The Liz Moody Podcast - Ask The Doctor: Happiness Edition—How To Feel More Content & At Peace, Regardless of Your Life Circumstances with Dr. Rick Hanson, PhD

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

My Ask the Doctor series was built around the idea that functional doctors have SO much incredible information about transforming our health, but the really great ones can be hard to find, tricky to get appointments with, and unfortunately quite expensive. On these episodes, I invite on the best doctors in the world and ask them all of my questions—and yours!—about a topic. We have Ask the Doctor episodes about hormones, weight loss myths, longevity, gut health, anxiety, skincare, and more, so definitely check those out! I’m so excited to share what might be my most important Ask the Doctor yet—the Happiness edition. I was so so honored to welcome Dr. Rick Hanson, PhD to the podcast. Rick is a psychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and New York Times best-selling author. His books have been published in 29 languages and include Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Buddha’s Brain, Just One Thing, and Mother Nurture. He’s lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard, and his work has been featured on the BBC, CBS, NPR, and other major media. On this episode, we talk about: If happiness is an ongoing, all-the-time state or something you dip in and out of Exactly where to start for overcoming negative elements of life, from being born into worse situations to health conditions to childhood trauma A super pragmatic practice to develop self-compassion and self-love based on the latest brain science How to change the neural pathways in your brain so that you feel good more of the time A 3-step plan for confronting people who hurt you How much of happiness is genetic, psychological, and physiological How inflammation impacts our happiness and what you can do it The best supplements for mental health How to know if you should be in therapy + the best tips for finding a good therapist How kids impacts your happiness How money impacts your happiness A super actionable exercise to figure out what to spend your time on to create the most happiness The number one piece of advice for being happier in a relationship The number one tip for being happier when you’re single and don’t want to be How to not let comparison rob you of your happiness How to help someone in your life who is having a hard time Rick and I would love to hear your feedback, thoughts as you’re listening, any ways the episode has helped you, so definitely screenshot as you’re listening and tag us on Instagram—I’m @lizmoody and he’s @rickhansonphd. PS: Have you snagged my Foodie preset pack? You can get all 8 presets, designed to make your food pics look as good as they taste, at lizmoody.com/presets. PPS: Healthier Together is officially a number one best-seller! You can get your copy on Amazon or at lizmoody.com/cookbook. Please keep sending me your creations on Instagram—they make me so happy! This episode is sponsored by Nuzest, one of my favorite protein powders. It’s 98% digestible (a rarity in the protein powder space) and—get this—it actually tastes good. I recommend the Digestive Support Line—they have a Probiotic Vanilla and a Probiotic Cacao. You can use the code “HealthierTogether” for 20% off your order on Nuzest.us/healthiertogether. This episode is sponsored by Organifi, the makers of my favorite caffeine-free energy drink, Red Juice. You can go to www.organifi.com/healthiertogether and use the code “healthiertogether” for 20% off your order. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a cookbook author and longtime journalist. Today, I am so excited to share another edition of our popular Ask the Doctor episodes. If you are new here, first of all, hi, hello, welcome. And second of all, my Ask the Doctor series was built around the idea that these incredible doctors have so much genius information about transforming our mental and physical health. But the really great ones can be hard to find, tricky to get appointments with, and unfortunately quite expensive.

On these episodes, I invite on the people in the world who are the absolute best in their field, and I ask them all of my questions and yours about a topic. We have Ask the Doctor episodes about busting weight loss myths, hormones, longevity, gut health, anxiety, skincare, and more. So definitely check those out if you are interested in those topics. This might be one of the most important Ask the Doctor episodes I have ever done. It's the Ask the Doctor Happiness Edition. I was so, so honored to welcome Dr. Rick Hansen, Ph.D.

Rick is a psychologist, senior fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and New York Times bestselling author. His books have been published in 29 languages and include Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Buddha's Brain, Just One Thing, and Mother Nurture. He's lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard, and his work has been featured on the BBC, CBS, NPR, and other major meetings. happiness is of course such a huge topic but I tried my absolute best to make this episode as comprehensive as possible.

Listening back felt like going to the world's best two-hour therapy session and I really hope that it serves the same function for you and becomes a tool that you can reference again and again. We actually talk about traditional therapy in this episode, including how you can know if you should go and how to actually find a good therapist. We also cover how much of happiness is genetic, psychological, or physiological, if anyone can achieve an underlying sense of well-being, even if they have something like chronic pain or childhood trauma, how to literally change the neural pathways of your brain so you spend more of the time feeling good.

How having kids impacts happiness, how having money impacts happiness, his number one piece of advice for being happier if you're in a relationship, and his number one piece of advice for being happier if you're single, a three-step plan for confronting people who hurt you and so, so much more. I don't ask this for all episodes, but it feels really, really important for this one. If there's someone in your life who you think could benefit from this episode, I would be so, so grateful if you shared it. There's an incredible amount in here that I think could make people more resilient, happier,

and more at peace, regardless of their life situation. So I really hope that Rick's messages reach as many people as possible with this one. Rick and I would love to hear your feedback, thoughts as you're listening. Any ways the episode has helped you. So definitely screenshot and tag us on Instagram. Instagram. I'm at Liz Moody and he is at Rick Hanson PhD and Hanson is S-O-N. Also, if you just swiped up on this episode or you were sent it by a friend, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. We have tons of amazing episodes coming up, including one about how real women thrive with

anxiety, a Q&A, all about cortisol and a very frank and honest conversation about money with super actionable advice. You know we love our super actionable advice here on the Healthyer Together podcast. So subscribe, subscribe, so you do not miss any of the good stuff. Let's get right into it with the Ask the Doctor Happiness Edition. All right, Dr. Hansen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Liz, I'm really happy to be here and please call me Rick or I'll have to call you Ms. Moody or something. Yeah, please call me Lady Moody. I really prefer like my actual title to be used at all times.

Lady Moody. And we're going to talk about happiness. Okay. Status. How is it connected to status? No, thank you, Rick. You're so, I mean, you're such an affable. You seem to be evidence for the fact that what you preach seems to work.

You seem so lovely and so kind and so warm-hearted. So I can't wait to get into all of your amazing wisdom. So let's start out with the basics. Sure. What is happiness? Well, first, thank you for the compliment. I appreciate it. Happiness, I tend to use the word well-being, but I mean it by happiness.

It's a state in which there's a fundamental underlying sense of contentment and warm-heartedness and inner peace while feeling that one is really living fully in this life and contributing and helping other people in meaningful ways. That's how I would summarize happiness. Okay. I like that. Do you feel like you're there right now? Like, is it something that you have as an ongoing all the time state or is it something you dip in and out of? That's a great question. I feel happy in that sense most of the time. And the way I kind of defined it is important because as long as there's an underlying feeling in the core of your being of needs met enough in the moment. You don't feel like you're running on empty. You don't feel like you're running for your life. You're not gripped. with anger or fear or shame, you know, as long as in the core of your being, there's a basic well-being and a sense that you're engaged in life and in meaningful ways, around the edges,

absolutely, can be moral outrage on behalf of others, being furious about, you know, different political things, for example, or what a neighbor is doing to their kid or their dog. You can have chronic pain in your body. You can have an underlying slump in your mood. That stuff's there. But the key distinction is does it pass through awareness or does it invade and remain? And to me, this sets the bar appropriately. I think it's possible to be so enlightened, so far along, as some very rare beings seem to have gotten.

to have a mind in which absolutely no greed, no hatred, no delusion, no fear, no loneliness, no inadequacy can ever arise. But I don't have a mind yet like that. For me, the key question is, what do you feel like as your underlying ground or kind of like what's the wallpaper, the background sense of your awareness? And can you cope with upsets and irritations? and can you disengage from them fairly rapidly and return again and again. It's really remembrance and recovery, remembrance and recovery to an underlying feeling of resilient well-being underneath it all. That's the crux, and that's a very attainable goal.

Okay, there's a lot to impact there, but do you feel like that goal is actually attainable for everyone? Like you mentioned a few underlying things like shame or anger. And I know a lot of people feel like they carry a lot of shame from childhood trauma or other things. So can everybody get to that place, actually? Absolutely. In my view, everybody can. And the bigger the challenges, the more work we have to do. Both challenges that we inherit, just in our temperament or maybe a medical condition, or the worst the world is treating us in terms of structural issues, racism, patriarchy, etc., etc.

You know, the poverty. That's all just true. The greater the challenges, you know, the greater the work that we need to do. But inherently, and I know people like this, who, for example, are grappling with chronic, intractable, inescapable, extreme pain. And yet, in their being, the core of themselves, there is a sunniness, there's a cheerfulness, there's a lovingness that is intact. They can retain that. And I think as well, people in this life who've had horrible childhoods were much worse than mine. Mine was, I give it a C-minus, but it was not a D or an F.

They too have been able to establish this. And a key reason is our underlying nature, like who we experience ourselves as when our mind is quiet enough that we can actually be aware of what it feels like underneath it all is basically calm and loving and content. we become homeless. We leave our natural home because life stresses us and presses up against us, but it's really good news to appreciate that your innate being, even without resort to anything religious or metaphysical, your innate being has a fundamental goodness and ease in it. So it's like that innate being gets covered over, sure, by all these stresses and pressures. But our innate being is good. And second, there are absolutely things we can do. I speak as a long-time,

psychologist, absolutely there are things people can do in the real trenches of their life, number one, to heal the old pain and second, to grow the good inside themselves, to grow the good in their minds and their lives. So let's talk about some of that stuff. So if somebody comes to you and I don't know if it's the same sort of prescription either way, but they're like, I'm in really extreme pain all the time, or I have so much shame about this thing that happened to me in my childhood, or I feel like because of the color of my skin or the socioeconomic world I was born into, I don't get a fair shot in their life.

Where would you start with people? Yeah. I'm going to give you like a three by three grid. I warned you. I kind of think in these weird ways. But what point is it gives us nine places where we can make things better. And then it depends on where's the low-hanging fruit. What's the greatest opportunity that's going to have the most impact for this person in their situation with their issue?

So structurally, a person's course over a day or a life boils down to three factors, challenges, vulnerabilities and resources, challenges of all kinds, outside them and inside them, vulnerabilities that those challenges wear on, and then the resources of various kinds that they draw upon to deal with their challenges and protect their vulnerabilities. A little example, if you're washing dishes, let's say in the water is all, of germs and horrible. And that's the challenge. And if you have a little cut in your hand, that's a vulnerability.

That the, you know, it's like a chink in your armor that germs can get through. But if you put on a big pair of yellow gloves and maybe throw a little ducky in the sink as well, I don't know, to keep your kid entertained, then you're good to go, right? So you've got that resource, the gloves, that are protecting your vulnerabilities from the challenges. Okay, that gives you a structure. And then where are challenges, vulnerabilities, and resources located out in the world, in your body, in your mind? That gives you, if you think of it, three by three is nine, ways you can make things better.

And people are going to focus on different things. People like myself, I'm a therapist, I'm a psychologist, I'm focusing particularly on growing resources inside the mind. That's the one area that I'm going to zero in on. But I want to acknowledge that a person who's dealing with racism or poverty or injustice or a partner who's a jerk, let's hell I'll get real here, or barking dogs next door that make it impossible to sleep, it's only important to take action in the world around you.

I want to sort of let's assume that the person is done what they could in the world around them, including with other people. And also let's assume that the person has done what they could, realistically. with their own physical health in terms of trying to eat reasonably well, you know, do sort of sane, normal things that add up over time. Let's say they've checked those boxes. Okay. Now we're in my world of working with the mind and especially developing strengths there.

The way I put it as a summary, deal with the bad inside your own mind. The feelings, the trauma, the loss, the sorrow, the habits inside your own mind. You know, deal with the bad. And also turn to the good, turn to what is already strong inside you, turn to the goodness and the goodheartedness that you can trust that's already inside you and take in the good, grow the good inside you. So that gives you kind of a roadmap. Then that's it.

