The Liz Moody Podcast - What To Do When Things Feel Hopeless: Politics, Climate Change, Chronic Illness, & More With Susan David, Ph.D.

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

I’m excited to welcome Susan David, Ph.D. to the podcast. Susan is one of the world’s leading management thinkers, award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist, host of the podcast Checking In with Susan David, and author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. Her TED Talk on emotional agility has been seen by more than 10 million people, making it one of the most popular talks of the year, and she frequently contributes to publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. On this episode, we talk about:  a simple exercise to help when you feel stuck in a difficult emotion or experience  a surprising way toxic positivity manifests (and how to avoid it) how to become emotionally resilient in the face of things that aren’t in your control (like a pandemic, politics, climate change, chronic illnesses, etc.) how to identify what YOUR values actually are (versus your parents’ or society’s values)  how to make your life more aligned with your values why emotions like anger, loneliness, grief, and sadness can actually be beneficial  research-based practices for navigating grief  the first step to take if you’re feeling lonely  a practice everyone can do today to become more courageous  what to do if you feel like your dream life isn’t available to you and so much more! We would LOVE to hear from you any thoughts, reactions, or takeaways you have as you’re listening, so definitely screenshot and tag me @lizmoody and Susan @susandavid_phd on Instagram.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. This episode is sponsored by Seed. You can get 15% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01™ Daily Synbiotic by going to https://seed.com/daily-synbiotic and using the code LIZMOODY.  This episode is sponsored by Paleovalley. Head over to paleovalley.com and use the code LIZM for 15% off. This episode is sponsored by MUD/WTR. Go to mudwtr.com/lizm and use code LIZM for 15% off your order. This episode is sponsored by Ava Jane’s Kitchen Colima Sea Salt. Go to HealthierTogetherSalt.com to get your first bag of Colima Sea Salt for free.  Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the healthier together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning how to hack our genes to increase our lifespans, moving through childhood trauma, or finally taking control of our finances. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. I had the idea of doing a what-to-do when things feel hopeless podcast after one of the shootings this year.

It's crazy, honestly, to say one of the shootings this year. But here we are. It just felt like we had this barrage of awful things one after another for months for years, really. And I was like, well, what am I supposed to do with these emotions? How do I handle feeling all of this pain all in a row? What do I do if I don't actually have the power to make the changes that will make me feel better? Like when we're talking about things like politics or climate change or a global pandemic, I was looking for a guest for this episode for such a long time, and I finally found her. I can't think of a better person to tackle all of these questions than Dr. Susan David. Dr. David is an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist and the author of the number one Wall Street Journal

bestseller, Emotional Agility, Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. Her TED Talk on Emotional Agility has been viewed more than 10 million times, making it one of the most popular talks of the year, and she frequently contributes to publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. In this episode, we talk about a simple exercise to help when you feel stuck in a difficult emotion or experience, a surprising way toxic positivity manifests and how to avoid it, how to become emotionally resilient in the face of things that aren't in your control like a pandemic, politics, climate change, chronic illnesses, all of these types of things. How to identify what your values actually are versus your parents' values or

society's values? How to make your life more aligned with your values? Why emotions like anger, loneliness, grief and sadness can actually be beneficial. Research-based practices for navigating grief. The first step to take if you're feeling lonely. A practice that everyone can do today to become more courageous. What to do if you feel like your dream life isn't available to you and so much more. Dr. David and I would both love to hear your thoughts as you're listening and I'm so interested to hear what topics stick with you and if they help. So definitely share and tag us both on Instagram. I am at Liz Moody and she's at Susan David underscore PhD. If something in this episode really resonates with you or sounds like it could be helpful for someone you love,

please share it with them so they can hear Dr. David's incredible wisdom. I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those episodes that I'm going to be coming back to again and again during election season when the news is filled with awful headlines. I mean, hopefully, hopefully we won't need it that much, but at least it's here for us when we do. Thank you so much for continuing to share and grow the healthier together podcast and our amazing community. The growth of the show is literally what allows me to be like, I want to do an episode about this subject. And then I think of my absolute top pick guest for it like I did here with Susan David. And I can actually get that guest on the show. So it's very helpful.

and it's very appreciated. Okay, are you ready for some actionable hope? Let's get right into it with Dr. Susan David. Susan, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I am so excited to chat with you. I'm so much to get into. I really want to change how we're thinking about all these things. I feel like a lot of your work is very paradigm shifting.

Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you today. And yeah, I think a lot of my work has been really pushing against narratives that I came into contact with myself. and then went and explored them in my research. I know. I love that. You have a very personal story for how you got into this work.

Do you want to kind of quickly share that? I think for all of us, our stories begin not in our certifications and our degrees. Our stories begin in our story. And for me, my story really starts growing up in South Africa. And I was a white child growing up in the white suburbs of apartheid South Africa. And just to give you some context, it would not be foreign, for example, for someone to come and work in one's house in the white suburbs as a domestic worker who would simultaneously be raising the children in that house, feeding them and loving them and looking after them, while at the same time, possibly even having a newborn child who lived hundreds of miles of. away where apartheid legislation basically forbade that person from bringing their child into that suburb. And so if we get down into context, the kind of example you might have is someone living

in an environment raising someone else's children and literally expressing milk and flushing it down the toilet because that person's own child is someone that one sees once or twice a year. So from a very early age, I was growing up in this environment and I became interested in really, I think, notions of seeing versus unseeing. I didn't have the language at the time. When do we see people? When do we unsee people? How do we see ourselves?

So that's the first piece of context. The second is when I was around 15 years old, my father who had been this just gorge, warm-hearted, beautiful, beautiful person in my life was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I recall as a young child, a 15-year-old, my mother coming to me and saying to me that I needed to go and say goodbye to my father because we'd brought him home to die. And I remember being this little girl treading the passage. I remember to this day, this green carpet, you know, 70s, 80s, rug, this green carpet walking through this passage, opening the door, walking into my father's

room. My father's eyes are closed. He indeed dies that day. And yet I just have this palpable sense that he knows that I'm there, that he sees me even though his eyes are closed. And this experience, Liz, that was the opposite of what was going on in the broader society, which is feeling scene and what that meant to me. And so I think a core piece of my work is really in the threading of psychologically, what does it take to see ourselves? What does it take to see others? Because I believe that only when we are able to see ourselves, are we truly able to see

others too. Immediately, I'm like, would I be strong enough to see my dad in that moment? It feels like it requires sometimes a level of strength that feels really, really difficult to access, especially when it feels like there's so many traumatic things going on that demand you bearing witness to them. Yes. And I think that bearing witness is beautiful. It's a very evocative way to describe But often, even in the context that we're in right now, there's a lot of discussion about burnout and resilience and well-being. And I think what often happens is it feels like resilience becomes some kind of goal. You check resilience off your to-do list because now you've done your 15 minutes of self-care today. And I think that I've reconstructed my sense of resilience, which is that resilience is, you know, we are not asked whether we want to be in a fragile world.

We are not given a choice as to whether we want life to be fragile. It just is. It just is. And so the experience that I had with my dad was a just is. It just was the reality that was in front of me. And then at the same time, there's a lot of crafting of narratives through social rules, rules about when you feel tough emotions, you've just got to be positive. It was remarkable to me that even during the pandemic, there was a lot of language that you would see in social media, which would be things like, if you didn't use your time in quarantine to dust of your screenplay or to perfect sourdough bread baking, it's because you lack the discipline.

And so there's so much narrative that almost turns us against ourselves or asks us, demands, conspires that we be at odds with seeing. And yet the paradox is that true resilience is threaded through being in a situation and not trying to race for the exits, but rather showing up to that situation and trying to learn and understand and bear witness to yourself. So how do we do that? I know you say in your TED talk that only dead people don't get inconvenienced by their feelings, but our feelings can feel insurmountable sometimes. I know sometimes I'm like, oh, I want to have the resilience to be in this hard time and to feel it and to still function,

