The Liz Moody Podcast - The Sneaky Ways You Waste Your Life: Optimize Your Time, Do Less, & Have More Fun

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Do you ever feel like you’re behind on the life you’re trying to build, despite constantly being busy? I sat down with Oliver Burkeman, one of the most influential voices on productivity and purpose, to share tools to make more time for the things that genuinely matter so you can do more of what you love to create your dream life. Oliver unpacks the psychology, sharing a radically different productivity approach: embracing your limitations, choosing what matters, and releasing the pressures holding you back. 🎧 What you’ll learn: What boredom and discomfort actually signal How to work on your dreams when you only have 10–20 minutes A grounding question to decide what’s truly worth your time How to trust yourself even if you’ve “let yourself down” before A moment-to-moment practice for choosing what life is asking of you now Why your brain clings to the fantasy of a “sorted, future version” of yourself What procrastination is really about (and why it’s not laziness) A simple tool—the Reverse Golden Rule—for becoming kinder to yourself How parenting reshaped Oliver’s relationship to time and control Why daily-ish habits work better than perfect streaks ✨ Homework: Spend 10 minutes doing something you know you want more of in your life—writing, calling someone you love, being outside, reading, creating. Not planning it, not optimizing it. Doing it. This is how change starts. For more from Oliver Burkeman: His new book, Meditations for Mortals His bestselling book, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals His website: www.oliverburkeman.com Subscribe to Liz’s substack to download a FREE Connection Card Game by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: Seed: visit Seed.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first month. Pique: go to PiqueLife.com/LizMoody for up to 20% off plus a special gift. LMNT: head to DrinkLMNT.com/LizMoody to get a free sample pack with any order. IQ Bar: text LIZ to 64000 for 20% off all IQBAR products plus FREE shipping.  Wildgrain: visit Wildgrain.com/LizMoody for $30 off the first box - PLUS a free item in every box. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. Music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast. This podcast and website represent the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests. The content is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your healthcare provider for any personal health questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 387 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You wrote this book that basically changed millions of people's lives by awakening them to the fact that we only have 4,000 weeks to live. Since realizing that time is finite, what's one concrete change that you've made in the way that you live your day-to-day life? I think it's much more important to develop that muscle that allows you to keep coming back to any kind of habit or practice. Rather than to do this obsessive, got to keep the streak going, it's a much more significant challenge to be able to say, like, I'm going to do it today, even though I didn't do it yesterday. I thought this was such an interesting part of the book because it spoke to me the idea that we're putting too much pressure on ourselves. With this whole construct of what you think you need to do to be a better person, and then it's like these are my marching orders day after day after day and I got to do them. Kind of the wrong way around, right?

These should be supports to help you live more fully. My name's Oliver Berkman. I'm an author and a journalist. I wrote a book called 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to get to chat with you again, this time in person. It's great. I'm glad to be here. So you wrote this book that basically changed millions of people's lives by awakening them to the fact that we only have 4,000 weeks to live.

That was four years ago now, right? I'm curious, you've done all these interviews, you've talked to all these people about it. How has your thinking around that concept evolved and shifted and changed over time? The most amazing thing that I find all the time is just the way in which you have to sort of, maybe not keep re-learning the lessons, but you learn them on a deeper level and a deeper level and a deeper level. So what I'm trying to say here is I don't think I'm just as unfamiliar with this idea of finitude as before I wrote the book. I think it has changed me, but there's always like another level that you have to go down in terms of seeing like, oh, this is what it means to have limited time and this is what it means to have limited control over that time. It's fascinating to me. The journey does not end.

What are some of the levels you've been going to recently? Well, first of all, I began writing that book before becoming a parent. Did that impact your time? We'll teach you certain things about the limitations of time. I had this kind of intellectual idea about how it would be interesting to write a book about what it really means to be finite. And then I was shown it in a very intense fashion. One thing that's happened because the book did quite well, and I got a lot of opportunities here and there. That whole question of how do you make the choice in what to do with finite time gets kind of harder.

I mean, it's in a lovely way because they're great opportunities. But I wrote chapters about how to deal with the fact that we'll get too much email. And now I get lots more email than the before then. So I am obliged to try to walk the talk. Do you believe in inbox zero or is that a waste of time? depends what you mean. I do attempt to keep an inbox zero, meaning everything that comes into my inbox ends up moving out of it. But I don't believe that it's necessarily the right approach to try to give a huge amount of attention to every single email you get or to even answer

every email you get necessarily. So that phrase inbox zero, like if it means you've got to really give your attention to every single email, then some people might manage that and some people will have hundreds and hundreds more emails than they ever could. I have like 5,000 unread emails and like 1,000 unread text messages. You should do inbox zero, right, by selecting them all and then archiving them all. And then your inbox will be empty. You don't do that. Do you do that?

I have on certain occasions declared email bankruptcy in that way. It's not the ideal, right? But it's like all these decisions, like every decision in life, there are a huge downside. to it and sometimes that's the right downside to bring into your life. Because what's the difference between archiving an email that's six months old and not replying to the email that six months old and it just sits there? The second case, it makes you feel bad, but in neither case does the sender get a reply? And would you say that's one of your core theses is that we're going to do a lot of the same things anyway, but sometimes we'll do them in a way that

will make us feel bad, and sometimes we'll do them in a way that won't make us feel bad. Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it. Another aspect of that is, I think a lot of what I'm writing about, it's not so much live your life in a different way. It's more, see more fully and honestly how things already inevitably are. And one way in which things are is that your time is limited and there's always going to be a much larger space of things that it would be really good to do with your time than you're going to be able to do with any portion of time. And I think we spend a lot of our lives and adopt a lot of techniques and practices that are basically aimed at helping us ignore that fact and feel like it's not true. And actually, I think it's very helpful

and ultimately calming and relaxing to let that truth in and see that, you know, that's what you're dealing with. You're always dealing with like, what shall I do in the understanding that that means a million other things are not going to get done with that with that portion of time. And the more you can sort of face it and metabolize it and not clench against it. Since realizing that time is finite and sort of changing your views on productivity, what's one concrete change that you've made in the way that you live your day-to-day life? I feel like the main answer I want to give is that it sort of seeps through everything in a subtle way. But in terms of concrete things, Email is a big part of it. I've had to be really direct in my newsletter about how I love getting replies, but I'm just telling you right now that I'm highly likely not to be able to respond if you reply to it, you know. And I still don't like that. It's not that I just become completely chill with the idea of not replying to people who I think deserve a reply. But I also see that, you know, it's in the nature of the work I've decided to do and how it all functions that that has to happen. Of course, whenever I meet someone who's

emailed me in response to the newsletter and not got a reply or something like that. They've got no cases in which they were furious. It's inside me that the anguish comes from that. I guess another thing I would say just in terms of how I handle my sort of main writing work, I've learned that I'm much more effective if I can with some consistency, not a sort of rigid consistency, but with some consistency to sort of modest amount day after day. And so I'm much more rarely now end up doing kind of binge working up to deadlines and things because I always hated it and it's actually not actually the most effective way to produce things on a good schedule.

Do you do it every day or do you do it per your most recent book, Everyday-ish? Yeah, daily-ish. I think it's much more important to develop that muscle that allows, you to keep coming back to any kind of habit or practice in a sort of overall consistent way, rather than to do this kind of obsessive, like, got to keep the streak going, mustn't ever drop a time. Actually, it's a much more significant challenge to be able to say, like, I'm going to do it today, even though I didn't do it yesterday, right? It's like that sort of anti-perfectionistic approach that says, weak has been, you know, 50-50 in terms of how I've been doing

this and I'm still going to do it today rather than I've got to do it every single day, otherwise I'm a failure because then you drop a day and you feel so ashamed. I thought this was such an interesting part of the book because it spoke to me the idea that we're putting too much pressure on ourselves to try to do our habits every single day. But I also think that we do that because we hope that at some point it will become habituated. It will become routine. It'll become automatic. And that by doing it every day, we're giving it the best shot at that.

Do you disagree with that? No, I think it's partly personality-based and it's also partly the attitude that you bring to doing it every single day. If that's like a fun challenge and when it goes wrong once because life happens, it doesn't throw you off course too much, then of course it's great to have that aspiration to do it every single day. I think that where the problem comes in is, yeah, firstly when people see it as the whole challenge to be absolutely consistent and then if they fail, the sort of, impact of that failure can be much more destabilizing. And then secondly, it's interesting, yeah, we do obviously want to habituate things and make them come naturally, second nature, automatic, whatever. I do think it's important as well to remember that all these rules and habits and systems

to improve your life, they're there to serve your life. And you don't want to get into the situation, which I certainly have for years, where you're serving them in a way, right? So you come up with this whole construct of what you think. think you need to do to be a better person. And then it's like, these are my marching orders day after day after day, and I got to do them. It's kind of the wrong way around, right?

