The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - Brené with Amy Cuddy on Pandemic Flux Syndrome

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

I’m talking to Dr. Amy Cuddy, social psychologist, bestselling author, award-winning Harvard lecturer, and expert on the behavioral science of power, presence, and prejudice. We discuss her recently published Washington Post article, “Why This Stage of the Pandemic Makes Us So Anxious,” and how working through this collective, constant pandemic flux affects us as individuals and as leaders. We also talk about developing a flux mindset and how important it is to facilitate a sense of agency as we make decisions about how we return to work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone. I'm Brne Brown, and this is Dare to Lead. I am so excited to be back to the podcast. I miss y'all while I was out writing Atlas of the Heart. I miss the conversations. I missed reading your comments and feedback on social. Thank you for letting me take that pause and get hella writing done. God, that book was hard. It kicked my ass. But I'm proud of it, and I can't wait to share it with you. We're coming back to Dare to Lead with a conversation with Amy Cuddy about her recently published Washington Post article, why this stage of the pandemic makes us so anxious. I thought, you know what?

We went out with the truth. Let's just come right back in with the truth. Like, oh, my God, raise your hand. If you're like ready for predictability and some certainty and less volatility between people in our houses, in our workplaces, in our communities, Jesus, it's exhausting. Amy is a social psychologist. She's a best-selling author, a Harvard lecturer,

and she's an expert on behavioral science of power, presence, and prejudice. And I've known her for years. And when I read this Washington Post article, I thought, oh, no, I need her to talk about this with us because there's something weird going on right now with how we all feel. It's a different kind of anxiety.

So we're going to dig in. and we're going to talk about it. And I am so grateful to be back and I'm grateful for y'all. It's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King

calls Scary as Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules. Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch.

Saving those children. is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. All right, before we jump into our conversation with Amy, I want to tell you a little bit about her. So we start our conversation with me asking about her story. And so you'll learn a lot about her. It's such an important story about tenacity and grit and falling and getting back up.

It is everything that I really love about Amy. But let me give you a little overview. Again, she's an expert on focusing on the power of prejudice and stereotyping, nonverbal behavior, and the ways in which people can affect their own thoughts, feelings, and performance, and well-being. She studies, writes, and speaks about how we can become more present, more influential, compassionate, and satisfied in our lives, both professional and personal. You will learn that she earned her PhD from Princeton. She was a professor at Harvard Business School from 2008 to 2017. She was at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management from 2006 to 2008 and at Rudkers

from 2005 to 2006. She continues to teach at Harvard Business School in their executive education program. I don't know if you've seen her book. If not, it's so good. I immediately bought a copy for me and my kids. Her book is called Presence, Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. It is just incredible. And we talk about this in the conversation, but if you're a Ted Lassau fan, you'll see that Rebecca, owner of the Richmond team, is a presence practitioner. It's a great scene in Ted Lassau. You may have seen Amy's TED Talk. Your body language may shape who you are. Just, I think it's got 60 million, 60 million views, maybe even more. You'll also learn that Amy is a deadhead and a lover of live music, an avid skier and roller skater. She's got one son, Jonah, who's a guitar player and songwriter at the Berkeley College of Music, and her husband, Paul, is an adventuring Australian lover of life. Let's jump in. Let me just start by saying, it is so wonderful to see your face. It's on Zoom, but I'm so happy to see it. Me too. It's been a long time.

It's been a really, how long has it been since we've been together in person? It was one of your book. launches and Amanda and I were there. Amanda Palmer and I and we sang. Oh my God. It was Brady New Wilderness in New York. And Yumi and Amanda sang Towns Van Zandt. Exactly. Exactly. That was so beautiful at 92 Y. At the 92 Y. Yeah. I'm ready to sing with you again at the 92 Y. I'm going to try to kidnap you and take you to a dead show in a month. So it might be earlier than that, but we'll see. Okay, well, we were going to definitely talk about the grateful day. We'll come back to that. Yeah, we'll have to come back to that.

So let me say that when I saw your article, I saw your article in the Washington Post in kind of mid-August before you even texted me about it. And I think I held my breath the entire time I was reading it. So I'm so excited to talk to you about it. I think it's incredibly helpful and accurate in terms of what we're all feeling. But before we get started on the article, I want to start with the question we start all podcasts with, which is, will you tell us your story? Wow, my story. Well, it was circuitous. And it's funny, because I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about me is that I somehow was planful about ending up where I am and I was not at all.

In fact, I feel like I sort of allowed the path to unfold before me. Yeah. As long as I was open to things, you know, I made choices. Some were good, some were bad, but they came together. And in this strange way, everything that I care about and love and the world are now in harmony with each other. So I know that was a very abstract answer. The more concrete answer is that I grew up in a really rural part of Pennsylvania, the kind of Amish Mennonite country, not in a place where many people went to college. So only a third of my high school class went to college.

I think I was one of the only people to go out of state. And I worked through college mostly as roller skating waitress at the University of Colorado, which, you know, I now feel like everything should be done on roller skates because it is much more efficient. But in my second year of college, I was in a really bad car accident. I had a very serious head injury. I was withdrawn from college. I was told I would not finish college. It took me four more years to go back. I kept starting and having to withdraw because I could not process information. And it was a real threat to my identity because I always felt like no matter what I did,

I'd be smart, you know, to have, I never thought that that was like mutable. And it is. Yeah. So I was thrown out of a car. The car rolled several times and I was thrown out. And, you know, so your brain is sort of shaking against your skull. And each layer of your brain is a different density.