but it can feel so overwhelming that it can be hard to actually get there. Do you have any pragmatic action steps to getting to where we want to be there? So the first thing is that it's useful to recognize that if you've grown up, for example, in a family that says, says, oh, we don't do anger here. Or when you come home from school and you are sad because you were rejected today, there's no space for your sadness. You know, you're here with wonderful intentions might jump in and try to help you bake cupcakes and brush off the sadness. And so what starts to happen is we start to have these display rules. And what a display rule is psychologically is it's

basically a kind of implicit rule that we have within our society or within our family that says, either all emotions are bad, you've just got to be logical, tough and hard-headed, or some emotions are bad. Anger is bad or sadness is bad, okay? So now when you experience these difficult emotions, which you will, because again, we live in a fragile world where life's beauty and fragility hold hands with each other. So when you feel the sadness, then what you now don't have is you don't have the practice to firstly navigate that sad. Or secondly, you might feel sad, but layer on judgment about the sadness. So you might say, I'm feeling sad, but I'm not a lot of feel sad.

Other people have got it worse off than me. So you can see we start getting into what I call, you know, type 1 and type 2 emotions. A type 1 emotion is where you feel the feeling, you feeling sad or grieving or angry. Type 2 is when we start layering on hustle. We start hustling with whether we can, can, can, should or shouldn't experience a difficulty motion, and we often don't have practice. So a very important part of my work has been to really push up against the notion that there are some emotions that are good and some emotions that are bad. And I know this has found its voice more popularly in some of my.

I work, this idea of like toxic positivity, but I would love to kind of actually be a little bit more nuanced, which is that toxic positivity is a very in your face. You've got to be positive all the time. But there are other ways that we can engage in more subtle forms of toxic positivity with ourselves. When we say something like, I shouldn't feel that feeling, I'm unhappy in my job, but at least I've got a job, where we rationalize or we push aside our difficulty motions in the service of goals, or something forced or false. And so when you're talking practically, one of the very first ways that we begin to develop our emotional agility

is by recognizing that all of our emotions, every single emotional experience that we have had and will ever have in our lives, that every emotion, it might not feel good, but that our emotions are actually part of our evolutionary adaptive system, that when you feel a difficult emotion, for example, you miserable in a relationship, that emotion is often signposting to you, gee, it doesn't feel comfortable feeling this emotion, but it's signposting that there's a value that's being threatened, a need that's unmet,

or something else that's important to you that becomes really critical. So a very important first part of emotional agility is what I call in my work gentle acceptance. And really what I mean by gentle acceptance, it's not passive resignation. It's not, oh my goodness, I feel what I feel and this is terrible and there's nothing I can do about it. It's rather gentle acceptance because it is hard to human. It's hard to human. And so gentle acceptance is facing into yourself with compassion and love and light and a willingness

to bear witness to yourself even if I'm not. others won't. So what does that look like on a day-to-day basis? Like, am I taking a day to, like, sit on the couch and cry? Definitely not. Well, I mean, you can if you like, but in the same ways I spoke about bottling difficulty motions, pushing them aside in the service of forced positivity. The opposite of that is what we call brooding on difficulty emotions. Brooding is when one gets stuck in the difficulty motions. You say, I feel sad. The sadness is always. encompassing. That's all there is. There's no space for anything else. And when you brood on or get stuck in your difficulty motions, you are also in a way unseeing because you aren't connecting

with other parts of yourself that are just as beautiful and precious. We all have wisdom and we've got intentions, we've got our values, we've got our choice, we've got who we want to be in the world. and when we get stuck in our difficulty emotion, we aren't giving voice to the others. And it's the way that I imagine this metaphor looking, and then I'll talk about what that looks like practically, is it's almost like when we bottle emotions, imagine you are holding some books of these difficult experiences and you're holding them so tightly away from you at such an arm's length that after a while your arms get tired and your heart gets It's weary and you aren't able to engage beautifully in your relationships or with others because

you're investing so much energy on holding those books aside and then one day you will drop them. And we know this to be true. When we bottle our difficulty emotions, there's often what is called an amplification effect. The emotions don't go away. They just come back stronger, but it impacts on your relationships. And then the opposite of that, which is brooding, it's almost like you're holding those book so tightly that you aren't able to see the love in your child's eyes. You aren't able to be

present with your loved one because you're so consumed by this emotional experience. So what this looks like is on a day-to-day basis is emotions come and go, stories come and go. A story might be what's the point of my career or what is my purpose or I'm unworthy or what? we might have thoughts. Thoughts might be like, gee, I can't stand this change in the organization. There's no point in trying. So every day we have literally thousands of thoughts, emotions, and stories. And we don't want to get too invested in them, but sometimes what happens is we do get stuck by one of them. We feel undermined in a meeting, so we shut down or we stressed and we block people out. And so a really important way to be with our difficulty emotions is with a gentle noticing.