These should be supports to help you live more fully. Much of the time that's going to mean, yes, I'm going to go take some physical exercise today, even though I don't 100% feel like it. But on the other hand, there are going to be times when that's not the right thing to do or when it would force the matter too much and leave you in a worse place. It reminds me of something that we talk about a lot on this podcast and in my book as well, which is just really knowing your why. Because I think if you're waking up and you're doing something because you have the sense of,

I should do it, I did it yesterday, I don't want to break my streak, whatever. It's not motivating and it's also not really good use of our finite time on the planet. And I do think that sort of what you're saying in general is also to have a deep sense of like, what is the reason for you doing all the things that you're doing? I think that's really true, absolutely. And to elaborate on that, ideally, I think we would have reasons that are not kind of deficit-based reasons, right? So we wouldn't have, I probably can't avoid this to some extent, but you wouldn't mainly be thinking, I'm basically a bad person and I'm trying to fix myself. You would be mainly thinking, like, I feel okay about myself.

My self-worth is basically intact, but now I'd like to do all these other things get even better because it's fun. try to push myself and to be what I can be. I think there is a problem with any project of personal transformation that's based on the idea that where you are now is totally unacceptable and you're just trying to get yourself to some like level of adequacy. There's a therapist, you may know his work, Bruce Tift, who has this sort of thought experiment he suggests where it's like you take whatever it is that bothers you the most about yourself, right? Whether you feel like you're a terrible procrastinator, or you have issues with how you show up in relationships or whatever it might be. And you just sort of imagine, like, what would it be like to know

that some version of that problem was going to be with you for the whole of the rest of your life? Like, it was never totally going away. And I think when I do that with my issues, there's a real sort of liberation, right? There's a moment of like, okay, if I just accept that I'm always going to be slightly more anxious than is appropriate to the thing I'm dealing with in any given moment. Maybe I can sort of let that be and put my energies into something more exciting than trying to fix that problem. I think it's really useful to sort of allow in that possibility that you're kind of fine as you are. And then what we're doing here is trying to get even better because it's fun rather than you're a terrible worm and we're trying to make you

minimally adequate, you know what I mean? Less warming. Right, exactly. Why do you think it's so pervasive to do it the other way? Like, is that capitalism trying to sell us things? Why do so many of us try to hate ourselves into a place of betterment? Oh, that's really nicely put. I like it. I mean, it's awful, but it's very eloquent. You know, when it comes to the causes of all of this stuff, I very often am kind of evasive, because I think it is definitely capitalism, and it is definitely certain aspects of the way that most of us are raised, even when we're raised by really good parents. There are ways in which, you know, conditional messages are communicated to us. And then, I guess, at the sort of most fundamental level, there is this kind of human condition

thing that I'm often writing about where we, on some level, just don't accept that what we are is finite. We're going to die eventually. We have, we can only be. be in one place at a time, we only have 24 hours in a day, all these ways in which we're limited. It's very tempting to sort of subconsciously see that as a big problem that we've got to find a solution to. So sometimes the deficit we're trying to fill here is just like the one that is called being human. And, you know, one grows old, one has certain talents and not other talents. You always have your historical biography wherever you go.

Often I think people are trying on some levels to get out of the situation in which they actually find themselves. Or put it this way, I think I spent many years trying to. One of the most concrete tools for loving ourselves a little bit more that I've ever heard was your reverse golden rule. Can you share that? Oh, yeah, totally. This made a big impact on me.

The reverse golden rule, which in this form I'm borrowing from a philosopher called Ido Landau, was treat others as you'd like to be treated. The reverse golden rule is don't treat yourself worse than you would treat most others or a friend or something like this. See, I always had this problem. This might be because I'm British. It might because I'm male. I don't know what it is. But like, I always had a problem with the whole discourse of self-compassion.

There's something kind of too cringe about it for me. Now, I've since learned that when something's cringe, that's probably a sign that it's something I need, right? It's like the cringe is a defense reaction against something vulnerable being touched. That's like a deep bit of wisdom right there. Well, we can come back to that. I love that. I love talking about it.

But I was never very happy with the notion that I should, you know, love myself more than I do. Because it seems to me to speak of like treating myself as very special and unique. Self-indulgence. Right, exactly. And I don't think that's necessarily. fairly fair at all about the best therapeutic work and writing on that topic, but it's what I thought. Whereas this reverse golden rule is just like, oh, it's just like don't treat yourself significantly worse than you would treat someone else. And it really draws attention to the fact

that so many of us go around with inner monologues and inner critics, talking to ourselves in ways that, like, you would never speak to a friend. And if someone spoke to you that way, you'd cut them out. They wouldn't be part of your social circle. So obnoxious. And yet we do it to ourselves quite readily. So I really liked that because it was, it's the opposite of asking for special treatment. It's just like, don't be specially mean to yourself if you're the kind of person who is generally quite friendly and nice to the people you like in your life.

It made me sad when I read it because I think I've normalized a level of treatment for myself that. that I would never accept for somebody else. Do you find yourself still catching yourself in a moment and saying, oh, I wouldn't say that to my friend? Yeah, yeah. Totally I do. And I think the thing that's important as well, one other thing I really like about that framing of like,

just be as friendly to yourself as you would to a friend, is that there's space there for tough love, right? Sometimes the friendly thing to do for a friend would be, like to suggest that they didn't have the fourth cocktail on a night drinking. There are contexts where firmness is an expression of friendliness or love. So it's not about self-indulgence, but it really then separates that from... Like, you're a piece of shit, you're doing this, like you're dumb. Why do you always do that?

And I think that something I'm a lot better at that I used to be, but something that I do still catch myself is that sort of globalizing thing, right? It's not I messed up doing something, but I always mess these things or things up. And that's kind of just demonstrably not true. Do you tell yourself in the moment that's demonstrably not true and like try to kind of think of counter examples? Or would you just say, would you say that to somebody you love or how do you stop yourself in the moment? That's an interesting question. When people talk about inner monologues, as I have been doing in this conversation, I sort of mean it relatively metaphorically.

And I think some people have a much more kind of, it's really a specific voice that is chattering away in their mind. How literal is it for you when you talk about having an... It's literal. I have a very strong voice-like inner monologue. Do you just have like vibes? I don't think I verbalize it as much as many people seem to. But it's just a sort of a, yeah, it's a vibe or an attitude. And I can see, when I see that attitude, and sometimes it is in the form of words.

but the crucial moment is when you disidentify from it, right? So it's not even that you need to counter it necessarily. Just you need to like see that that's what's happening as opposed to just like being that experience. Isn't that one of the goals of a lot of meditative practices is to see your thoughts as sort of kind of separate from you a little bit that going by like a river? Yeah.

And I think one of the things that's so powerful about, you know, really fashionable these days, all kinds of inner parts approaches. psychology, internal families. Like IFS. Like IFS. There's an approach that gets less airtime called focusing, which I think is really,

really, really fascinating. And all of these, they share this basic idea of saying, like, you're not trying to eliminate this bit of you that berates you and criticizes you, but you're just, you're seeing it from a perspective where you contain it, rather than that you are it,

or it runs your life or anything like that. It's like, okay, yes, you're there, have some understanding of how you came to be and what you're trying to do for me, but I am not identified with, actually, almost without realizing a lot of what I've ended up writing about is a process of encouraging both myself and then hopefully the reader to be like, you see this thing, this dynamic, this, this tension or this way we have of behaving. And once you can see it, you're kind of, you're not the servant of it in the same way as before. regardless of whether you manage to like eradicate it or transform it.

It's just like you're no longer just fully identified with it. Something else your work does that's in a similar realm to me is it plays with the concept that I became familiar with when I was having really severe panic attacks really regularly, which is that that which we push against often get stronger. And I think one of your core concepts is just to kind of loosen the grip on a lot of what we're kind of holding tightly. Oh, yeah.

that that tight grip is actually what's giving it its strength and power, which is what I've found with my anxiety. When I have a panic attack coming on or I'm feeling really strong anxiety, it's often fighting against that that gives it its strength, that gives it its power. And when I relax into it and I say, okay, this is just how I'm going to feel right now, it will often dissipate. Yeah, totally. And to just sort of zoom out to the most abstract version of that, I think this is something

that I've found Zen Buddhist tradition to be really sort of eloquent about this idea that we engage with reality as if life is a problem to be solved. And it turns out that actually the main cause of suffering is treating it as a problem to be solved rather than the fact that we haven't found the solution to it. The line I quote as an epigraph at the beginning of 4,000 weeks from Jocco Beck, who was an American Zen teacher, who said, What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. I think this is an amazing insight when you sort of let it soak into you.

