Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Survive The Holidays: Advice For Political Conversations, Overeating, And The Indignities Of Travel | Dan Solo Episode

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

A compendium of expert advice on handling all the complications — and pleasures — that the holiday season brings.I have whipped up a holiday survival guide for you, a series of evidence-based strategies for navigating what can be a tricky time of year.  During the course of this episode, I'm going to talk about nine pain points, including navigating political differences around the dinner table, overeating, overwhelm, travel indignities, social anxiety, difficult family members, etc. I'm going to share with you a bunch of strategies pulled from ancient wisdom and modern science.  In this episode we talk about practical strategies for dealing with nine pain points of the holiday season:The expectation of perfectionOverwhelmDifficult family dynamicsGriefLonelinessSocial anxietyOvereatingHoliday travelFinancial worriesRelated Episodes:How to Feel Less Enraged And Hopeless When You Consume The News | Sharon McMahonScience-Based Tools For When You’re Stressed, Obsessed, Or Overthinking | Dr. Jenny TaitzHow to Speak Clearly, Calmly, and Without Alienating People | Dan Clurman and Mudita NiskerThe Science of Loss and Recovery | Mary-Frances O’ConnorStrategies for Social Anxiety | Ellen HendriksenThe Anti-Diet | Evelyn TriboleCan Anxiety Be a Gift? | Dr. David RosmarinYour Craving Mind | Kevin GriffinWhy Your Bad Habits (and Addictions) May Be Getting Worse - and How Mindfulness Can Help | Dr. Jud BrewerSign up for Dan’s newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/holiday-survival-guideAdditional Resources:Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/downloadSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey everybody, Dan here. I've got a solo podcast for you today. No guest, it's just me. I have whipped up a holiday survival guide for you, a series of evidence-based strategies for navigating what can be a tricky time of year. Let me say from the jump here that I actually love the holidays, although, of course, there are lots of complications.

I'm aware, however, that some of you find nothing redeeming in the holidays, and for you, this season is, you know, holistically horrible. So I have tried to whip up something that will work for everybody no matter where you stand on the holidays. What I want to do no matter where you stand is to reframe the holidays. You've heard me make this move before.

I did this the last time I recorded an episode on election stress, for example. I like to reframe difficult patches in my life, and by extension, your life, as a test, as a gym, as a dojo, as a place to practice all of these strategies that we know work to help us do our lives better. So let's think about the holidays in that regard, or at least try to. During the course of this episode, I'm going to talk about nine pain points,

nine ways in which the holidays can suck, including navigating political differences around the dinner table, overeating, overwhelm, travel indignities, social anxiety, difficult family members, etc. etc. I've identified nine different pain points and I'm going to share with you a bunch of strategies pulled from ancient wisdom and modern science. Before I dive in, my usual caveats, I'm going to throw a lot of stuff at you here.

You do not have to do any of these things. Please view this as a menu, not a to-do list. The point is not to overwhelm you. If you do find that a couple of these strategies work for you, please don't try to do everything at once. That is a recipe for stress. To the extent that you try them and quote unquote fail, please give yourself some grace to start again.

I'll have more to say about this notion of starting again throughout this episode. Okay, your holiday survival guide coming up right after this. One quick note before we get started here. If you're starting to think about holiday gifts for the meditator in your life, head over to the shop on danharris.com for a limited 15% off site-wide market calendar.

The sale runs from November 25th through December 2nd. Meanwhile, over on the Happier app, they've got personalized meditation practices that fit any schedule, which is especially relevant in the midst of the holidays and all of the stress that comes with it. From quick meditations to mindful cooking videos,

Happier can help you stay grounded through the season. And now through December 6th, you can get 40% off a yearly subscription. Go to happier.com slash four zero to get your discount. My wife and I were talking just last night about the fact that we need to plan some trips for the winter because she in particular really needs some warm weather to look forward to.

She has seasonal affective disorder in a pretty intense way. So we've got some trips coming up. We need to plan them, but they're definitely coming up. And of course, one way to fund said trip or trips would be to Airbnb, our own home. Note to self, I should talk to her about that. Whether you could use extra money to cover some bills or for something a little bit more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca.

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and exclusive Audible originals, all in one easy app. Enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things, household chores, exercising on the road, commuting, you name it. My wife Bianca and I have been listening to many audiobooks as we drive around for summer vacations. We listen to Life by Keith Richards. Keith, if you're listening,

I'd love to have you on the show. We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would also love to have you on this show. So audio books, yes, audible, yes, love it. There's more to imagine when you listen, sign up for a free 30 day audible trial and your first audio book is free.

Visit audible.ca, audible.ca. All right, I'm back with your holiday survival guide. As I mentioned in the intro, I'm going to run through nine pain points, nine challenging aspects of the holiday, and we're going to give you a bunch of strategies for navigating these situations pulled from both modern science and ancient wisdom. And pain point number one is the expectation of perfection. A lot of us look at Hollywood or social media and we see visions or versions of the holidays that appear flawless.

And then we measure our own holidays, which may be unmitigated shit shows against the visions of perfection on our screens and we feel like shit. So I think this is a ripe area for suffering that we should talk about at length. I have three strategies I want to propose to you in this regard. The first is a Buddhist concept known as non-attachment to results.

It's not such a malefluous term, which is de rigueur for the Buddhists, but it's actually quite powerful. Basically, the way I think about it is this. We can try as hard as we want to try on anything, during the holidays or really at any other point in our lives. We have to recognize, or at least if we're wise, we will recognize that the result is out of our control. We live in an entropic and ever-changing universe where there are so many variables that we

simply cannot control. So keeping this in mind can be very helpful when you burn a cake or have an awkward conversation or a gift that you put a lot of time and effort and money into doesn't land as well as you thought. It's very useful to keep this concept of non-attachment to results in your mind. As you know, I like to give people little slogans or mantras to help you operationalize the wisdom that either my guests or I bring to this show. And so I'm going to give you two little slogans that might help you apply non-attachment to

results during the holidays and in the rest of your life. The verse comes from one of my favorite indie rock songs, which I think came out in like 1993. I'm showing my age here. It's called Shoot the Singer and it's by my favorite band of the 90s, Pavement. At the end of the song, you can hear the singer, Steve Malkinus, warbling the words,

Don't Expect. Sometimes I just say that to myself, Don't Expect. It's a really nice way to turn the volume down on my efforts to control reality, which might work to a certain extent, but are never going to work to my full satisfaction. Don't expect is one little mantra you can use. Another I got from David Axelrod, who's a legendary political professional. He ran Obama's campaigns back when Obama was running for president.

