Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Sara Bareilles: Anxiety, Anger, and Art (2021)

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

This week, we're posting some of our best podcasts from the archives on a dragon many of us face internally – anxiety. The first episode of the series features Sara Bareilles. Sara Bareilles is a singer, songwriter, composer, and actor who earned Tony and Grammy Award nominations for her Broadway musical Waitress. She also stars in the show Girls5eva, which is back for a second season this year on Peacock.Behind all of Sara's artistic and professional successes, there is a meditator who is fearlessly open and public about her struggles with anxiety and depression. In this conversation, she talks about: her history of anxiety and depression; the relationship between suffering and art; whether meditation might defang somebody's creativity; how she works with anger; and her relationship with social media. She’ll also share some of the backstories behind some of her hit songs.Just a note: This episode is a rerun from June 2021. There are some references that might seem a little out of date, but the content remains relevant. Content Warning: This conversation features an exploration of depression and anxiety with one very brief mention of self-harm. We’re re-launching our ten-day meditation challenge, called the Taming Anxiety Challenge, over on the Ten Percent Happier app. To join the Challenge, just download the Ten Percent Happier app today wherever you get your apps or by visiting tenpercent.com. If you already have the app, just open it up and follow the instructions to join! Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/sara-bareilles-repostSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. This week we're posting some of our best podcasts from the archives on a dragon many of us face internally anxiety. Anxiety to state. The obvious is a massive issue in our society. Even before the pandemic, it was on the rise, and now the situation is sadly even worse. Chances are, it has afflicted you or somebody you love at some point and on some level. Maybe you've

received an actual diagnosis, like generalized anxiety disorder, or maybe your prone to symptoms closer to panic, as I've been known to experience, or perhaps you're just susceptible to a bit too much garden variety worry. The bad news is that anxiety is unlikely to disappear overnight, but the good news is that you can change your relationship to it. That's what we're going to discuss on our episodes this week. We're kicking things off with a personal story from Sarah Barellis, a fearsome polymath. She's a singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. The list goes on. She's earned Tony and Grammy Award nominations for the Broadway musical Waitress. She stars in the very funny Tina Fey produced show Girls 5 Eva, which we'll be back for a second season this year on Peacock. I highly recommend

that show. It's very funny and she's very funny in it. However, behind all of Sarah's artistic and professional successes, there is a meditator who is extremely, and I believe very deliberately open and public about her struggles with anxiety and depression. In this conversation, she's gonna talk about her history of anxiety

and depression, the relationship between suffering and art, and whether meditation might defang somebody's creativity. That's a big question a lot of people have. She's going to also talk about how she works with anger and her relationship with social media. We're going to get a rather intimate glimpse into the back stories behind some of her hit songs. Just a quick note to say that we talk a bit about Sarah's anxiety during 2020. So while

you might hear some references specific to 2020, the conversation about anxieties, sadly evergreen. And speaking of working with anxiety, we're also relaunching our companion 10-day meditation challenge called the Taming Anxiety Challenge over on the 10%% happier app. Meditation teacher Leslie Booker is one of the core teachers in the challenge, which features short videos and guided meditations about how to live with our anxiety in a more successful manner. In the app, you will see Leslie sharing strategies with me and with you by extension for putting into practice

everything we talk about on the podcast today, including ways to normalize the experience of anxiety in your community. In fact, by joining the Taming Anxiety Challenge, you'll be part of a community of thousands of meditators learning to cope with anxiety. You'll get videos and meditations specifically designed to help you tame your anxiety, as well as daily meditation reminders to keep you on track. To join the challenge, just download the 10% happier app today, wherever you get your apps, or by visiting 10% dot com, that's all one word spelled out.

If you already have the app, just open it up and follow the instructions to join. Before we dive in here, just a quick heads up. As mentioned, this conversation does feature an exploration of depression and anxiety. There's also one very brief mention of self-harm. Having said that, we'll get started with Sarah Bareilles right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier

instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show.

Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or whatever you get your podcast. Alright, Sarah Borales, thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having me. I'm such a fan of this show, of your podcast, of the app, of the whole thing, my big believer. Thank you, really appreciate that. And right back at you. You're a believer. Believer, I believe in you. Thank you.