It's like, oh, okay, life has its ups and downs, but the thing that makes the downs unbearable is the idea that it should not contain the downs. It's the idea that, like, I ought to be able to get rid of them, and I haven't done so. and so I just sort of flail around looking for this solution to make all the negatives go away. And that's what causes the, you know, suffering as opposed to pain in that famous Buddhist distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. What do you think then makes a well-lived life? Because I think a lot of us have the idea that we are working towards a state of happiness, contentment, fulfillment, versus if we accept our life,

What are we sort of doing here? What are we doing every day? Obviously, I completely feel that and have probably felt it more acutely than average in the past, which is what has led me to all this being interested in all this stuff. I think that, you know, there's nothing wrong with pursuing goals in the future, and there's lots that's good about that. Plus, we're probably just not capable as the animals that we are of not living in that way. some extent. The problem comes when you invest in that so much that you kind of drain all the

value out of the present, right? And it's like a whole meaning of your life is once you've sorted this thing out, once you've fixed your personality problems, once you've achieved financial security, once you've got married, had kids, or just once you've kind of sorted your life out. This future time when things are sorted out, what I'm trying to do for myself, as much as anyone, is bring the focus back to the idea that life can only ever be lived in in a present moment. And so absolutely fine to have long-term goals as a form of navigation. But what they're helping you navigate is an experience of being here in the moment. The things that get in the way of that for me are there are ways in which I'm holding back. There are ways in which I'm not

quite unclenching into life. This is kind of like vaguely unpleasant a verb that always seems to me to put it well, right? It's like it's almost like we go through life. and I think to some extent it's a literal muscular tension sometimes never mind a metaphorical one right we're throwing our brow and we're clenching our muscles and we're trying to get to the point in the future where we can relax all that and then life will be good and it's always just a matter of learning and relearning to do some of that relaxing into reality in the in the moment this is very abstract conversation but maybe I'm maybe I'm conveying some of something of what I mean. I don't know. So obviously one of your main

the thesis is that just the awareness that we're never going to get to this future place that we've put up on a pedestal in our brain is like part of that. But is there anything else that's part of that unclenching for you or that's helpful in that process? Part of what causes us to kind of stay clenched and feel like we're not in the really real bit of life yet is holding ourselves to standards that are kind of flawed in some fundamental way because they're not meetable by humans. The phrase that I use to try to unpack this at the beginning of the book is like, the human condition is like worse than you think. And this is actually really good news,

if you understand what it means. So simple examples, you know, it feels really, really difficult to get through your whole to-do list of all the things that feel like they need doing. And as long as you think it's really, really difficult, life is a slog, you're beating yourself up, you're looking for new systems and techniques and spending more and more money on fancy planners and the hope that you're going to find the final way of doing it once and for all. But then if you see that it's worse than that, then actually it's impossible, not really difficult, but impossible, to get through all the things that feel like they need doing, because there's no stopping, there's no limit to the things that feel

like properly worthwhile uses of our time. Then there's a kind of a shift and a kind of transformation from that stressful, blanched stance towards saying, well, if this is not possible to do all the things, it can't be my job to do all the things. My job must be something else in this situation, like maybe doing a few of the things that feel like the most important ones and learning to deal with the anxiety or the disappointment or the regret of letting go of some of the others. And that's a really interesting for me anyway, transformation, because it's not painless, but it's no longer got that sense of provisionality like, why am I not there yet? Why am I not yet? There yet. It's much more like,

there's a situation in which we find ourselves as humans, and it's not all great, but it has wonderful parts to it. And now I just need to do the things that I actually can do, instead of constantly like punching myself in the face for not being able to do something that is impossible. Which begs questions of prioritization. How do we know what are the things we should be letting go of and what are the things we should be doing moment to moment? So the first thing to say, it's not the whole answer at all, but the first thing to say is that the choices, like which direction you go probably matters less than you think in almost every situation, right? it's precisely because there's always a trade-off, because you're always missing out on one thing to do something else, because there's such a surplus of really worthwhile things to do with your time than you have time to do.

Actually, sort of rationally, that ought to somewhat reduce the pain of indecision. Because, I mean, to pick a sort of fun example, right, if you've got a few hours in your week for a creative, pursuit outside of your work and you're really interested in painting and you're really interested in songwriting but you don't have time to do them both toss a coin almost one wants to say because there's no way that you won't be using those hours for something that is meaningful and worthwhile for you you said in the book that it's less about picking the best decision it's about picking a decision and then like making the best of that decision totally and also that reminds me that it's also kind of more immediate and momentary than we're prone to thinking about it,

right? So we're very tempted to say, like, I'm choosing a path and then it's got to be that path forever. That a huge amount of this is just, you're in a moment of time, trying to decide what to do at, I don't know, four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. You can consult your intuition and you can have a sense of whether you are, you know, doing something that is important to you for real or whether you're hiding your desk for the 10th time that day because you're trying to avoid the thing that is actually really important to you but you're a bit scared of it. And I'm still a work in progress, but I have been on a long-term shift from sort of strictly planned ways of organizing my time through to more intuitive ones.

And one of the big benefits I've found is that, like, you get to at least include a role for what you feel like doing, which people are very scared of, right? They think, if I just did what I felt like doing, I would just, like, sit on the couch and watch movies all day and eat potato chips. But actually, that's not true. And when you think about it, that's a very strange idea of oneself. Would we say that to our friends?

Would we reverse golden rule? and say to our friends, like, left to your own devices, you would lay on the couch and eat potato and stuff like that. So you need me to kick you in the butt all day long, right? It's made a big difference to me to be able to sort of harness that energy of what I feel like doing instead of constantly trying to oppose it, especially with like creative stuff and writing and things like that.

I mean, I do need to keep doing it regularly, but catch the current of wanting to do it. I want to talk about your writing process because I am really curious about that. And in the frame of like, how do we go after these big goals in our life? But just to dial in on the choice thing a little bit more, I think that it's really interesting, even for like larger life choices, there's a level of self-trust in being like, no matter what I choose, I can make it the best choice. Yeah.

Versus sitting around and being like, I have to choose the absolute best thing for me to be able to handle it and have a good life. Yeah. Totally. And it's really interesting to think because it's like we don't trust the future version of ourselves. We think like we've got to get it all right now. because we don't trust that we could adapt and meet the consequences and, you know, change course and correct course. We don't have enough trust in our future version of ourselves, but we almost have too much trust in the present version of ourselves because how on earth you're supposed to know right now, how something's going to feel a year from now? You've got to make your best guess.

Commitments, especially kind of relationship type commitments, really matter. They aren't to be taken lightly. But on the other hand, nobody can enter into anything if the condition for doing so is that you have to know for certain that three years from now you're going to feel the way you do now. I often feel like there's a certain kind of person that I am and I have the sense that you are and who thinks about this very seriously and it can lead to paralyzing indecision sometimes. And then you just see people in life who just don't seem to be bothered by it at all and just sort of like stride off into life and take on commitments or say yes to things. things. Do you think self-trust is the difference? Do you think that they're just like, I know I can adapt to whatever this. I think it is. I mean, I think self-trust is a big part of it. Maybe, maybe there's a place where that becomes overconfidence and you should have a bit more humility.

But I don't think that's the problem of anyone who's kind of fretting about this stuff. Like, I have historically, for me, it's much more like, what is the evidence up till now? Like, the evidence up till now is that every single time something's happened in my life that wasn't exactly the way I would have wanted it. I handled it and here I am. The evidence is pretty good that the next time something happens like that, I'll have the inner resources to cope. And yet, yeah, a lot of us move through life assuming that it's been like an incredible fluke that we managed it up till now. And that next time, that's when that's when things will really, you know, hit the fan. The other thing I found very freeing that you said is that we don't have

to like do something forever. You were like, just do it right now. Like just pick something up, do it right now. You don't, you're not committing to this for the rest of your life, which is something that I very much fall prey to. I'm like, oh, if I'm going to work out today, I want it to be the most perfect workout routine so that it's not a waste of time. And then I'll do it forever more. I feel like so many parts of your book were just screaming, like just do something, anything. Like just do anything. No, absolutely. Obviously, we want to form lifelong practices of physical fitness and all sorts of creativity, all sorts of other things. But in the end, you only actually get there by doing it once and then doing it once again and doing it once again.

We really like those techniques and approaches to self-transformation that feel like you're like seizing the reins of your life. So you're drawing up the habit tracker and you're buying the equipment and you're like, okay, I'm in the driver's seat now and things are going to change around here. whereas very often taking the actions that make the difference actually requires a kind of loosening of your grip on the reins. It requires you to sort of be willing to just go to the gym once and have no confidence that you're going to go back again and again and again. I'll be willing to like, you know, try writing a page of the novel you want to write with no confidence that you're going to write all the rest of ill

that people will enjoy it if you do. So we love all the stuff that is like, hey, Now I'm in the driver's seat, but actually often what's called for is the opposite. It's just like you're turning the water and see what happens. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier, but so few of us actually take the steps to make eating healthier easier. That's where Marley Spoon comes in. What I love about this company and what's different than all of the other companies out there that are doing like stuff in the same arena is that you.

you can customize your choices based on the effort that you want to put in. So if you want them to send you ingredients, so you can make your own 20-minute meal and get into your chef energy, they'll send it to you to all be in perfect portions so you'll eliminate waste. Great, that's sorted. But they also have meals that you can just heat up. They have ready-made breakfast, which is always such a tough time of day to get a healthy meal in. They have grab and go snacks. Everything is made from farm fresh produce with high-quality proteins and you can select by dietary preferences, including Mediterranean diet, which is the top diet that doctors on this podcast recommend. Also, things like gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sodium, anything that you need. The food is so good and it's so gourmet-fe feeling

like you feel like you're at a nice restaurant. We're talking like chicken Milanese with a crunchy cucumber arugula salad or everything bagel salmon with truffle chive potatoes. My favorite recent meal was the creamy lemon chicken tray bake. I had one of those moments where looked at my plate and I was like, wait, I made this. And so quickly, like so easily, it's just so little effort for so much reward. Marley Spoon just makes eating well feel easy instead of stressful. And honestly, that is everything. This new year, fast track your way to eating well with Marley Spoon. Head to marlyspoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. That is right, up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon. That is Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody.