I'm noticing that I'm feeling really depleted. I'm noticing my grief. I'm noticing my sadness, my loneliness. When we notice our inner world with a level of compassion and with gentleness, you no longer are in the type 2 emotion where you're fighting against your emotional experience, and you're just able to be with it. And when you are able to be with your emotional experience, what it does automatically in us, in our children, in the people we love, when we see them, it defangs that emotional experience automatically. There are of course other aspects of this that are practical, that lead on from

showing up to difficulty emotions, but this is a very important start. And I noticed that the specific words you chose there are important, I think, to not veering into the overbrooding, right? Like you didn't say, I am sad. You said, I am noticing that I'm feeling sadness. I know that that's something really important you talk about in your work. Yes. So if we think about the language that we use to describe our difficult experiences, the most common way we do this, especially in the English language is like this. we say, I am. I am sad. I am angry. I'm being undermined. Now, if we think about that language,

it sounds so normative. But when we say, I am, what you are saying linguistically is I am all of me. I am defined. All of me, 100% of me, is defined by this difficult emotion. Instead, when we notice our difficult thoughts, emotions, stories for what they are. They are beautiful. They are part of us, but they are onto all of us. And when we notice them for what they are, which is thoughts, emotions, and stories, we create critical space between us and that experience so that we can choose, empower ourselves with who we want to be in the moment.

So I am sad. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm not good enough. I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story. And again, this is very subtle, but language matters. And there's beautiful research that shows that the sense making that is created when we language about our difficult experiences in ways that are effective can actually be absolutely transformative in terms of. of the way we walk forward in the world. Do you ever think there's too much that we actually can't acknowledge it and sit with it and we need to push it away? I'm thinking about all the social media memes that have been going around that are like, if you're feeling like crap, it's okay. Humans aren't meant to deal with this ongoing pandemic and government crises and this barrage of bad news. You're literally not equipped to deal with that. Do you feel like that? Or do you feel like we're equipped to deal with anything if we handle it in the right way? I think there's profound bothness.

And what I mean by that is when I use this language of life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility, all of us in our hearts know that to be true. We all know that one day we'll look around an empty house and our children will have grown up and be gone. We know that one day we will lose our love. We know that. And so there is an essence of life that is contained in the wisdom of that knowledge and of holding that knowledge. And at the same time, the world has evolved in such a rapid way that it's quite possible that human, evolution in terms of our capacity has not evolved as quickly as we need in order to respond to it. And so this is actually why these kinds of emotional agility skills are, you know, often termed

the skills of the future. Someone said to me a little while ago, you know, I feel so tired. She was like, I think so many people are feeling tired. How do we just find the light at the end of the tunnel. How do we just go towards the light at the end of the tunnel? And I said to her, you know, I think that when we think there's a light at the end of the tunnel and we make getting to that light our focus, what happens is it's a little bit like having resilience as a check mark because health and wellness, mental health and wellness is not about racing to the light. it's actually about learning to see better in the dark. And what I mean here is that, well, there might not be another pandemic, but there may be,

but there's always going to be change and there's always going to be something else. And so I think that there is a real essence in recrafting the way we think about resilience, which is about this endpoint, it's about I'm going to do this and then I'm going to feel better. And it's actually about learning to see better in the dark. And how do we learn to see better in the dark? We learn to see better in the dark, firstly, by not racing for the light. By allowing ourselves to be in the dark, allowing our eyes to adjust, realizing that when you're in the dark, you can sometimes just sit down.