So those layers are shaking at different speeds and tearing axons all over your brain. So they call that a diffuse axonal injury. And what that really means is that you're just different in every way. You know, there's no one targeted part of the brain that's affected where they can say, well, it's your motor area or your speech area. It's your personality. It's your ability to think. It's like what you think about. it might be the way you move. It's kind of everything. And at the same time, because it's not a focused

injury, like being shot or a stroke, you look okay to people. So they feel like, well, you look great. You should be normal. But I had this experience for the first couple of years of really, really dear friends saying you're not the same person. But I couldn't quite remember who I was. And so, like, trying to hold on to that identity is like holding onto like a wet ball of sand as it dries and slips through your fingers and you're just grabbing it. And eventually, you kind of have to break up with your old self. So if you're in a sort of okay relationship, but it's not great, you know you're not going to marry this person. Sometimes you have to leave it without knowing what else is out there for you. And that's sort of what I had to do. I had to leave that old relationship with myself and trust that

there would be a new me that I would love more. So it took me four extra years to finish college. And it was tough. It was tough. I had to relearn to learn. Wow. I don't think we understand what it's like to not be tethered to who we are. Oh, yes. And that's such a theme in sort of what I do now. And, you know, the ability to kind of let go of that. The way we see transition, even from one self to another, is like we're in one self, but we see a better self.

and we jump to it. But sometimes it's not that. Sometimes we have to be floating around at sea and hoping that we find a new port. And we don't know what that port is or where it is or what it's going to be like or what the people will be like or what we'll be doing. And the worst part is, or not the worst, but the most beautiful and challenging part is the new port, we look for it externally, but it's an internal thing. That's exactly right. The anchor is internal. Yeah.

And so I remember when I got a really severe concussion right before braving the wilderness, I think we talked about it. And I couldn't tell, you know, and I couldn't read, I couldn't watch TV. I couldn't do, you know, I just couldn't do anything. And I finally saw a psychologist that deals with concussions a lot who works with football team here, the Texans here. And she said, you're in a place where I don't know where the concussion ends and the anxiety and depression begins because you don't know who you are without your ability to think.

Yeah. And be smart and connect the seemingly unconnectable. And she said, but the harder you're pushing, the more likely it is that you're really wearing your brain out right now with this fear. And I was like, oh, my God, I just, can you just wake me up when it's over? and she goes, it just doesn't work like that. Exactly. The thing with that kind of head injury is that there is no clear sort of prognosis or treatment.

It's so idiosyncratic to each person. They can't say when it will end, and maybe it never ends. And maybe that's not bad. Maybe it is bad. But it is not like many other diagnoses in the physical health world. That's right. And some of your close people don't know how to do. deal with that. Yeah. Because you may seem different. So it's not only you and your identity,

but it's also how others saw you and you wanting to meet their expectations of who you are. Yeah. And then there's a whole conversation about the value attached to it or the value people think you bring to the relationship because of who you were or who they need you to be. Absolutely. What happens when you finish college? So what I finally, so I went back twice and had to withdraw. The final time I went back, I decided to study psychology. I worked in a lab that studied brain injury for a year. And I'm glad I did that, but I realized that was not for me. And somebody said, you know, I think you'll like social psychology. So I focused on that. And then I moved immediately from Colorado to UMass Amherst and started studying with my advisors, Susan Fisk, and focusing on

stereotyping and prejudice and things that I really cared about and really understanding how do they work? How do we speak to people about these things from a place of, you know, understanding the brain. Yeah. And our human sort of instincts and tendencies. So I did that. I was there for two years at UMash. She moved to Princeton. So I reapplied, started there. So I basically spent seven years in grad school. But when I got to Princeton, you know, as this small town, kid who had gone to state schools. I remember like I got to the the stoplight in the middle of town and I looked around and I remember crying. I was like, this is, I'm never going to fit in here. You know, so I really felt that I had to work. The combination of not feeling that I had a fancy

pedigree and the head injury, I felt like I had to just sort of study circles around people to sort of stay on the level with them. I mean, to be at least doing as well as they were doing. I feel like I did that for five years at Princeton, never feeling like I totally fit in and working really hard. I don't think there's a person listening that doesn't know that feeling of, I don't belong here. Exactly. And what kind of proving mode am I going to have to be in and for how long because it's exhausting? Yes. Yeah. You know, feeling that you're going to be tapped on the shoulder and told, I'm sorry, Ms. Cutty, we made an admissions mistake. Oh, yeah.

You're not supposed to be here. Like, that is an actual fear, right? That will happen. So keeping my head down and studying and writing papers was one thing. But speaking, presenting my research was a totally different thing because that felt like a real vulnerable moment. It felt like at any moment, any of those professors in the audience could come up and say, sorry, we were wrong.

Yeah, you don't have what it takes. It was another Amy, right? Yeah, exactly. Oh, God. So from Princeton, where'd you go? So then my first job was at, I took a tenure track job at Rutgers and Psychology. I was there for a year. And I also had my son in my second year of grad school, which was really not following the

prescription sort of, for what you are supposed to do at Princeton as a grad student. And so my nickname in grad school was Mama Cuddy. I feel like everybody, I would take him to class when I was TA and people would come to my office and ask for like mom advice. You know, and so then I left, I taught at Rutgers, and then I got this call to come give a talk at Kellogg at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. And I didn't understand that. I was not savvy enough to know that that's a sort of job interview, even though it was unspoken. And so I went out there and gave a talk and they offered me a job. And I was like, I'm not teaching at a business school.