Moody, so remember to get the offer in there. Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. If you have headaches, allergies, brain fog, skin irritation, or you've been dealing with hormone issues, you are especially going to want to listen to this ad. Every single thing that I just listed has been linked to chemicals and household cleaners. One study found that regular use of cleaning sprays was associated with a lung function decline comparable to smoking 10 to 20 cigarettes per day. Synthetic fragrances are a well-documented migraine trigger and a number of studies have linked ingredients in common household cleaners to fertility issues, thyroid dysfunction, mood changes, and more because of their impact on our endocrine systems.

Luckily, you can just make one simple swap and you can eliminate all of those risk factors that you get from common household cleaners. Branch Basics makes cleaning products that are plant and mineral based, completely fragrance-free, and made safe certified, meaning they are screened against thousands of known and suspected harmful chemicals. And best of all, you literally use one product, but you mix it with different amounts of water to make your kitchen spray, your bathroom cleaner, your laundry detergent, your produce wash, your glass cleaner, literally everything. It does not smell. It does not give me headaches. It does not give me rashes or itchiness from clothes because you are. Remember, we're using this for laundry.

We're using this for literally everything. And it works so well. Everything gets so clean. And I know that I'm protecting myself from all of those long-term issues, too. And I'm protecting my kittens who are much tinier than me. So anything they're exposed to has a much greater impact on their little tiny systems. And they're running around on their little paws and then they're licking them. So I'm protecting them too.

Branch Basics is now available at Target.com, Amazon, and branchbasics.com. so it's easier than ever to make the switch. And if you want to grab their premium starter kit, you can use code Liz Moody for 15% off at branchbasics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody.

I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products that I have come across in years. And I am so obsessed with it. I've been telling all of my friends to get it, so now I need to tell you guys. Here's some science first. Your skin isn't just getting older. It's being actively broken down by something called senescent cells. These are cells that have stopped functioning but refuse to die.

They sit there, releasing inflammatory signals, breaking down your collagen, degrading your skin barrier, and accelerating every visible sign of aging. Scientists call them zombie cells, and as they accumulate, they are one of the primary drivers of how old your skin looks and feels. The team at one skin, a group of female longevity researchers and PhDs, spent five years testing over 900 peptides to figure out how to help reduce the accumulation of senescent cells. And they finally landed on it.

OSO1, the first peptide scientifically studied to reduce skin's biological age at the molecular level. OSO1 goes in and it clears out the senescent cells so it helps skin function like healthy younger looking skin. It is not masking the signs of aging. It's not targeting one thing. It is actually rolling the clock back at a cellular level. I've been using the face moisturizer for almost six months now and I love it so much. It feels amazing. It goes on really smoothly. It's not tacky at all. And I actually see a difference, which I just feel like is never the case with skincare. You want to always like see a real difference and you're kind of like, do I? Do I? And this I genuinely do.

Because it's clearing the senescent cells, it doesn't just target one thing. So my skin looks firmer. It looks glowier. The texture feels dramatically smoother. And I feel like you can see that too. I also love the body moisturizer. It dries down really quickly, which is always a pet peeve of mine with moisturizers. I hate that, like, sticky feeling when you go to put your clothes on.

This does not do that. But it does moisturize really, really well. And then again, I'm reducing my skin's biological age. I am not making it just look younger. I am making it actually younger. OneSkin has four peer-reviewed clinical studies and over 10,000 five-star reviews. The data backs everything up. For a limited time, get 15% off with code Liz at oneskin.c.c.o slash Liz.

Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.co with code Liz. What if we're trying to prioritize and there are so many things that are top priority that we are overwhelmed just by the bare minimum of our lives? There are like all sorts of different approaches and they're all sort of context specific. Obviously on the largest, most abstract level, you can do one thing with a 20 minute period of your life. So when you see that and you really internalize what it is to have that kind of, I can do this one thing at a time, then you just, all you need to do is to pick one thing and do that. And then later on pick another thing.

thing and do that. There's something about that ethos of like just do one thing at a time. We live in sequence. Time flows sequentially. There's really no point to thinking about any of the things but the one you're doing. I find that a big help. I'm not going to claim that that immediately eliminates the sort of stress of overwhelm. I do think that a lot of techniques, planning and productivity approaches inadvertently have this problem that they sort of constantly put in front of your face, all the things you're not doing. And this is not helpful, actually. Beyond that, understanding that, like, there's actually always going to be many, many more things that you should usefully and importantly be doing with your time than you can. So there's that kind of, oh, all right,

the plane has already crashed here, right? It's like, it's like, this, this thing that I was trying to keep in the air is not, is not, that's not how it works. So there's that sort of relief. I think we get into the habit of finishing things, which sometimes means defining. a little sub-part of a bigger project, but then seeing that through to the end and moving it off, getting into this habit of what I've referred to and other people too as limiting your work in progress, right? Even if there are 200 things that you feel

you really need to be doing at the moment, have there be three that are your things you're doing right now and you're making the other ones wait in the corridor, do them, move them on, take another three, do them. If you can get over the initial hump of like the anxiety that's caused by making those other things wait, there's something really calming about the sort of realism of taking just a few. And you end up making faster progress overall, right? Because you're not task switching.

Right. As you know, yes. Like a lot of what we do when we're multitasking is, or really switching between tasks, is making ourselves feel like we're in control as opposed to getting, the most stuff that's important done as fast as realistically possible. Those two things are at odds. Chasing the feeling of control and spending your time doing the most constructive stuff are very often, like, totally separate. I also think we task switch because we're looking for almost these like dopamine bumps that we've trained ourselves into from news consumption, social media, like kind of the world that we live in. And so when we're trying to sit down and

just do one thing, it feels really boring. Absolutely. It feels boring. It feels like you're missing out on other exciting stuff that's happening somewhere. It feels like almost dangerous, like you have to be taking care of all these other things. But yes, the dopamine thing is a really big part of it that also then leads people to kind of, you know, do things that didn't need to be done in the first place at all, just to have them done. Just to have like a little hit. Right. And a little bit of that is probably forgivable, right? How do you get over that hump, though? Like if you're trying to sit down and just do one thing at once, is it a wave of discomfort? that you have to ride it and then it crests and then you can settle into doing one thing.

Some of it is riding out discomfort. Some of it is just any approach that allows you to sort of stick with something long enough to see that the discomfort doesn't kill you. I still to this day, I use a timer all the time, right? I mean, if I decide that what I'm going to do now is 25 minute on some project where in the first like three minutes I'm going to feel these feelings of, of resistance or boredom or insufficient dopamine, having that boundary around it,

knowing that I'm not committing myself to 10 hours of it, but I'm committing myself to a bit more than might feel instinctively comfortable, gets me over that. Something I think that I do do for better or worse is to sort of chunk projects down in such a way that the things that I need to do for them become those little dopamine hits. So I will like endlessly reduce huge projects down to like, this is the 10 minute, 20 minute thing that I'm focusing on completing now. And then I can complete it and get that sort of feeling of completion.

If you work this way on a big project, like a house renovation or writing a book or launching a company or whatever, it really forces you to articulate what it is the specific task you're working on right now. And it does give you that sort of sense of progress and satisfaction. I don't think I want to be making the claim that we should just be training ourselves out of wanting that feeling of progress and those small wins. I think it's a question of making sure that they're the right small wins. Our craving for small wins is so strong that we will send an email versus work on our novel or work on our dreams because we just want that little win.