So I've just kind of created a frame here. Throw me some hardballs. Let's talk about particular issues that are really tough. And then inside this framework, then I can address them. Okay. I think a big one that people listening to this podcast have is they have some sort of chronic disease or illness or pain or they have something in their physical body that they feel is preventing them from getting to do the things they want to do on their day-to-day basis.

Well, for one, so that's, okay, there we have the area where you intervene inside your physical body. I'm not a physician, so I'm not going to be giving medical advice here. But I live with someone who's had chronic issues and who treats people with chronic issues. And I've kind of seen that. I will tell you some number of things that I've seen really make a difference for people over time. One is to get tons of emotional support for yourself grappling with all of this, with lots of self-compassion.

Self-compassion tends to go out the window. So I'm going to name things that are useful, and some of them will seem obvious. Some of them, a person will need to develop. Okay. Self-compassion. Another key thing is to have a treating professional who's sort of the hub of the wheel. I see a lot of people who move from one practitioner or another, or they have multiple people with different pieces of the puzzle, but there's no one person that is treating them over the long haul that kind of is aware of all the other pieces, the hub of the wheel. Another key in my observation is to have a strong sense of healthy entitlement, especially, frankly, if you belong to a group of people, notably women or people of color, who have been systematically squelched,

or dismissed or undermined in their credibility. And healthy entitlement's really important to be able to go in and say, no, I don't understand what you just said. Please explain it to me again. Or, well, I did what you told me to do and I'm not better. What can we do this different? Or, no, wait a second here.

I deserve respect in the system and not to feel ashamed. People often feel ashamed of their illnesses, which is doubly unfair. It's unfair to have the illness. It's really unfair to be ashamed of having the illness. Or like you're a bad patient somehow that you haven't been cured, or that you're boring your doctor, or frustrating them. Well, they're there to help you.

Who cares how they feel? You're that person who matters in the room. And, you know, be sensible in my experience. It's sensible to use, you know, traditional allopathic medicine in some ways and be open to alternative medicine and look for stones unturned. Look for things you haven't tried yet if you're looking for a different kind of result. So I would offer that as an overview. But what if, oh, go ahead.

Well, I would offer that as an overview. Then I was going to segue into things that people can do inside their own minds to cope with tough conditions. Yeah, I would love to hear about that, particularly like the idea of like why me or everybody else is getting to go on vacation without worrying about it or wake up and just not feel this way every day. Yeah, yeah. Where we start is self-compassion or where we should start. is with compassion. And that's the feeling that there's empathy for your own suffering where you feel it. And there's warm-heartedness for you about it. And that is a little different from why me. Why me is understandable, but that's a kind of suffering. Why me? Why me, right? And compassion is aware of that

suffering and is tender and warm and supportive toward it. There's been a lot of research on self-compassion. People have developed self-compassion programs. I can describe some simple steps that can help a person build the muscle, as it were, of self-compassion. I know a lot of people who are very compassionate toward other people, but they're not very compassionate toward themselves. And they even think erroneously that self-compassion is like wallowing and self-pity when it's not. So that would be one thing. A second thing, I think, is honestly a sense of common humanity, which does address why me? Because the truth is, a lot, a lot of people have been kicked in the teeth by life. That doesn't minimize the ways in which that's happened to you, but there's a sense of

like fellowship or camaraderie with those people. A lot of people are dealing with chronic health conditions that are often, you know, unfair. Something happened. They weren't well cared for. Maybe there was a genetic glitch. They're dealing with this or they had to postpone dealing with it because they had to care for a young child for a while before taking care of their own health. And, you know, so there's injustice, injustice even in it. Well, that too, many, many people are grappling with that. So there can be a sense of perspective about that. It's also helpful, if I could kind of, you know, ring a little Buddhist bell here, to be aware of the ways in which the condition you're dealing with is impermanent. It's dynamic. Even if you're kind of stuck with it,

it has a dynamic, changeable, vibrating quality to it. Even the symptoms of it have a dynamic quality. So it's in that sense, it's not static. Also, whatever you're dealing with is made up of many parts. It's not a congealed, unified brick kind of thing. And whatever you've got going is the result of thousands and thousands of factors and causes reaching out into human society, reaching out into nature, reaching out into the universe, and reaching back in time.

And this recognition of what's called the emptiness of all experiences and all conditions could might start a little philosophically, but it can become very felt over time. And this recognition is highly, highly recognized, by some of the wisest people who've ever lived. And I can tell you from direct experience that as your recognition of the kind of foamyness, the cloud-likeness rather than brick-likeness of what you're dealing with,

the sense of airing and out, disentangling some of the knots that seem to make it all so tight and static and stuck with, allows you to be with it in a more airy kind of way and also in a way that's less saturated with a sense of self. and I'm not pulling any punches here. I'm speaking of a very deep practice that can feel very freeing and easing and liberating for people. My therapist and I are working on right now what she says, I see things in like a very binary way. Like I'm either my husband and I are in a good place or we're in a bad place. Either something will be bad for my anxiety or it won't. Is this similar to sort of that?

That would be a good way to putting it. Yeah. Because when we make it good or bad, we turn it kind of into. static things, we polarize it. And reality is fuzzier than that. You know, he's a, he's a mixed bag. I'm a mixed bag. I'm sorry to tell you, but you're probably a mixed bag as a wife. Oh, I know I'm a mixed bag. Yeah, we're fuzzy. We're dynamic. We're kind of pulsating. And when we don't sort of pin other people so much into static positions, you are this, you know, I need you to be a that. And we allow a little more airiness in our relationships with

others. It doesn't mean waiving your rights. Doesn't mean squelching your truth. But this insight into, again, I'll use that word, the emptiness. They exist, these conditions exist, but they're empty of essence, they're empty of solidity. And you can just try it. Try regarding him, let's say, as I'll use a different metaphor, and Eddie in the stream, like a swirling, dynamic, Eddie, that has some continuity to it, but is dynamic, it's changing, and is actually a patterning, a local patterning of a much faster reality. As soon as people start looking at things that way, they start lightening up a little bit, and it feels more spacious. It's airier. They don't feel so assaulted by the conditions they're dealing with. And you said you could mention

a few practical exercises for self-compassion. I would love if you could do that, and maybe we could broaden it out into self-love because I think a lot of people find they try really hard to love themselves, but they can't. And that's a huge impediment to them achieving the states you're talking about. We'll do it. People listening can kind of listen in. So start with the way I do it is this way. I kind of prime the pump based on some brain science about how we develop relational feelings. And compassion is a relational kind of feeling. So start with. someone that it's easy for you to have compassion for. Perhaps a dog that's hurt or a friend, child,

maybe a group of people, and just take a breath or two to feel maybe in the area of your heart some caring for that being with a recognition of their suffering and a wish for them to feel better. Maybe also with a desire to help if you can. But even if you can't help, You honor their suffering.

Compassion has respect in it. And you wish them well. You're not just merely empathic and indifferent. You're empathic and caring. Know what that feels like. Okay. Also, be aware, second, of somebody or other beings who actually care about you. So you could breathe while feeling caring,

and then breathe while feeling cared about. There's a sense of caring coming towards you. It doesn't have to be perfect. Could be a partner. Could be a friend. Could be your dog. But there's supportiveness in it. Could be a group of friends, a team you're part of.

Like there's a good feeling for you. It's a good feeling for you. Kind of filling yourself up. And I'm going to talk more about how to fill yourself up with the feeling of being cared about by others, including appreciated by them because that's a big one. Okay. So now I've kind of warmed up the heart, right?

flowing out, caring flowing in. And then in the third simple step, bring that caring toward yourself. Be aware of yourself maybe deep down inside or you can visualize yourself sitting outside you. You're aware of some of the burdens you're carrying, how life is tough for you, stuff that irritates you, stresses you, how you feel let down or hurt, how you've actually been mistreated. And don't just get swallowed up.

and the suffering, make sure that the caring for yourself is bigger. You might have thoughts to yourself like, may I not suffer? May I get so pissed off about that? You know, may I feel happier? May I be at peace? Whatever words are good for you. May this illness ease up. And it can really help as I finish here, as you do this longer. I'm doing this quite quickly. But if you take a little more time with that. You can get a sense of the warmth and the support and the respect and the recognition of what you're carrying these days. You can feel that it's sinking into you, that it's becoming a part of you, including it's being received into parts of you that long for that recognition of your suffering and that long for that tender support of concern from other

people. You're giving it to yourself and you can receive it into yourself. That's a good practice of self-compassion. That's beautiful. That's really beautiful. To go back to what you said earlier about the self-love, like, are you actually doing it? Are you practicing it when you can be practicing it and talking to yourself that way? It's something that I think I learned from you, actually, which is the concept of neurons that fire together, wire together. And every time you catch yourself talking negatively about yourself, if you consciously flip that thought, you're actually in a real neurological way.

making that improvement for the next time. Can you speak a little bit to that notion in terms of general well-being and then also self-love? Definitely. Well, the bad news is that the brain is designed to change from our experiences, including painful ones. The good news is that it's also designed to be changed by our beneficial experiences, which means we can actually increasingly grow the good inside ourselves based on physical changes of neural structure or function. New connections get made between existing neurons, existing connections get strengthened. Blood starts coming to parts of the brain that do particular things, like the thing I called you to do there, involves sustained mindfulness of your own inner world. You've got to keep paying

attention. You've got to sustain it. And research shows that when people do practices like that, especially repeatedly, they build up tissue and key parts of the brain that are involved in regulating and sustaining attention. So you literally can change your brain for the better through your practices. What we practice grows stronger. Now, it's important to help beneficial experiences to really sink in. For example, many people have people around them who do actually care about them in one of five ways.

And I'll just list those five because these are opportunities for people to look around themselves. And I'll start with easy all the way to the most profound. So there are people around you who actually include you in some way. You're part of their group. You're part of their floor in the apartment building. You're part of a team. You care about the whales.

You own, we don't really own cats. You have a cat or your cat has you, et cetera, speaking for personal experience. But there's a sense of inclusion. There's a sense of belonging. Okay. Also, there are people who respect you. They appreciate you. They may not be your best friend, but they want you.

to do this or that. They're grateful to you for doing this or that. They appreciate you. They're also people who see you. Maybe they don't see you perfectly, but they're trying to. They're trying to understand. They're empathic or they're actually listening or they're available for listening to you when they are. Fourth, there are people who like you. There's friendliness. It could be goofball friendliness like I think of the hot dog vendor or the person who gets your coffee and you're joking with them. You're not best budge. Maybe you don't even know their name,

but there's like a mutual camaraderie in a time of COVID. There's been a lot of like gallows humor. Here we are standing in line masked up, you know, waiting for something or other. But there's a friendliness there. And then last, there are people who love you, who love you, who cherish you,

even if they drive you crazy sometimes. So these are five ways to feel cared about. When we have a chance to feel cared about, I think of these three steps again and again and again. First, recognize good facts. The fact that somebody cares. There are other kinds of good facts, like the facts that you got something difficult done. Or the fact that something you worried about didn't actually happen.

Or the fact that, honestly, you push a little metal knob and water comes out. I mean, when you're dealing with a ice storm in Texas, you can appreciate in whole kinds of new ways. You know, how wonderful a fact it is that much of the time many of us have access to fresh good water. Second, after you notice the good fact, let's say that someone is friendly toward you or caring toward you or treating you with respect, feel it. So many of us, we don't notice the good facts around us. And when we do, it's like, meh, you know, on to the next thing. I got to notice the bad facts.