But it ended up being a great experience. I was there for two years. And then the same thing happened with Harvard Business School where they're like, would you come and give a talk? And this time I was sort of like, hmm, is this a talk talk or is this an interview? And they then offered me a job. And so I spent nine years there on the tenure track. And the level of teaching was higher than I've seen anywhere.

Like you do not miss a day. You are absolutely there for your students. But you're also on the Harvard tenure track and that's pretty stressful. I then became kind of the target of a pretty large-scale bullying campaign in academia, which is actually extremely common. Academic bullying is very common. I'll just say now that I did not feel unsupported by Harvard. It was a more general thing that was happening in my field. And I was also writing and had released presence and that was doing well. And I loved speaking. Big TED Talk. Right. You know, that was the beginning of the too much attention on me thing because that did so much better than I expected it to. And just like you, you know, I remember watching your talk and you're talking about how you think like, oh, maybe a thousand people

will see this or something. I felt the same way. And now we're at 62 million people. It's, It's terrifying, and I wanted to hide under my bed, you know, after it came out. I didn't know how to feel responsible for that many people because so many people felt like I was speaking to them just as they do with you. Like, I'm sure you get so many messages from people saying, I feel like you were telling my story or you were speaking to me. And that's a pretty big sense of responsibility. For sure.

And I didn't know how to deal with that. but, you know, I still wanted to stay in academia, but I really ultimately wanted to reach people like the people that I grew up with. I wanted to reach people outside of the ivory tower. And I was really struggling with this sort of pain of academia, the kind of nastiness that it can be and what I really wanted to spend my time doing. And I will just briefly tell this story, I called you. And I remember this moment, it's a flashball. memory for me. I was in a parking lot. My son was playing soccer and I was waiting to pick him up. And we talked on the phone. And I was sort of saying, do I want to go up for tenure or not? It's stressful to

go up for tenure. You know, you've got like 20 people outside evaluating you and it brings more attention to you. And you finally said something like, I don't think the question is, are you going to get tenure or not, that's not the question you should be asking. You should be asking whether you want it. The way you said it is it's not whether you'll get to the top of the ladder. It's whether your ladder is up against the right building. And that moment changed my life. That was it. I knew at that moment that was it. I was like, I don't want to go up for tenure. I want to leave. And it's my choice. So thank you for that. I think about that moment many, many, many times. That's a moment that I passed along from a lot of otherwise people who have shared that with me. So we'll just keep paying that forward.

Yeah, to the droves of people who are, unfortunately, you know, the bullying stuff was so serious and so gendered. and it's the Henry Kissinger quote, the politics and the academy are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Exactly. And I really saw over COVID droves of female scholars leaving universities. Yes. And it's hard because I know before I left my tenure track position,

I got pulled into a kind of like you're going to dean school. So in addition to going up for tenure, you're going to go into kind of the dean preparation track. Okay. And I was like, no, can you see me in a suit with a university lapel pin? Like, no, that can't be my thing. I just can't do that. And I remember someone telling me, but how is it going to change?

And I said, I don't know, but I can't martyr myself and my family. And there are so many good leaders in higher education, but there is still so much bullshit. I know. I think people on the outside look in and say, but aren't you supposed to be the quote unquote smartest people? Like, well, not so much. Yeah, there's intellect, but there's also with it on equal footing massive fragility around ego. Absolutely. You, I'm sure, have also heard this, but you're a psychologist. Like, how do these things happen among psychologists? And you're like, oh my gosh, maybe they happen because you probably know the term me search. They always say that

psychologists don't do research, they do research. They study the things that are wrong with them. I mean, I'm kind of joking around, but I certainly don't think psychologists are less likely to behave badly in academia. No. I think there is ample empirical evidence that they are at, can be as problematic as the rest of it. Completely agreed. Okay. So I have to just stop and pause and say, you're doing your thing now. You look, you look as lit from within as I I've ever seen. But how much of that is coming off the Grateful Dead tour? A lot. Tell us about the love.

It's, gosh, I mean, it's my community. It's my home. And it's a traveling home. The music is so meaningful to me. You know, it started for me in 1988. That's when I got on the bus, so to say. People say. and, you know, I never really got off, but Jerry Garcia died in 95. And so there was a long sort of period of time when a lot of deadheads my age were not doing much. But although I always joke that we spent that time, we're like, oh, I guess I have to go to grad school or something and make something of myself. Now we're back for like lawyers and doctors. And, you know, it's very funny to me, like those deadheads then, what they're doing now.

But still came back to it. It is this, I call it, bounteous presence. So stories that are timeless that will be passed on. And the living members of the Grateful Dead, they want those stories to be passed on. That's their greatest wish is for the music to not die when they die. You know, these are stories of the struggles and joys of life and death. And they speak to people. They're just not all simple love stories. One of the most beautiful things I think about the Grateful Dead is that their lyricists, they considered to be part of the band. So Robert Hunter and John Barlow were poets, and they wrote lyrics and worked with Jerry, Garcia, and Bob Weir to write the music. And they were part of the band. And those lyrics are just, I mean, you could listen to them a thousand times and have a different interpretation each time.