But if you then write on a little piece of paper, you know, 200 words of my novel, or you set a timer for 20 minutes or something like that, like you get the small win. Let's talk about your writing process. You've written many books, many articles. What do you do when you have a big project that you want to undertake? Just really working in these very proximal goals. So it's never as much as writing like writer chapter. It's always things like figure out the structure for the chapter,

do a brain dump for subsection one of the chapter, go consult these four sources and make notes. Something that is a relatively new addition to my process is kind of free-writing exercises, right, where you just sort of set a 20-minute timer and writes in a sort of completely unedited way, not because that's then going to be like a page in the book because it absolutely isn't, I assure you,

but because it gets you into that habit of writing before you know that you have a good idea. And that actually causes the ideas to flow. So in writing specifically something I'm now a huge proponent of is plenty of time just opening the flow process where you have a subsection or a topic or a question that you want to address. And before you do anything else,

you just spend half an hour not stopping. You don't need to type really fast or anything like that, but it's like keeping the fingers moving on the keyboard. It has this very strange effect where ideas and perspectives and things to follow, things to go and research sort of come up out of the subconscious. And the great thing about it is you can always do it. Like even if you're completely stumped at the very beginning of a book project

or in the middle where you don't know where it's going. And will you sometimes even be typing like, I don't know what to type right now? Yeah, the worst. That would be it, right? Yeah, exactly, because you can always write something. And then what tends to emerge from that is go and consult that source or take this particular topic and gather all my notes on it or whatever it is. There's a lovely line from the novelist, EL, Dr. O, who very famously said, I'm paraphrasing a bit, writing a novel, is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

And that is like, that is a guiding philosophy for sure. And I love the free writing activity because I think what stops a lot of us from going after our big dreams is feeling like what we produce has to meet a certain standard. And so you're saying there's no standard here. I'm going to write crap essentially. And then that's where, of course, you unblock your own brain and get to the good stuff. At the beginning when I started doing that, which as I say was not all that long ago, it was really hard because apparently I really had. hate the idea of like making a mess on the page, even when I absolutely 100% know that nobody else is ever going to see what I'm writing. It's very strange, actually. I had internalized

an approach to writing that. And I think this was one of the downsides maybe of my journalistic training, although there were many upsides where like you do want it to be basically publishable first go around. Well, especially because of the output. Like the churn for me when I was working in editorial full-time was just like I had very quickly produced very publishable material. And you get good at that and it feels like it's a sausage machine, right? You're sort of like bringing all this stuff in and it's coming. It's like being extruded out in publishable prose. But yeah, I had to somewhat unlearn that.

And it was a really useful thing to get into the swing of being willing to just fill a file with nonsense. And it's so odd. Like, what's the worst that happens here? You waste 15 minutes of your life typing into a... No, I think it comes back to the reverse golden rule. I think it literally comes back to you have this image of yourself. You're trying always to live up to and you're failing often. And so it's just more evidence that you're not the person you want to be. I think you're probably right. And yet, of course, like, what were you going to do with that 15 minutes? You were probably going to stare in paralyzed anxiety at a blank page. So it's like, you haven't lost anything, really. Do something.

Yeah. Yeah. One of your tips in the book is to set quantity goals. Do you do that when you're writing? Yes. There's something really powerful in pursuing goals that are very strictly like a number of words or an amount of time spent on the project as opposed to sort of, you know, trying to do a really good job of anything because it really takes the drama out of it.

Because the writer, I'm always trying to find this balance between like, think of it as just a job because that makes it doable and it stops it being some, like, like weird melodramatic, like artistic drama that terrifies me. But on the other hand, I want to keep it like alive and have soul in it. And I don't actually want it to become like a boring job. So the quantity goal thing really helps me when I'm in those places of feeling kind of like overwhelmed by the scale of the project. Just, you know, add another 500 words to this manuscript and count that as success.

You typically do 500? It varies at the stages of the project, because there are times that I can do a lot more than that in a few hours' work, but there are other times when it's probably less. But yeah, I think, I mean, if you think about it, if you turned up most days for a year and wrote 500 words, that's a huge amount of output. So you'd have a book, though, in half a year if you did only 500 words a day, which is pretty like cool. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

How did the success of 4,000 weeks impact your writing process for this new book? Definitely freaked me out. Elizabeth Gilbert writes very, very eloquently about basically writing a whole book and having to throw it away because she was writing for the millions of people who'd read Keep Pray Love. And I had a smaller version of that going on here. Lots of us have this idea where if you do something, you have a success of some kind, that then becomes the minimum standard for the next thing. So you turn every sort of good thing in your life into a negative because it's like, oh, no,

now I've got to do it again. So I had to sort of work through that. And the free writing was a part of that, right? I didn't really do much of that for 4,000 weeks, but it really made a difference here. Is it true that you think we should only be working three to four hours a day? In terms of the situation, which we really find ourselves, that advice is that if you're in a kind of knowledge work job that involves a certain amount of deep focus or benefits from a certain amount of deep focus. It's probably a good idea not to try to do more than three or four hours of that deep focus in a day.

I don't mean that most people can then just pack up and go home. Even I can't do that, right? I've got emails, admin, bills to pay, all sorts of, you know, businessy things to do. but there's this pattern. If you look at the routines and rituals of all sorts of authors, artists, scholars, scientists, through history, you find again and again that when they have the freedom to choose, that's roughly the amount of time that they try to dedicate on a daily basis to the, we can't exactly replicate their lifestyle,

but sort of points you in the direction of being quite rigorous in trying to defend that time and make sure you're not interrupted during it and make sure you don't have 20 meetings scheduled during your best hours, but also not trying to be perfectionistic about scheduling your time and scheduling the whole day, right? It's this wonderful kind of middle way that says, yeah, I'm going to try and get three uninterrupted hours to really move the main thing forward. And then I'm going to accept that it's in the nature of life and work that the rest will all be serendipitous and interrupted and chaotic. And actually you sort of want it to be because there's a real benefit to that as well, right?

It's not actually a good thing to be in total control of your time. You cause chance things to not happen that might otherwise happen. So what that means for me, I will try very, very hard to make sure that I don't have scheduled meetings and stuff for the first sort of... four and a half hours of the day, of the working day, I won't then try to be very, very strict about exactly what I do in that time, but I'll make sure that I haven't committed to doing something else. And then almost always that turns into the time that I'm thinking about like doing the focus stuff, not always, but more often than not.

It's funny. I was listening to another writer on a podcast and she said that she'll sit down for her like three to four hour chunk of writing time and she'll faf about for like three hours and then she'll be like oh I have an hour left I gotta like bang something out and I was like I've never heard a more accurate description of my creative process yeah and I do think there is something funny about like you allow the time but like almost acknowledging that some of that time is going to be quote unquote wasted time is like freeing unto itself totally and that is absolutely true for me very often as well it almost takes like a while for my thoughts to just like unravel and also I sometimes think I need, I've trained myself into needing the pressure of the deadline,

getting closer and closer to actually bang something out, which is maybe not great. I'm in the similar situation. I have a very strong desire to be the kind of person who just very steadily works on things and always does a little bit every day and gradually over years just produces book after book on a very sort of calm schedule. this is how I believe that my friend fellow writer Cal Newport works, but I don't know, maybe if you really got it deep with a conversation with him, he would admit that he doesn't, I don't know.

What I end up doing in reality is being very influenced by pressures of deadlines. And I think that may just be some habit I'm never going to fully break from working in news media. But I also think a deadline is really helpful. I have a lot of friends who will say, like, their best writing advice is to arbitrarily put a deadline on yourself. I think that can be helpful with any type of big dream because we don't have deadlines on our dreams, but we have deadlines on our day-to-day lives. And I think that's often why we end up prioritizing the minutia and not moving the needle on the things that really matter to us. I think that's a really good point. Actually, when I think about it in a really sort of treat you as my therapist kind of way, what happened was my teens and as young adults, I was good at meeting. deadlines because on some level I was trying to please other people, right? And then in my earliest

days on the newspaper, that was definitely the case, right? I was, there was some weird psychology in my mind confusing editor with parent, you know, somewhere deep in the unconscious. And so I was good at deadlines because I was trying to sort of get the approval of these people. Then I went through a whole phase of like, no, screw it. I'm not doing that. I'm a grown up. I'm going to do things when I want to do them. And I feel like maybe now I'm finally entering into a third stage, which is like I am going to have deadlines, but most of them are going to be my deadline. You'd be parenting yourself? You know, I would rather not spend 10 years coming up with my next book. But how loving is that? I mean, I'm joking that you're re-parenting yourself, but you kind of are.

You're saying there's place for boundaries, there's place for gentle authority, gentle discipline, and there's also a place for being compassionate and giving myself room to do what I want to do and be who I want to be. Yeah, and there are real deadlines where I've agreed to do things by a certain time. But there's all the difference in the world between doing that in this kind of slightly strange, like leftover parent-child way versus saying like, you know, yeah, I'm a grown-up. I've made an agreement to do something with somebody else because it serves my purposes as well as theirs. I'd like to do this thing. I'd like this next book to be out in the world rather than sitting on the back burner for the next 10 years while I feel agonized about it. So it's like it's my priority as well. Going back to how we decide what we're prioritizing, let's ground it in like a real world situation.

Like you are a parent. You also want to write these books. You also, I assume, want to spend time doing other things that you love. like moment to moment, how do you decide which thing gets your time when different things are pulling at your time? I want to say something more useful than I just sort of just sort of try to vibe it, right? But the truth is that I've been, as I said before, like on a journey towards more of the, of the, the vibing of it. What helps me is I kind of have an evolving set of sort of governing principles for how I use my time, but that's very different. from, I think, what I would have done in a previous time, which would be, like, strict rules. So it's not any more, like, highly scheduled, set down at the beginning of the week and slot in the different things.