I got to deal with the bad facts. Let yourself feel a good fact, not out of denial of the bad, but actually because it's the necessary step toward growing strengths inside to deal with the bad. recognizing good facts, including good facts inside you, your own sincerity, your own willful efforts over time, your own willingness, after some grumbling, to cop to your own BS, right, with other people. Recognize good facts, feel them, and then third, when you're feeling it, when you're feeling gratitude, let's say, or you're feeling cared about, or you're feeling compassion for yourself, or you're feeling a certain healthy entitlement, moxie, my needs matter just as much as

anybody else is in this family or in this team at work, slow down for a breath or longer to keep the neurons firing together so they can wire together as well. Take it in. So see the good facts, feel the good facts, take in, take in the good experiences again and again and again. And people can really do that to fill empty places in their own heart related to absences of appropriate caring toward them,

reaching all the way back to their earliest childhood. I mean, I certainly have done that, and I can talk about that. We really can fill ourselves up today with much of what was missing when we were young. We'll never be able to have truly had excellent parenting if we didn't get it. Okay, but even if we can't get every bit of the pie, we can take in much of the pie today and gradually fill that hole inside and heal the wounds of the wound. our own heart. And with repetition, a thousand times, ten seconds at a time, we truly can internalize healthy social supplies and fill in that hole in our heart and ease, you know,

the longings there that are not, that haven't been fulfilled. Surely the fact that there's something progressive and that builds on itself happening, it gives me more impetus with the way that my mind works, it's like that incentive to stop and do the fact in them or like to recognize it. That was the thing that tipped it for me is I was like, oh, if I just every single time that I think that my body looks shitty and then I stop and like think of it a different way. Every time I take in that my husband says I look really hot or my girlfriend says like you look really cute in that outfit, if I stop and take that in, I'm actually building something progressive makes it easier for me to take that time. I don't know why, but it does. You're growing something good, right? It's kind of like

your money in a bank. You know, if your money's in a bank and it's earning no interest, eh, but why put more money in, you know? Right. But if you know that it's actually earning interest, if you're actually building something over time. And I would say as well in it, maybe I could ask you a question, Liz, a little that because part of this is about being good to yourself, treating yourself like your matter. In effect, we are taking in. We are letting ourselves eat, in a sense, consume beneficial experiences that are authentic in the flow of our day, no rose color glasses, no positive thinking here. These are real experiences. We've earned them. And we're letting them really be received deeply into ourselves. We're kind of guiding them. We're helping them land deep inside

ourselves because that engages a whole bunch of neuropsychological machinery that steepens the rate of healing and growing. So we're doing that. But for many people, especially frankly many women, it's hard to give to themselves. It's hard to take for themselves and to deliberately focus on positive experiences to grow the good inside. And I kind of wonder how you are about that and maybe what you've learned yourself about giving more to yourself. Because this is one of the central issues I've seen, one of the central bottlenecks for many people, especially many women, to actually do these practices, which are evidence-based in science, to increasingly grow self-love, confidence, feeling of worth, release of old pain. These methods do work, but you got to be on

your own side to use them. And that's a barrier for a lot of people. Yeah, it definitely is. I'm a really interesting case because I think on a surface level, I feel eminently worthy. And I'm the person that all of my friends come to when they want to get a raise at their job and they don't know how. Or they just want to cheer later in life because I'll be like, you can do it. Like, why? F, wouldn't you be able to? You're phenomenal. And I do the same in my own life, but I do think I struggle with from my childhood, a lot of almost disdain from my childhood self and a lot of shame around my childhoods. I think that's where a lot of that comes from, which is why when you mentioned earlier that you could talk about your own childhood and how you sort of rebuilt these in your

own life, these feelings of self-worth and compassion in your personal life. I would love to hear a little bit about that. Yeah. Well, kind of like you, we can have almost like silos, side by side, in how we regard ourselves. And in one silo could be a list of self-esteem characteristics. Oh, yeah, I'm good at this. I know I can do that. You know it. But I know a lot of people with high self-esteem and low self-worth. They feel bad about themselves. And also alongside maybe adult experiences of people who like you and promote you and think you're attractive and so forth could be a whole bunch of old experiences from early childhood that are, you know, more nonverbal, they're kind of lurking in the semi-conscious, they're more emotional and somatic and the

sensations in the body. Those can live over here in effect in other rooms in the mansion of the mind overall. So what to do about it? For myself, I grew up in a decent loving home. in the suburbs of Los Angeles mainly. And my parents' intact family. I'm the oldest of three. Good people. No, not there. But for different reasons,

neither of my parents were very good at empathy. So while being loving and decent, it was really hard for them to have a feeling for the being behind the eyes in the other person or understand. It was hard for them to understand

or anticipate the impact they would have on their kids. and as a result, I felt a lot, they were interacting with someone who is kind of displaced a foot or so to the side of who I really was. And even if you're a kind of introverted, self-willed person like me, still, we all need, especially in early childhood, what are called healthy narcissistic supplies, like mirroring, attunement, empathic regard, and a felt sense of being prized, being sought and cherished. and wanted and special, honestly. That's it. That's natural. It's not conceded to need that as a young child.

And for me, it was really a thin soup. So I didn't get much of that in my family. And then I withdrew from my parents and it made it kind of a vicious cycle. Then in school, I skipped a grade and I have a very late birthday. And that plus my kind of shy, dorky temperament, led to many experiences of being an outsider, being unwanted, like the runt of the litter, as my dad might put it, who grew up on a ranch in North Dakota. And I had, there too, the normal needs to feel popular, to feel wanted, to feel seen were just absent for me. There too was a thin suit. And little things add up over time. I don't think in my life I've experienced any macro traumas, but a lot of micro traumas can kind of add up to a macro trauma. So I landed in adulthood with what felt like an enormous hole in my heart,

like the size of the construction site for a skyscraper, just a vast, empty place. And it's important for people to appreciate that the absence of the good can have as much effect as the presence of the bad. I wasn't abused. I wasn't horribly bullied. I wasn't horribly punished. But wow, it was like a desert in terms of, you know, healthy caring for me. And then what began to happen for me when I landed in college at, you know, 16, very miserable, socially clueless, kind of twisted and neurotic, really, very much so in my own mind. I began to do this practice in three parts that I named already. And it was like a miracle when I stumbled on it.

I would start noticing when people were actually including me or listening or appreciating or even being friendly toward me. I would actually notice it. And then I would try to let myself feel something. Outwardly, I was always all cool and no big deal, you know. But inside I would like, oh, wow, this feels really good. They like me. Whoa, they smiled at me.

She smiled at me in the elevator. Whoa, a million dollar moment, you know. And then I just had this intuition that there was a hunger inside me, a longing deep down that I would start to feed. I would let the good feeling kind of sink down in. you know, like a soft rain falling inside or a soothing balm sinking down inside or just connecting with a little four-year-old in me or a nine-year-old who felt worthless and unwanted and never anyone would like was finally getting what they needed. So I just did that, like I said, a thousand times,

10 seconds at a time as the years went by. And I truly feel that I've really filled that hole in my heart. I can still get a little caught occasionally, even though I've been at it for now about 40 years. And I think this is also realistic that certain kinds of painful experiences, if there's a perfect storm of external stimuli of one kind or another, zing, you know, it can kind of still get us and move the needle. But the real measure of practice is how rapidly are we mindful of that reactivation and how rapidly can we disengage from it and not fuel it and then return. to reestablish our previous baseline of resilient well-being. So anyway, that's been my journey. Is it important, like in your scenario, would it be important for you to also have a conversation with your parents about what you experience as a kid and heal that externally?

Or do you think it's all internal work? I think both are really helpful. And this is a complex question, including in situations where there's a lot of real trauma, even molestation and abuse. How do you deal with that? Sometimes there's a legal framework as well. is a big deal it's a kind of a technical conversation but I find that I think that it's actually really helpful generally to be able to speak your truth first to

yourself second to an ally third to the person who did you wrong and maybe they did you wrong unwittingly maybe they did you wrong in some ways amidst doing you right in lots of other ways that's complex but if you can speak it to them, that can often be really, really helpful. Sometimes as a therapeutic technique, you realize that in the real world, it's not appropriate or even possible. Maybe they're no longer alive to talk with them directly. Maybe they're demented, and they have no idea what you're actually talking about today. But you can still get a lot of value from doing things in your own imagination or writing letters you'll never send, things like that, or acting it out

in a kind of psychodrama, all of which I've done. yeah, that can be really, really helpful. And then it's interesting, if the other person is perfectly receptive, that's fantastic. And the obvious scenario, right? What happens all the time? Yeah, it's something coming. But I'll tell you, when you just feel how great that would be, if someone's coming something to you, it's a real lesson to try to be as good as possible for them. That's a wake-up call right there. Think about how important it would be to you to be received in that way. that's how important it is to them to be received in that way. That's going to singularly probably change how I argue with my husband.

Yeah, well, I got to change like this myself. Still changing. You're listening to the Healthier Together podcast. I get asked constantly about my favorite protein powders because, quite frankly, it can be really hard to find ones that have great ingredients and actually taste good. Using protein in green smoothies is key. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient.

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and they both have probiotics and L-glutamine, which is one of my favorite gut health supplements. Basically, if you're looking for a protein that has everything you want and nothing that you don't, NuzS will be your new go-to. They'll taste amazing in all of my smoothie recipes, I promise. And of course, I've got a code for you. healthier together 20 will get you 20% off your first purchase over on newsess. us slash healthier together. Once again, that's code healthier together 20, the name of this podcast, and then the number 20,

all one word over on newsest, n-u-z-e-s-t-test, n-u-z-heltier together. I can't wait for you to try this protein powder. I know that you're going to be as obsessed as I am. Now, let's get back to the episode. On the other hand, most other people in the real world are not great. Oh, they're not great interactive partners when you're bringing a complaint to them about them. And some people are, and that's wonderful. And it's okay if the other person gets a little twitchy initially, but then they settle down. And also, I think there's a place for us to do some reasonable things to try to help them understand. The structure of nonviolent communication, which you may already know about is really helpful. It's kind of an XYZ structure. When X happens or happened and described

neutrally, objectively and descriptively, when you come home at 630 and you had promised to come home at six, when you hit me with a coat hanger when I was seven years old, you know, when X happened, I felt why. And again, felt as as close to your experience as possible, not I felt you were an idiot. But more like I felt sad, I felt hurt, I felt enraged, I felt like I wanted to smash your face, I felt like I wanted to smash my own face, whatever it is. You know what I mean? I felt. And then because I need Z, because there's a universal human need to feel safe, to feel heard, to feel that we have reliable partners, to feel that the person we're spending our life with thinks were great, right? That's a universal need. So that's structure. When X happens,

I feel why because I need Z is a fairly good structure, nonviolent communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg. And there's a lot of detail around it, but that's a pretty good, quick summary. So point being, when we do bring it to someone, for me, it's important to communicate for yourself so that the sense of being successful primarily depends on you and not on how that other person receives you because how they receive you is mostly outside your control. You can do small things to influence it, but a lot of it's outside you. But to feel that you spoke truth to power, to feel that you communicated with dignity and self-respect and gravity. You weren't sputtering. You weren't flailing. You meant business in what you had to say. You weren't there to annihilate

the other person. Maybe you were not, you weren't there to get agreement from them or approval from them. or even an apology necessarily. You were there to speak your truth and know you spoke it. And then no matter what they do, you can walk away with a feeling of self-respect and success in what you had to say and peacefulness inside yourself. I love that. I love that. Okay.

So yeah, this is all quite psychological stuff. I'm curious what you think of as how much of happiness or well-being is those psychological things versus physiological things versus. genetic things. Classic question, nature, nurture. With like an in-between of, you know, food, supplements, exercise, like nature, nurture, and whatever it is in between of the actual physiological parts. Yeah.