So you have been phenomenally honest and I mean phenomenally in two senses of the word phenomenally and that you've said a lot and phenomenally in the sense that I think you're doing a great service to a lot of people by saying a lot phenomenally honest about your own history with anxiety, depression, etc. Can you tell me when you first started getting inkling that your mind wasn't always your best friend? Yes. I have a good friend, my friend Jesse Nelson, who's like, there are wet people and there are dry people. And I'm a wet person, meaning that like,

I've always been really close to sadness and melancholy. That's always been like an emotion that came quickly for me. That was really an easy lens for me to kind of adopt and I have to really work to see the world not through a sort of melancholic lens and it's interesting because I'm also someone I love the world. I wouldn't say that I'm like overall a depressed person but but when it happens, it comes acutely. And the first time I remember my dear friend Anxiety showing up in my life, was about to graduate college, and I started having some disassociation, and I started just

being unable to sort of stay in the room with my conversations, with my actions. I could only hear kind of the chatter that was going on in my own brain. And then sort of went into a spiral about that because it wasn't an easy thing to explain. And I remember trying to explain it to people, and for people who haven't experienced acute anxiety or disassociation or you're sort of having a little bit of an out-of-body experience, it was like, only made me feel more lonely and misunderstood and scared. It was the end of my college, and I think I was facing the precipice of like becoming an adult. And you realize you get to the end of your schooling years.

You know what's in front of you for such a long time, and you get to the end, and they're like, go! You're like, excuse me? What? So, I think I was just terrified, and I didn't really know how to even process what I was feeling about the world. It's interesting to say that because one of my big early depressive episodes was right when I graduated from college.

I felt like I was looking down the barrel at the rest of my life and I had no plan and at just everything just turned gray. Yeah, I had a lot of, it would vacillate between sort of the fear of no plan and then the fear of a plan. Like, everything made me feel claustrophobic. The idea of a life and a routine or a house or like sitting down to dinner or getting married and not knowing that I was considering that at that age, but everything felt claustrophobic to me, but I didn't have an answer for what else would I want.

It just felt like the idea of having to be alive for the rest of my life was an impossible thing to hold. And I never was someone who contemplated self-harm thankfully, but I can so easily understand how quickly those thoughts might crop up and how easily you might find yourself feeling overwhelmed because I was really on the I just couldn't imagine how do you possibly get through so many days in a life? It just seemed unimaginable. Would you describe that as anxiety and depression? Yeah, I think I've always talked about them like they're sisters.

They're just those kind of miserable relatives that show up. In my meditation practice and over the years of having done some reading and research about it, I do understand that a friendly quality towards these parts of ourselves is truly the remedy. But when they first started cropping up, they really felt like the monsters under the bed that would just show up.

And everything went cold and dark. And, you know, that melancholy lens became so wildly vivid. And I was someone who, you know, I've been working in music. My whole life has been, my artistic career has been kind of the centerpiece. So I wasn't miserable in a job I hated and, you know, couldn't pay my bills. I was touring the world and singing music for people

and secretly kind of just really struggling with being okay on a day-to-day basis. What did you do about it at that point? I think the first best friend of mine was talk therapy. I was living with a good friend of mine at the time and I had just moved out. And I think I was sort of realizing for myself that I had some kind of codependency issues where I would get really, really close to friends. I think I was kind of hiding from the world alongside whatever friends slot into that place at the time.

And I was living alone for the first time and I went into, I don't remember how I found this therapist. She was awful. She was just terrible. She was bored and like, I feel like she didn't even say two words. But the act of articulating my internal state was like the light bulb moment. It was having to explain to someone without apology what was going on. And even though she seemed kind of bored, she wasn't shocked.

There was nothing unusual or even particularly special about what I was going through, which I think in and of itself was the thing that was comforting in that. I mean, I've been in therapy now 12 years. I talk to my therapist every week. I consider it a huge part of my self-care routine, but at the time, even with a bad therapist,

it was just helpful to talk about it. It's interesting, even a bad therapist just, it seems like there are maybe two pieces in there. One is being able to articulate it, and then it comes out of your head and into the world in some way that you can hold it at a distance and look at it. And the second thing is the fact that she wasn't shocked, in fact, she was bored. Probably not paying attention. Yes, well, it may be that. But the fact that if she was paying attention, she wasn't shocked by it, made you realize, oh, yeah, maybe this is garden variety.

Right. I think that was actually a huge part of just even beginning that road towards healing is the act of articulation. I think being able to express whether it's in journals or in conversation or to a therapist, but to not be afraid of what's coming out, I really do believe that, you know, the truth will set you free. Whatever's happening is Happening and I think I was making myself feel crazy because I just didn't want it to be true So I felt

Unwell on a really deep level Rather than knowing that there's this massive community of people who of course we go through these struggles Of course we do through these struggles. Of course we do. How hard is it to be human? It's so hard. Agreed and also awesome. And there's the rub.

So that was your early 20s. You went on to become super successful. You have a life that I think most outsiders would say, what's not to like? And yet, the evil twin sisters would come back. Yeah. Yeah, they come back. I mean, I got a little brief visit just the other day.