But it is sort of principles, like, I really want to focus on the writing that is at the core of what I do pretty much every day, at least a little bit. I think that's really helpful. It's really, I know from long experience, it's almost always best to try to do that first in the working day and not to convince myself that at 2.45 in the afternoon I'm suddenly going to slot into deep thought mode. But I don't want to rule that becomes so brittle that if I'm in a plane between two venues and I suddenly get an inspiration, you don't want to be like, oh no, I only do that between 8 o'clock and 10 o'clock in the morning. That would be self-defeating. And then, you know,

I do just find that family life creates rhythms that sometimes feel a bit constraining, but that are ultimately really good for me. So it's like, how do I decide what I'm doing at 3.30 when it's my term for school pickup? It's because it's school pickup. So I go and do school pickup, right? I mean, it's like, and then I hang out with my son for several hours, and I'm somewhat led by his interests and curiosities. I'm not saying that at 2 o'clock when I feel that moment approaching, I don't start to get antsy and wish that I had hours more to focus on work or something.

But ultimately, it's really good for me to be part of at least somewhat collective rhythms. It's interesting, though, I think that most of us have a general sense of what will make us feel good, what will make our life feel good at the end of the day when we're looking back at it. but like day to day we don't do those things. What's that about? It's anxiety-inducing to do the thing that you care about because maybe you're not confident that you can do it well. Maybe you're not confident you can do it in time for whatever deadline might be there.

Maybe it involves going to vulnerable parts of yourself and feeling things you don't want to. There's always something that is kind of a little bit risky about a lot of the things that we want to do. And the thing that when something is more comfortable to do instead, I think another way of saying that is it feels like, feels safer. Like you're still,

you know, still in the driver's seat of things. So I'm, that's the idea I'm always coming back to at the moment is that actually doing the things that matter counterintuitively requires a feeling of, yeah, like sort of jumping into your little kayak and being set adrift on the river rather than

role and carrying out the plan in a formal way. Boredom is a really interesting part of this, I think, ironically, because one of the reasons that we end up not doing things we on some other level want to be doing is because it feels boring when you're doing it. And it can get very boring to work on a piece of writing that's not working out.

or I think especially with much younger pre-verbal children, super cute as they are. It can be boring to spend long amounts of time as the sole caregiver of a kid, even though people don't always like to admit it. My theory is that what unifies all these experiences is that it's that you are not in control of how the time goes, right? Like, if you have to be with a, keeping an eye, a close eye on a two-year-old for four hours, because no one else is doing and two-year-olds can get into trouble if people aren't keeping a close eye on them. You've surrendered the ability to choose what to do with your time.

And in the same way, if you're like, no, I'm going to spend the next couple of hours working on this bit of writing, you've sort of deliberately giving up for the right in some way to go off and do 100 different things. And then I think one of the feelings that comes up is what we call boredom. But it's actually something rather sort of more dramatic and aggressive. I feel like I'm having a little bit of an aha moment. And I wonder if people listening to too, like, of, oh, that discomfort is almost a sign that I should lean into this. That helps us get over that hump and actually do the things that are going to matter in our lives at the end of the day. Yeah, I think so.

There are kind of different kinds of discomfort, right? And there's a whole long tradition of people teaching that there's a certain bad feeling that you might get, either a sort of really sort of serious one in the context of like a top. it relationship or something, or just a bad feeling that when a certain path is not for you, right? So it's not always like, if you feel bad, that means it's good. But there's these different kinds of badness, right? There's the kind that if you examine it is showing you that there's a red flag. And then there's the other kind which if you examine it, it's like, oh, no, this is the experience of growing. Like, this is how it, this is how it feels. There's that question

I've written about several times that James Hollis, the Jungian, great Jungian, psychotherapist and writer, recommends we ask, which is like, does this choice, does this option, does this path I'm on, enlarge me or diminish me? And I find that really powerful. There are kinds of difficulty that you can encounter in, say, an intimate relationship, right? Which fall into the category of, like, you need to get out of this relationship right away for your own safety or something or for your own like fulfillment at least. And then there are all the difficulties that you encounter in a close relationship, which is just like, that's called maturing

in the relationship with someone and expanding your capacities for things and learning to, like, love and cherish difference and the fact that you can never quite figure out what the hell makes other people tick and all the rest of it. Right. It's useful to just bear in mind that there are those two kinds of difficulty, but I agree with you that the sort of the good difficulty kind is a pretty good indicator that you're on the right track with something. When it comes to wellness, you're going to get the best results by focusing on the big needle movers. A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to optimize that last 1%, which creates a ton of stress and it actually doesn't help our health that much. At the top of the needle mover list,

sleep. And one of the best ways to optimize your sleep is to optimize your mattress, which is why I love avocado green mattress so much. First of all, this mattress is so comfortable. I have the one with the pillow top, which is medium firm, and it's just a dream. I miss it when I travel. It's better than even the fanciest hotel beds. Having a mattress that supports your joints and your body and feels good is going to help you get more sleep and better quality sleep. But then, on top of that, Avocado mattresses are made with certified organic cotton, wool, and latex, and they are made safe and greenguard gold certified. They're also Okotech certified, which is the gold standard. I look for it in any mattresses, sheets, or towels that I buy, which means the materials have been rigorously tested for harmful substances. You can actually look for the Okotech standard 100 label right on the product, and I love this part.

It includes a traceable certificate number and the name of the testing lab so you know exactly what you're getting. There are no toxic chemicals, there's no harmful off-gassing, it does not smell like it's going to kill you when you unbox it. This is what I mean. I'm not going to swap out all of my clothing, which is that top 1% of optimization. But by making sure that my mattress and my bedding are as good for me as possible, I literally reduce my exposure during a third of my life, which is a huge needle mover for a one-time swap. I will also note, and this is a me thing, but I sleep super hot and avocado's materials, are really breathable, and it makes me sweat the least of any mattress that I have slept on. And avocado is a certified B Corp and a 1% for the planet member, because caring for yourself and caring for the planet do not have to be separate things.

You can get up to 20% off organic mattresses and more by shopping Avocados Presidents Day Sale right now at avocadogreenmatress.com. That is avocadogreenmatress.com, no code needed. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has

genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes, every step, every workout, every muscle contraction, depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here is the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me. Starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more.

We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, Mitopure, does. It contains Erolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently.

Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondrial increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine. It's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithineA keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how

you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopure gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. I'm genuinely confused how master class gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest, this is like a use case I don't hear a lot of people talking about. I'll just watch it for entertainment when I want to do something that's far more interesting than scrolling. Christina Aguilera taught me to sing. Shan Boodrum's Art of Mastering, Art of Master's, Art of Master's, Art of Master's, it's,

10 out of 10. There's menopause classes with leading doctors. There's script writing with Mindy Kaly. Literally, you name it, they're on masterclass, and it is such a good way to get off your phone, but have something that's like not quite as long or hard to get into as a TV show or a movie and that it just keeps you entertained and interested. And you are learning. There are over 200 classes from the world's best, all for just $10 a month when billed annually. And you get unlimited access to every class on the platform so you can learn at your own pace whenever you want on your phone, your computer, or even in audio mode like a podcast. If you're looking to stop scrolling and start consuming entertaining content that makes you feel.

excited and helps you learn, Masterclass is it. And the best part, every membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can start learning risk-free. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. The other advice that I loved in your book for people who maybe have a big dream that they're preventing themselves from going after, they have a goal that they haven't been able to get started on. It's in French. I'm not going to say the French,

but it translates to the idea of like it's just people, right? I think it's Quebec-Cois. So I think actually if there are any like French, French, it's Canadian French. For our Quebec-Cua washers, they'll be so happy. It's Sifet par d'amonde. People did that. Just regular people did that. And this was just, I came across this originally just in a posting to an internet forum by an anonymous person who I made some effort to track down but failed.

And it was attributed to the poster's grandmother. A sort of wise thing that she said whenever somebody expressed sort of awe or admiration at, I don't know, how someone had, like, at an artist or a novelist or someone like an amazing invention or something like that. Like, every single thing you see in the world, except the natural environment, was done by someone who was just as fundamentally limited and flawed and subject to mortality and all the rest of it as you. And that's a very good reason to assume that, or to work on the assumption, let's say, that things you wonder. if you might be capable of, you may well be capable of. It's not an argument for saying that, like, you know, I can decide tomorrow to ever become a pro tennis player or something, right? This is not going to happen.