Okay, so I'll answer it this way first. One way to think of it is that about one-third of the variation in how adults turn out in terms of happiness or well-being or certain characteristics like confidence, positive mood, compassion for others, about one-third of that variation in the population. This is how scientists think about it, is heritable. It's baked into the DNA that was given to you at the moment of your conception. The other two-thirds is up for grabs. It's the two-thirds that's based on things like personal health practices, like you're getting

out there, of luck and bad luck, social class, poverty, environmental effects. Are you growing up in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip or, you know, relatively comfortable, sorry, something in my throat? If you want to take like a second, we could do that too. I can keep going. It's a little lozen that I took to help and it hurt. Okay. Thanks for being kind here.

So right here, you're being kind in a professional framework. You weren't shaming me. And I could slow it down. And as a colleague, you know, a collegial friend, a friendly colleague, I could go, okay, there's a goodness in Liz's heart. She's a decent person, even though there's a job to do here. And it's not more than what it is. On the kindness scale, maybe it's a one or a two,

but it's real. I could slow it down and receive it. And that's a teaching about how many times in life little things do happen that we just step right over, move right by. We don't even notice them. I think of these is like the ordinary jewels that are strewn before us in our path through life each day. Dozens and dozens of diamonds, rubies, and pearls, and some emeralds and sapphires as well. And we just step right over them. We just go right by. And truthfully, we can still function while noticing the good around us and slowing down a lot just internally while we still get other stuff done to let it register for a few seconds. Let it register in emotional memory, kind of in our body, the sense in the body, and then we keep on going. So there's a little lesson for that.

I was going to say, on average, about two-thirds of how we turn out is up for grabs, which goes to, why it's really important to help society be as good as it can be, it also goes to maximizing our personal health practices, and it also goes to working with the mind. Myself, I'm a little biased toward the mind because for two reasons. One, it's a field of opportunity that we always have. We can always practice with our own minds. Continually. We can't always practice with the environment around us, and we can't always change things inside our own body. And, Second, we take the benefits of what we do in our mind with us in all ways wherever we are. Because, you know, wherever you go, there you are, right?

But interventions we make or changes we might make in our body tend to be more situation-specific. So in terms of the outcome for people in their personal well-being, you mean what effect is our holistic health practices say versus mental training? I've never seen any kind of realistic study that tries to compare those. My own view about it is my wife's model of the 10-tax. You're sitting on 10-tax. And if you address one, like low blood sugar chronically, you're still going to be uncomfortable, but it was still worth taking that one away by eating more protein or not, you know,

cranking up on carbs and sweets. All right. If also you have an intense self-critic, you're hard on yourself all the time, maybe related to your body. I've heard some hints of that already from you, Liz. Watch out. You're talking to a therapist, but anyway, I'm kidding you. Fair not.

We will not do that here. I'm really clear on those boundaries. But anyway, you know, maybe that's in your mind. Well, that's one more tack. So now you address that tack. You're still maybe hurting because there are more tax to get to, but it was still really worth taking care of these. And sometimes what's true for people is that some of the tax are more, they have greater opportunity for them.

They're willing to change their diet, but it's hard for them to work on their minds. They're not willing to take 10 minutes of day to meditate, and they're certainly not going to go talk to a therapist or read a good self-help book and actually do what it says. But, you know, they'll take vitamins and they'll eat better and reduce carbs and so forth. Great. on the other hand, they're people who they'll meditate, but will they do aerobic exercise? Forget about it. But that's what they're willing to do. Okay, you know. And so I guess that is more my view. It's not so much that body-oriented practices are better or mind-oriented practices are better. Do the ones that will have the most impact for you that you'll actually do. And generally, the more comprehensive, the better and the more sustained over time, the better. Therefore, finding what you like doing is really key. It's hard to keep doing what you don't like doing. So find the kind of physical activity you like. Find the kind of mental training you like. Maybe you don't like to meditate, but you do like listening to guided meditations from Tara Brock, say, or even me, let's say. Or

you like listening to podcasts. You know, you get Liz Moody in your ear while you're on your exercise bike. Yahoo! That's a two-for-one right there. So find what you like. and keep at it. And I think in this, too, just to go back to it, is this feeling of being on your own side? Do you care about your future self? I mean, what kind of life do you want to give the you that you will be in a day or a year? And can you feel a kind of loyalty and, you know, generosity and stewardship for that person you will be in a day or a year? And that can motivate you. Well, and I think going back to what you said earlier about women, particularly sometimes having a hard time turning that attention and compassion towards themselves, I think it's because they care who their children will be in a year or two or they care about everybody in their life and who they'll be in a year or two or five years. And they have a hard time giving that same grace to themselves.

So I think that picturing yourself as your own carey is a really useful practice. Are there holistic practices that you feel like are more research-backed versus less? Like my dad is a psychologist, and he constantly is citing the fact that exercise is as effective as antidepressants in a number of different studies. And I know you talk about a few supplements in your Just One Thing book. Yeah. If I could, before I go further, I'd just want to mention a really neat little practice people can do. And they could kind of sort of imagine it, even as I say it right now.

I call it the view from the porch. And the basic idea is you imagine being a really old version of yourself, but still healthy and happy. And you're sitting there on the porch, however you want to visualize it, in the rocker, looking out over the valley. And later that night, there's going to be a group of people gathering, maybe spaghetti's involved. I don't know. Maybe it's a community center. And they're going to ask you to look back on your life and share some of the lessons from it. and especially what you are glad that you had done in your life. What was important to you and what felt wise and skillful and worthy. And so you're kind of developing your notion.

So it's interesting to locate yourself at age 80 or 90 or older even, looking back on your life, what will you be glad that you have done from this point going forward? It's a really cool technique to look at your life in that way. You know, like certain kinds of things to shed them, to lay down that baggage, drop the chalupa. Don't worry so much about this. Don't stress so much about that. What also will you be glad that you had, you know, developed and kind of cultivated with a few minutes every day or 15 minutes every day over time?

what will you be glad major choices of different kinds that you will be glad about and maybe take some notes as you imagine this or let your imagination just kind of just go wherever it does the view from the porch is really good and you can bring it in closer in time just a little exercise you know five years from now 2026 2026 how old will you be how old will your kids be how old will your let's say your husband be and then from that perspective looking back over the previous five years in effect what will you be glad that has happened and what would you wish you know you will have done by then or 10 years out you know that's a good little practice here i love that okay holistic health well you can disagree with my dad it's okay oh no

A lot of research shows that on average, we're talking about averages, so we have different people, right? That certainly physical activity has as much benefit a lot as antidepressants. I've known people who could exercise till the cows come home. They could do therapy until the cows came home, but they still had chronically depressed mood that was not relieved until they finally took Zoloft or something like that. Or maybe the precursors to serotonin, such a lot. as tryptophan or five hydroxy triptophan. There are a whole bunch of holistic things people can do. I will tell you kind of the things that I've seen to really pay attention to, maybe.

One is inflammation. I read a review article in Science Magazine a few years ago, so this is as legit as mainstream science gets. And the opening sentence really caught my eye. the opening sentence read, most of us will die from inflammation one way or another. Wow. Pneumonia, inflammation, arterioschlorosis, inflammation, lot of stroke inflammation, inflammatory pathways, inflammatory processes, creating vulnerabilities to cancer, inflammation. So pay a lot of attention to inflammation. And inflammation from the standpoint of mental health, in addition to its impacts on your physical body is very involved in what's called fancy term alert, the cytokine theory of depression.

Scytokines are messengers, you may know, chemical messengers of the immune system that are released when there are inflammatory cascades. And when one part of your body inflames, your whole body inflames. It's a systemic process in the most ancient of the two branches of the immune system, the innate immune system, inflammation. So when there's inflammation, such as eating foods that you have some kind of an allergic reaction to, or being in environments that are moldy, or toxicans one way or another, or you just react to perfumes, you walk through the perfume section of macy's and you feel crummy after a grind. When there's an inflammatory process, the cytokine messengers that are released go into your brain and they interact with.

your hypothalamus there in ways that can lead to depression. So pay attention to inflammation, you know, and take it seriously. Second big takeaway from me from all this is pay attention to subclinical findings. The normal range, so-called, in laboratory testing, is typically from roughly the 15th to the 85th percentile. Sometimes it's from roughly the fifth to the 95th percentile. That means that your lab results could be at the 20th percentile. for, say, a woman your age, and a typical health care provider will say, oh, you're normal.

You're within normal limits. W&L, within normal limits, leave. And you have to kind of bang on them. This goes back to Healthy Entitlemen. To say, wait a minute here, I get it, and I understand that a lot of people can be at the 20th percentile, and they're just fine. But me, I'm symptomatic. Let's say thyroid. I get cold really easily.

I'm losing my hair. I lack energy. I get fatigued easily. Yeah, I get it that my thyroid markers are at the 30th percentile for some in my age. But I don't know. That seems low for me. And let's pay attention to that. So this is important to pay attention to so-called subclinical findings. That's the second big thing. And I think a third thing is to find providers who listen to you. That's really important. Do you feel listened to? And if you're not listened to, if you feel patronized, brushed aside, that's a huge, huge, huge, huge, orange flag, if not even a red one. And then last, what we eat matters, you know, we can shape our lives.

I've talked a lot about what you put into your mind, good or bad, you know, try to pull the weeds and don't feed the weeds, don't plant new weeds, and also plant flowers, plant the seeds of flowers in your mind, and then tend to that garden, fertilize it, So you grow fruit, grow flowers and fruit from the seeds, sure, but also with what we eat. And I'm kind of a middle-of-the-road guy. I think about the moral issues of animal protein, and I try to restrict that as much as realistically I can. And also, you know, good balanced diet, a lot of veggies, be careful about carbs, be really careful about alcohol.

My maternal grandfather was an alcoholic. like I can feel the part of my brain that really wants that. So, you know, be careful. Be careful. You can get in real trouble there. But, okay, that's it. That's the extent of my holistic take. And be willing to take vitamins.

To me, it's weird. People are anti-supplements. The side effect of too many vitamins usually is your financial loss down the toilet. You know, generally speaking, they're not going to hurt you. You might waste some money on them. But from my standpoint, you know, if you can afford it, a handful of supplements every day, year after year, you're loading trillions of good molecules into your body that have generally, many of them, especially minerals, have been depleted

in the soils after hundreds of years of intensive farming. And they're not going to cure your cancer. Don't be diluted about that. But why not tilt the balance sheet inside your own body over time? Fewer bad molecules coming in over time, more good balance. more good molecules coming in over time. You know, you're tilting your balance sheet of your body. We're made up of 100 trillion or so cells, made up of trillions of trillions of molecules.

Why not gradually nudge them in a good direction? I think people are pro, at least listening to this podcast, are probably pro supplement, but they feel bombarded with how many. You go to the supplement aisle in a grocery store and there's 4,000 options. So I think it's the idea of narrowing in on which ones. I interviewed one doctor who takes 100 supplements a day, and he was really proud of that fact. And I think most people would be intimidated by that notion. So how do you narrow in on what you would take?

So I'm speaking just from personal experience. So I'm like one, I'm a guy at the end of the bar, although I don't go to bars anymore. But anyway, just rattling on. Well, for one, there's wealth involved here. Like, that's someone who can afford. Oh, yeah. And you probably get some wholesale. So there's that consideration.

the people I listen to and have learned from, and I then can share from personal experience, a good multi, and typically you need to take more than one capsule. It's hard for me to swallow the pills. I like gelatin capsules or the equivalent, along with a balanced diet. On the other hand, supplements can make up for the fact that most people are not going to have a perfect approved paleo,

cook three meals a day, mainly vegetables, diet thing. Like that's not the life of most people. So, okay. So that means you're probably taking two capsules at least a day for your multi. Second, essential fatty acids. If you're a strict vegetarian, flax oil, make sure that you're able to convert some of the key acids inside flax oil to the acids your body needs. That's a technical detail, essential fatty acids. Otherwise, good fish oil. They're called essential because we don't get them in our diet. And If we ate enough fish these days to get them, we'd expose ourselves to mercury risks. So that seems like a prudent thing as well.