You can sit down in that dark tunnel and you can just take a breather. You can reach out with someone else's hand. you can face into the reality of the experience that I'm having now is that I am tired. And the reason that I say it's both end is because I think one of the most disempowering narratives we could possibly have is the narrative that says it's all about systems, it's all about everything external to me. and it sounds like it's great to have something to pin things onto. But if we think about how disempowering that is, what that basically says is, there is nothing I can do. There's no choice that I can make.

There's no way that I can be with myself that is going to change things because it's all about systems and processes and other people's expectations. And, Liz, the most disempowering narrative in the world is, when we say, it's all about me. It's only my choice. It's all up to me. I am make or break. And so I think it becomes really important for us to hold both, for us to hold bothness. Yes, there are systems, process, and expectations that feel just so tough. And as a human being, I can sometimes get stuck in a way of responding to that environment or a way of being with myself that sometimes unsees me and doesn't give voice to my values, my intentions, my choices,

and who I want to be in my life. Do you have any advice for those moments where let's say we're sitting there and we're like, I want to be able to say I am feeling sad or I am experienced sadness or I am experiencing a sensation of disempowerment or something like that. But really, we want to scream and cry and we can't get over that hump of the feeling of emotions to disentangle ourselves in that way. Do you have any advice for how we can kind of separate that? The mattress that you sleep on is one of the highest exposures that you have. Like, if it's off-gassing, you're breathing that in for basically a third of your life. And most conventional mattresses are

loaded with synthetic foams, flame retardants, microplastics, and more. Plus, if it's not comfy, you're going to be tossing and turning, you're going to be really hot. And sleep is the foundation of health. It is so important. Because of all of this, if I were not going to invest in any other part of my house, no other things in my house, I would invest in my mattress. And in fact, I have four years well before I had much money to spend on any of these things because it is such a big needle mover. The birch mattress is incredible. It is made with organic cotton, natural latex, and ethically sourced wool. So it has literally no off-gassing.

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hypoallergenic, which is really worth paying attention to if you find yourself waking up stuffy or congested. Dust mites in a conventional mattress can actually impact your breathing and your sleep quality without you even realizing it. And again, we need to be able to breathe to get good sleep and getting good sleep is the foundation of our health. And then comfort wise, Zach sleeps on his back and then I sleep on my side and my stomach. So we have two completely different sleep styles, and we both wake up feeling really good, no aches and pains. CNN actually named the Birch mattress,

the best mattress for side sleepers, and Wired named it the best organic mattress period. So there you go. Birch has options for every kind of sleeper in your household. They have three firmness layers. I like the Lux Natural, which is the medium one. And then parents, they even have a Birch Kids natural mattress. Birch ships right to your door. It sets up in minutes and it comes with 120 night risk-free trial.

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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 Marley Spoon.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 marlyspoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody. So remember to get the offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. So firstly, when we're sitting with sadness, when we're sitting with anger, often it shows up in a part of our bodies. And before we get very verbal, there's real power in just being with the part of our body that is feeling that experience. The second way we can be with ourselves in these strong emotions sitting in that

tunnel metaphorically is in the present right now and the feelings feel really big. And And as human beings, we are tactile. In the past couple of years, we've actually had much less physical touch with others and physical connection than we normally would. And I often say to people, when they're going on a Zoom call to have yet their, you know, 15th meeting of the day, one of the ways we can start grounding ourselves is literally, I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but to literally give yourself a hug. Because there is something so extraordinary in grounding yourself in your body.

When physicians are going to give bad news to a patient's family, we often ask them to remind themselves of their feet on the ground and just to hold themselves. So that's a way we can center. Breathing is I know something that you've spoken about previously in your conversations. There's so many compassion. Self compassion is so beautiful when we grant it to ourselves. And often people will say things like, I'm too busy. I don't have the luxury of self-compassion or there's a lot of view that self-compassion

is about being weak or lazy or lying to yourself. But I often think we've all seen this beautiful situation unfold. Imagine you go to a restaurant. and you see a caregiver or a parent at the restaurant with their little child. And the child's maybe 18 months old or two years old. And there's something so sweet that happens as you watch. And it's that the child gets off from his or her chair and runs away from the parent, runs to go and explore the restaurant.