And I was in an off-the-record meeting back when I was a journalist with David Axelrod, I think it was during the 2012 presidential election. And I remember my boss, Ben Sherwood, who was at that time the president of ABC News, was asking, really peppering David with a lot of questions about various variables in the presidential election and how were they planning to deal with them. And at one point, David said, all we can do is everything we can do.

And I really like that. And I sometimes say it to myself, for example, I've been, as many of you know, for the last couple of months, really deeply embroiled in launching a new business. Sometimes things don't go the way I want them to go. I like to tell myself and if I'm, if I have my wherewithal,

if I have my wits about me, I will try to remind the team that all we can do is everything we can do. So non-attachment to results, very helpful. The second strategy I want to lay on you if you're beating yourself up by comparing yourself to your favorite influencer whose holidays seem to be immaculate. The second strategy I want to recommend to you is to embrace the mess. By way of analogy here, there's an ancient Japanese cultural tradition called kintsugi. And basically, they take broken pottery and they repair it with gold or silver or some

other precious metal. And the result is a piece of art that is more beautiful than the original. And I like to keep this in mind when things are messy in my own little world. There's a way in which embracing the messiness, again, the burnt cake, the awkward conversation, the gift that doesn't go well, embracing the messiness can add more beauty than perfection ever would. So again, maybe this is a good mantra for you, embrace the mess. And if there's nothing about the mess

that you find beautiful, if it is truly hard to accept, maybe just embrace your capacity for resilience. Because that is, I believe, a perennial for you, for all of us. And the third thing I wanna recommend, and I do this with some hesitation because it's gonna seem like, you know, stereotypical for me, but I want to recommend mindfulness

meditation. You've heard me, if you've listened to the show for any length of time, you've heard me talk about mindfulness meditation over and over again. However, I want to talk about it today because unlike, and you may have heard me make this analogy before, unlike the airline safety instructions where every time you have to listen to those instructions blaring over the overhead speakers on an airplane, it's more annoying than the last time somehow.

Unlike that, every time you hear the basic instructions for mindfulness meditation, at least in my experience, it's always refreshing. It's always a good reminder. And as many of you know, one of the original translations for the word mindfulness is remembering or recollection. And so hearing this wisdom over and over again,

hearing about this practice over and over again can have a really positive effect. Okay, so I'll do this quickly, but as many of you know, the three steps for beginning mindfulness meditation are sit comfortably. You can lie on the ground if you want. Close your eyes. If you don't like to close your eyes, you can keep them open and gaze softly at a neutral spot on the ground or if you're lying down on the ceiling. So

that's the first step. Assume a comfortable but dignified position. The second is to bring your full attention to something. Often we start with the breath. You don't have to control the breath. You're just feeling it as it naturally occurs. Can help to pick one spot like your belly or your chest or your nose. Some people don't like feeling the breath so you can focus on sounds in the environment

or the feeling of your full body sitting in the chair or lying down. And the third and final step, the most important step is every time you get distracted, which is likely to happen over and final step, the most important step, is every time you get distracted, which is likely to happen over and over again, every time you get distracted, just start again. A lot of people think that when they get distracted in meditation that they have failed, but actually that moment of distraction, that moment of waking up from distraction, more specifically, is proof of success. Because the whole goal here is not to clear your mind,

as I like to say, that's impossible unless you've somehow gotten enlightened or died. The whole goal in meditation is to get familiar with the chaos and cacophony of the mind so that it doesn't own you as much. This can be very helpful when it comes to expecting perfection during the holidays. You can notice if you're mindful, you can notice that reality is not living up to your expectations and let that thought go. Meditation or mindfulness meditation specifically can supercharge everything we're going to talk about on the podcast today. And really

in the Buddhist tradition or in mindfulness meditation, whether you're doing it in a secular or Buddhist context, expectations are the most noxious thing you can bring to the party because it really blocks you from engaging what is. It puts you in a position where you're at war with reality. I sometimes think about this great painting that is hanging on the second floor of the main hall at the Insight Meditation Society, which is in Barrie, Massachusetts.

B-A-R-E, Massachusetts. Great place to sit a meditation retreat. On the second floor, right outside of the little rooms where you can go meet with your meditation teacher every other day or every third day to complain about your practice. On the second floor second floor as you're right as you're walking down the stairs after you've met with one of the teachers.

There's this painting that has these words on it. The words are, try not to expect anything. In this way, everything will open up to you. It's a little twee, but I always find it to be an excellent reminder, especially in meditation practice itself. If I can stop wanting things to be different than they are right now, then I can make progress. As I sometimes joke about meditation, it's like this fucked up video game where you can't move forward if you want to move forward.

You have to somehow get your mind into a neutral position where the expectations come and go, but you're not latching onto them. So that's pretty specific to meditation practice itself, but you can think about meditation practice as practice for the rest of your life, where you learn to navigate some of the more nettlesome aspects of the mind, including expectation.

One little postscript before I move on to the next pain point. My producer for this episode, the great Tara Anderson, points out that many of us suffered not only because we have unrealistic expectations of perfection, but also because we're expecting things to suck, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that's just another thing to be on the lookout

for during the holidays and anytime really. Okay, now we're going to move to the second pain point, and that is overwhelm. Many of us feel overwhelmed and burnt out and time starved all the time at a baseline level. Then the holidays come rolling in and we have to add on top of that, travel planning, cooking, going to parties, cleaning, shopping. So how do you handle it when your already clogged schedule

gets even more clogged with obligations and other people's expectations? So first thing to say is that all the things we just talked about, non-attachment to results, mindfulness meditation, setting realistic expectations, these can all be very helpful when it comes to overwhelm. But I have a fusillade, is that how you pronounce that?