We find ourselves in an extraordinarily tumultuous time in the world. And there's so much to hold that doesn't really have an answer. And I think sometimes the, you know, the fragility in me is something I've come to really have a lot of tenderness towards. But I could cry just like all day long if I wanted to. And sometimes that's not as useful. So, you know, being very overwhelmed all the time, that's not a useful state either. There's no productivity in that. There's no helpfulness in just resting

in how sad or tragic or how much pain or how much sad. I mean, this is all true. But like you said, there's also so much beauty and hope and possibility and connectivity to be had as well. It's really just what are you looking at? So you talked about therapy, and you mentioned at the top that you're interested in meditation. How did that come about? How did you get interested in meditation as a way to deal with the four mentioned sisters?

I got introduced. I think it was actually one of those 21-day challenges, the Deepak Chopra Oprah Winfrey challenges. And it was about health, and I had just moved to New York City. And I just sat in my brand new apartment with my mattress on the floor and my two coffee cups. There was a real reset button that had been pressed in my life. I left a long life and relationship in Los Angeles. I left my band members. I left my manager. I really pressed reset in a pretty deep way. And there was some space that got created, I think, in the simplicity of my lifestyle,

where I just sat and started to listen to myself a little bit differently. And I really liked the feeling of it, but it didn't stick. I didn't continue with it. I did it more intermittently for the next years, and then it was going through a really bad breakup and the depression came back with a vengeance and I just realized there was just wasn't another way. There wasn't a way to distract away from it. I just had to like sit inside of it and get to know it and that was where meditation really started to become helpful. I read a lot of Pema Children and got the Insight Meditation app. I also started there and did a lot of that meditation. And then now, and I'm not even just saying this because I'm talking to you, but 10% happier is such a wonderful

companion, really kudos to you for making such a great resource for people who want to deepen their practice. And the teachers you get are just incredible. I appreciate that very much. And you know this is somebody who's often the front person for large organizations that there are so many people who are doing the actual work of the app. So just a salute to those guys. And it's amazing to hear from you and others that it's useful. So what does your practice look like now? Do you struggle with consistency? Yeah, let's start there. At the moment, I'm not struggling with consistency,

which is new for me. Every morning, it's the first thing I do. It's a little bit more challenging when I travel, but one of the things I did when my boyfriend, Joe, and I just moved into an apartment together and one of the things I did was I really carved out a space for it. So I have a meditation. It's a tiny little room, and the washer and dryer also happened to be in that room. But carving out a really intentional space is what I do every morning, and it sets the day.

I'm listening to some beautiful set of teachings. And then I find that, you know, I do it the other day, I just got jagged somewhere during the day. I don't even know kind of what was the catalyst for that, but I did a meditation on the train. It's something I just come back to now to whether I'm doing something guided or not. It's just a space that I touch more often. And I find that I am a better version of myself when I'm really in touch with the simplicity of the breath and how there's so much that's out of our control. And I'm so money really is also kind of a control freak too. So it's been really helpful for me to let go. It's kind of intuitive how you think as a control freak and you're in good company

or bad company, never understood that expression. As a control freak, you would think getting in touch with your lack of control would be the worst possible thing. And yet it really helps. Well, yeah, like you said, what was the phrase self discovery as bad news? Before we started rolling, I was telling you a story about how we were talking about how

both of us had experienced some anxiety during recent house moves. And you were saying a little bit about how you had some moments that you weren't that proud of. And I was sympathizing and saying that I once called my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who you're familiar with and told him about some very negative feedback I had gotten on my own personal comportment. And he paused and said self-knowledge is always bad news. But I think what's so great about that is the fact that you chuckle after that, the light hardiness with which we can hold the fact that, of course, we're flawed

in ugly in certain ways. Like, of course, we are. So I've really appreciated the practice of naming that part of yourself. So I call her tight Tina. And so tight Tina shows up sometimes and it really helps me just like tell her to sit back and relax and just like pull up a seat and you don't have to drive right now. But it happens at the drop of a hat and I won't even notice that all of a sudden I'm very rigid and I'm very angry when things aren't going the way I wanted them to go.

And I've always thought of myself as being like really, boy, am I a cool chick in my mind? Like, I am just so chill. And then all of a sudden, you let someone really get to know you. And I speak about my partner Joe at this point, and it's like, oh, ****, really? No, no, I'm very much not that super chill woman that I would love to be.