And Robert Hunter, who was just a mensch and died two years ago, whenever you were. somebody said, well, what does it mean? He always said, it means what it means to you. Because I'm writing it from my knowledge, from the books that I've read, from the experiences that I've had. But I would be taking something from you if I told you what it meant, because what it means to you is just as right as what it means to me. It's beautiful. By talking about in many ways the sort of mundane moments. Oh, yeah, the ordinary moments of our lives. Exactly. And the beauty and fragility. in those moments, the power of those moments, to call our attention to those, also calls our attention to each other. And so, you know, one of the things about the Grateful Dead is that

they've never played the same set of songs twice at a live show. So they've now played close to 3,000 shows if you include the new iteration of the Dead, which is Dead and Company. And they've never played the same set list twice. You know, there are hundreds of songs. in their catalog. And so when you go, you are always getting an experience that has never happened before and that will never happen again. I feel like people who are like, they listen to a recording, they're like, oh, they don't sound so good. I say, you got to go see them. You have to feel this and the jams in between because they are so present with each other. The audience is present with each other and the band is present with the audience. And so that's what I call bounty

his presence. And it is absolutely intoxicating. People think of it as like drugs and, you know, sloppiness. And it's so not bad. No, it reminds me of Emil Dirkheim's construct of collective effervescence. Yes, very much a related construct. Yeah. It is a shared sort of euphoria. But it brings out this incredible generosity. There's a sort of norm that you never sell a ticket. if you can't go for above phase value. You sell it for what you paid or you give it away. And so, you know, a lot of people will have their finger up, one finger, and that means I need a miracle. And a miracle is a free ticket because there are plenty of young people there who can't afford a ticket. So you miracle them. I got miracle many times when I was, you know, 17, 18, 19,

but now I'm able to miracle people. So it's so much not about greed or getting all that you can. It is about sharing what's there. So it's very much an abundance mindset and not a scarcity mindset. Yes, I think deadheads look pretty strange. They're pretty colorful and a little bit messy looking. And when you first check into a hotel, people are like, what are you people going to do? But by the end, by the next day, the staff say you're the nicest people. You clean up after yourselves.

You look us in the eye and thank us. you're nice to us. You know, that's what it's about. And I have to say, one time I was speaking in Chicago and I was all dressed up in my keynote speaking outfit, you know, and I... Oh, yeah. But the Dead was playing their 50th anniversary final show. This was 2015.

I know it's 2021, and now there have been hundreds more. And I was going to that show. So I gave a talk in Chicago, going to the show in Chicago, but checked in my fancy dress. And it was a nice hotel. And I'm checking in and I stayed there before. And the guy checking me and leans forward, he goes, I'm sorry about the riffraff because the lobby was filled with deadheads.

And I leaned toward him and I whispered, I am the riffraff. So I so want a T-shirt that says, I am the riff-raft. I am the riff-raft. That is the best. Oh, my God. Proudly. Proudly, yeah. And I can't wait to get to your five songs because I was really curious about.

about which song from the dead you'd pick or if they'd all be dead songs. And so we'll get there. Okay. Let's talk about this article. Shit, man. Yeah. Yeah. You could have called this article shitman by Amy Cuddy and Jillel and Riley. But it's called why this stage of the pandemic makes us so anxious. So let's start with the good news. On June 14th, as vaccinations were becoming widespread, Gallup classified 59.2% of Americans as thriving based on our responses to a survey that asked them to evaluate our lives. So this is the highest score on that measure in 13 years. June of this year, optimism was through the roof. Yes. Then what happens? Walk us through. Well, it was through the roof because we felt like we were coming out of it. People were beginning

to get vaccinated, summer was coming, and summer last year was a bit better than the rest of the last 18 months. People thought we were re-emerging. And so they were excited about, you know, going out to eat with their friends and Fourth of July and going to concerts and even like reconnecting with clients face to face. And then the Delta variant, there were several things that happened. First, I think July 4th came and went. And for better, for worse, July 4th, in the U.S. sort of unofficially marks the beginning of full-fledged summer. You're now in summer.

Everyone's out of school. It's summertime. And I think people thought that would be the turning point. And it wasn't. They didn't feel as euphoric as they thought they would. So that week, I started to get texts and emails from friends saying, I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm more anxious or I'm more depressed.

And they felt they were a lot. alone, like, I'm supposed to be happy, right? Because we're re-emerging. I felt the same way over lunch. I remember saying to my husband, like, I just feel like we need to change something, something dramatic in our lives. Like, we need to move or get new jobs. And he said, I just feel like shutting down for a couple weeks. And that was what I was hearing from a lot of people. I was right there with you. And totally around July 4th weekend. I was so ready for like this demarcation line. Exactly. And the thing is, we never are going to have that with this, but we still felt that we might. And on top of this, we realized the uncertainty would continue. We've been living with uncertainty for more than a year. We had been

already at that point. We thought we were getting some certainty and clarity, and we didn't. And the Delta variant starts to creep up. I'm going to pause on that for a minute. But I think the first thing that was happening was what we call affective forecasting errors. In social psychology, This is a Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson construct, and the evidence is that we're very poor at predicting our future emotions around significant life events, good or bad. So, like, how good will you feel when your favorite sports team wins the championships? People think they'll feel much better for much longer than they actually do. That's an affective forecasting error. So you're mis forecasting your affect.

But on the other side, we think that something bad that happens to us will feel much worse for much longer. So on both ends, we're not very good at predicting our emotions. So I think people really thought that they were going to feel euphoric, ecstatic around the 4th of July when they first started reconnecting. And they didn't feel that. And that was really disappointing and confusing. I've been inside for, you know, a year plus, am I not? supposed to be so happy to be out to deal with my friends. Why do I not feel better? Why do I feel so muted or anxious? The second, I think, was that lack of clarity. It became clearer and clearer

that things were less and less clear, right? Yes. As the Delta variant emerged and differences and opinion about what the threat was and how to deal with it again became sort of amplified. workplaces that were saying you're coming back to work physically, you know, started to reverse policy at the same time. Kids are supposed to go back to school. It was just so confusing. It was very clear that there was not going to be a victory day, a day when we all celebrated in the streets together and said, oh, it's over. We're not going to have that day. And that is really hard for us. Understandably, that's a lot of uncertainty. And that's why we ended up calling it pandemic flux syndrome because this is like constant flux that we've been in for now,

you know, almost 18 months. Oh my God. It is like I cannot take it. It is like literally just tell me what's going to happen and stick to it. Even if it's shitty news, I can't take the ups and downs. Like it is so, it's so difficult. It is a lot. And that takes us to the The third thing that's happening, which is that our nervous systems are depleted. Surge capacity. Exactly. Talk about surge capacity, which is the sort of network of, you know, sort of psychological and physiological systems that help us get through really acute crises.