Fusillade of other practical tips. In other words, I've got a lot of other practical tips. I think I have eight of them here. The first one is making to-do lists. Now, this may sound blazingly obvious, but I have made a real practice for several decades of getting a journal and making regular running to-do lists. And I found that as I make these lists

and then cross them off with a pleasing squirt of dopamine in my mind, it really is helpful to manage overwhelm. There's research to back this up. Research shows that making to-do lists can help you organize your thoughts, set priorities, and increase your productivity. For me, the way it works is that if I don't make a list, I have this like me is Matic background static sense

of overwhelm like I have an infinite number of things to do. Making a list makes me realize it's definitely not infinite. You can't have an infinite list. I mean, there's no to do list that is like the number pi that just goes forever. You will always have a finite list of things to do even if the list is longer than you would like. So just making the list

helps me get a sense that I've got my arms around the thing. Then I can prioritize what's most important and let go of what I really cannot get to. And then I can start thinking about delegating to other people. Speaking of journaling, and journaling will come up a couple of times during the course of this podcast. Let me just quickly engage in some blatant self-promotion here. My wife and I, my wife Bianca and I just wrote and designed and published our own journal called Dump It Here, which is designed to help you engage in some evidence-based strategies for reducing stress and anxiety through journaling. And if you go to danharris.com into the shop, you can check it out.

All right, I'll stop shilling. Okay, strategy number two for managing overwhelm is a great phrase, another mantra that you can use to help you keep your shit together if you're feeling like you've got too much on your plate. And this phrase comes from an education pioneer who lived in the 1800s, an African-American woman by the name of Virginia Randolph.

And just to give credit where it's due, I heard this from Sharon McMahon, who was recently on the podcast. Sharon writes about Virginia Randolph in her most recent book. And Virginia had this phrase as she was going about her work that really helped her, and I think can help you, keep it together when there are many things you have to do. And that phrase is, the next needed thing. Instead of worrying about boiling the ocean and getting it all done immediately, just focus on the next needed thing. I've heard my wife talk about how she might actually want to get this tattooed on her wrist.

We've recently got our first tattoos and we like them and so we want to get more. And so I think the way my wife was phrasing it, and she might have gotten this from the recovery community, is the next right thing. Whatever phraseology you like, the next right thing or the next needed thing, it can help you get out of this vague and overwhelming sense that you've got so much to do that you could never tackle at all, and to instead focus on what's on your plate right now, the next needed thing or the next right thing. Just to say there's a song in that movie, Frozen 2 called The Next Right Thing.

So maybe just hum that to yourself. Some more tips for overwhelm. Some of these which I'm about to share with you, I got from Jenny Tates, who's a psychotherapist and author who lives on the left coast of the United States. She's an incredibly kind person. I was on the phone with her just the other day, and she was giving me some tips to share with you.

Just to say, Jenny wrote a book called Stress Resets, and she was also on the podcast, so I will drop a link to her podcast, as well as the one with Sharon McMahon in the show notes, if you want to dive deeper. Anyway, some tips from Jenny. One of them is if you have this running dialogue of anxiety and stress going through your mind

and you're taking your thoughts too seriously, try singing them out loud. I love this because one of the central goals of meditation, as you know, is to take your thoughts less seriously. But meditation is not the only way to do that and to just sing your thoughts, and I will spare you and not sing for you right now, just to sing them helps you get some distance so you're not taking it so seriously.

Another tip from Jenny and this is tip number four in my list of eight here for helping you deal with holiday overwhelm. Another tip is to put a half smile on your face. If you notice that you're coiled up in stress and overwhelm, you're feeling burnt out, just putting a little half smile on your face can tell your brain that you're in a better mood than you actually are. This can help you relax.

Once you've engaged in this and you've told your brain and the rest of your body that everything's okay, then you can go back to the next needed thing. Another tip from Jenny Tates, and this is very much supercharged by mindfulness meditation, is to let an emotion come and go. So we might be sitting in the middle of a holiday meal, feeling overwhelmed by all the courses that have yet to be served or all the cleaning that's going to be necessary at the end of the evening, or we might be moving through our day, a regular work day, and thinking about all of

the extra shit we have to do because of the holidays and the emotion of anger or anxiety can arise. And then if we're not mindful, we just act out of that emotion. But Jenny suggests that you catch the emotion and just watch it. Watch how it only has a half life of like a minute or two. And the difference between how much damage you can do in a minute of anger or anxiety, or a day or a lifetime of anger or anxiety, that's an incalculable difference.

And can you muster your mindfulness, which again is an innate quality we all have that is trained through mindfulness meditation, can you muster your mindfulness to let you watch the emotion come and go, check out how does it show up in your body, what kind of thoughts are associated with it? And then nothing lasts forever,

the emotion won't last forever either. And there's an enormous amount of freedom on the other side. Once you see that everything is coming and going, including your thoughts and your emotions, they aren't permanent monolithic forces. They're passing weather patterns. Once you see that, there's an enormous amount of freedom on the other side.

A few more techniques for managing overwhelm during the holidays or anytime really. Number six is something called straw breathing that I find very helpful and I learned about it right here on the show. I forget who taught it to me, but I do it a lot. I actually do it at the beginning of every meditation session and I do it when I'm freaking out.

So it works like this. You just take the deepest breath you can possibly muster and then exhale as if you are breathing through a straw and try to make the exhale two or more times the length of the inhale. So really slow, long, long inhale and then even longer exhale, pursing your lips as if you're blowing through a straw. Do this for a couple of minutes,

or even just a minute if you're truly time-starved. It will reset your nervous system. Tip number seven, schedule your downtime. It's incredibly important for all of us to take care of ourselves, not because it's self-indulgent, but because that's how we can be more effective in the world, we can be more useful to the people we

say we care about. If we're doing our meditation, getting our naps, doing our exercise, taking our walks, whatever it is that recharges your battery, you need to do it or else you're going to burn out and that's when things go truly pear-shaped. So if you're having trouble finding time to do it, schedule it. I was talking to the aforementioned Tara Anderson,

who's producing this episode, and she was talking about how for her, as she's working through her to-do list, if she knows there's a nap or a massage or a great book at the end of it, it's a great way to keep her motivated. I like that. Eighth and final tip for dealing with holiday overwhelm. And obviously this list is far from exhaustive, just some things that work for me and I think

might work for you. But here's the eighth and final tip. Say no. You don't have to do all the shit everybody else is expecting you to do. Sometimes, just take a hard pass and say no. You are allowed to do that. I'm going to have more to say about that as I move into the third pain point here.