Well, maybe you are sometimes. Yeah, I think this much not that super chill woman that I would love to be. Well, maybe you are sometimes. Yeah, I think this part of you is. Yeah. You know, that idea of like taking pleasure in seeing your own, maybe this is too harsh of a word, but I'll use it anyway, seeing your own ugliness. You know, as Joseph has explained to me at times, like the Buddha even talked about that. In Buddhism, there's this idea of Mara, who is the God of desire or the God of the manifestation of all of our notches, intertendencies. And occasionally in the Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha will say something like, Mara, I see you. And Joseph has interpreted that as a kind of playful thing. Like, yeah, Mara, I see you, and self-knowledge can be bad news

because often what you're seeing is something unpleasant. The good news is that you are seeing it and most likely, then, not going to be owned by it. Yeah. And Mara is sneaking into, like, hang out in the back of the room. You're like, no, no, you're not going to hijack this one. Another moment is kind of of freshen my mind from that conversation with Joseph,

where I didn't plan to talk about this, but now that we're talking about that conversation with Joseph, where I, after having gotten this feedback, said something like, you know, my concern, Joseph is that I am thoroughly rotten. And I thought, okay, well, I've just revealed something really big. This is just kind of my deep dark secret. And I thought this was, well, I've just revealed something really big. This is kind of my deep dark secret.

And I thought this was going to be a grave moment in my conversation with Joseph. And he laughed at me. Not just a little laugh, a big laugh. And at first I was taking it back and then I realized, this is really a nice thing to do. And he said, no, you're just half rotten like the rest of it. And so I mean, it just gets back to my point of like you, or your point, rather, like seeing tight Tina, seeing all of this stuff come up to use a grandiose term. It's liberating. So what did you do? After having that conversation with him,

did you just sit with it longer? Did you find that you feel differently about that same idea of yourself today? Is it something that just shifted over time? It's been shifting over time. It's been a long process. You articulated it really well a short while ago where you said that you're now looking at the members of your inner cast, the cast of characters with a sense of humor and some warmth, your own fragility, your own controlling aspects of your nature.

For me, I'm a tough case, it takes me a little longer, but I've started to slowly come around to, I guess the term of art here would be self-compassion of just viewing, you know, your own stuff with a sense of humor. Yeah, it's so hard because, especially with, I think, like, culturally, we're set up in a way if you're on social media or even paying attention to what's happening in the public eye. There's so much comparison happening and there's also this very false sense

of what's being put forward. And so I feel like it's like the great trick that gets played on this that we're supposed to be happy all the time. It gets talked about ad nauseam, but that there's a pill or there's a distraction or there's a thing to buy that's actually taking us away from the truth, which is that sometimes we will just be sad, or sometimes we will just be angry or hurt or vulnerable or exposed or they're just that actually we have to learn how to cope with those uncomfortable things in a way that doesn't derail the whole production.

And that's what I work hard on trying to build a relationship with that because I don't think it gets any more fun. It's not like it gets awesome to realize, like, I'm a sh** sometimes. Like, I'm not thrilled about that. But I find that I spend less time punishing myself for it. It's just, I hear on the app a lot, it gets spoken about it's like,

I wasn't skillful in that moment. It's like moving through a moment of tightness or just comfort or someone says something that upsets me and not reacting in a way that was skillful. And then you catch yourself and you're like, well, I'm gonna try to do better next time. But I know my heart, I try to be a kind person, I know my heart, I try to be a kind person, but it doesn't mean I'm not a legit There's a concept that I heard of from a woman who's been on the show before. Her name is Dali Chug and she's a professor at NYU and she looks a lot at bias prejudice, things like that. And her concept is good-ish. Most of us think of ourselves as good people, but then when we're, once it's pointed

out to us that we've done something bad or unskillful, that threatens our identity as a good person and it can go haywire in a number of ways. If you relabel yourself as good-ish, well, then you've got the elasticity, the flexibility in there to know, yes, you can be a legit expletive sometimes. And like, of course. Yeah.

Yeah, I think I like that. I mean, I think we have to have... It's like, I always thought about it as learning to become your own friend. The way we're so forgiving of the people that we really love, we can see them trying and failing or trying and just not ending up where they had anticipated they would and how much forgiveness and generosity is available when you love someone. Of course you tried.

Of course you did your best. It didn't work out the way you thought it would or, but if there's just even a tiny opportunity to practice spending some of that generosity on ourselves, how much farther we'll get. Much more of my conversation with Sarah Bareilles right after this. Like the short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What is happiness

really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, pure on earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short, with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy

during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is Short, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. You kind of brought me to something I did want to talk about,

which is something you've written about in your music, which is how anxiety or any other inner hobgoplin can be alleviated when things are going well through having close intimate relationships. And I believe the song was called Someone Who Loves Me. And am I right about that? That was kind of the theme of that song. Yeah, I wrote that about my partner, Joe.