But they're not meant to last 18 months. They get depleted. We can only stay in that state for so long. There's a psychologist in Denmark named Merit Weddell-Wettlesburg, who's a psychologist. studies this in a slightly different way. She says that crises have three phases. The emergency phase, and I'll talk about what each of these is, the regression phase and the rebuilding phase. The emergency phase is the surge capacity phase. That's when the threat is acute. We have shared goals. We're on the same page. Our adrenaline is kicked in. We are going to fight this thing.

We're going to get through it. And many people in the first couple of months actually felt that they were more productive and creative and energetic in this strange way. But that was surge capacity getting us through. And I think one of those variables that you just mentioned around surge capacity that I think deserves a pause is that in the emergency phase, the nature of the immediacy of the crisis demands transcending difference, political difference, ideological difference. Yes. And as a Houstonian, it's already, you know, we're in hurricane season. So our neighbors unfortunately are really struggling because they got hit with Ida. But, you know, when we got hit with Harvey or Ike, there were Louisiana fishermen with

Maga Hats brought their boats from Louisiana and were rescuing neighbors with, you know, the liberals, people you know, hugging, crying together. There was a transcendent moment because it was a short emergency, a dream. adrenaline-driven-driven time-constraint moment. That's exactly right. And this felt different already. Although, to some extent, people did sort of at least acknowledge that there was a threat. Yes.

And I don't think that we were able to totally transcend differences then, but there was a superordinate goal. Yes. And quickly, that kind of fell apart. We no longer had that shared sense of what we were fighting. I mean, it's interesting. A lot of that work comes from research, you know, studies of combat soldiers. And in that first battle of a war, they're in that emergency phase.

They're on surge capacity. They are a team. They are working together. They have a shared goal. Teams function really well in those moments. Good leaders operate really well. after the battle, the war continues. And then you're in the in-between phase where everything is uncertain.

You don't know what you're supposed to do. You become withdrawn. You're tired. You're agitated. You're tired of Zoom meetings. For sure. In the beginning, people were having Zoom part in time. And then by like the third month, we're like, I can't do that anymore.

So that's what happens in wartime for combat soldiers as well. And then teams start to fall apart. So it's sort of surprising, maybe kind of counting. or intuitive that when there's less to do, teams fall apart. Yes. But that's what began to happen with us in addition to just that nervous system depletion. So then the regression phase is called that because from a developmental psychology perspective, we're regressing toward things that make us feel more comfortable and safe. We're kind of shutting down. We also feel powerless. In the beginning, we thought maybe we have some control here. Maybe we have some agency. Maybe we can do something. And it quickly

became clear that we weren't sure what we could do. And we were at home. And we lost a lot of power personally. And we lost our sense of personal power on top of that, if that makes sense. So we totally does. We had less choice. And then on top of that, we just started to feel less powerful, less, you know, less sort of vital, less able to be our best selves. That's what happens. And it's inevitable that we're going to go into that regression phase. Not everyone at the same time, but societies at the aggregate level will go through that and most people will experience it. Now, eventually you want to get into rebuilding. And that doesn't happen without effort. Now, I think we were moving toward rebuilding in June. And that's why you see this, you know, 59.2% of people say that they're optimistic about the present and the near future.

That was that Gallup poll. And then by mid-July, a month later, when the Delta variant's creeping up, 62% of people said they were worried about the Delta variant, but 52% still said they felt optimistic. So you've got this weird ambivalence happening now. You know, are we moving toward rebuilding or are we not moving toward rebuilding? I remember that feeling. I remember asking my husband, because I just lay so much at his feet because he's a physician. Someone was like, is it going to be over? Is it going to be? Are the vaccines going to be good? I mean, we're done, right? Like, this is good. We're going to be good for September, back to school. You know, like, I just, it was like I was like a train chugging toward rebuilding right out of regression, like chugga, chugga, chugga, and then all of a sudden the tracks are broken. I don't understand what's happening. I can't decide which way to go. And then I really started personally vacillating.

between, it's probably about the time your article came out, vacillating between anxiety and depression, like just, you know, just coming out of my skin, but then also just wanting to go to sleep. That's, and I too vacillated, because I experienced both of those things, you know, talking to other clinical psychologists and psychotherapists, I started to hear that people who, you know, tended toward anxiety were feeling more anxious in July than they were, you know, months earlier, and people who tended toward depression were feeling more depressed. But along with that came a desire to escape. So for anxious people or people experiencing anxiety, they wanted to drastically change something about their lives. Like, we have to move. We have to, like, you know,

my co-author, Jill Ellen Riley said she was going to become a doula. She was like, I'm going to not a writer, I'm going to be a doula and swaddle babies for the rest of my life. You know, meanwhile, I sort of wanted to get under a weighted blanket and listen to, you know, Grateful Dead bootlegs endlessly and just sort of shut down. So the interesting thing is both of those instincts are about escape from a threat that we feel we can't control, right? So changing something about our lives, that's getting away from the threat. Shutting down is getting away from the threat. So they're actually very, very similar responses that make perfect sense. It's so funny because I just read an article. I don't know if it was in the New York Times or on

Vox that said the need for tattoo artists are at an all-time high that the lines and the reservations just to get tattoos right now. Like, you know, you can't buy, you know, a mobile home right now. People are tapping out. We're in serious regression slash reinvention mode, like escaping. And you see people picking up and moving across the country. and being like, I'm going to be a professional mountain bicyclist now. You know, it's like you also can't get a bike, by the way, a bicycle. You cannot get a bike. It's another one of these weird things that you can't get.