Okay, so here is the third holiday pain point for which I wanna share some potentially sanity saving strategies. And this one is a biggie, difficult family dynamics. For those of us who have biological or chosen families, and specifically I'm really thinking about the former here, biological families, we may love seeing them and it may be incredibly triggering

and cause you to regress to prior versions of yourself. You don't love that much. So families can be great and they can also be trying. So here are two strategies. And let me just say, you know, I've hopefully designed this list so it compounds as it goes. So let me just say, you know, I've hopefully designed this list so it compounds as it goes. So let me just say that a lot of the things we've already talked about,

including meditation and how to manage expectations and straw breathing, all of those should help with this pain point and many of the ones that will follow it. Okay, so two strategies for dealing with difficult family members. The first really picks up on the last thing I was saying about how to manage overwhelm, and that has to do with saying no or setting boundaries. I'm not an expert in boundary setting, but I have interviewed twice right here on the show a great expert. Her name is Nedra Glover-Tawab.

I'll put links in the show notes to the two episodes I've done with Nedra. And she has some very simple instructions for setting a boundary that I thought I would share with you. One is to state your boundary clearly, be concise and be direct. For example, I'm not able to do that, or I'm not able to help you with that. The second is to use repetition. It's nice to have a script going into a difficult encounter.

So if you think in advance or talking over with your shrink or a friend or whatever about what your boundary is, and then you have a script that you can rely on, at least for me, that kind of reduces some of the stress and anxiety. So you've identified your boundary clearly, it's concise and it's direct, and then you're using repetition. and it's direct, and then you're using repetition. The more whoever person X is, the more person X is pestering you to do a thing that you don't want to do.

You don't need to over explain. There is no need to justify your boundaries if you've thought carefully about them. Those are rules that you've set, and it's important to protect them. And the final thing from Nedra is to stay calm and firm. The tone of your voice while you're stating your boundary really matters. So you can just keep saying, I understand you're upset if the other person has gotten upset, but I still can't do it. Setting boundaries can be really scary as Nedra explains, both

for you and the person with whom you're setting the boundary. So let's just give yourself permission for this to be a little messy, but I think it is an important thing to do when you're dealing with difficult family members over the holiday. And, you know, like I said, don't expect it to be perfect, but it's a good experiment to run. Okay, the other strategy I want to talk about for dealing with difficult family members is I think universally useful, but I want to talk about it within a specific context. We've just come through a very difficult presidential election in the United States. It's highly likely that for many of us, there will be uncomfortable political discussions

at holiday parties. So how do you deal with that? These are some tips that I have gleaned from a pair of communications coaches with whom I have worked for many years, Mudita Nisker and Dan Klerman. I will drop a link in the show notes to an episode I did with them. These folks have had a huge impact on my life. I talked to them once a month and actually right after I record this, I'm getting on the phone with them because I have a difficult conversation I want to plan.

So here are three tips from them. One of them is plan your conversations. Anticipate the fact that there may be a difficult political conversation really or any other conversation during your holiday season, and just prepare yourself. Plan what you want to say. As I mentioned when I was talking about setting boundaries,

it can be really liberating to have a script to not rely on yourself to extemporize in the moment to know, okay, here's what I'm going to say. You don't want to be robotic about it, but to know roughly in a very concise and direct way, what are the points you want to make. So planning the conversation is very helpful. The second thing is to reflect before you react.

So this is a reference to reflective listening, which some of you have heard me talk about before, but I'm going to repeat it because to me, this is one of the most impactful life hacks I've ever heard. It works like this. Somebody says something to you, maybe they speak for a couple of minutes, and you listen carefully and journalistically so that when they're done talking, you can repeat back to them in your own words in a very brief way the

bones of what they said, the essence of their message. And this is reflecting back to them the essence of what they've said. And this can have a huge impact in terms of helping people put their guard down. You're deeply relaxing the other person's nervous system because what most of us want most in life is to be seen and heard and understood. So you're giving that to them.

You're also giving yourself a pause before you pop off or shoot from the hip. This can lead to much more successful conversations. And then the final option or strategy from Dan and Mudita for dealing with difficult conversations at any time. But specifically in this context, I'm thinking about political conversations during the holidays. The final idea is to say nothing.

That is always an option you retain. If you're in a heated argument around the dinner table, you don't have to say jack shit. Nobody's got a gun to your head, or at least I hope not. Silence is always an option, and it often is a great deescalation technique. All right. Let's take a quick break.

When I come back, I'm going to talk about three more pain points, grief, loneliness, and social anxiety. Keep it here. Peloton has a variety of workouts for whatever era you're in. Holiday era, running era, wellness era, whatever era of life you're in, Peloton has the classes and motivation you need to get after it. With Peloton's All Access membership, you can work out where you need it. Whether you're at home, on your bike, tread, and row, or on the app at your kid's game, you can squeeze in what you need wherever you need it. Whether you need 10, 20, or 45 minutes of you time to sweat and get grounded, Peloton provides flexibility

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Lots cooking over at danharris.com, including live guided meditations and Ask Me Anything sessions. Would love to have you over there. Meanwhile, over on the Happier app, they're offering 40% off the yearly subscription. Now through December 6th, go to happierapp.com slash four zero. We're back with more of my holiday survival guide, sanity-inducing techniques drawn from ancient wisdom and modern science. We've been running through a list of nine pain points or nine difficult aspects of

the holiday season and we are now at pain point number four, which is grief. We're talking before the break about dealing with difficult people, but there's also an enormous amount of difficulty in dealing with people who are no longer with us because the holidays can be a time when grief comes roaring back. So I want to say from the outset that I'm not an

expert in this. I've been incredibly lucky thus far, in that I have not had major losses of people in my immediate family. I have had plenty of losses in my life, but I have not dealt with overwhelming grief up until this point. It comes for all of us eventually. But as I record this, I am not an expert in grief. However, I've had the great good fortune of interviewing many experts in grief for this podcast. So I'm taking some of the wisdom I've gleaned from them and I'm going to share it with you.