In my opinion, a B vitamin complex is really useful because the bees are factors and all kinds of functions, including mental health functions. Fourth, myself, I notice B12. It's the one vitamin I notice. I take it sublingually 5,000 micrograms once a day. Tastes like cherry. I like it. No big deal.

I think those are my go-toes. these days in a time of COVID, being strong on vitamin D, smart. It's a good smart thing. And then people can throw on other stuff. I take Cs every day. I take a lot of supplements every day because I can. And it's easy for me. And it makes me feel better about my bad habits. You know, I think aging is partly about managing your bad habits. Oh, I think it's a lot about managing. But I think you become more aware of those bad habits as so you have a little bit more tools in that kit. What about therapy?

You're a therapist. Do you feel like everybody should be in therapy? I feel that everybody who's not enlightened should work on their minds for the sake of the planet. I mean, you can look out there and ask yourself how much of the trouble our planet has been as long as humans have walked the earth. And frankly, ever since we left Hunter-Gatherer bands. Ever since we left that hunter-gatherer template that we evolved in and are adapted to,

including for group decision-making, in other words, for politics, we've been living in the Game of Thrones ever since with a very thin veneer of democracy in just the last couple centuries for just a tiny fraction of the world's people. So just think about all the horrible things that are done out of neurosis and lack of the development of compassion, for others, mean-spiritedness, addiction of one kind or another, fear and anger. Think how much those are drivers in relationships. So for the sake of others, just for them, work on yourself as well as obviously for the

sake of yourself. Now, formal therapy, I think the usage rate in America lifetime for a single appointment of therapy is something like 5%. So maybe 5% of the population over the lifetime will go see a therapist. That's why I think the person who contributed more to American mental health in the last 40 years is Oprah Winfrey by far. You know, she's really helped the most people, I think, actually. That said, if you're up for it to have a deep, meaningful conversation once or 10 times over a few months or every week for a year with someone who's really trained to listen deeply and gives you that combination of complete acceptance. of you and a major bullshit detector and who has some skillfulness about helping you work with

underlying patterns and can give you some guidance and tools. You can start using in the 167 hours a week when you're not sitting in her office or whoever's office it is. That's a good person. I've done two rounds of therapy. I got a lot out of each one. And it's also true that there are many ways to grow if you're motivated to doing it. You can look into programs like I offer, including many free ones. You can listen to podcasts like you offer. There are many resources out there. My own deep feeling about it is that it goes to this kind of sacred matter of being on your own side, respecting and recognizing your own suffering and your own longings for fulfillment and self-expression and happiness and wisdom in this life and adventure and full throttle intensity

some of the time. You know, to honor that in yourself and to see that in yourself, really important. And to recognize that inside your innermost being, you can always learn and grow. You can always heal a little today. You can ease a little. You can be a little less hard on yourself, you can have a little more insight into that was then, it's not you today, you're no longer at the effect of those people, you're no longer under their thumb, you can heal a little bit, and you can grow a little bit every day, you can take in some soothing, you can take in compassion, you can take in a feeling of your own worth, you can have insight into other people, you can grow in your inside of the emptiness of all experiences, for example.

You can grow. No one can defeat you from healing a little and growing a little every day in the innermost temple of your own being. Because it's just you there. No one can stop you, which is great. And no one can do it for you. You are responsible for the healing and growing there, which means that you will earn the fruits of your practice. It takes it out of a little bit of the notion of like Maslav's pyramid where it makes it feel like mental well-being is at the very top and all of the place, all the other pieces in your life have to sort of be in place to get there. But being like this is in your mind, you have the power no matter what your circumstances are. It's a really empowering thought because it doesn't mean that it has to come last then because you always

have access to that. That's really true. And also kind of related to that, a lot of what you're growing there in that inner temple are strengths to deal with the crowd of. life. You're growing understanding of others. You're growing capabilities, social capabilities. Like earlier, you talked about shifting and how you might argue with your husband, taking into account some things. That's a learning right there and becoming more skillful in some way. We are developing skillful attitudes, like realizing that most other people are not really out to get us because we're just a bit player in their drama. Like, that's a useful thing to understand, to realize that the unhappiness in your home when you were young is not your fault.

It was your parents' making and the making of the world around you. You were a kid. It wasn't your fault. And so things like that, you're growing capabilities. You're growing know-how. This that I'm talking about is very old school. It's at the heart of self-reliance. We find ourselves in all kinds of situations with other people, with life circumstances, with even the history that we've made for ourselves. Choices we made a day ago, a decade ago, we are now inheriting the results of and kind of stuck with. Okay.

What are we going to do about it? And what, if it were more present inside you, would really help these days. I think of there are three things a person can do every day that are really useful. One of them is to know, what's one thing these days? maybe two or three things, but one thing in particular for sure,

that you're trying to grow a little every day. You're trying to develop in yourself. A little more perspective, perhaps, a little more self-acceptance, a little more commitment to sobriety or exercise or eating well, a little less reactivity to what your body looks like, whatever. What are you trying to develop in yourself? Maybe it's a fairly spiritual kind of thing, like you're trying to develop more real-time mindfulness

or more sense of kind of being in touch with a lovingness, even when you're dealing with irritating people. Know that one thing. That's one thing. Maybe you're trying to take into that to fill that hole in your heart. And so it's very practical. It's very, very practical what I'm talking about. Maybe after I give you a chance to say something, I'll tell you the two other things that

you can do every day. No, I want to know the other two things. Okay. I contain this and say what I call the five-minute challenge because it takes less than five minutes a day to do what I'm talking about here. The first thing I've said, look for a particular strength you're trying to grow inside yourself each day, is a two-step process of looking for ways to experience it or aspects of it, like to experience self-acceptance or to experience that other people do care about you and include you today, whatever it may be. You experience it and then stay

with it for a breath or longer, feeling it in your body, focusing on what feels good about it, take it into yourself, which will accelerate neuroplastic changes inside your own brain. All right. So okay. Second, as you move through your day, take in the good half a dozen times every day, five, ten seconds at a time, maybe a little longer if you like. You know, you look out the window and you see a cool bird and just, wow, birds, birds, birds are pretty neat.

Your partner is nice to you, is kind to you. You get something done. Yeah, I finished that. I did well there. Good on me. Maybe you just feel inside yourself your own endurance that kind of sucks your work day, but you can get through it. You're strong. You can feel that.

Take in the good in the flow of your day. That's another minute or two. And then every day before you go to bed, maybe just before you go to bed, I call it marinate in deep green. What I mean by that is to have a sense of shedding for the three minutes, the two minutes you're doing it, even just a few, breaths you're doing it. You just sort of disengage from your stresses, your worries, your hurts with other people, and you establish in yourself what I started with as the definition of well-being, an underlying sense of feeling safe enough in the present. It's all about the present. Whatever the future may hold in the present, I'm basically all right right now. Basically all right, right

now I can afford to ground in a feeling of calm strength in inner peace. And then with regard to contentment, I can release frustrations, I can release drivenness in the present. Right now, I'm not going to chase anything else, and I can rest in a feeling of gratitude, enoughness already, thankfulness, and we could say contentment, a sense of being content in the present, knowing that I can aspire later. And also then warm-heartedness. disengaging from hassles with others, ill-will, resentment, vengeful fantasies, you know, anger at one political leader or another, disengaging from that, and resting in a felt sense of your own warm-heartedness. You have a good heart, you have an open heart, you care about other beings, you're not evil, you want to build up,

you don't want to tear down. In a nutshell, resting in peace, contentment, and love as your home, which is truly biologically what we return to as a kind of home, when we feel that our needs are met enough in the moment. They don't need to be met perfectly, but met enough in the moment we rest in this feeling. Find your own words. Calm, contentment, confidence, open-hearted, peaceful well-being,

and just marinate in it, just, ah, which is so important these days because we spend so much of our time driven from home. based on external stressors or our own internal reactivity. We're kind of chronically homeless in terms of our true home. And it's said that the root of all sickness is homesickness. And there's a lot of wisdom to that. And so when you come home to Deep Green, you're hardwiring that way of being into your brain and body.

And so you're going to be more able increasingly to come home to this feeling of underlying peace, contentment, and love, even when the oatmeal is flying around you. Why deep green? I distinguish that from the red zone, fight, flight, freeze, of, you know, fear and anger and frustration and greed, loneliness, shame, us against them, corals. So that's why I call it. Plus, I'm a nature guy, garden, green, grow the good. green light, grow the green.

So if somebody has decided the kindest thing for themselves is to do therapy, do you have like quick hot tips to finding a good therapist? It's a question I get asked constantly. Oh, yeah. So do an initial screen and then reach out to them on the phone or otherwise. And notice how they are when you reach out to them. Do they return your call fairly soon? Do and then when they're on phone with you, do you actually feel like someone's listening? Is there a real being over there? And does it feel like someone who has some personal depth themselves? There's been a lot of research on what shapes the outcome of psychotherapy, and you can parcel it out in different ways. But I think one of the keys that has really been revealed in the research is that the two

most powerful factors are the motivation of the client. and the level of functioning of the therapists themselves. Do they have a personal practice? Is there a feeling of soulfulness in them? Or are they going to approach you in a real cookie cutter kind of way? And then also, do they seem motivated to help you? Is there a kind of indifference? Like, well, sure, I'll see you.

Or do you feel like at some deep level they really, really, really want to help? These are the things of the crux. There are different styles that might appeal to a different person at different times. Maybe you come in and you just want to do a general life exploration. And so a therapist who's relatively non-directive and in the language, maybe more psychoanalytic or Rogerian, you know, they're just kind of being with you and you're unfolding. Okay, great. Or maybe you want to really target a particular issue that's traumatic for you. And you're looking for people that are going to engage it emotionally and somatically. So you're looking at.

for people who are trained in those kinds of therapies. Or maybe you've got a life situation that you're trying to get some help thinking through. I've had a number of people, parents often come to me and they're trying to think through how to, what to do about a certain child-rearing situation they're in. Their kids struggling to read in school, they're heading into a divorce, how to buffer the impact on the child, things like that. And then last maybe you're interested in changing a behavior. You know, as someone once said to me a long time ago, that she'd lost a thousand pounds,

and I stared at her like what? And I think she said the same 10 pounds 100 times over. And maybe there's something that you're trying to change. Maybe you know that you're drinking too much. You're under stress, and one glass of wine becomes three most nights, and you want to dial that back. So then you would aim for people that could help you those particular issues. But the most important things are the alliance between you and the therapist,

which is a function of your motivation as a client yourself and the depth of being of the therapist themselves. You're listening to the Healthier Together podcast. As a non-caffeine drinker, people are constantly asking me how I get my energy. So I'm going to tell you my secret trick, Organify Red Juice. It has absolutely no caffeine, only two grams of sugar, and it gives me boatloads of non-jittery energy. Organify is super particular about the ingredients that the ingredients that they're not. they use so you get exactly what you need and nothing extraneous. The red juice has 13 superfoods,

including Rashi, Cortecept, Siberian, ginseng, and rhodiola, all of which have been used as natural energy boosters for centuries. There's also a freeze-dried berry mix, which both makes it taste really good, even when it's only mixed with water. And it adds a ton of vitamin C, which I have been prioritizing, including in my diet, ever since the skincare episode of the pod. If you listen to that one, you will definitely know what I'm talking about. do a scoop in the morning if I am feeling sluggish, but I really love it around 2 p.m. One glass full fully gives me the energy that I need to enjoy and thrive for the rest of my day. Organify also makes a green juice that Zach's obsessed with. It can basically act as your daily

multivitamin. That one has a little bit of caffeine for matcha or I would be all over it, but he says it tastes amazing and has gone through like five canisters of it already. So I will take that as a ringing endorsement. The ingredients are really why I love Organizant. I'm So much. A lot of companies put like 45 different ingredients into a blend, but Organify picks the absolute best ones and puts enough in their blends for you to actually feel a real effect. They're also all organic and incredibly well tested and source, which can be such a problem in supplement land. Basically, I love them and I can't wait for you to try them, especially the red juice because I feel like you're all going to message me saying that you feel like a superhero. I of course have a code for you.

you can go to www.organify.com slash healthier together and use the code healthier together for 20% off your order. Again, that's Organify, O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I-com slash healthier together, and the code is healthier together for 20% off. Enjoy. I love the idea. A lot of people are like, what are the specific questions I should ask? And I feel like I love the idea that it's not about the specific questions, about talking to them about anything, really, and then kind of seeing how they engage with you when you're talking to them about that. That's, yeah, that's a good way to think about it. And also, honestly, convenience matters.