And also there's this, you know, mass, what are they calling it, the Great Resignation? What are they calling it? Oh, yes. Something like that. People are leaving their jobs without another job lined up. They're just like, I'm going to do something different. And, you know, how do we deal with that? That's another thing that's happening right now.

You know, on the depressive side, the desire to shut down, it's not that people are feeling that they want to be gone forever. They just would like turn off for a while. Like, wait a year. Yeah, just turn off the world for a little bit. Exactly. Let me ask you two questions because I thought this was really interesting. Because I've experienced both of these to certain degrees, but I've had friends that have really experienced one or the other. what about the struggle that some people are feeling because they feel some guilt and shame

about COVID really working for them, not COVID, but the quarantining really working for them. Yes. And then the other question is people feeling kind of guilt and shame around getting back together after a year or 18 months with people that they've missed and it being a real letdown. Let me add to that last one, guilt and shame about getting together, and now should we get together, even if we're vaccinated and we're following all the right rules. Are we supposed to? Are we not supposed to? But that's such an important part of it. So, you know, I spoke a lot with Lori Gottlieb, who wrote, you know, maybe you should talk to someone, which I see on your shelf there. Yeah, it's great. It's wonderful, great psychotherapist and a friend. And I said, what's happening with your clients? And she said, a lot of them feel guilty because, routines they developed, like taking walks in the middle of the day, spending more time with their kids, just having less social stimulation worked for them. So they had really become attached to some routines that they now realized they were going to have to let go of. And they

simultaneously felt sad that that was happening and guilty because things were getting better and fewer people were dying. So they feel bad that they're sad to be. And they're sad to be through this when people are doing better physically. So there's this sort of guilt and shame around that. And then this confusion around, you know, not feeling what we think we should feel when we do socialize. Like guilt about that. But, you know, I complained for a year about not seeing people and now I'm seeing people and I don't feel the way I'm supposed to. And I feel kind of awkward. Or should I even be doing these things? I'm not sure what I should be doing. There's a lot of guilt and shame. And I say both guilt and shame because I think there's a lot of

survivors' guilt as well. Those things are preventing people from talking about how they feel. And so we're all quiet about this. There's not a lot of discussion. People who write to me say they feel like they're the only one feeling this, but they're not. And so that lack of discussion, you know, is really unfortunate because if we're not talking about it, we're we're not able to help each other and ourselves. And not, yeah, we're not normalizing it. Like, and I think we also get into something I write about a lot, which is comparative suffering, this idea that, you know, yes.

You know, my daughter who's starting graduate school this semester, my son who's in high school saying, we don't want to feel bad that we're disappointed and, you know, kind of grieving the loss of things that we were looking forward to because people are actually dying. And I'm like, you know what? You get to own that grief and that disappointment. and you not owning how you're feeling just makes you less capable for compassion, empathy, towards people who have things that are really difficult, too, that are going on. So compassion, empathy, not finite things, not pizzas, right?

Absolutely. We don't have eight slices that we have to delegate appropriately based on ranking suffering. We can pull that up for everyone. What do you recommend right now besides going, like, I may join you on the road with the Grateful Dad? You should do that for sure, but, and everyone should. I'm inviting everyone. But other than that, I think first, for people just to hear, this seems simple, but you're not alone, right? I promise you, you are not alone. Other people are experiencing that. It may not look exactly the same way, like the manifestation of it might be slightly different, but others are feeling this, and it's okay

for you to talk about it. Second, it is normal. It's a normal human response. We're exhausted. We've gone through this bizarre, global shared experience that's also very idiosyncratic to individuals, to different groups of people in different places, but it's still a shared humanitarian crisis at a global scale that many of us never lived through something like that. So, you know, Merritt, Weddell-Wittlesburg, who studies these phases of crises, says, you have to accept that this is normal for you to feel this way. And that's okay. So stop judging yourself. It's not the anxiety. It's the anxiety about the anxiety. You know, or it's not the depression. Exactly. It's the depression about the depression. For sure. Allow yourself to feel it. Channeling Susan David,

negative emotions aren't necessarily negative emotions. I mean, there's a subjectivity to it. Yes, it's hard, but it's also informative and it's normal. I think that's really important. I think on a hopeful note, we have to remember that we are still psychologically pretty resilient. So there's a paper, an Atlantic article by Laura Aknan, Jamil Zaki, and Liz Dunn from June. So this is before Delta variant, but still they looked at many sets of data around the world and saw that people were actually doing pretty well. So we have these psychological immune systems that have gotten us through in the past and

we'll get us through now. So yes, it's going to be difficult, but we are very likely to reemerge and adapt and be basically okay. I want to say I don't want to neglect the reality that this experience is very different for different people based on their... income based on what's available to them. If you have the luxury to leave a job and be okay financially, that's not the experience that many other frontline workers are experiencing people who are immigrants and working jobs that they can't leave even for an hour without fearing

losing. There are many people who are in powerless positions. And for them, the experience is different. And that psychological immune system for them is really being tested, and I think we need to be aware of that. So looking at sort of average data is a little bit dangerous because people are having very different experiences. So I think those are three things, like to keep in mind that we will adapt. Also, there's this concept of adapting to the reality of flux. So there's a new book called Flux by a friend and writer named April Rina. And she talks about how we actually need to adapt to flux as a kind of constant state, that things are going to be unpredictable. And rather than seeing it as a bug in the system, we see it as reality. So what do we do with

that? What do we do with the reality that we're going to be in flux for a long time? I think that's an important thing to consider. And I don't have all the answers there, but to develop a kind of flux mindset. And then back to that affective forecasting piece, you know, I said we're really poor at predicting how good we'll feel after a positive event, but we're also really poor at predicting how bad we'll feel after a negative event. So the same thing that's not allowing us to feel as happy as we think we should feel is also causing us to think we're going to feel worse for longer than we probably will.