And I've got three strategies I really want to talk about. The first is to allow yourself to feel whatever you're feeling. I mean, this is true of anything, really, but specifically of grief. We don't live in a culture where grief is normalized and accepted. And so it's easy to feel the instinct to push it away. But I want to give you permission to actually feel it. Mindfulness meditation is a great way to accept whatever you're feeling. And there's a great expression that comes out of the mindfulness tradition. And this comes specifically from Joseph Goldstein. This actually may be my next tattoo.

It's a very simple, potentially misleading at first, but a very simple phrase. The phrase is, it's okay. Now, this does not mean everything's okay. This isn't like a there, there type of slogan. It specifically means it's okay to feel whatever you're feeling. It may be uncomfortable, it may be wrenching,

it may be excruciating, but you can feel it. You can let it in. It's okay. I have found in my own life with my own difficult emotions that just reminding myself that it's okay to feel it and then hopefully to take action on the other side of it. So if it's anger or anguish or anxiety, to let the feeling come and go.

And as we discussed earlier, to when it's time to take action, to respond wisely on the other side of an overwhelming emotion, it's okay has really helped me in this regard. Another way to really feel your feelings is journaling. We recently had on the show, a guy named Dr. Jamie Pennebaker. My wife and I interviewed him.

It was a great episode. He's the guy who came up with something called expressive writing or therapeutic journaling, which is a form of journaling that has been studied extensively all over the world, hundreds and hundreds of studies on this. It's been shown to have all sorts of physiological and psychological and even behavioral benefits.

And so I'm just going to describe it briefly. We talk about it in the podcast, so I'll drop a link to it if you want to hear more about it. But I'm just going to describe it briefly to you now. Really, it's quite simple. Just find a quiet place and pick an issue in your life that's difficult. It could be grief, it could be anything. And just write about it for 15 minutes straight.

Don't worry about writing well. It doesn't matter. You're not going to save this or try to get it published. It's just about getting it all out of your head and onto the page and writing for 15 minutes. If you run out of things to say, just repeat yourself until you get a new idea. If you get overwhelmed, you can stop and change the subject of your writing. Do this for three or four days straight.

You can write about the same thing every day or switch it up. Do it for three or four days straight and see how you feel. This is an evidence-based way to really reckon with grief or whatever powerful emotions are alive for you. And yeah, so I recommend you give this a try. Check out the episode we did with Jamie and obviously our new journal that we've just put out.

It might be a great place to do this, but you don't need a fancy journal for this. You can just write it on scrap paper. The most important thing is that you just do it or try it. Strategy number two for dealing with grief during the holidays is a bit out of left field. I'm kind of freelancing on this one. I don't want to say I'm making it up, but I'm suggesting it as something you might want to consider,

but I haven't seen any studies on this specifically, and that is loving-kindness meditation. Some of you know what this is, but for those of you who don't, I'll briefly describe it. Loving-kindness meditation is an ancient Buddhist practice that has been studied extensively in the labs and shown to have all sorts of benefits. The practice is quite simple. You sit or lie down, close your eyes, and start by envisioning a really easy person.

It can be a pet or toddler, somebody easy to love, and sending that person four phrases silently in your mind. May you be happy, may you be safe,, may be healthy, may you live with ease. And then you move from the easy person to yourself, send the same phrases. After yourself, you move to a mentor or a benefactor, be a teacher, a parent, family member who really helped you out. If you don't know somebody who fits this category, personally, you can think of a role model

on the world stage, the Dalai Lama, for example. You move from the benefactor or the mentor to a neutral person, somebody you see all the time, but are tempted to overlook. From there, it's a difficult person, as I often joke, best not to pick the most difficult person, maybe go with somebody mildly annoying. And then finally, all beings everywhere.

So what I'm suggesting as it pertains to grief during the holidays or really anytime is to create a new category for the person you're missing. So you can tweak the phrases because some of them may feel discordant given that the person is no longer alive, or you can picture them when they were alive and send the phrases to that version of the person is no longer alive, or you can picture them when they were alive and send the phrases to

that version of the person may be happy, healthy, safe, and live with ease. One of the things that Joseph has often said to me about grief is that the love that we felt for the person we're missing does not have to die. And so I'm intrigued by the notion that this practice might be a great way to nurture that love, which of course is inextricably interwoven with grief. Strategy number three for dealing with grief during the holidays or anytime

is to get some social support. To, as I like to say, and I pick this phrase up from somebody very smart, to never worry alone. I love that phrase. You've probably heard me say it before. It's based in a lot of research about what makes humans flourish, and what makes humans flourish is other humans. We need positive relationships in order to thrive. And when we're dealing with something difficult, doing it with other people can be incredibly helpful. I sometimes think

about that old phrase, misery loves company, and it's said as if it's a bad thing. But wanting company when you're miserable is the healthiest possible instinct. So again, as I said earlier, we don't live in a culture that encourages open expressions of grief. Often people feel like there's an expectation that they get over it. But I encourage you to talk about this with sympathetic and empathic friends and family members, tell stories about the

person you miss. And it doesn't matter how many years later, grief does not operate on a timeline. The other thing is if you don't have people in your life who you feel are good listeners in this regard, is to join a support group. These are available all over the place, just do some Googling.

Like I said, we've done lots of episodes on grief. The foregoing was not a full treatment on the subject, but I'm going to put some links in the show notes to episodes on grief that we have done. And coming up soon, we've got a full week on grief, three episodes that we're gonna be dropping in early December on grief. So stay tuned for that.

And that brings me to pain point number five, loneliness. This can really spike during the holidays because if you're looking at Instagram, it may seem like everybody else is having a great time and you're on your own. And I think loneliness is a public health disaster at the moment. The data on this are pretty clear.