I think enough good therapy is better than not enough great therapy. Here's a good question for a therapist. You know, from what I'm saying to you, how do you understand it? And how would you try to help me with it? And if the therapist says, well, we've only talked to her five, ten minutes on the phone, why don't you come in for a first session, and then I'll answer your question at the end of that first session. I think that's legitimate.

But if you're not, my opinion, if the therapist is not willing to feed back to you how they're hearing what you're talking about in a way that makes you feel heard and that they're actually listening to the depths, even the unspoken depths in what you're saying. If you're not going to get that from your therapist, I don't know if I would go back to see them again. And I want to hear them starting to think out loud about how they would help me. And if they say, oh, we've got to work together for five sessions. I mean, you should be able to start thinking fairly quickly within a few minutes of meeting somebody. How do you understand their suffering and the causes of their suffering? And what's your plan?

At least at the beginning of that, and I think that's very important to look for. And you'll save yourself a lot of wasted time if you hear what I'm saying here. Can we talk about parenting? Because there are a zillion studies that say, like, having kids, do you? decreases your happiness exponentially. Your happiness won't go up until your kids turn 18 and move out of the house. But then if you talk to any parent, I feel like they're like, oh, it's the most fulfilling and routine thing I've ever done. So from your clinical perspective and also maybe your parent perspective, yeah, what do you think? Yeah. Well, and to underline the thing I just said a

second ago about the therapist, you want to feel like they're on your side. Remember, I keep banging on this point about being on your own side. You want to feel that they're there to help you. You want results. You want to feel not that they're going to be dominating or pushy or all-knowing, but they're engaged in action. There's some traction. You know, Ticknodhan, the great Buddhist teacher, was described once as a combination of a cloud, a butterfly, and a bulldozer. You want the feeling that your therapist is moving forward with traction to really help you because you deserve it. Okay. Well, parenting. Transition to parenthood, on average, is the greatest challenge a couple will face. I have a lot of background in the transition to parenthood. In my very first book, it's called Mother Nurture.

And it's about how to promote the well-being of the people doing all of the bearing and most of the rearing of our kids and the next generation, the mothers. So that's a finding on average. It's also true that individual parents, mothers and fathers, alike, and this is true also for the same gender couples. Routinely, as you say, describe it as the most fulfilling, most important thing that they've ever done. And then in the next breath, they'll say, whew, and the hardest, and the most challenging, the relentlessness of it, physically, mentally, and interpersonally. The couples and individuals that do well increase their resources to match the increase of challenges. This goes back to what we're we were talking about in the very beginning. As your challenges rise, resources need to rise as well.

So if you're going to have a child and you're going to bear it in your body as a woman, make sure you're eating really well and you're trying to maximize your good health practices, including after the kid comes along because a lot of moms will make a really good breakfast for their kids, but for themselves they'll skip breakfast or have half a bagel and a Diet Coke. So, you know, challenges rise, resources need your eyes. In a couple, couple tends to be challenged in two major ways around the area of teamwork and I'll call it intimate friendship. Teamwork research shows that even in same gender couples, especially heterosexual couples, gender roles tend to intensify. We, you know, we maybe have a kind of an egalitarian relationship today. And then suddenly after kids, we started

looking like Ozzie and Harriet, or I'm dating myself. But, you know, we started looking like our grandparents looked. You know, he does this. she does that. And when roles tend to intensify in different ways, teamwork issues can start to emerge. And classically, it's the woman who does most of the child rearing and most of the housework, and that's not fair. And then there are issues around how are we going to raise the kids? Can we parent from the same page? So on the teamwork issues, they divide it in two things. One, make sure you're parenting from the same page as much as possible and resolving conflicts well, sometimes going to get a tiebreaker once in a while, maybe a therapist for a one-time

session or just talking with someone as a parent coach, or read a book together and then agree basically to follow its approach. A good, solid, helpful book you both can agree with. And also share the load fairly. This is extremely important because when there's an issue of equity around the workload, the stress load, and the executive responsibility of holding the kids in your mind, that creates issues. So as much as possible, you want to address that. And if you have a partner who will not address parenting from the same page or managing, you know, sharing the load fairly, that's a yellow

flag at a minimum, if not a real red one over time. And it can become a real deal breaker, a real issue. Meanwhile, intimate friendship, that's the area, I think of it as yardstick, you know, the last inch or so is sex, but most of that yardstick is listening to each other, communicating, valuing of each other. Many men in a heterosexual relationship feel suddenly abandoned by their partner who's deeply invested in the child. And they can feel like, hey, way beyond sex, I just, I notice about you, let's say, my female partner, that you're willing to absolutely come through for the child or your mom friends. But me, you can't find an authentic interest in me erotically half an hour a week. Like, huh, you know, so the issue isn't so much

lack of sex. The issue is lack of priority. And that really can sink in. Flip the other way, a woman can feel no longer listened to. She can feel dismissed. She can feel like she's lost a deep friend. And so it's interesting to finish that these issues of teamwork and intimacy support each other that very often typically come often. The woman's complaint is there's a breakdown in teamwork because she doesn't care so much about the intimacy. The man, you know, complains about the breakdown of intimacy because he doesn't care so much about the teamwork. And sometimes what can help, and I've definitely lived through this in my own marriage, is to address both needs, to really look for ways to support the intimate friendship,

partly because it fosters better teamwork, and to really support teamwork, in part because it fosters a better intimate friendship. Then you start getting a positive cycle, an upward spiral when you work both of those. If somebody said to you, Rick, I just want to live my happiest life ever, and I haven't decided whether or not I want to have children, would you say do it or would you say don't do it? I'd say you'd be really sure why you're going to do it. You know, first, the actual divorce rate in America is about two out of three. It's 50% if you count people who have a marriage certificate and then separate.

But if you add people who got legally married and then effectively separate, or you count people who were never legally married, but let's say they owned a property together and they had a kid and then they separate. it's closer to two out of three. So the odds, if you want to stay together with someone, you know, pay attention to what keeps re-knitting the fabric of that relationship and also pay attention to the kinds of things that could tear it apart. And as I said, a child is a serious challenge to a relationship. So make sure that you're resourced up to do that. Second, a child is a profound moral commitment. We were all ourselves, newborns, once, right? And infants, toddlers.

preschoolers, and we know the effects of other people on us. We know the effects of our parents. We know the effects of the environment they brought us into. If we're going to inflict consciousness on unsuspecting flesh, as it were, we have a moral duty that's profound to that kid, and it's a 20-year duty, if not longer. Our kids are 30 and 33, and Jan and I are highly motivated, Jan's my wife, to do whatever we need to do to come through for them in important ways. And so it's a serious commitment.

It's a really serious commitment. And I think the idea of having a child to save our relationship is almost always doomed to failure. And the idea of having a child because it kind of sort of seems like an interesting lifestyle enhancement, that's a terrible reason to have a child. But if in your bones you want a young being to give love to, If in your bones, maybe also that for you might be reparative of some of what was missing or bad about your own childhood, if you don't want to leave this life without having had one of

the most fundamental, powerful, profound experiences, you know, raising a family, then, okay, think about it really seriously and go ahead and do it. And those three reasons, you know, a deep desire to give love to a little kid who then became a big kid, a 33-year-old kid, and second, the movement toward a reparative act, you know, related to what was missing in my own childhood. And just the feeling that in this one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver puts it, parenting is one of the major rides in the carnival of life. And I didn't want to say. That last one. The last one is the most persuasive to me. by far because I want to live the fullest, richest, most experienced deep life that I possibly

can, but I'm afraid that the additive notion of kids is overwhelmed by all of the subtractive notions of kids that have been well researched and documented in terms of literally just living my roundest, most powerful life. Well, first, remember that that research is always about averages, essentially, and of groups. And so we see these curves of happiness declining and then coming up after kids finally leave the home. That's an average. Wow, having kids probably was the happiest thing my wife has ever done. She'd be the first to tell you through and through.

Total happiness enhancer. For me as well, even though we had a little bit more of a traditional kind of role where, you know, I did two-thirds of the making money and one-third of the parenting. she did two-thirds of the parenting and one-third of the money and so forth, you know, you can have, it can be tons of fun. You start discovering the world 18 inches off the ground when you're crawling around with your kid. Kids are enormously fun.

They're interesting. They're cool. You go to school nights. You know, you help with their homework. You start rereading these stories to them that you read 30 years ago. You know, you got in the world. They're great. And I will say this in terms of the world.

of the primal process, nothing like parenting, and frankly, especially mothering, to just pull you in to the primal currents of mother nature, suddenly your body, it just takes over. It's a vehicle for the most targeted aspect of evolution, which is reproducing, bearing and birthing and keeping alive a genetic copy of yourself. you know, these powerful forces moving through you to bring this being into the world and keep it alive so it can have children of its own one way or another. Like that's really primal. You really feel the jungle drums beating in the background when you have children. It just takes over you. I want to talk about money and happiness because there's another sort of oft-quoted study that's

75,000, I think, or 70,000. Once you make over that amount of money, you won't be any happier. And I've always had many problems with that. There's so many ways I've seen personally that money has made me, I think, happier. I've been able to afford therapy. I've been able to afford to eat well. I feel good when I'm on a fun vacation or at a nice restaurant with my friends, even the more superficial stuff. So I'm curious, I personally have a feeling like more. more money will allow me to take better control of my mental health and my life and solve these problems. Is that true? Is that a fallacy? Great question. So I know those studies. And the good takeaway is that the additional increments

of prosperity beyond comfortable middle class in whatever setting you're in and really comfortable middle class. The additional increments of prosperity have less and less contribution to your overall well-being. Okay, but that doesn't mean they have no contribution. And this also depends a lot on the individual. Maybe you're an individual living on a family farm that's fully paid for, you know, in a setting where your focus in life is pretty simple and you've got really good public schools nearby. You know, to make more money is neat, but you wouldn't spend it. You would just bank it or give it to your church, right? On the other hand, what if your particular situation is that you want to go back to grad school or in your particular situation, your child really

could use a different kind of instruction than the conventional public school that's available to you? Or you have significant health care needs and your medical budget is easily $2,000, dollars a month, especially if you had that money to spend, you would spend it. So then for you, those increments are going to make a lot more difference, the idea of individual benefit. Second, the measures that are used in these studies are typically on a seven-point scale, a well-being scale, ranging from extreme, you know, very unhappy to very happy. Well, once you start moving into the six and the seven, where you start, you don't have a lot of upside room so that those scales are going to tend to top out.

