our bodies, following cues for when we're hungry, getting over the idea that there are sinful foods and not sinful foods, keeping in mind, like a little bit of how nutrition basically works, but really just like chilling the fuck out. And really sort of like bringing self compassion to how we eat and bringing mindfulness to how we eat. And I've loved those episodes, I'm proud of those episodes, but as someone who hasn't been working like you have with the co-founder of Intuitive Eating for the last few years personally, and probably never will, I have Harvard a lot of skepticism

and it's not like the part of my brain that I'm most proud of, but it's there. And I've always sort of had this feeling that all this intuitive eating stuff is like kind of soft and unscientific and like for somebody else, you know, and that if I followed it, I'd be like a happy sucker. And this is like fueled by the fact that like I open up my phone or my laptop every day. And there's just this constant stream of headlines of like eggs or wine or chocolate or not even exercise stuff like saunas or cold plunges about how it's good for you or it's

bad for you. It just feels like there's this constant stream of advice and expertise and what I've heard people call like this data day loose. And it leaves me feeling like if I was just more patient or committed or disciplined or whatever that I would weed through everything and find the person with the answer. And this whole sort of self-compassion kick that we've been on these last few years has just always sort of felt to me like probably right, but I don't know when I'm going to evolve to that place. And in the meantime, like, what's the right actual diet? But like I want to be convinced. And so my most selfish reason for producing this series was to see if I could convince myself of what we've been telling people for a while now.

I want to keep people in suspense. So I'll wait to ask you whether you've convinced yourself something I meant to say earlier, but somehow I forgot to say it is, I'm just harkening back to this thing you said about how you're constantly judging yourself and other people. And I am too. I'm really aware of how I'm trying to live up to these aesthetic standards,

which doesn't make you necessarily healthy if you have abs or a veney biceps or whatever, but somehow this is what's been sold to us and talk about being a sucker, I've fallen for that. And I'm beating the shit out of myself. And then of course, the more I wake up to that, the more I see how I'm judging everybody else. And it's so embarrassing. And I just was thinking about like, there's so much violence we're doing to ourselves and others on a psychic level over this issue. Yeah, I have two kids and the older one is three and a half.

Once she could talk, it became really clear that I had to fix this stuff because she wants to know why I'm going for a run or why I'm not, and she wants to know what she's supposed to eat. And I like cannot tell you how many hours I've spent agonizing about like how to approach conversations about vegetables with her

in ways that like make sure that she doesn't only ever eat brown food and also that she doesn't grow up with negative feelings about her own body or grow up to never eat a vegetable again when she's out of the house or whatever. So yeah, this stuff really runs deep and I think it's one of the most inescapable parts of my day, you know, because I eat every few hours. I move multiple times an hour, hopefully, you know, like it's Christ right. I've heard that this is not an original idea,

but the idea that you can quit alcohol and drugs not easy, but you don't need those to live. But a dysregulated relationship with food, a disordered relationship to food, you're always going to have to eat. So that's some really tricky stuff. Yeah. So again, we keep teasing this. We want to know how convinced are you by the work you've done. But before we answer that, I'm going to use it again, DPs, because I think it'll be helpful for you to describe the architecture of this series that you have built. Yeah, so it's six episodes over three weeks, and we've vetted a couple dozen guests to figure out this list of six. So I'm excited about who folks are gonna hear from.

And what makes this series different, I think then some other series we've done in the past is that these are not six people who would all be invited to the same cocktail party, right? Usually when we do a series, we sort of have like a single pedagogical aim, and we book people who revolve to some degree around that aim. And I think with this, I wanted to hear from the intuitive eating folks, but I also wanted

to hear from folks who had really intense diet recommendations. And I wanted to hear from the B-Gental on yourself in terms of fitness, but I also wanted to hear from the folks who work out 16 hours a week, you know. And I wanted to put them all in conversation with each other sort of through you. I wanted to hear each of them get grilled basically. And so you and I talked about before are these interviews being a little bit more journalistic, being a little bit more skeptical. I mean, we already do that, but really trying to pierce through some of the salesmanship of it all, because this is a sphere where people are so often trying to sell you something.