Loneliness has gotten worse over time. And so we need strategies for dealing with it. So I'm gonna give you two. The first comes from Dr. Vivek Murthy, who's the Surgeon General of the United States right now. He wrote a whole book about loneliness. And he actually, just by way of context, has a really useful way of talking about loneliness.

Because for a lot of people, we don't see ourselves in this word, or we don't hear ourselves in this word, because we may tell ourselves a story that we're surrounded by people. We know a lot of people at work, we have a family, but you can still be lonely. Loneliness has to do not with the quantity of your relationships, but the quality of your relationships. In fact, Dr. Murthy

self-diagnosed with loneliness during his first tour of duty as Surgeon General when he was surrounded by people, but nonetheless lonely. So one of his big suggestions for loneliness is to volunteer. Volunteering is a great way to meet other people, and given that loneliness can really do a number on your opinions and views about yourself, volunteering is a great way to remind yourself of your innate worth. The other recommendation for loneliness,

this one I'm pulling into my rear end a little bit, but I just have this suspicion that it might help and might be worth trying. I'm kind of pulling in my rear end a little bit, but I just have this suspicion that it might help and might be worth trying. I'm not making any guarantees. It's just maybe a useful pointer. It's quite similar to loving kindness meditation in that, first of all, it's a related practice. And second, because I don't have any evidence for it, just like I didn't have any evidence about loving kindness meditation for grief, just a suspicion that it might help. So this practice is known in Pali,

the ancient language in which the Buddhist teachings were written down. It's known in Pali as Karuna, which translates to compassion. And here's how it goes. Assume a comfortable position. You can lie on the ground or you can sit in a chair, close your eyes,

and then just envision a series of people who are struggling right now, people from your life or even people from the news. And then silently send them phrases such as, may you be free from pain, may be free from fear, may be free from sorrow. And then I like to finish with, may you be free from suffering. And just work through as many people as you can muster. And for me, this does two things. First, it pulls me out of my own stories about how bad everything is for me.

It just pulls me out of myself in a helpful way. The second thing it does is, for me at least, it provokes gratitude because as bad as I might be feeling about something in my own life, things are always worse for somebody else. So try these two strategies for loneliness, which again is at unprecedented levels right now. Which brings me to pain point number six during the holidays,

which is maybe a little bit, it's going to sound a little bit like the opposite of loneliness and it's social anxiety. Although I actually think that they can be pretty deeply related because when you're lonely, you're one of the catch-22s of loneliness. How it can become a briar patch is that the more lonely you are, the more spiky you become, the more socially awkward you become, and that just makes everything worse.

So whether you're lonely or not, social anxiety can be a real problem. And speaking as an extrovert, I want to own the fact that I, well, I do sometimes struggle with social anxiety can be a real problem. And speaking as an extrovert, I want to own the fact that I, well, I do sometimes struggle with social anxiety. It's not an area of expertise for me. The good news is that I interviewed a true expert on this, Ellen Hendrickson, who's a clinical psychologist,

and she wrote a book called, How to Be Yourself. I interviewed her a couple of years ago. I'll put a link in the show notes to that. And she has three tips that I really like. The first is if you're nervous going into a holiday party at work or your romantic partner is dragging you to meet their family or you are having your own family over and are worried about awkward interactions,

the first thing to do is to shift your focus outward. So instead of being coiled up in stories about your own flaws, being coiled up in self-consciousness, make a concerted effort to take note and interest of your surroundings. Could be your physical surroundings, could be the people you're encountering, ask questions of them, get curious.

This can get you out of your own head and get you more deeply connected to the people you encounter in these various contexts. The second piece of advice from Ellen Hendrickson is to prepare conversation starters. Maybe this sounds a little dopey and you don't wanna be forced or robotic or weird about this, but as I keep saying,

I really like having a script. I really like knowing just loosely a couple of things that I might be able to say in a pinch. And so just going into the party and thinking about, all right, what might be interesting to talk about with people? And that the third thing to do is to reframe your nervousness or anxiety about social interactions as excitement.

I love that. I'm a person who deals with a lot of anxiety generally and to reframe it as excitement can be incredibly powerful. Let me tell you about it. I may have told this story before, but recently I had this experience where I was going on CNN to talk about election stress actually.

And I've been trying to do more media recently because I'm launching this new company. And so I'm trying to force myself to go do interviews more. And I, as you know, I have panic disorder. I've quite famously had a panic attack on national television 20 years ago. And once the brain learns how to panic, it gets pretty good at it.

And one of the problems with panic disorder is that if you're not doing something frequently, you're more likely to get anxious or panicky about it. And so I haven't or I hadn't been doing that much press. And so I was really freaking out before this CNN interview, and I was calling my wife and telling her I was worried I was going to faceplant on CNN. And I happened to be preparing for a podcast in which the interviewee,

I was reading my document that helps me prepare for every podcast. And the interviewee I was going to talk about dropped this wisdom bomb of reframing nervousness as excitement. I used that as my mantra all day long and it worked right up through the interview and it went reasonably well. The bottom line here is you can be afraid and do it anyway. That is a radical notion. You can go through your whole life, as I have,

with anxiety, and you can still make the affirmative decision not to lead a small and limited life, to continue to do things even though you feel anxious, and taking those baby steps. And really, that's what I'm recommending here when it comes to social anxiety or any type of anxiety, to take baby steps. But as you do it, you will build confidence to do more and more.

All right, time for another quick break. And when I come back in the final segment, I'm going to talk about overeating, the indignities of holiday travel, and the financial worries that can come up during the holidays. Keep it here. Make this holiday season wow with a brand new way to play from Wondery Kids and the number one kids podcast, Wow in the World. We are making STEM toys fun like never before. For the first time ever, be wowed with exclusive engaging companion audio that comes with each STEM toy.

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We're back with your holiday sanity guide or holiday survival guide. We're down to the final three pain points that I'm gonna try to give you some, what I hope will be useful advice on. As you know, we're going through nine areas of potential struggle during the holiday, and I'm sharing some evidence-based strategies from ancient wisdom and modern science. So pain point number seven is overeating.