But when it comes to like, well, how dare I think I could write a book? How dare I think I could start a successful business? Start a religion. The example. The example I give. Yeah, I'm sort of, that's a funny example of the Scientology example, I do not seek to praise that organization. But point being, like, yes, if L. Ron Hubbard can do that with a religion,

you can probably have a good shot at writing a novel or starting a non-profit or making a difference to your community or, you know, whatever the thing is that you doubt you've got the ability to do because all of it was just done by people. You have a kid. Have you read the book? Everybody Poops. I'm not sure that one. There are a heck of a lot. There are so many books. about poop these days for kids, but I don't know if I actually ever did read that one. It's like a picture bug, and the point is like you go through all the animals, but but sometimes

I think about it in the context of like, it's just people of like Obama like wakes up and goes to the bathroom. Right, right. No, exactly. It's like these people that I revere are just normal people who have to like brush their teeth and have bites with their wives. No, totally. And I think one aspect of that that I think about a lot that we're, that we're.

all subject to is how the most powerful people in the world today don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, you know? And we spend our lives kind of worrying like, oh, I've got my ducks in a row for whatever happens in the future. And obviously in certain ways, you know, presidents and prime ministers have like personal doctors and all sorts of things. So if something happens to them, they've got a good chance of getting the right care, whatever it is. But basically the future is just equally unknown to the richest or most powerful people in the world as it is to anybody else. And I always think that's a really interesting.

Which is why you should also doubt when people come and try to like say with authority, they know what the future is because they're mostly just using that to like, I don't know, manipulate you in different ways. Right, right. It usually means like this is what I have an interest. in their future. It's happening a lot like with the AI conversation these days. There's a lot of people who are like, it's the end of the world or this is the greatest thing. And like we honestly don't know how AI is going to shake out in 10 years, 20 years. We had no idea that we were

going to be here technologically 10 years, 20 years ago. Absolutely. And so anybody who's saying with any kind of authority either way is just like that they don't know. We're all guessing. We're some of us are making more educated predictions than others. And I do think there's power to informing ourselves, but we are all guessing. Oh no, totally. And I think very often it's like an anxiety management technique as well, right? We don't know what AI is going to do to the world of work, right? And so one way to feel better about that, ironically, is to decide to commit to the idea that it's going to 100% eradicate all jobs. It's going to be absolutely transformative in every single respect.

As a certainty. Right. You've gone as far as you can and you've found the ground and it's certainty. And it's people really, really hate the fact that that, that, you know, the truth is we don't know, right? It reminds me of that argument. There's some research to suggest, I think, that one of the great appeals of conspiracy theories is that people would rather believe that the world is being controlled by secret cabal for nefarious ends than face the fact that nobody's fully in charge and we don't know what's happening. It's like you'd rather have the sinister shadowy forces. At least there was some order to it. It might be like,

like awful, but at least there'd be some order. And it's a defense mechanism against just accepting that it's a lot more random and unpredictable than that. But if you're listening, the person that you have on the highest pedestal is just people. And they, you're just people too. We're all just people. I love that. Okay, so why are the things that we think are the cringiest pointing us to the work that we need to do? One version of this is like, I've called it like the awkwardness principle. You have so many things that I'm just like, he's British. Like, these are, they're so groundedly British. Yes, yes, thank you.

I'm just sort of like trying to inject some Britishness into the personal development space. As I said before, I do think that when I, when a person finds something, uh, cringe inducing, it's very often clear that the reason it's cringe inducing is because it's kind of touched something. vulnerable in them and that cringe is like a defense mechanism against it and I think we all know right the certain kind of cynicism or irony as a way of being in the world is a kind of way of not having to let yourself take things seriously and then maybe get hurt or experience emotions that are distressing so yeah in the example of like self-compassion I'm like like yeah maybe that's telling you something that that sort of

you have that reaction to the idea, because maybe that's something that you need. A related point that I have sometimes called the awkwardness principle, change that's working for you, that is good for you and that you need in your life, is going to feel awkward, right? It's going to feel not like there's something that doesn't quite fit. Like putting on a piece of clothing that's slightly the wrong size or something, right? It's going to feel like strange. just because by definition, right?

Everything in your life up to now has been helping you be conditioned to be how you are now. You're trying to be something different. So these are sort of slightly different points, aren't they? Right. One is like something strikes you as really embarrassing. That's a very interesting sign that is worth introspecting about. And then secondly, when you embark on some process of change and it sort of just doesn't feel right. like that also can be a sign that it's that it's working right everything feels completely comfortable

and straightforward then maybe you've just found a way to do the same thing as always i think there's that distinction between the kind of awkwardness that is associated with growth and change and the kind of awkwardness that is not really awkwardness but it's like oh i've got a really bad feeling about this that's an intuition and that is based on thousands of years of evolution of your subconscious and its ability to detect signals in the environment. So there's these two different kinds of negative feeling, the kind that means there's something to steer clear of, and the kind that is like, oh, yeah,

it's actually going to feel like this to change in a positive direction. The thing that irks me is I feel like there's this in-group of thinking other things are cringe. Like, it's like, if I want to be part of the people online who are hating on something, then I'm in this in-group. Yeah. Find it distressing. And I'm like, has this gone up? Has hating on things gone up because of social media?

Because of clickbait news, et cetera. Do you think that finding things cringy has risen as that's become like the cool in-group thing to do? I mean, I bet it has because that sort of in-group out-group dynamic is just out-of-control these days. And I think that like, cringe is a sort of semi-respectable way to dis and out-group. An awful lot of our politics, I mean, is this based on this idea that like the reason that people choose who to vote for, as one strong example, is very often not because they think that is the right way for society to go, because they want the right people to be pissed off by it, right?

It's like a lot of, it's like negative partisanship, I think it's cool. we do a lot of things, or we have a tendency and a temptation to do a lot of things primarily to wind up the people we consider to be the outgroup to us. The sort of idea of finding that cringe is a part of that as well. It's like you want the people that you think are wrong or think are pursuing a lifestyle choice that you dislike to feel like they're doing something terribly embarrassing. I do want to talk about the news. I thought it was really interesting that you cited 2016 as a time when our relationship to the news fundamentally changed. In my bubble, right? Yeah, totally. That's when you said that you saw that people started living inside the news is what you said in a different way. Can you explain what you meant by that?

I think there are various different reasons why it was then, but also it's like, you know, if you're, it was, it was the 2016 U.S. presidential election and it was the Brexit referendum. in the UK. So these two sort of seismic events, which were certainly sort of exceptionally unexpected in like my circles. Anyway. And yeah, I noticed in myself, but more in some other people, this this tendency that I called living inside the news, which is to sort of shift your central gravity so that the news was the place that you sort of mentally lived. And then, like, the rest of your life was somewhere that you visited outside of it. Social media, I think, massively encouraged this shift because it really makes you feel like you're a participant in the news. Even just, you know, liking things, sharing things, even just scrolling to refresh, right?

It's like an action that you're taking. And you feel like simply having the information is action. and if you're turning a blind eye to that information, then you're not being the type of citizen that maybe you want to be. Right, right, right. So, yeah, we have this sort of hangover notion that good citizenship means pushing yourself to pay a bit more attention to the wider world than you naturally would.

And I say hangover because I think that comes from a time when that was true. But the attention economy, the way we live with new media now, it is not the case that you need to try in order to have your own. attention grabbed by things. Like the whole system is set up to grab as much of your attention as possible. What you actually have to try to do, I argue in the book anyway, is to be willing to and to learn how to withdraw your attention sometimes, which for people who feel like they want to be good citizens feels almost like bad somehow, right? Yeah, I think people would say like there's people suffering over here. Who are you in your comfortable house? Eating your cereal to turn a blind

eye to their stuff? Like the bare minimum you could do is... bear witness. Right. And, you know, I don't think that there's no validity in that position, but I do think that overwhelmingly the balance needs to go in the other direction, right? We're so used to the idea that giving attention is intrinsically the right thing to do, and that withdrawing attention is somehow an indulgent thing to do. But as I say, actually in this world where your attention is exactly the thing that every form of digital media at once. Even like really reputable, honorable news organizations are just obliged because of the environment in which they operate to do anything they can to grab your attention. And even to exaggerate things, which is a hard thing to say, because I'm not talking about disinformation, misinformation, I'm talking about good organizations reporting on absolutely real crises.

if they were ever to say, well, this is maybe the third most important thing happening today or something, it would be a direct contradiction of what they need to do to survive as businesses. So I just think it's not an argument for shutting yourself away in a room, and if you've got a relatively privileged life, just getting on with it and pretending that so the suffering doesn't exist. It's an argument for saying, number one, is the form of attention that I'm paying, helping in some concrete, way. And number two, what about sort of picking my battles, right? You pick your cause or two and that really sort of speak to your heart and you make those things where you want to try to have

at least some concrete effect instead of this notion that you're going to sort of spread your attention and your compassion equally around all the world suffering. Because apart from anything else, you know, we just learn about far more things than anyone in a pre-digital era. ever would have done. And just to remember, yeah, like if you spend one hour of your week actively, concretely, like making a small but real difference to a particular issue in your community, if you can do it, make a financial contribution to people who are doing that work. And then you spend the whole of the rest of the week just like doing whatever you want. ultimately that's more effective than spending all-day doom-scrolling and feeling like the emoting

itself is helpful. Like I say, I think there's a role for bearing witness, there's a role for just knowing how awful life is for a lot of people around the world. But we're so far in that direction, like anyone who cares at all about the wider world, is so prone now to just smear their attention and their compassion. It's paralyzing. To your point, I think it actually gets in the way of us taking action in a way that not only alleviates our anxiety,

but actually makes a difference. Yeah, totally. Related to this idea, just recently I've found very powerful, it's maybe a bit less about kind of fighting for the kind of world you want to see or advocating for the kind of world you want to see and a bit more about just sort of being an instance of it. I mean, maybe this is be the change you want to see in the world, right? It's Gandhi.