And my working hypothesis for myself coming into this series was, if I can watch Dan grill these people who I haven't known whether to believe or not, it'll help me figure out whether or not to believe them. And so in the first week, we have two guests who are talking about longevity known whether to believe or not, it'll help me figure out whether or not to believe them. And so in the first week, we have two guests who are talking about longevity and how to live healthier and longer. And those guests are unquestionably on the intense end of the spectrum, right? So we have Peter Atia, who works out 16 hours a week and wears a continuous glucose monitor. And once everyone to go get a VO2 max test, where you run on a treadmill until you fall over and has all of these prescriptive ideas

for how to do life better by sort of bucking some of the trends in conventional medicine and really getting really data driven about how your body works, which there's a part of me that is really attracted to that and there's a part of me that's really repulsed by that. We have Mark Hyman who has this new book out called Forever Young, which like the title alone seems to fly in the face of like the most foundational Buddhist teachings there are, right?

And this is a guy who wears a low oxygen mask while he's working at his desk and does killer cell therapy and stem cell therapy and plasma transfer exchange. And the list goes on and on and on. His book has four pages of just his own wellness routine and includes like over a dozen supplements. Here's a little feel for Mark. I don't really think that I want to live forever. I think it's a bad idea. I'd love to be young as long as I'm alive.

My joke is I basically would like to die young as late as possible. And again, there's like a part of me that wants to just treat his book like a plan for my life. And there's a part of me that feels like the whole thing is way too far out there. And so I'm really excited because those conversations went

really well and you ask some really tough questions and it really gave me a sense of kind of what to take and what to leave behind and what we do and don't know about how long we can live. And Peter in particular gets really vulnerable in his conversation about some of the ways that he's had to soften around some of these things. Here's one of my favorite moments from that Peter Atiyah interview. I think as I began to see lots of struggles with nutrition across lots of different people, I realized, well, clearly Peter, you're wrong. It can't be that this thing that worked so well for you is going to work so well for everybody.

And then in the second week, we have two guests who are talking about exercise and movement. We have Kelly and Juliette Starrette, who have this new book out called Built to Move, which is all about how you should think about moving your body in the 23 plus hours a day when you're not working out. What is healthy movement look like outside of just exercise? Here's a little bit of the Starrette's. And so we have to ask ourselves,

is this trillion dollar experiment we're running in fitness and commoditization, and fetization of exercise? Is it serving our communities? And it turns out it's not. So we decided maybe take a different tack to that. Can we improve and sort of help people make sense of their lives? And then the Dharma teacher, Karlai, who had a hilarious conversation with you and a really vulnerable conversation with you about how she's had to heal her own relationship to her body image and exercise and how we can think about being kinder to ourselves with all of this noise.

This is one of those moments from Cara. A part of me felt resentful towards myself for buying into the idea that I should be scrutinizing and hating my body in a very particular way that wasn't mine. You know, those are not my set of standards or ideals. And I was just kind of applying these societal rules about how my body should be and how much exercise I should get and what I should be eating. And it made it so that I lost touch with my body and didn't have a good relationship with my body. And it's been a long process of trying and didn't have a good relationship with my body. And it's been a long process of trying to come back to a good relationship with my body and learn how to listen to it in a way that feels caring and respectful and not fearful.

And then in the last week, we have two guests talking about food. So there's Dr. Uman Nidu, who's a nutritional psychologist. and she talks about the relationship between food and mental health and even give specific tips for folks who struggle with anxiety, what they might want to consider in terms of diet versus folks who struggle with maybe depression. For example, here's an example from Dr. Uma Nidu. When it comes to anxiety, fiber is your friend. High fiber foods, beans, berries, nuts, seeds, legumes, healthy whole grains.