Yeah. boosting the anticipatory anxiety. Exactly. And so I think it's very important to remember that even if the future looks very different, we will probably return mostly to a kind of baseline level of subjective well-being. That said, I think people feel very powerless still. They feel a kind of loss of autonomy, a loss of agency. And this is just, I feel it's important to say to employers, to leaders, to people who are making decisions about how we return to work, to remember that people really need the restoration of that sense of power and agency and to as much as possible give people some flexibility to make choices about how they

return to work. Because this has also been a time of self-reflection. No one should feel guilty about that. We've learned about ourselves. We've learned what works for us and what doesn't work for us. And so I want people who are making decisions about how we return to work to allow people to take what they've learned about themselves and apply it because what we know is that people work better when they're working in ways that work for them as individuals. So people who want to go back to work physically feel like you can't possibly do good work from home. But the evidence just doesn't support that. Some people do great work from home. Some people do great work when they're together. So we're going to have to find a way that is accommodating to what people have

learned about themselves through this experience. Yeah. We let our team decide how we were going to come back. I love that. Yeah, it was really great. We did some surveys. We pulled. We had conversations. So when we come back, we're going to come back only partially. So we're going to do a hybrid model that they actually was really intentional. It wasn't just a, oh, shit, I don't know what to do. Let me pick the hybrid model. It was really intentional. They talked about what days they wanted to be in, what days they didn't, what we would do if it was different.

And then we're reassessing in six months. So I think it's that sense of agency and, you know, embedding what they've learned in a meaningful way is so huge. All right. Let's get to the hardest part of this whole thing. This is so helpful and normalizing. I'm really grateful, Amy, thank you. Thank you. You ready for the rapid fire? Okay. Fill in the blank for me. Vulnerability is.

Misunderstood. You're called to be very brave, but your fear is real. You can feel it in the back of your throat. What is the very first thing you do? I think about how I want people to describe me after I've died. I love that. No, it's amazing. What is something people often get wrong about you? They think that I've sort of planned this life where I end up at Harvard and I'm fancy. And I'm actually just like a farm girl, you know, working class kid who's, you know, a hippie on roller skates. I can vouch for all that. Okay. Last TV show that you binged and loved.

Ted Lassow. Okay, wait, let's just stop here for a second. Did you see your shout out? Oh, God. I, like, I cried. I cried. And I make myself big. Yes. I could not believe it. I love that show so much. And I know how much you love it too. And I've listened to your interview with those guys. The first time I watched Ted Lassow, I was crying at the end. And I turned to my husband and I said, I love Ted Lasson. And he turns to me and he goes, that's because you are Ted Lassow. And I love that. And I was like, oh my God, I am Ted Lassow. My husband's Australian. So he's like, that is the American that you are. So of course you love him.

He said, so that means you have good self-esteem, which I thought was great. That's awesome. Yes, yes. I saw the episode and then Nate doing it in the bathroom. And I just, I mean, my heart was tickled. I love it. Beautiful. I love it. My husband said, you love Ted Laso because you're Roy Kent. I was like, that's true.

That's funny because I thought you were Ted Lassau, too. No, I do love her. I'm there. I'm fucking everywhere. Brenna Brown. Yeah, no, if I had to be one of the characters, I would definitely be Roy Kent. Okay, that's something people often get wrong about me. All right, favorite movie. I know there's a lot, but if one. This one's easy, almost famous. Have watched it, I don't know. 200 times. We own it. My son and I can just go through the entire script together. We have so many almost famous lines that we share with each other. I just, I don't know, it captures to me the experience of following the dead so perfectly. Yeah. The only true currency in this bankrupt world is

what you say to someone when you're being uncool. When you're uncool. Yeah. Exactly. It's one of my favorites too. Okay. That's a great line. It's just my favorite line. There's so many from that movie though. Okay. Favorite. Oh, no, no, no. A concert that you'll never forget. Oh, geez. Okay, so I know that you ask this. And so I decided to, because I've seen the dead, you know, 150 times, I probably see 50 live shows a year, other bands as well. So I'm going to choose a moment, a dead moment that was recent. I had waited, you know, for me, emerging from the pandemic was going to be seeing them live again, right? And so I've seen them seven times in the last week and a half. But at one of the shows in Philadelphia last week,