And really the idea that getting to a place, I think about this with myself as well, but it's really powerful when you receive this kind of love from another person. It's just someone who stays, and it just can exist next to you in the pain. It's really so powerful. And it's something I'm not, I have to work harder at with my friends, with my loved ones. I have a really hard time when someone else is in pain.

And my tendency is to want to fix it or do the grand gesture that's going to take away all of the problems. And something that my therapist says that I think about a lot is that we have to allow everyone the dignity of their own discomfort. And that sometimes fixing someone else's problem is not really the fix. It's actually about allowing someone to just be in pain. And that that is a dignified process as well. But yeah, letting someone see you and all your mess is a lot harder to do in practice than I mean, it's something I talked about in song and sort of like the kind of love I always wished for. And then, but ultimately it is about which version of me shows up, too.

It's not just about the person on the other side who's willing to stay. It's like, what are you willing to show? Knowing that they might walk away. They might be too much. They might be me. You like, got a piece out from it. It's really, you know, it's, it's an act of faith. It sounds like Joe is a good dance partner here in that you were willing to show some of this stuff that's not comfortable showing.

And he, instead of going into fixed mode, has the capacity to just kind of stay there and be in the dark with you. Yeah, he really does. He has a really generous heart, and there's a lot of space for, I mean, honestly, I think for anyone who would be partnered with me, there would have to be a lot of capacity to hold my stuff because I'm a real emotional, a really emotional person. My highs are really high, my lows are really low. And I have noticed meditation has helped balance some of that. I think not that I don't feel a great amount of joy anymore or anything,

but I think that I bounced back a little bit better from the lows than I used to. But yeah, anyone who was going to love me was going to have to like love the ride a little bit too. Have you ever worried because I've heard this from creative folks that if the ride isn't so bumpy, the art won't be so good? Yeah, I do worry about that. I haven't written a lot of songs lately, and we were just talking about this the other day actually, is because pain is so fertile. It craves being expressed, and it's so so relatable and especially I find as a writer, there's a lot of people out there that depend on you to translate the emotion because they haven't been given that part of the gift. And so I feel like as songwriters and as writers and artists out there, that's part of our duty is to try to translate

so someone else has something to hold while they walk through that part of their life. So it is a little bit more of a stretch, I think, when you're feeling sort of satiated inside your heart. There's just another code to crack, I think. There's plenty to write about. There's just another code to crack, I think. There's plenty to write about. There's plenty of pain to access, but I also think it might be a nice challenge to try to write something joyful too.

My job is less traditionally creative than yours, although I write books. I found just for me, there is still plenty of pain. And that the most creative I ever feel is when I'm on meditation retreats. Wow. You may remember this was your piece of advice to me when we were connected by our friend Meredith Skardino months ago, before I moved into my new apartment.

And I was talking to you about wanting to deepen my practice and that was your the main piece of advice for you. It sounds like you need a retreat. And I didn't even think about it being attached to creativity. It's not like I sit around writing for long periods of time. It's that I'm flooded with ideas. And so I take a notebook and write a bunch of stuff down. Now, as I've joked before, there are times I emerge from retreat thinking,

I've written some beautiful stuff and it looks like the unibombers scrolling. So, you don't know what you're gonna get when the muse visits, but nonetheless, I've found that the turning down of the volume of habitual remination allows for other stuff to come up and it's unpredictable, but generally speaking, there's a flood of other stuff.

What kinds of things come through for you? Is it like book ideas or like what kinds of things? It's not ideas for new books, it's ideas for the book, whatever book I'm writing at the moment. New ways to say things, new insights into the way the mind works, new insights, usually new insights into what a moron I am. You're just seeing how your own version of lunacy and how it shows up and the kind of crazy things you're saying to yourself, I often make myself laugh a lot. So coming up with dumb jokes that I'm going to put in a book or going to tell my son and watch his face turn sour because nobody's more annoying to him than his dad.

I'm often telling him dumb jokes and he's giving me the stink eye, but I did confirm him with him the other day that when he's a dad, he's going to do the same thing. Highest compliment. Nice work. Anyway, my point is that, you know, you don't know what you're going to get, and this is just my experience. I won't guarantee that for any of you or anybody else,

but I've found that meditation does not kill creativity. I agree. I mean, I can't speak to the retreat experience, but I, oh my gosh, I think it's the opposite. Because you're getting to see your inner workings so much more clear, I know your feelings about things that get too spiritual, but I actually really believe that the universe responds really positively to the gesture of making space

for creativity that sometimes you do just have to kind of worship at the altar without knowing what will come through. And I really think that it does respond. I mean, songwriting for me was always like a huge act of I think now in looking back at meditation or prayer or that was my relationship to sort of like my spiritual practice was writing songs. And then as my business grew around it that sort of pure seed of it starts to have to hold a lot more complexities.