These foods are rich in fiber, and the way in which fiber slows down your digestion also helps sort of fend off anxiety. And then we end with Rachel Hartley, who wrote a book called Gentle Nutrition, and she's our intuitive eating person, but she talks about how to make sense of nutritional guidelines within an intuitive eating framework. Just to get a feel, this is a little bit of Rachel. Gentle nutrition. It's nutrition. It's all evidence-based, but it's focused on using that nutrition knowledge

to support your well-being, rather than manipulate or control your body size. So week one is longevity week two is exercise week three is food and overall for me those six episodes are kind of the hardest run we've ever taken at these topics and I think are going to give a lot of people things to think about and chew on. I can guarantee you you're going to hate something. One of those guests says, if you listen to All Six, and that was by design. We really wanted to be honest about the fact that we're inundated by all of these messages all the time and wanted to have some of the loudest voices in the space on and run them through

our lens in the hopes of serving the audience. You did a great job with it. It's utterly fascinating. So let me ask you the question that I have been promising to ask, which is, where do you net out? I mean, this is such a deep, deeply personal issue for you. We had these six conversations after you did a lot of time figuring out who should be on the show. So you've done way more research than is actually showing up on the air, so to speak. Where do you land after all that?

I got to say, when I first started researching this series, I was filled with dread and regret and wanted to go back and pretend I hadn't said it. I started getting all these books of potential guests and opening them up and reading a single sense and just like slamming them shut. Like I found it super dysregulating to have to go through two dozen possible guests and try to figure out who to have on and all their recommendations and lists. It was like I had intentionally set myself

the task of like living out a personal nightmare. And I'm really glad that I did it because I really actually have come out the other side with some really practical takeaways. And I genuinely feel, I feel more chill about all of this than I did at the start. So I would say there's three big takeaways for me. One is,

I mean, this is gonna sound so obvious in hindsight, like kind of like all insights, sound obvious in hindsight, but I think I really was operating under this unswoken assumption that there was a right answer out there, and that the reason I hadn't found it yet was that there was like something wrong with me. And I just don't believe that anymore. Like, I think one of the myths that were sold in this diet culture is that there is an answer out there.

And I think part of what was disregulating me so much was this feeling of somehow missing it, right? Like, there are all of these signals and all of this input coming in 24-7. And like I said, all these headlines about, you know, eat eggs, don't eat eggs, drink wine, don't drink wine. And I just felt like I wasn't keeping up.

And I don't feel that way anymore. I think the fact that we are inundated by data doesn't mean that we are inundated by answers. I don't think answers really exist. So that's been really helpful to realize. And I think in some ways, like, it took me looking at 24 or 25 different guests to realize that like nobody had the market cornered on how to do this. So I think

my other two takeaways, one is around eating and one is around exercise. The eating one is, and I've been dreading saying this all day, but I think you may have been right, Dan. I'll keep you guys ahead again. That's all right. You were just like, no, no, no. I debated whether I would say it at all. I was walking over here being like, is there a way I could not say Dan was right? I thought there was going to be a lot more disagreement among start experts about how to eat. And there was way more overlap than I anticipated.

And I think actually you probably could have these six people to a cocktail party, and they might actually like each other more than they expected to. I don't think there's a ton of confusion about what's good for us. I think where it gets confusing is the idea that a single diet might work for everyone. And it just seems really clear listening to expert after expert after expert, that if you are lucky enough, which a lot of people aren't, right? But if you're lucky enough to be surrounded by relatively healthy food choices,

if you can have fruits, investibles, and whole grains, and proteins, and healthy fats around, and you can generally kind of go light on the sweets, but not worry about it too much, that you're probably going to be in pretty good shape, right? And there are a lot of caveats for individual people's health, but for me, after listening to these six conversations, actually do think that the best route probably is to listen to my body and just keep sort of a gentle idea in the back of my mind about what's good for me. In other words, we know generally on a population level what is good for people, and we want to shy away from making individual recommendations for people that we don't know.