And it was raining. There was rain, but it was just like an incredibly beautiful night. And they started playing one of my favorite songs. And a year ago, when things got shut down, and I knew it was going to be a long time before I saw them again, I knew that it wasn't just seeing them again. It was when they started this song that I would allow myself to sort of open up and be liberated. And they started playing this song, broke down palace. And I just, I just, My jaw dropped. It's funny, my friend was with me, and I didn't even realize she was taking a video of me, and I'm like, jaw on the floor, crying, just holding my hands over my heart. So right now, that's the one. And that was a little week ago. And it was just, it was magical. I wish everyone that moment. Me too. Yeah. Wherever you need to find that moment, find that moment. Put your hands over your heart. cry a little bit lean in yeah okay favorite meal oh cheese fries that's an easy one like i mean

velvita cheese fries and double fried like the fries that got left in the tray and went down three times in the oil and then with the velvita on top that's it god dang that sounds good okay what's on your nightstand. Too much stuff. Books, knicks, knacks, speaker, you know, like little family pictures, just things that I need to look at before I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning that remind me of who I am. A snapshot of an ordinary moment in your life that gives you real joy. I love to make breakfast for my husband and son. I don't know, like, I love to make them breakfast. And I know this is so strange. Eggs on toast. sunny side up. They pick up the toast and eat the egg and bite into it. And just that first bite,

there's so much pleasure. There's, like, just even seeing the yolk run down the toast. Like, I take pictures of my husband and son eating breakfast. I love making breakfast for them. So that's a really mundane moment, but that is one of the most beautiful parts of my life. I love it. Okay, tell me one thing that you're deeply grateful for right now. I'm really glad to be talking to you. I'm sorry. It sounds so corny, but I know that we get each other, and this makes me so happy right now. And I'm here right now. Yeah. All right. You gave us five songs for your mini mixtape. Before I even read them, let me just tell you that must have been hard as hell for you. It was like, I knew that you asked people that. And so I had started thinking about it

just because I thought, what would I ever say? And it's like, you know, a thousand songs. Like, how do I possibly do this? And your people will know that there were a million emails exchanged about this. Because what happened is I started writing essays for each one because I thought, I'll submit an essay. And I was like, when's the latest that I can submit them? They're like, well, can you please get them in by, you know, at this time? And I'm like, but I've only written one essay so far. Like, you just need to send the song names. So that's how I felt about that. All right. So. All right. Let's do it. Carrie by Joni Mitchell, broke down palace by the Grateful Dead. Fock I Love You by Fall Line. A Change is going to come by Sam Cook and bright as yellow by

the innocence mission. In one sentence, what does this mini mixtape say about you, Amy Cuddy? music animates every moment of my life and I include birth and death and all of the in between in that and that's what this mix does. I have so enjoyed our time together. Thank you. Me too. Very much. I'm sorry I'm choked up thinking about all of these songs and all of this. So thank you so much.

Oh, I wanted to ask you a question. I wanted you to do, you know how those like on BuzzFeed they have those, which totally. or strudel are you or which character are you? What do you think it says about me that my favorite two songs by The Grateful Dad are, it must have been the Roses and Scarlet Bagonia's. Oh, well, there's obviously a flower theme there. There's a flower theme for sure. But what does that say? Well, there's such different songs. What is the vibe of those songs at the concert? Do they ever play them. Oh, yeah. I mean, it must have been the roses is such a sweet. It's funny. I picture it sort of like in a field of the country with, you know, having a piece of sort of like wheat between your teeth.

Like there's a real simple, beautiful romance of that song that's just pure and almost naive and beautiful. I mean, Scarlett Bagonia's has so much about just absolutely embracing and celebrating music fully without apology, like with abandon. That's what that song is about. Okay. So both of those are about giving in to it. Giving into it. You know, it must have been the roses. Like it just, like I had to go with it. Giving into it. I will also say for the record publicly for the first time, that one of my favorite songs of all time is the weight by the band. And the Grateful Dead is the only band that I will allow to cover that song. So the weight is in my top five, but my husband said, you can't say it because I bet it's one of hers too. And there will be too many commonalities.

I mean, the weight is just one of the greatest songs ever written. It's one of the greatest songs ever written. It's just one of the greatest songs ever written. My friend calls it a molasses song. It feels like molasses, like sweet and slowly dripping down. I don't know. I just, it's an amazing song and story. And do you like it better by the dad or by the band? I love the version from the last waltz with so many people coming in. That's just an amazing version. So I like it better by the band, but I do love when the dead cover it as well.

All right, sister, this has been so fun. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. And thank you for normalizing this kind of shit show of emotions. It's like my shirt is stuck on the barbed wire fence between regression and recovery. And I need to like slow down. Like the more you tear out, the worse it gets. I need to slow down and be thoughtful and unhook myself a little. Yeah, I keep kind of running forward and then I get pulled back because the shirt's so caught. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. And so I just did you know, this is real. I'm not nuts. You are absolutely not. And to the rest of you, you are not either.

All right. Roy Kent signing off to Ted Lassow. Ted Lassow signing up to Roy Kent. Bye. I'm so glad y'all got to meet Amy and I'm so glad you got to get to know who she is, what she's about, and all the incredible things she has to offer to us around her work. She is a real contributor. And man, this new level of pandemic anxiety, I think this article in the way Amy breaks it down to several real, you know, evidence-based reasons why. things feel so hard and scary right now. You can find Amy's book presence, wherever you like to buy books. We love our indie booksellers. And watch out for her next book that she's writing, Bullies, Bystanders, and Braveheart's coming out soon. You can find Amy on Instagram,

Twitter, and Facebook. And you can get all of those links on our episode page on Bray Brown.com. Her website is amycutty.com. And we will put a link to the Post article on the episode page. Don't forget that every episode of Unlocking us has an episode page on Brne Brown where you can get the resources, downloads, and transcripts. Okay, y'all, stay awkward, brave and kind. Deer to Lead is produced by Brne Brown, Education and Research Group. Music is by the sufferers. Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Deer to Lead on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning

shows at podcast. Dot voxmedia.com.