So there's a kind of an artificial effect. And last, I think that the real bottom line here is pragmatic. And there's this term in business that basically has to do with, you know, incremental cost and incremental gain. So the incremental cost being effort. So if we were to ask people, what are the handful of things that don't take a lot of effort and yet give you a lot of gain. What are those things? Those are the things you're really out of focus on. If you have to make a lot of effort to scratch and claw to make an extra

$1,000 a month or $2,000 a month and that extra amount of money doesn't make much difference to what you really care about, which typically is your well-being way down deep, well, that's not a really good use of your effort. But on the other hand, if spending five minutes a day with Rick's five-minute challenge, if that makes a real difference for you, that's five minutes a day that's going to make a really big difference for you. If brushing your teeth, spending three minutes a day to brush your teeth, maybe twice a day, really enables you to have your teeth when you're 70 years old and avoid and be able to eat and chew and swallow and delight in the food, That was a very small cost for a very big incremental effort.

It's called marginal analysis, the margin of cost, the margin of gain. And that's, to me, the most fundamental way to think about it. It sounds so simple when you say it, but I also just think our human lives are spent making the wrong calculations, like spending the time at work when we should be having our relationships and not really getting anything out of that. And I think about that even in the way I spend my time throughout the day, like what am I getting out of this social media interaction, but I keep doing it. Do you have any like really narrow on the ground tips to figure out the marginal costs of things and how you should be focusing that?

Yeah. One incredibly weird, powerful thing to do is for a week, track your time very carefully, like by the quarter hour. And you can create a little spreadsheet like in Excel or some other program or just draw it out and make the rows like 15 minutes 6 a.m. 6.15, 6.30, whatever, all the way to midnight. And then each column is a different type of activity you do. Sleeping, personal hygiene, getting dressed, looking at catalogs, reading political Twitter on my phone. And then track your time for a week. Don't change what you do. Just tell the truth about how you spend your time. Everybody I've known who's ever done it, it blew their mind.

It told them a lot of stuff they already knew. It reassured them about some things they were worried about, like how much time they're actually spending on shopping sites online. But also, always it flags something really big. Like they realize, wow, I'm spending about three and a half hours a day, and as best I can tell, it's just bullshit. It's stupid. I'm just kind of trolling through the news, looking for something.

I'm getting into some hassle with my husband. It's just dumb. And you suddenly start to realize that your life could be so much better if you took at least some of that time, like half an hour or an hour a day and applied it productively. Do whatever you want to do, working on your pottery, meditating, gardening, hanging out with your kids, your husband, whatever. So that would be one suggestion. Second suggestion, really pay attention to how good crowds out great. What I mean by that is, to quote the Buddha or whatever we think he said it, we don't know for sure, wisdom is choosing a greater happiness over a lesser happiness.

It's easy to choose happiness over misery. That's a no-brainer. But a lot of the happinesses we choose are lesser happinesses. We're just watching stupid TV and kind of numbing out. You know, we're grumbling in our mind. We're ruminating negatively. People spend a lot of time ruminating with anxieties or resentments or old hurts or self-criticism. No cheese down that tunnel.

No value there. And those are, they're rewarding. We do them, but it's a lesser happiness. And so ask yourself, what are the kinds of things that I'm doing habitually that are crowding out how I would really like to spend my time? And it's helpful to know how else you would really like to spend your time. to know that in your heart. How else would you like to spend your time? Would you like to spend it just truly relaxing and easing and feeling that you're entitled to do it?

Okay. Would you like to spend it starting to work on your book or building your website or re-learning the piano, coming back to the piano, which you put down 20 years ago? You know, how would you really like to spend that? Would you like to spend it walking around your neighborhood gratefully, half an hour every day? or in prayer. A lot of people, for them, prayer is something religious is important for them. So that's it. I think that the last point is really important because, I mean, all of them are really important,

but I do think it's important to recognize that we've almost moved away from knowing the really satisfying ways to spend our time because we're being given these constant much ease. I always use the example of reading a book. It's so much harder to read a book than it is to go on social media or watch crappy TV, but you feel so much better after, especially if you can get over that like 15-minute hump where you actually sink into the book. And I think it feels like almost an impossible effort sometimes because these things are literally designed to stoke your dopamine triggers and your reward pathways and all of that.

So it just feels like this huge hurdle to get to the satisfying good ways to spend your time. A key there, I think, is around jump-starting yourself. So, for example, you know, back in the hunter-gatherer days, you know, those people had a lot of time to reflect. And they spent a certain amount of it in a little bit of solitude. Maybe the rest of the band was 100 yards away, but they were kind of by themselves. And so one thing that's helpful for people is to pause and to step out of the whirlwind for five minutes, walk outside your front door, look up at the stars, and just know what time it is

and say to yourself, I'm not going to walk back in until five minutes have gone by, and just sort of let it land what your life is like these days. What's it like for you? Not the outer form of it, but the inner experience of it. What's it like to be you? Bob or Jane, Carla, Juan, what's it like to be you these days, right? And let it land and also ask yourself, second, what are the longings in my heart? What is, what am I longing for that I'm not having in this life? You know, underneath the superficial wants,

underneath it all, what would, if I got those superficial wants, if I got that really cool cashmere sweater from Maiden that's on sale now, or something else, what would I feel? What is it I long for? and how serious are those longings? You know, am I kind of fine-tuning the frosting on the cake in my life, which is great?

Or is something calling to me that's actually a big, big deal that I have continued to shelve and pushed aside that I really ought to listen to? So first, what's it like to be me? Second, what are the unfulfilled longings? And then third, what wisdom is coming forward? is you listen inside yourself. You know, a clarity, like, maybe it's just a first step. Like, I need to talk about this with my friend Sue

because Sue's wise and smart and she'll listen to me. I need to talk about this with somebody. Maybe that's your first step. Maybe there's some wisdom that says, you know, from now on, I'm not going to argue with my sister-in-law. Done. No more arguments. I'm just going to nod, smile.

I'm going to get off the phone. No more of that stuff. right? Or maybe the wisdom says, I've got to be really serious about going back to school. I need to really listen to that. And now's the time. I got to really do it now. The boat's going to sail pretty soon. Now's the time I got to do it. Whatever it might be. Maybe the wisdom says, you know, I'm going to spend a minute a day meditating before I go to sleep. And I'm going to make that commitment for the next 30 days and see where I'm at in a month. Okay. So those three things. Take a break, maybe in nature, maybe in your bathtub, maybe talking with a friend.

But those three questions, what's the like to be you? What is your heart still long for? What is wisdom telling you? That can make a big difference for people. You've mentioned meditation a number of times. I would love for the skeptical meditator or somebody who wants to incorporate meditation in their life, but can't quite persuade themselves to do it. Can you give me your best one-minute argument on behalf of meditation?

Sure. There are many kinds of meditation. The best kind is the one you will actually do. And the one you will actually do is the one that feels enjoyable and fruitful. In that context, much research shows that some kind of meditative practice, maybe with a related sense of mindfulness during your day, is one of the single best things you can do for your longevity, for your physical health, for your career success and for your relationship happiness. It's fantastic. A little bit of meditation, maybe even more than that,

but a little bit of meditation is to the mind, what aerobic exercise is to the body. And I think also that when we meditate, we are underlining our own autonomy. We are basically saying, during this meditative period, I am the boss inside my mind. own mind. And I am not going to let myself be hijacked and distracted by all the programs and

automatic machinery and old habits that I've acquired over the years. I'm going to focus on something simple like the sensations of breathing. I'm going to allow the chatter to just keep on going. I'm not going to resist it or feed it and follow it. I'm going to stay in the present autonomously because I'm the boss of my mind just here in the present moment. And after I do this for a minute or longer, I'm going to really relish the results and let them sink into me so that increasingly this becomes how I'm centered as I move through life. Okay, I'm going to speed round you. So these are hot tips. What is your number one piece of advice for being happier in a relationship?

Number one piece of advice, take care of your own needs. Number two piece of advice is see the being behind their eyes. and hold them in your heart, even if you disagree with them or leave them. What's your number one tip for being happier if you're single and you don't want to be? Recognize what a really cool, good person you are already. And if you're serious about it, take skillful action that is sustained over time to getting into a relationship. What does that look like? I always think of relationships, like meeting a good person is sort of out of your control

in some ways, although there's the apps and stuff. We could do a whole podcast on relationships, but for me, I think it really boils down, getting into a good romantic life relationship boils down to three things. Number one, your intention. Is your intention truly clear? I know a number of people who are actually ambivalent about getting into a relationship, really clear intention. Second, psychology.

You know, do you know how to talk to people? Do you know how to listen to people? Do you know how to quickly disengage if clearly the other person is a loser? And one of the key characteristics of another person being qualified to being with you is that within 20 minutes or so, they think you're great. If they don't think you're great within 20 minutes, they probably never will. And they need to think you're great. Yeah, maybe there are things about you that really kind of bug them and they think, yeah,

you're kind of sloppy in your closet or, you know, I don't know, you had that weird sound you make while you chew. But basically, they feel like you're awesome. They don't, if you're not getting the vibe that they think you're awesome pretty fast, get out of there. And then third, after intention, psychology, marketing. Marketing. It's a marketing problem, especially these days, the more that a person is developed.

More educated they become, the more deep in personal practice they are, the more aware they are themselves, the more developed they are, let's say, well, they're starting to move out on the tail of the curve. They're statistically are fewer and fewer people who are going to be well matched with them. That's just reality. So to me, the name of the game is to have a lot of deal flow, as we would say in the business world, just to have a lot of prospects and to qualify your prospects. I'm using sales language because it is a little bit about that.

And they're doing it to you too, so it's okay. It goes both ways. Qualify your prospects quickly and efficiently with minimal time and minimal effort. So you're moving through, that's why online, I think, is really helpful. Putting yourself in target-rich environments where the kind of people you're interested in tend to congregate, you know, that could also be a really good thing. And then move through it really quickly and briskly. Choose quickly, move quickly, you know, and, you know, that's what I would say.

And be careful about, I watch people. be unwilling to be natural and real when they're on a date or even when they're in that early phase. And the fastest way to find out if this other person is really somebody you want to be with is by being real yourself. And so being real yourself, not playing games, being a little vulnerable, being revealed is really on mission. And then the question becomes what are the inner resources, the flowers and so forth, you can grow in your inner garden that help you be comfortable in being real. And there, that's why I started out by saying the most important thing is to know that you're a catch yourself. You're a high quality,

really good person. Maybe there's some things you're kind of working on. You've got a temper or you're trying to stop smoking. Okay, got a few things. I'm a work in progress. Suzuki Roshi had a, you know, had a wonderful saying to people. He said, You're perfect as you are, and there's room for improvement. Both are true, okay? And so I think that attitude, where you basically think to yourself, I'm good, I'm great, and not everybody is going to want me. I'm not everybody's cup of tea.

Maybe they're looking for, fill in the blank, shorter people, taller people, heavier people, lighter people, more educated people, less educated people, whatever. I don't know, but the fastest I can find out that this other person, I'm not their cup of tea, that does me a service because then I'm not going to waste my time with that person. And the fastest way to get there is to be real myself. A hundred percent. Putting my best self forward.

100%. You're kind of lighthearted, you know? Yeah, I completely think that we're doing ourselves the biggest, for friendships, too. I think that it's just more information that you get quicker if your authentic self. And I think the more information we have, because life is so short. I feel the shortness of life constantly. Okay, if comparison is the thief of joy, what is your one hot tip to deal with comparison and not let that rob us of our happiness?