And then something very wonderful happens. the child looks back, acknowledges notices, ah, my parents and caregivers are still there. And then what does the child do? The child with the knowledge that the parents or caregivers are still there runs forward, runs away even more. And so what is happening here? John Balby, the beautiful psychologist who did a lot of work in attachment theory, describes how it is the knowledge. It's the knowledge that the child has that if something goes wrong, someone will be here able to help me. It's that knowledge that allows the child to grow and explore and move forward in life and to discover and to learn. And so what the parent is doing in that situation is providing what is called a secure base.

It's the secure base that then propels the child forward into the world. And the way that I often think about self-compassion is self-compassion is the secure base that we have for ourselves. It's the, gee, I really stuffed up with this thing today. And you kind of hold yourself with compassion because, you knew that what you did on that day was maybe taking a risk or it was part of learning for yourself or stepping out. And so when we grant ourselves compassion, really what it's doing is performing the function of a secure base. It's that that then allows us to move forward in an uncertain world. I love that. We've talked a lot on this podcast about what to do if you don't

have that secure base from your childhood or things like that. But I also think something a lot of people are struggling with in the world right now is feeling like they've lost the secure base socially and politically. And I feel like people feel like that disruption caused by the pandemic and caused by various types of turmoil. You're like, oh, I don't know what's coming next. I don't feel safe here anymore. And I think the idea of being that secure base for yourself that you don't need the other things to be the secure base is so empowering. Liz, I think that's such a beautiful way of putting it. I think there's been an untethering or an unbecoming that has happened in so many ways.

And so for everyone listening right now, one beautiful exercise, if you're feeling stuck in a difficulty motion or stuck in a difficult experience is when we feel stuck, we very much in the immersion of that experience. It's very difficult to read the instructions when you are inside the bottle, when you inside the jar. One of the ways we can start just getting our footing again is firstly by every single person listening right now, there is a five-year-old.

There is literally a five-year-old inside of you. There is a five-year-old that's tapping you on the shoulder that's saying, see me, see me, see me. What is your five-year-old saying it needs? Is it saying it needs rest or spontaneity or to connect? What is that child meeting from you right now? And then every single one of us has a 15 or 20 plus years person inside of us. So if you 50, you might have a 75 year old inside of you. And that older version of yourself is also saying, see me, love me.

I need you to be brave. I need you to get some perspective here. You're 75-year-old. All of us, I think, have got these very wise people inside of ourselves. And psychologically, this is called continuity of the self. And it's basically this idea that when we feel stuck, when we feel untethered, we often are very immersed in the experience. But when we can bring other parts of ourselves, the child part, the older part,

we start connecting a little bit more in the child part, both with our feelings and our needs. And in the adult part, we start connecting a little bit more with our values. You know, this future orientation of how you spend your time, who you spend your time with, what would make the adult version of you proud. Yeah, let's talk about values for a second because you say knowing our values and living by our values is so important. and I found myself reflecting like, do I know my values? And how can I figure out what my values actually are? It's crucial.

Values are often spoken about in a very abstract way. It's like things that people put on business walls or on websites. Like I hang in there, kitten poster, yeah. Exactly. Knowing what your values are is truly remarkable in this context of tethering yourself, of grounding yourself. So I'll give you an example of what we know. we know that when people are going through a very difficult time, they are much more likely to become self-biased,

which is very interesting because often when we talk about biases, we think about biases as things that other people have about us. But there's really fascinating work that shows that when we are stressed, we are much more likely to take the stories that the world had about us and turn them again. against ourselves. So for example, imagine you are someone who has grown up in an environment where every single message has been, we don't do college. We're not college material. We don't do college. Okay. But imagine you are 16, 17, 18 and you study and you work so hard. And finally, the first person in your community, you go off to college. And then, because life's beauty, is inseparable from its fragility. One day you will fail a test or struggle with something or feel really overwhelmed or stressed in that college environment. At that point, 70% of those kids

are likely to take that bias of we don't do college here and turn it against themselves. So they are more likely to say things like, oh, they were right. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe this isn't me. Maybe I'm expecting too much from myself. You find the same when women enter very traditionally male-dominated professions. It's like, oh my goodness, maybe they were right all along. Now, if you take those kids and you ask them to do a very simple exercise to literally spend 10 minutes writing down what their values are, why they are studying, what they're studying, why this thing is important. to them who they want to be in the process of studying, and you get them to do this on their