Now, I'm in my early 40s, and I think back on those first years of songwriting, and it was just like taking a sketchbook into the woods, like that's what it was. It wasn't for anything. And now wanting to kind of reclaim some of that, I think, for myself. This may disappoint some of my skeptical listeners, but I actually have no problem with what you just said about the universe. I mean, it's mysterious the way creativity works. There's a reason why the language is the muse visits.

It does feel like you're receiving a letter from somebody else instead of inventing it on your own. I can see from your face that that lands for you. It does. I have a little bit of an allergy to when people start to take a lot of ownership over even their work as if it wasn't kind of, I always have felt, you know, as writers were channeling something. We're connecting into some greater network that has been around long before we were here

and will continue to be around and especially with music I think when people get very proprietary about music it feels a little bit pathetic because it's just it's so much bigger than any person and so I think remaining really open I love that quote by Martha Graham about the blessed unrest and that it's our job as artists to keep the channel open, not to judge what comes through, but keep marching on the blessed unrest towards the next idea.

This is the type of sentiment that I would have historically been allergic to, but I remember years ago before I wrote any book or anything like that, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who's also a meditator and a well-known skeptic. His name is Sam Harris, we're not related, but he's a very sort of well-known skeptical guy, but also a well-known meditator. And I was praising some book he had written years before. And he said, honestly, I don't even feel like I wrote it.

I have that experience too. Like music, I don't, it doesn't feel like it was mine. I mean, I can remember going through whatever churning experience was happening at the time, but it was, especially as we age and we get, you know, further and further away from the person that actually wrote whatever it was. We changed so much. So how has your anxiety and depression been during the pandemic? Just horrific, just awful, through the roof, had a really intense kind of like meltdown in the middle. And one of my like the close companions for anxiety for me is this claustrophobic feeling and starting to feel,

especially if I'm in relationship at the time, that's the first stop. I'm like, well, we gotta break up. I can never be with you, you have to go, you have to move out. This is really bad, I'm being told, by the universe, you gotta go. And most often, it's actually my anxiety

is usually attached to some unexpressed desire, some wish, some resentment that's building something I'm not communicating. And I'm feeling anxious about not wanting to hurt the other person's feelings or not wanting to take up space or not wanting to, you know, fill in the blank. But within the context of the pandemic, there were so many elements of it that were out of our control. And it was such an exercise and surrender to an unknown, in every way, shape, and form, it was,

we didn't know how long it was going to last, we didn't know how bad it was going to get, we didn't know who it was going to touch in our lives. And then the conversations around race that began in the middle of the summer and all of the discomfort that comes with really re-examining the systems that we have known in our lives and it's all so deeply important and so uncomfortable. And then the politically charged conversations that were happening and then realizing people that I love don't think the same way that I do and having to come to terms with that and still struggling with that and where to put those feelings of disappointment and judgment. Before you talked about your self-care

regimen and and we've talked about a number of things that you do to help with anxiety and depression whatever's going on for you. We talked about therapy, meditation, exercise. We haven We talked about therapy, meditation, or we haven't talked about exercise, but that's on your list clearly. Another thing that I've read that is important to you is activism. Would it be fair to say that using your platform

to speak on on issues you care about is a mitigating factor on anxiety? I think it is to a certain degree and I'm actually having a really interesting kind of experience of it in the moment because I sense that we're in a new phase of it where it almost feels like let's just take Instagram as an example. It starts to feel that, or at least in my bubble I should say, in the community of people that I follow and see, experience them online, if you're not talking about activism or you're not dealing with social justice issues, or there has begun this pressure to if you're not saying something at all times about whatever issue is in the foreground, then that's an act of violence in a way.

And I just have felt thoughtful about that recently because it can start to feel like one gets a little bit bullied into engaging and I just always want to make sure that I'm really, I'm trying to be as authentic with my expression as an activist and as an artist and as a person on the earth as I can be and I absolutely care about lots of issues. But it is interesting. It starts to feel like pressure some. And I'm not even sure that making sure you post about something is actually the most effective thing to do.

I, you know, it's wanting to make sure that the engagement is actually meaningful. So it's just something I've been thinking about a lot because it's a space I spend time on. Fair to call it a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's empowering to have a platform to be able to speak out on issues you care about on their hand.

You want to make sure you're doing it because you want to do it not because you feel pure pressured into it by other people whose images slide by you on the scroll. Yeah, I think, you know, that there's sort of nauseating to talk about cancel culture, but I do think it's something to be examined that without any capacity for forgiveness or the space for someone to learn, how are we going to move forward?