Well, this is going to be counterintuitive. It's human to compare ourselves to others because we are social beings. And so if you try to fight that or you shame yourself for it, you know, where you stand in the group and all the rest of that, you're just going to intensify it. you know you're going to add mass to it so allow comparing to move through your mind and then return to the recognition of the emptiness of everything sec the swirliness of it all return to a sense of your own worth and return to compassion and respect for other people we can wish other people well while being you know very clear about our own worth and our own worth and our

own quality. No, I think that makes sense. When we talk about the emptiness of being, does that make you feel, I think on one sense it can feel freeing in the way you've talked about, but does it ever make you feel nihilistic or like, well, then what is all of this effort for? Great. Great question. Short answer, no. It's understandable, though, that people could feel that way, it's more like what happens when you practice with this over time. You start looking at life in a more dynamic and relational way. You start seeing a husband, let's say, or a podcast as an eddy in the stream, as a kind of dynamic process that's swirling along. It's continually changing. It has some continuity over time, but it's pretty dynamic. And when you look at it. And when you look at,

look at it like that, you recognize that whatever phenomenon we're zeroed in on, like, for example, how good-looking they are compared to how not-good-looking I am. So we go, okay, the looks of them, the looks of me. When we start to see the looks of them, they're, let's say a woman, her appearance compared to my appearance, we realize that her appearance is made up of many elements and it's kind of dynamic and it occurs due to a zillions of factors most of which are have nothing to do with me many of which have nothing to do with actually with her and then i think about my appearance and what i look like and all the many things that led to that and the many aspects of that and then a way that's changing this way of looking at things which might sound philosophical

and intellectual it becomes more of a habit and within a few seconds you've kind of regarded things more like this, more like swirling clouds than static bricks. And when you look at things like that, immediately your sense of stress reduces. Try it. You feel less stressed. You feel less implicated. Life seems both more impersonal and freer with more room to breathe in it, more spacious, more room for you to be who you are. It's interesting because on the flip side, it feels like an ego exercise because it means that all of the good qualities you attribute to yourself are the same sort of fluid eddies. True, in a way. You start to realize that you don't own yourself.

This is getting pretty deep here. Sorry. No, it's great. Like you are a person. Like, Liz, you are a person. I'm a person. We're distinct from each other. You're a body mind process unfolding over time.

that has its own continuity, its own kind of identity, and it has rights and responsibilities. Those are persons. And interestingly, if we love ourselves as persons, what happens increasingly is we get less egoic as selves. We take things less personally. We get less caught up and work in others to impress them and to extract approval and other narcissistic supplies from them. So both are true. We can really be tender to ourselves as persons. We can guide ourselves as persons without shaming ourselves. We can recognize that ourselves as persons

have wounds, have holes in our heart from childhood, and we can give to ourselves as persons. It's interesting that actually one way to heal feelings of self-centeredness is to truly internalize the felt sense that others love you and care about you, and you're pretty awesome. In a funny kind of way, because we're scratching claw for it to go back to Maslow, when there's a sense of deficiency, something missing inside, that's when we kind of claw for it. But if we have a sense of filling ourselves up with worth, then we don't keep reaching out to the world to prove that we're worthy, for example.

That makes a ton of sense. Hot tip, what if you have somebody in your... life who is feeling depressed or not so well in their being, what can we do to support them? I'm a therapist, so I immediately think make sure they're not going to harm themselves, you know, in the extreme. But suicide is unfortunately really quite common and just to say it. Think about, well, what we can do first and foremost is listen and be careful about giving unwanted advice, that they ought to snap out of it or it's not so bad or, you know, If they only ate green matcha tea, they'd be better now.

When you're depressed, think about when you've been depressed. You want people who listen and are simple. You're not thinking that clearly. It's hard to think when you're depressed. It's hard to plan. People give you an action plan. Even though you know it's true, oh, I should call 10 therapists and pick one. Oh, my God, it seems overwhelming.

It also helps to be kind of an auxiliary ego for that person in the sense of you're there to, you're there as an ally. You can make the call. You can cook the meal. You can get them out of bed. You can get them to go outside and go for a walk. You can listen to see if there's something really serious here and you need to drive them to an emergency room or make sure they see a therapist really soon.

I mean, these are the things we can do for other people. You can lift some of that burden of being alive. You can open the curtains. You can tidy up their home. You can bring some flowers. You can let them know that depression is episodic. That's really good news. They're in a slump.

They're not going to be stuck there. You can let them know, look, don't make any big decisions. You'll be out of this in a few weeks, maybe even a week or less. Just let's get through to the other side. Then we'll look back and figure out how to not fall into this pit again. Kindness.

Kindness is so touching. People who are depressed, they may not be able to get really animated and interactive and drawing people into a superficial, you know, animated conversation to kind of please their friends. That's bad. Let them be depressed. You are depressed. Be depressed when you're depressed. But know that deep down, who you are is not depressed. The space in which depression occurs is not itself depressed. Awareness is not depressed.

That good heart in you is not depressed. That feeling of lovingness and giving us to others is not depressed. and you can take refuge in that 1% of you that's not depressed while you look at the 99% of you that is. This is my last question, and you can make it as shorter long as you want. But in the context of all of this, do you think we focus too much on trying to have well-being, on trying to be happy? And what do you think is the place of happiness in regards to our purpose and life? and why we're here on this planet. Yeah. Well, there's certainly some research,

typically on college sophomores, that if you manipulate them into trying to be really happy, that's frustrating and irritating and they get less happy. Okay. But that does not mean that we should not seek the happiness of others? Of course. It's appropriate to value and seek, whether it's at the level of major public policy

or down to what you care about your friend or your dog or your child. We appropriately seek the happiness of others. Well, if it's legitimate to seek the happiness of others, it's legitimate to seek the happiness of ourselves. And deep down, money, we talked about money earlier, money, looks, fame, they are all means to the,

ends of well-being. Even physical health is a means to the end of well-being. Well-being is the prize. Now, as part of well-being, I would add in terms of life, the values in life, well-being is a major aim in life. I think service is another important aim, and sometimes we put well-being to the side for the sake of service, like during the years, particularly that we have children who are young or for the sake of the greater good. And also, I think there's a third purpose in life that's neither well-being per se nor service per se, which is learning and even awakening, including spiritually. So these are the three great aims in life, in my view, but certainly among them and the most common and widespread one is seeking well-being. It's perfectly appropriate. So then the question

become what fosters well-being. And it's important to be able to cope with the world around you. Because if you're continually mistreated by the people around you, that's the important thing to deal with. If you're in an abusive relationship, that's going to erode well-being. If you have no money, doing what you can to find different work or better work or other options for yourself, if you're not being fed well, you need food. You know, food insecurity is real in America, the wealthy is country on the planet. So do what you can around you. Okay. And also especially in your relationships and your own mind, fostering and strengthening relationships and finding ways of expressing yourself in your relationships. Thwarted contribution, a sense of being stagnant and

bottled up inside totally undermines well-being. And I think for many people, a major reason why they're unhappy in this life is there are not vehicles into which they can pour their love or their full talents, their full abilities to really step out of being like a thoroughbred strapped to the kitty rides in the local carnival and be able to run freely. That's really important for a person to be able to find a way to do that. And then last, really work inside your own mind. Much research shows probably the major factors of personal well-being are internal. They're psychological. That's where you can always grow the good in the inner temple of your being

and develop skills, develop competency with your own thoughts and feelings, to be competent, to become skillful inside your own mind, not just out in the world, but inside your own mind, and over time to gradually cultivate qualities of whatever you like, mindfulness, resilience, self-worth, emotional intelligence, social intelligence. And last, in my own view of things, gradually uncover and become increasingly rested in and identified with the ground of being. That's underneath all our thoughts, that's underneath all our feelings. It's the container. It's the space in which they happen. And as you increasingly rest in that, which for some people has a transcendental, transpersonal dimension to it, as you rest in that, you feel increasingly that you're rested in an unshakable piece,

an unshakable inner peace and contentment and love that transcends all ordinary human conditions. And do you rest in that through meditative practice? Many people go there through their religious background. whatever it may be and fine. With personal practice, whether it's in yoga or Pilates or walking the dog, you kind of just tune in. Like, who are you when you're not disturbed? Who are you when you're not contracted?

Who, in the broadest sense, are you? And what people talk about is a sense of spaciousness. And these are qualities that are like signposts, their finger pointing home, you know, sense of spaciousness. a sense of needs met enough in the moment, a sense of not contraction, not pressure, not overly self-referenced, you know, the little self starts falling away as we open out into the great self, the big self. These are guides in. I think open-heartedness, a sense of open-heartedness, maybe even a sense that there's a benevolence in this underlying ground.

You know, simple positive emotions of gratitude also tend to draw us in, contentment of some kind draws us in to the ground. However you find it and then know what it feels like. Yeah, it's such a powerful one of your messages is that there is all of this good, but you need to drill it into your head. You need to find it and recognize it and sit in it. I think a lot about remembrance and return. You know, we return.

We remember what it feels like. and we return again and again. That's a lot the marker of mental health and resilience and coping. Can you remember the best parts of you, the wisest, the strongest, the clearest, the most open-hearted, the most noble, parts of yourself, can you remember what they feel like and can you return to them and then stand in them as you express yourself out into the world? beautiful all right you have so much work if somebody wanted to hear more from you where would they begin well thanks my website probably the best place rickhansen dot net rickhansen s-on-net i have tons and tons of

freely offered resources there as well as some cool online programs and we have scholarships for everything we sell so i would encourage people to check out that that website also i do a podcast speaking a podcast with our son for us, the Being Well podcast. We're up to about two million downloads a year. So it's kind of medium-sized, but, you know, we're coming along. And we interview all kinds of really cool people and check out the Being Well podcast, too. What's your favorite one of your books? Well, I love all my children, all six of them, all six books to date. But I like the last one the best, Neurodharma. And I'll show you the cover. which comes from my experience in the mountains.

You know, it's a pretty cool cover. It's beautiful. And if you'll indulge me, I'll read you the first paragraph. Yeah, do it. Do you let me do that? Yes. Okay, good. And it's aspirational for us all.

All right, so here we go. First paragraph. I've hiked a lot in the mountains, and sometimes a friend farther up the trail, has turned and looked back and encouraged me onward. Such a friendly gesture. Come join me. watch out for the slippery ice. You can do it.

I've often thought about those moments while writing this book, which is about the heights of human potential, about being as wise and strong, happy and loving as any person can ever be. If those heights are like a great mountain, awakening is the magnificent journey that carries you along toward the top. Many real people have gone very far up, the great sages and teachers throughout history, as well as others no one has heard about, and I imagine them turning with a sweet smile and beckoning

us to join them. It's beautiful. It also brings me back to some of my favorite hiking memories, too. So I love that. Well, thank you so much for taking so much time to share your amazing wisdom with all of us here today. Well, Liz, thank you. And really respects and good wishes to everybody listening.

This is a long conversation. I really wish you all the best with this. I hope that you feel really good right now. Listening back to this episode made me feel just calmer, more peaceful, more in control of how I approached and how I felt about my life. And I really hope that it has the same impact on you. If you love this episode, if you love our Ask the Doctor episodes, I would so appreciate a quick rating or review on whatever podcast platform that you listen on.

It really helps other people find the podcast. And I'm so, so appreciative everyone. read every single one and they make me so, so happy, except for the ones that are mean, which I'm working on letting those wash over me a little bit better. Maybe this episode will help with that. And like I said at the beginning, if there's anybody in your life that you know who you think could benefit from the wisdom that Rick shared in this episode, maybe they're not feeling so happy themselves or they have a partner or a loved one who's going through a rough spell, I would so appreciate if you would share the episode with them. I just think there's so much

information in here. And I get DMs all the time from people who just aren't feeling good in their life. And I really want to empower as many people as possible to feel deeply, resiliently, beautifully good, not like toxic positivity bullshit, but deeply good on a real level like we talk about in this episode. I want to inspire that feeling in as many people as possible. As always, I am so grateful that you chose to spend your time this way with me. And I love you so much. And I will see you on the next episode of the Healthy You Together podcast. The mattress that you sleep on is one of the highest exposures that you have. Like, if it's off gassing, you're breathing that in for basically a third of your life.

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