entry into college. Those kids that spend 10 minutes grounding themselves in their values are protected three years down the track from dropping out of college. So if we think about this world, Liz, you spoke so eloquently about all the change, all the chaos. And When we feel so untethered, knowing who we are and what we stand for, connecting with our own heartbeat, is what actually protects us from so much of the anxiety that is going on in the world at large. Okay. So how do we do that? Because I picture the kid going into college sitting there and writing that and then being like,

oh shit, I actually am going to call it just because somebody told me to, like realizing it's not even their own value. I think that there's a dangerous thing there of like, what do I want for myself versus what is the world telling me I want versus what are my parents telling me that I should want? Yes. And values are often spoken about as if they're like fix things that exist in that way forever and over. But of course, your values change. Things that you might have wanted when you were 15, maybe different from when you were 25. And so part of emotional agility is firstly being open to this idea that as a human being, the world is changing and you are evolving and there's beauty and grace and dignity in that. It's also really important to be thoughtful about what are

some values that maybe your parents had for you, but that you don't hold. Sometimes people can feel really pushed into having children or buying a house. And then you do those things and you suddenly realize that you're living someone else's life. And a lot of parents will say that they've spent so many years tending to other people's needs that they've completely lost a sense of what their own values are. So it becomes really important. So some of the ways that we can start unfurling our values are firstly through our

difficulty motions. Our difficulty motions are not just gentle acceptance of difficulty emotions. just saying it because, gee, you know, that sounds like the kind of thing a psychologist should say. But when we look at our emotions from a scientific perspective, what we know is that our emotions are often signposting our values and our needs. So anger is often signposting, huh, a boundary has been crossed. This particular boundary has been crossed. Loneliness, the experience of loneliness is heartbreaking and common. And we can be lonely in a room full of people. We can be lonely living with someone 24-7. We can be lonely. So what is loneliness signposting?

Loneliness is often signposting that you need more intimacy and connection. Boredom, boredom in your job. You can be busy and bored at the same time. Bortem is signposting that you value learning and growth. You need more of it. So in an extraordinary way, these difficulty emotions aren't just things that we need to tolerate. If we just breathe into them for a moment, we start recognizing that our difficulty emotions are data. Our emotions are data that signpost our needs and our values. And when we show up to those difficulty motions, we're now on being driven by them. Rather, we are able to surface our wisdom and other parts of ourselves, our values that we can start moving towards. So that would look like feeling something

like anger or sadness or shame and then really taking a step back and being like, why do I feel this? What need is this expressing in me? And then that is perhaps a value that you have. Correct. Grief. You know, a lot of people are experiencing grief. And it's no surprise because we have been through a couple of years that is so bound in many ways by being in the shadow of illness and death. and there's a lot of grief that is unprocessed, either grief for an individual that is maybe with you no longer or a relationship or an experience that you feel you are lacking. I often think that grief is love looking for its home. When I experience these moments of, oh, I'm just sucked into grief.

instead of racing for the exits, that grief is often saying, see me, remember me, connect with those memories, connect with the things that I gave you. There's something really powerful in that. I think so too. And I think there's also something powerful in giving yourself permission to feel all of those types of grief. I think sometimes we're like, well, you know, if I didn't experience literal loss of life in this pandemic, I don't get to mourn the loss of I didn't. I didn't get to have my senior year of college or I didn't get to make friends in this new city or these huge life experiences that people have missed out on. Yes. And this is where again this type A or type B or type 1 or type 2, whichever way you want to phrase it comes in, which is grief is grief is grief.

Your grief is real. Your grief is you, your experience. There's no rulebook that says you are only allowed to experience this grief, but not that grief. And so when we connect with ourselves, we create the capacity for wholeness and circling back to this notion of resilience. What we do is we then become practiced with these difficult emotions. And we are now not only saying, oh, I'm only allowed to experience joy, or I'm only allowed to be positive. We're saying, I can experience all of it. And when you do that, you create more capacity in yourself. And again, it's this difference when you say I am, I am sad, I am angry.