This is something I have struggled with for many years, especially during the holidays. I cannot tell you how many times I've woken up the day after Thanksgiving or Christmas with like a food hangover because I've pounded too many cookies. And then I'm of course in a shame spiral about how I'm a glutton and I look like shit or whatever. So let me tell you about what something that's really helped me and it's intuitive eating. I'm not an expert in intuitive eating, although I've been practicing it for many years. I've interviewed many experts on the show. And so I'll, and I know I keep saying this,

I will link in the show notes to my interviews with people like Evelyn Tribullet, who is one of the progenitors of intuitive eating. The basic logic of intuitive eating is that diets do not work. Plenty of data to support this. Dieting is often a predictor of future weight gain. Diets don't work, but what does work

is a radical counterintuitive strategy which involves eating whatever you want whenever you want it with two caveats. The first caveat is you should keep in your mind a kind of gentle background reminder of nutrition guidelines. You don't wanna be overly milit reminder of nutrition guidelines. You don't want to be overly militant about nutrition guidelines. You don't want to make certain subsets of food off-limits or sinful or something like that.

But you want to keep a gentle reminder of what the overall nutrition guidelines are. That's the first caveat. The second is you should listen to your body about when you're hungry and when you're full. And this can be a very hard thing to do, especially if you've spent years following other people's food rules and turning off the internal signals of satiety. This can be a real thing to learn over time. I myself have spent many years learning how to listen to myself,

having the patience to slow down while I'm eating and figure out when I'm full. But intuitive eating has been a game-changer for me when it comes to overeating during the holidays. So I'm gonna give you three little slogans that might help you. The first, and this is straight from Evelyn Tribbley, the first is to aim for satisfaction.

You're standing in front of a buffet, there are sheets and sheets of cookies in front of you or canapes or whatever, or you're walking by a bakery and you grab a fistful of cookies and pay for them and bring them home, whatever the scenario. As you eat, instead of gorging, aim for satisfaction. Sometimes I notice that when I'm eating, especially when it's cookies and they've got bright colors, I'm not feeding my body,

I'm feeding the pleasure centers of my brain. I'm just looking for more and more little hits of pleasure in the brain instead of listening to when I'm actually satisfied. The second slogan that might be useful for you is, and this is another question from Evelyn, how do I want to feel right now? Evelyn's big on not making categories of food sinful. And she points out, and I think this is brilliant, that we use moralistic language when describing our food,

which perpetuates sort of weirdness or awkwardness around food, not only for yourself, but for the people around you. I specifically think about this with my son. I went through long periods of time where I wasn't eating dessert, but was that the message I want to send to my son that he should feel strange about cake? Absolutely not. So how do I want to feel right now? Instead of operating out of some legalistic, moralistic set of ideas around food, I often ask myself,

okay it's eight o'clock at night, I do have a hankering for a cookie and I don't have any rules that say I can't or shouldn't do that. But if I have a bunch of cookies, am I gonna be able to sleep? Or am I gonna wake up feeling a little logy? So how do I wanna feel? Just as an operating principle,

it's a great way to help me make smart decisions around food. Many times I'll just eat the cookie because I want it. But just to having that question, I find to be very healthy. Just to be super clear, I eat a lot of cookies and cakes, so I don't want you to think that the goal here is to limit yourself. The goal is to actually enjoy it while you're eating it, which can help you counter-intuitively not eat too much of it so that you feel like shit.

Okay, the third little slogan is something that I made up in a conversation with Evelyn. I still talk to her every couple of months. And this has to do with the shame spiral that can often ensue after you've eaten too much the previous day. And often for me, it's like looking in the mirror and, you know, feeling like my face is puffy because I ate too much crap the night before or probably I shouldn't even use the word crap because that is, again, making certain categories of food bad because I ate too much food the night before, my face might be puffy, I might feel like my belly doesn't look the way I want it to.

This little phrase that I came up with is wrong yardstick. My culturally embedded ideas about the aesthetics that I should aspire to for my body are not the right way to measure my actual health. I exercise pretty religiously. I'm in good shape. Whether I like the way I look in the mirror, whether I'm living up to the arbitrary cultural standards for physical aesthetics, really should not be the right yardstick that I'm living up to the arbitrary cultural standards for physical aesthetics, really should not be the right yardstick

that I'm using to judge myself. And I find this incredibly helpful. And so you might try it too, wrong yardstick. Okay, pain point number eight. This is the penultimate pain point we're gonna explore in my holiday survival guide. And this one has to do with the indignities of travel. We all get stuck in traffic jams or get stuck on

planes that are idling on the runway or we're seated next to a crying baby or whatever it is, travel can suck, especially during the holidays when the airports and the roads are clogged. I got this survival or sanity inducing strategy from David Ross Marron, who's a clinical psychologist and a founder of the Center for Anxiety, which sounds like a super fun place. And David was on this show, and he argues that one of the reasons we're seeing this unprecedented uptick in anxiety throughout our culture is that we've become allergic to discomfort. We've become intolerant of discomfort.

In part, this is because we've designed a world where there's so much less friction than there used to be. With a swipe, you can get food, you can get directions, you can get any piece of information, that you can get a date, you can get a ride, everything is available at your fingertips. As a result, we don't handle discomfort very well. David's suggestion is that you reframe any travel struggles

as an opportunity to practice your tolerance for discomfort and your ability to bounce back. This one, I don't have to belabor. It really is about this little inner jujitsu move you can do next time you're in a traffic jam or your flight has been delayed to say, oh, okay, this is a chance to practice dealing with life's inevitable ups and downs.

I will also say that if you are at the airport or on a plane and you're experiencing delays, it's a great time to meditate. Final pain point that I want to discuss with you is money worries. During the holidays, many of us feel like we have to spend a lot of money on parties, on travel, on shopping especially, and it can be painful.