Again, the really important caveat is like not everyone is well-resourced enough to do it, and so for some folks it might take more intention, or for some folks it might be more out of reach, but I think this general rule of, you know, try to eat healthy without driving yourself nuts. Probably is a good way to go about it. Who came up with that rule? Who says that a lot? What's that?

Who says that a lot? I'm just gonna pretend I don't understand your question. Oh my God. Oh my God. By the way, I'm not an intuitive eating evangelist or a proselytizer. It's worked for me. I really try to quell my own impulses toward dogmatism, you know what I mean? Because it's annoying and it doesn't work.

Totally. And I mean, you, you know, listen, there's a little here this, but you straight up asked, you know, just about every single guest like, hey, I do intuitive eating. What do you make of it? You know, and no one really had no one had a convincing counter argument that I could tell. No. No. Those are the big takeaways on nutrition.

What about movement slash exercise? Yeah. So the top line for me on movement and exercise is that I have been doing it wrong, and there isn't one right answer, but the basic guidelines are pretty clear and convincing. And luckily we had Carlisleon to talk about being gentle with yourself, so I don't feel bad about doing it wrong. But I am excited to start doing it better. You know, for me, it's really hard for me to carve out workout time with a three year

old and an infant. And I have found over the last couple of years that the easiest way for me to exercise is just go outside and go for a run. That's been my big source of exercise. What I learned researching the series and then producing the episodes was that cardio is really important, but it's only part of the equation and that if you want to live longer and healthier, and you are genuinely committed to doing some level of exercise that it's really bad strategy

to just do cardio. So you need to do strength training as well, and you need to have some mobility stuff in there too. And I was just thoroughly convinced in both the research and then hearing from the experts about all the reason that matters, not for the six pack or for the beach bod, but for avoiding falls as you get older, beach bod, but for, you know, avoiding falls as you get older, being able to get up one you fall, being able to pick up your

grandkids, those sorts of things. And so, I mean, right now, my family and I are in the middle of a move and I'm not going to make any big changes this week. And I'm going to have self-compassion for myself around that. But, but yeah, like late summer early fall, my intention is to sort of revamp the way that I do exercise to make it more balanced because I can spend the exact same amount of time working out and gain way more benefit if I diversify the portfolio, so to speak. That sounds great. You want to hear my biggest takeaway?

Yeah. Are you going to be an asshole right now? No, I'm not. I know. I know that sound like. Are you gonna be an asshole right now? No, I'm not. I know, I know that sound like I was gonna be an asshole. I think I said this recently, like sometimes my wife will look at me and I'll have a look on my face and she'll just put her hand up and say garbage.

Before anything comes out. Yes, garbage. But this is not garbage, I don't think. Sure. Carly, the Buddhist teacher who we have on really got me thinking. So this question I've had, it's a bit of a cute question that I was thinking about actually calling a whole series this, and maybe we'll call this episode this, I don't know.

This idea of like, can a Buddhist want a beach bod? I don't know, just somehow sucking my head as an interesting co-on to be even more Buddhist about it, like an unanswerable riddle. Maybe it is answerable. I mean, like what Kara said, and I won't spoil the episode, but really just got me thinking about what is your motivation? Why do you want to be healthy? Why are you exercising?

Why are you eating healthy? And that just kind of flipped the script for me a little bit. And so maybe a Buddhist can want a beach bud, but I'd want to know why. What's your why? I started doing this. I'm going to say cheesy bit. I'm not pronouncing that from the mountaintop like this. What I'm about to say is irreparably cheesy, but it scans to me as somebody who doesn't adopt these practices easily as cheesy. And it was recommended on this show by Dr. Richard Davidson, who was kind of my running buddy on the big Dalai Lama series that we did at the beginning of the year. He's an eminent neuroscientist. And he talked about dedicating everything you do throughout the day to the benefit of everybody else.