Because there's a lot, I mean, I have a lot to learn. And I find that sometimes I get really crippled with this feeling of being afraid to make a mistake. And so I end up not saying anything, because I'm so afraid of offending someone or saying the wrong thing or not having the right speech with which to discuss a complicated thing. And so I wanna be open and available to to learning and at the same time knowing that

like we learn by making some mistakes unfortunately and which is not to say that there shouldn't be exhaustion with people being like catch up already, you know, I feel that in myself with a lot of learning, a lot of unlearning, all of the above. I share all of those anxieties about social media, which is why I basically don't go on Instagram. Yeah, I've thought about it a few times where I'm like, maybe this actually isn't healthy. It feels like a place to be social,

but I'm not so sure it is. I think I'm just like slowly trying to like do my own ad campaign and I'm like, I don't think that's what I want to do. Yeah, between what you described before, the sort of comparing yourself to other people's carefully curated images, and also just feeling like you need to participate in a dialogue, but also fearing that if you do participate,

it's going to blow up in your face. A lot of that is really tricky. There is one Instagram account I'm kind of obsessed with, so I actually log into it via the web, the open web. Tony Baker is a comedian who does these incredible, do you know who he is? I follow him, yeah. Oh, you do.

Have you seen these voiceovers? Yes. This is completely irrelevant, but if anybody's looking for a small way to mitigate whatever sadness, worry, anything else that's going on for you. Tony Baker is an incredible comedian who does these little videos where he voices over animals in very funny voices. And my wife and I will watch it for extended periods of time. It's really funny. I also, the good news movement is just one of my favorite follows.

There's always something lighthearted or something. It's about good news and it's so nice to go on there. And yeah, I find that when I'm feeling low, I gravitate towards the animal videos and then the good news movement where it's just, it's stuff that's going to make you feel good. It's the best of humanity. Much more of my conversation with Sarah Bareilles right after this. Let me ask you about this song, Armor, which isn't necessarily about anxiety and depression,

but it is about an emotion many of us experience. I'll just speak for myself. I experienced it on the regular where you talk about anger. Yeah, I wrote armor after coming back from the Women's March in 2016. And I must say, I think that was my first real personal interest in activism and getting my actual physical body involved in some movement or some mode of expression, that some mode of resistance. I mean, it was an

introductory experience for me and it was tremendously powerful. And so my best friends and my actual sister and I went to DC and we marched on Washington and it was a sea of pink hats and it was just otherworldly. It was so beautiful and so powerful and so safe and so calm and so strong. And I felt like within that song, just sort of deconstructing the idea of what it means

to be a woman and really looking at some of these stories we get told as women from end men, and everything in between. Things we get told from such a young age about who we are and what it means to be a fill in the blank. And just recognizing that it's time for a revision. And it's time to open up the discussion and actually reclaim what feels good about it and what doesn't. And anger is not comfortable for me at all.

I'm deeply afraid of confrontation. I'm not good at it. I find that it's usually, I've learned to appreciate anger as being an indicator of something's wrong. But I find that it's not the most efficient emotion. It's really easy. And this is actually a lot of what I feel like I'm experiencing from

the conversation online especially is that people are sort of stuck in the whirlpool of anger. And there's something beyond that that I think is actually a more powerful place to work from. But that's just me speaking for myself and I don't mean to discount the value of anger because I it's here for a reason. I think I heard this in your comments earlier that you have the sense that the culture maybe even parents are telling girls growing up into women that anger is not okay for them. I think so. I think it's almost inextricably linked to other parts of it where it's the people pleasing the nurture or the one who sort of oriented out I think as as young girls we are oriented towards the group think we're oriented towards making sure

Everybody's okay where the ones given the chores, you know, and this is I know this is a over generalization of course, but there are real differences into how young boys and young girls are socialized. And I think there's a wild reckoning about that. Now, which I feel really lucky to be able to see in real life. I work with a group in Los Angeles, the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls, Los Angeles is run by some of camp for girls, Los Angeles, it's run by some of my best friends.

And their whole mission statement is to help girls turn up the volume of their voice, where we get to take up space. We get to have needs and wishes and desires like anybody else, and we don't have to attach them to an apology. Young women have always been a demographic I'm really passionate about and wanting to speak to young women and encourage them to not apologize for being who they are and not apologize for any of the things that we are as people, you know, angry, frustrated, sad, demanding, having high expectations, having low expectations,

like whatever it is, that we don't have to apologize for being who we are. I was recently told by somebody very smart that anger is a secondary emotion, generally covering up for something beneath it. And I just exploring that in my own life that is I found it to be largely true. Usually it's fear. Yeah. I think that's right.