I'll be honest, and I've mentioned this before, but I worry a lot about money. And in my case, I've been extremely lucky in my life. And so for me, a lot of my financial concerns are just ancient patterns I inherited from my ancestors who had quite real and vivid money concerns. But it's an issue that I really deal with on the regular. And many of the things we've already discussed in this podcast

have been very helpful for me. Mindfulness meditation, social support come to mind as two things have been very helpful. And many of the tools that we've already discussed during the course of this episode are very helpful for me in this regard. Mindfulness meditation, loving kindness meditation, generosity, social support, all of these really help me work through these

concerns that course through my veins even though they're irrational. And for you, the concerns may not be irrational. So I want to be very sensitive to that. So let me give you two strategies that have helped me. The first is a question, a provocative question that Joseph Goldstein has asked me before, which is, how much is enough? I love this question. How much is enough?

During the holidays, or really anytime we can look at social media and get a sense that everybody else has more than we do. But really asking yourself, do I truly have what I need? Do I really need what I'm seeing that other people have? This is a great question, just to kind of bouncing around in your cranium. I've never really answered the question, but just to hold it as a question, as a frame,

when I'm worried about finances and fearfully, fretfully projecting into a future where I live, as I've written about before, where I live in a flop house in Duluth, how much is enough is a great thing for me to think about. And it throws me right back into this space, you know, when we talked about this earlier of gratitude, like I have a healthy family.

What more do I need? You need a little bit more. But just to keep things in perspective in this way is helpful. But it's the second strategy I want to share with you that has been the most impactful. And I kept this for last because I actually think this is really a key not only for a happy life, at least in my opinion, but also for helping you implement everything we've talked about during the course of this podcast. But let me start by talking about self-compassion

as something that you can bring to financial concerns. Self-compassion, if you haven't heard of it, is quite simple. There's been a ton of research in the psychological field into this. It was really kicked off by a great academic by the name of Kristin Neff, who's been on the show many times. And essentially, it is really about treating yourself the way you would treat a good friend. If a good friend came to you after having made an error or describing how they're in the midst of a tough time, I think you'd probably be quite supportive. But how do you talk to yourself? Most of us talk to ourselves like a drill sergeant.

Self-compassion suggests that you talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend or to your child. And there's a ton of evidence that shows that it can make you more effective at reaching your goals. So Kristin Neff has what I call the Neff Three Step, which you can do on the go. It's eminently portable. She doesn't call it the Neff Three Step. She calls it the Mindful Self-Compassion Break.

But anyway, call it what you want. This is just a three step thing you can do at any time when you're ambushed by financial concerns during the holidays or really anything that's bringing you down. The first step is just to be mindful of whatever it is that's bumming you out right now. You can even just say, this sucks. Her little phraseology is this is a moment of suffering.

I prefer this sucks. The second is to bring to mind that millions of other people are dealing with whatever you're dealing with right now. You're not alone. Kristen talks about this as invoking a sense of common humanity. And the third step, which for me is the key,

is to talk to yourself in a supportive way, to say the things to yourself that you would say to a good friend in a similar situation, to channel your capacity to be a mentor and to direct it towards yourself. There's so much evidence to show that if you can rewire your inner chatter in this way, it can have a ton of physiological and psychological benefits. I want to add a couple of steps onto the NEF3 step. One of them is something that she talks about and can be integrated into any of the steps.

So actually this isn't the addition of a step, it's just a way to supercharge it. And I resisted this because of, I don't know, of my innate skepticism and maybe my acculturation as a heteronormative white guy in modern America. But I resisted what I'm about to say to you, but it's backed by science and I have found it in my own laboratory of one to be very helpful.

You can supercharge this three-step process by putting your hand on your heart or on your chest or heaven for a friend, even giving yourself a hug. I don't like anybody to see me doing this, but if I'm in a moment of suffering about finances or anything else, I will do the nef three step, mindfulness, common humanity, and supportive self talk with my hand on my chest. And for me, that makes it even more effective. And let me add a fourth step onto it.

And this is a very Buddhist twist, which is to see that the self who needs compassion, you can't find it. The anger or anxiety you're feeling right now doesn't have an owner. Who's experiencing this anger? Who's experiencing the anxiety? Just looking for the you that is engulfed in these feelings will help you realize that there is nobody there, essentially.

And maybe this sounds a little weird or esoteric, but it's actually healing. You don't have to take all of your thoughts and emotions so personally. One little way to operationalize this for yourself is a linguistic trick that Joseph talks about, which is when you're experiencing anxiety, for example, we're talking about financial anxiety, to rephrase it in your own mind, instead of saying, I'm scared or I'm angry, to say there is anxiety or there is fear or there is anger. And you're less entangled in it. You can see it, as I said before, as a passing weather pattern, instead of some sort of reflection of who you fundamentally are because there is fundamentally no you there. If you close your eyes and look for your inner you there's nothing to find and as they say in Buddhist circles the

not finding is the finding. Okay so that little fourth step might not go down easy for all of you but just experiment with it. Just to say in closing here self-compassion I think think, is a great way to close this survival guide because I've thrown a lot of tips at you. And I want you to remember something I said at the beginning, which is that if any of these things landed for you,

you should pick a few, one or two, maybe just one, and try to do it, try to knit it into your holidays. But when you fall off the wagon or fail, quote unquote, to put it into effect in your life, use self-compassion to help you be resilient, to help you try again. These skills are not easy to learn and you need to have permission to mess it up and start again.

Okay, as I bring this to a close, I just want to say a few things. First, the list that I just shared with you, the nine pain points, I recognize that it's not an exhaustive list of every way in which one can suffer during the holidays. For example, I didn't talk about drinking, which I know can be a big problem for people during the holidays. So I will drop some of the episodes we've done

on addiction and specifically drinking in the show notes. The other thing I wanna say is, since I dropped so many ideas on you, if you're a subscriber at danharris.com, you will get a cheat sheet with this episode, which will pop into your inbox. And so you can consult that if you want to remember certain things I said during the course of this episode.

And there will be time codes there associated with it, so you can find it easily if you want to go back and re-listen or re-watch. So sign up at danharris.com if you want your cheat sheet. And finally, again, if you go to danharris.com, you'll see this new journal, Dump It Here, that my wife and I recently put out into the world. Thank you for listening.

Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself

by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.