And of course you're part of that, you know, so it's not like self erasing in that way. And I've really adopted that habit. Like when I wake up in the morning and went before I exercise, before I meditate, before I go to bed, before I do many other things during the day, I will just be like, I'm doing this to make myself healthier and happier so that I can make everybody else healthier

and happier. You know, may we all be free from suffering? And I wouldn't want anybody to see me do this. It's embarrassing, right? A little bit. And as somebody who is quite selfish by nature, and you know, like that's just how I'm wired. It's not like I'm now all of a sudden, you know, like bulletproof bodhisattva and, you know, complete altruist. I can feel it making a little bit of a difference on top of, you know, the prior 14 or 15 years of meditation before that. You know, it's just starting to shift to my motivation just a little bit. And so why do I want to be healthy? On a micro level, I want to be feeling good so that I can be here and awake and aware and helpful with my son and my wife and our cats and everybody who is in my orbit on a

day-to-day basis. And I want to be around for them as long as possible. I'm a bit of an older dad. We had Alexander when I was 43. You know, and I know he worries about that. So I want to be healthy, you know, when he has kids, if he has kids so that I can be a good grandfather, if that's an option available to me. And then beyond that on a macro level, as much as I like being successful for all of the ego and financial reasons, I really do like to turn up

the volume as much as possible on being useful in the world. And I want to be healthy for that too, because it's hard to be helpful and useful in the world. And I want to be healthy for that too, because it's hard to be helpful and useful in the world if you feel like shit. Anyway, that's my answer. I know you and I both used to have abs that we don't have anymore. Have you accepted that loss? You know, there was something I've been working on this for years, years. There was something that somebody said somewhere in this, I think it was Peter

at Tia. Peter, you know, the listeners will hear him. He's very intense, dude. Very data-driven and works out. He's the guy who works out 14 or 16 hours a week. And I said to him, like, I would love to have these abs back. If I don't have them though, is that in any way linked to my health? And he's like, no. I can't say that I magically in that moment dropped that desire and sure when I take a side long glance at myself

as I'm walking past a reflective surface shirtless. Yeah, there might be some negative judgments that pop up in my head, but I can feel that volume turning down over time as I learn how to, you know, be more self-compassionate and as I gather objective facts that, you know, like if you have a little bit of a punch in your 50s or your 40s or 30s or whatever, that doesn't necessarily mean at all that you're unhealthy. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I guess like the volume going down is like, oh, you can really ask for it, right? If you set the expectations north of that, you're going to suffer. I don't see in nature very frequent miraculous overnight transformations. They do happen or you read about them. So I'm not saying it can't happen. I just don't see it that often. I see messy marginal improvements and setbacks and then two steps forward and one step back. Yeah, I was listening to it. I always listen to Matthew Brenselberg, Dharma Talkswell, I'm brushing my teeth. And sometimes just the same ones over and over. I heard him say this thing last night,

you can't hate yourself into growth. And as someone who has tried repeatedly, I think he might be right. I'm literally writing that down. That's so good. That's a brilliant place to leave it, I think. Just again, great job with this. DJ, you was your idea.

It was your execution. I'll take all the credit for it, which I'm happy to do, but it's a great series. I can't wait for people to hear it. So thank you. Yeah, and thank you. Excited to hear how it lands for people. Thank you, DJ. You're the best.

I'm very excited for everybody to hear all of DJ's amazing work on this series over the coming weeks. Also, if you want to hear all of DJ's amazing work on this series over the coming weeks. Also, if you want to hear more from DJ, check out the excellent audio documentary he produced not long ago about his many years as an idealistic young teacher in Chicago. It's really well done. We'll put a link in the show notes. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davy Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. The aforementioned DJ Cashmere is our senior producer,

Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of ultraviolet audio, and we get our score from Nick Thorburn of the great Indy Rock Band Islands. We'll see you all on Monday for the first episode of our six part series on getting fit without losing your mind, the first guest is Dr. Peter Atia, who's got a new book about longevity called Outlive that's coming up on Monday.

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. 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. Listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.