I relate to that too. It makes sense to me that anger is a mask. It's so easy to hide behind it too because it's so vulnerable to be afraid. It's so dangerous to be afraid because it feels not that it is, but it feels weak or it feels exposed. And it makes you susceptible to pain. And it's just easier to be angry than it is to be hurt. Yep, easier. And a mask, I like those descriptions. And I think it really rhymes quite nicely with your comments about what we're seeing on social media where people are just stuck in the anger almost performatively, almost sort of kind of enjoying the anger and often not moving to the more

constructive self reflective stuff. I had an experience that was very clarifying to me, I wrote the music on the air for Broadway musical called Waitress, and I was doing a run of the show. And there's a particular moment in the show where I'm seeing the main song from the show, the lead character, Jenna, is kind of doing her big emotional number. It's called, she used to be mine. And inside the show, you're on a couch, you're sort of towards the front edge of the stage. And there are no phones allowed in the theater, you're on a couch and you're sort of towards the front edge of the stage.

And there are no phones allowed in the theater, of course, but I could see the phone on the lap of a person in the front row. And it's dark enough where you can't really see who it is, or like people kind of feel shrouded by the darkness there. But the metallicness of your phone is like, it's a reflective surface. So the lights on the stage catch it is really easy to see phones in the space, even if you can't see who's holding it.

So I saw this person holding up a phone and it was clear that she was taking a video of the performance and I was so out of body enraged. Almost went up on my lines, almost couldn't remember the words to the song because I was so focused on the audacity of this person. And I came off stage at the end of the show, I made this really angry video and I posted it online and I gave this person what for, and I was just, you know,

telling everyone how enraged I was, and don't effing use your cell phones in the theater. And I got so much positive reinforcement for being angry. I got so many comments, so many, yeah, where with you, what the heck, you know, all of that stuff. But something about what I was receiving did not feel good. I felt like I was getting a pat on the back

for something I actually, if I had let myself calm down a little bit, I would not have been proud of. And then I got a message from what ended up being a young girl's sister, who was like, that was my little sister who took the video and she's so embarrassed, she's 12 years old, she's like, we're so sorry, please forgive us, what can we do?

And I felt about, you know, yay, hi. It's like what even possessed me to act out like that? I mean, I don't love a cell on an theater. I do feel that way. But what a base reaction, what a gross outpouring of ugliness, and then to know that it landed on a little 12 year old girl who I'm marching about is just a deep embarrassment. So I wrote them back several times and tried to check on her and stuff. And I have a deepest regret about sharing that, but I also got so much positive feedback for being

angry. And I was like, this is poison. This is not something I will do again. So that's why I don't get pissed on social media. I just don't find that it feeds the right wolf. media, I just don't find that it feeds the right wolf. I would give you positive feedback for seeing that. It's huge. And it's probably in the end, a good thing that happened because you saw something really important. I also want to give you positive feedback for saying it publicly. It's useful to hear. Well, it wasn't cute. It was not charming. Yeah, but I think that the stuff that is most useful is rarely cute.

Yeah. That's true. Which leads me to the final serious question I want to ask you, which is, why do this? You don't have to be honest about your interior life outside of your songs. You don't have to talk about anxiety and depression. I'm glad you do, but why do you do it? I think mostly because I just don't want anyone to feel alone, because it's not true.

It's not true that you're the only one holding pain or vulnerability or embarrassment. And I think that ultimately I just want people to be okay. A couple of years ago, I interviewed a band called Culture Abuse. They're not really into meditation, but I really liked their music. I really love their music. And I really liked that their frontman, she's disabled. I just love that he, you know, because it's so open, it's hard to get up on stage in front

to punk band with a disability and I just loved the combination of his skill and his courage. After the interview, he posted a picture of me on Twitter. He said, this guy just wants everybody to be okay with himself or something to that. And I never really thought about myself that way and I have tried to live up to that caption for years. That's the coolest thing ever. Like what a deep kindness to offer. Well I say it because you are offering that kindness and I have a lot of respect for and I'm very grateful to you for doing it.

I think it's really important. Back at you. Thank you. Is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't ask any areas that we could have explored that I kind of failed to guide us to? I don't think so. I've found this to be thoroughly enjoyable. And I say genuinely, I've been looking forward to this so much.

I really admire the conversations you're having. So thank you for letting me be one of them. Thank you for being one of them. I was looking forward to it too. And thank you again. Really appreciate it, great job. Thanks again, you too. Thanks again to Sarah, really enjoyed that conversation.

And thanks, of course to everybody who makes this show, Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kaczmeer, Justin Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Plant. And we get our audio engineering from the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a rerun of one of our most popular episodes ever. How to break your anxiety habit with Jutson Brewer, Dr. Judd Brewer. That's coming up on Wednesday. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music.

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