I don't know where this came from, but it might have been Gandhi. Certainly didn't just come to me. But like, don't forget while you're thinking about ways to be involved in very long-term global scale campaigns and movements. Like, don't forget that, like, the moment you just look somebody else in the eyes and have a real connection with a human being or seek out the checkout that has a human at it instead of just interacting with another machine. Like you are actually building the web of a real functioning human society just in that moment. You just are it in that moment, whether or not the arc of history is going in the right direction long term. I love that.

I think that's like a really beautiful, hopeful, empowering thought. And it is notable that when your head is down and you're scrolling through your phone, you're not only creating a state of anxiety that makes you less prone to, do that, but you're like literally taking the moment that you could be connecting with another person and showing up for another person away. Yeah. You stay all, spend all day doom scrolling. Not only is it unhelpful, but that's time you could have been using to just be part of a compassionate, decent human world. How do you engage with the news? Like, what do you read? Do you have times that you read it? Do you try to get a diverse amount of perspectives?

Definitely a work in progress, but I try fairly hard not to engage at all until I've done my bit of deep-focused writing for the day. I'm much less consuming news on social media than I was a few years ago. It's still online, but it's online through a couple of outlets that I trust and that I'm, you know, if it says that the piece was written by this person, I trust that's a real person and not a AI generated. The difference between that too is you're seeking it out. So I always say, even if you prefer social media news, don't let it come to you in your feed, go seek it out so that you're choosing when you engage. Yep.

No, definitely. I got to say, this is almost embarrassing to admit, but like, we subscribe for my son to a magazine that exists in the UK. You get like a kid's news? Well, it's not my only source of news. I want to be clear, the week junior. No, I love the week junior. I'm constantly amazed at what a good job they do because actually I'm reading the New York Times and the Guardian and places enough to not. No, that they're not completely censoring it.

They're not saying that what's happening in the Middle East or what's happening in Ukraine or somewhere is so awful that we're not even going to tell kids about it. What they're doing is they're giving the outline. They are, you know, and they're not falling prey to some of those attentional dynamics. They're like sensationalizing it. Right, right. And you can be rest assured that if any breaking news has happened with dinosaurs, it will be reported. And that's important. I just want to be clear, I'm not advocating.

Zach and I, my husband and I were house sitting, and it was a house that had like a nine-year-old kid, and they got the week junior. Is the week or weekly or it's the week, I think, right? Yeah, the week is the grown-up version, which is also a very good thing. The week junior. And I loved it.

I, like, really enjoyed reading it. I felt like I learned a lot. It was very digestible. I think that's, like, actually a hot tip. Yeah, and then the other thing is just like a person could stop reading any form of, breaking daily news and it's simply not the case that you're not going to hear about the most important developments like you don't need to worry that you're being a totally irresponsible citizen

who's not going to realize when really big news events have happened because you you will hear and are you getting new information to just be hit over the head with it day after day after day which i think is a nice litmus test like is there new information here that i'm actioning differently or am I just sort of firehosing myself because I believe I don't deserve to have peace and happiness in my life. And I think, yeah, and that point you made about, I sort of underline it, that point about proactively seeking, pulling the news rather than having push notifications come to your phone or whatever. And then just a very boring technical point when it comes to online stuff, I try very hard to whatever extent possible to migrate it all off phone to a desktop because that's a place I,

go again in the same spirit like I go over to it and sit down and do something at it and uh gen Xer that I am it feels like the early days of uh technology when it was like over there it's in that room let's go and use the computer computer room and then stop I had one growing up okay the last thing that I want to touch on just in the interest of what do we want our lives to look like and what are the forces getting in the way of that and there's a concept in your book of a life task I would love for you to explain that so this is an idea that I'm sort of adapting from Carl Jung, if I'm honest. He talks about this idea that there are tasks that our lives have for us. So as opposed to like, what do I want to get out of my life? It's more like,

what is life demanding of me? I think that idea in Jungian psychology is very much about like one or two tasks for a whole life. And I'm kind of experimenting with the idea that it might be a much more sort of immediate moment to moment thing. But the unifying point is this sort of reframe where instead of trying to figure out what you want your life to look like or taking your situation and saying like, how can I fit it into this conceptual box that I have about what life should be? But at least sometimes a way of sort of figuring out what to do next is to say, well, okay, what is this place that I'm in now and what is it asking of me?

What does reality need from me? What's my job? There's a Zen teacher called Danin Katergiri who said, like, the question is, what is mine to take care of in this moment? And I'm not necessarily saying, like, this is the only way to navigate life, but I find for like getting unstuck, it's a really useful. thing because you can really get bogged down in like, well, this make me happy, what this make me happy? Or like, should I be doing this? I might have I got their skills to do that? And you get paralyzed, whereas there's always an answer to the question of like, what is life asking of you right now? And something about that phrasing also avoids you falling into just asking like, well,

what do other people want me to do right now? It might be that life is asking you to fulfill obligations towards your children or your family, right? But it might be that life is asking you to prioritize your own interests and ambitions. Again, it's intuitive, it's hunch-based, and I'm still feeling my way with this whole intuitive way of doing things, because I'm historically, I'm a overly left-brained person who wants to work it all out in schedules and timetables, but I find this to be a useful bridge into that. You leave us with just one homework assignment, something that anybody can do as soon as they turn off this podcast to begin to apply some of these philosophies and principles to their life. So I can, but I think it's slightly a rejection of your question, right?

Because in a way, I want to say, like, there isn't a rule, there isn't a system. This is not the point. But the one thing is to spend 10 minutes doing one of the things that you know you want to be a part of your life and that you don't give enough time to, right? A creative pursuit, a relationship you want to be nurturing and experience being in nature going outside. It could be like there is a list of these things that you have in your mind if or you can if you think about them and don't try and pick the best one because that's perfectionistic thinking again and gets you into another rabbit hole. But like that to me is the challenge.

It's like once you've done this off and go into the next moment of your life, like can you actually do that thing? not create a whole new system for how you're going to do it every day, not go and buy the equipment that you need or do the research for how to do, but can you actually do a little bit of it? You might do it badly if it's like you've been wanting to start a meditation practice. Like don't go and read up on more methods of how to do it, or don't like timetable it in for the next month.

Just like, can you allow yourself and you let go enough for the action to happen? Or, yeah, if it's like a friend, you want to be in touch with, don't say, as I would have done a few years ago, you know, okay, I'm now going to reach out to a friend three times a week. No, just once and actually do it. Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your brilliant new book? That's kind of you to describe it that way. It's called Meditations for Mortals, and the subtitle is four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. I guess in a way it's meant to be a course.

It's 28 very short chapters divided up into four weeks. And the idea, the invitation is that you might read one of those short chapters every day for a month. A lot of the book is about not being a control freak, so I can't really start trying to force people to do that because then I'd be being a control freak. But the idea is that each one of them in a different way embodies a little bit of this shift in perspective from control to trust. in reality and to sort of embracing the reality of our limitations. And I have found in my life that that is a much more effective way for change to really happen. It's not some big system that you have to have lots of spare time to put into practice. You don't have to get all your emails answered out the way before you embark on this new thing.

It's just like just a couple of minutes with morning coffee and then maybe that makes some small shift in how you live through the next 24 hours. Yeah, I loved it. I didn't do it over four weeks. But I thought, I stretched it over what I would normally do for podcast prep is like do it really quick. And I did try to stretch it to experience it that way. And I really loved it. And I will also say for anybody else listening who was like meditations, it's like meditation, like meditation, like thoughts, like essays and things to think about. Yeah, things to ponder. It's not sitting down on a cushion meditation. I was scared of that.

Yeah. No, that has been a little bit of a confusion. But anyway, something to ponder. but also to be a tiny little bit changed by. Yeah. I felt changed by your book. I absolutely loved it. And I loved this conversation as well. So thank you, Oliver. Me too.

Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, go ahead and follow on Apple or Spotify or subscribe on YouTube and hit that notification bell so you never miss a new episode. And if there's somebody in your life you think would benefit from this episode, send them a quick link. It is the best way to support the podcast. and it is so, so appreciated. And if you're watching this, drop me a comment. I would love to hear your thoughts

and what resonated most with you. Thanks again for being here. I feel so lucky that I get to grow and learn and share with you, and I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician,

a psychotherapist or any other qualified professional.