It's almost like the sadness or the anger is a cloud. And you've become the cloud. But when you say, I'm noticing my thoughts, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad, I'm noticing that I'm grieving, what you start doing is, you start recognizing that you're not the cloud, you are actually the sky, that human beings are beautiful and capacious and wise enough to experience all of their difficult emotions and not be directed by any one of them. What do you do if you're being signposted to a value that's not available to you?

Like use loneliness as an example. Let's say our loneliness is telling us that we value human connection. but we don't feel like we can make friends. We don't feel like we're able to make the connections that matter to us. What do we do in that type of situation? I'll use loneliness as an example, but this applies in many different contexts. So loneliness, what we know is that often when people experience loneliness, they actually physically shut themselves off from connections.

So even though we're experiencing loneliness, there's this really interesting paradox where the person who's feeling lonely is much more likely to then be distant or not be vulnerable. There's actually a physical closing off. So a very powerful aspect of emotional agility. I often think emotional agility is firstly it's about curiosity. It's about what is this difficulty motion signposting. It's about compassion because it's hard to human. And it's also about courage.

it's not just about saying, oh, well, I'm accepting the difficulty motion. I feel lonely. Therefore, that's just the way it is. It's about the courage to move in the direction of your values towards what matters. And you mentioned earlier that sometimes I talk about dead people's goals and I use it in a kind of slightly facetious way because sometimes people say things like, I don't want to be hurt or I just never want my heartbroken, but you can have a long time when you know, no longer on the earth, and I have to remind myself this as well to never be hurt. I'm going to have a long time to never have a disappointment that something that I really wanted didn't come to fruition. You know, I'm going to have a long time to do it. And so emotional agility

asks us to move courageously, to move with courage in the direction of our values. Now, Does that mean if you lonely and you desperately want to get married and like you feel that's not available to me, does that mean it's an all or nothing? So the beautiful thing with courage is that people often talk about courage as if it's swash-buckling superhero. But courage is often a whisper. Courage is often a whisper that might be imperceptible to others, but it's often a whisper as you move. towards what matters to you. So courage, if you are trying to move towards the value of connection, courage might be reaching out to someone who you've lost touch with. Courage might be joining a book club. Courage is going to look different to different people. And it may not be that

end point that you are after, but you're moving in the direction of your values. And I think this is a really important aspect of values, which is values are not things that you achieve. It's not like if I say, well, I want to be a good parent that one day, you know, 27th of September, I get to say, I'm now a good parent. I don't need to do this thing again. When you say, what are my values? values is really about what do you want your life to be about, what matters to you. And so they are actually directions. They're not endpoints. They're directions. And if you can keep moving in that whisper towards that thing that matters to you, you are grounding yourself in what feels ultimately most fulfilling and is a core part of your need. Do you think that courage is also a muscle metaphorically?

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courage just needs to be this absolutely genomic step that you take all in one go is not truthful to the reality of what courageous experience looks like. So often courage is about doing one thing and then doing one thing again and doing one thing again and practicing that 1% or that 2%. And just in this special way, as you imagine, if you're sailing a boat and you change direction by just 1%, and then 1%, and then 1%, the boat lands up in a very different part of the shore, so it is with courage, so it is with our values. I think this idea that in order to connect with our values, we've got to sell up and go live on a wine farm in France or we've got to do these dramatic things. It's not truthful to what we know about change, which is that change is a process. It's not an event. Change is a process. It's not an event. Although the wine farm sounds nice.

Gorgeous. But if that kind of life is a. a value, like if it represents in some way something that is values connected, then starting to ask yourself, what are things about that representation that feel important to me? And how can I start crafting those in tiny tweaks here and now is beautiful? Yeah, maybe it's about being involved with nature, having a spaciousness to your day, the idea of calibrating our values based on both our negative emotions, but also based on our dreams. Yes. It's these hopes and desires and challenges that hold hands with one another as we walk through life.

I love that. That's beautiful. You also talk about the importance of specificity with labeling our emotions. So we've talked about a few times here, like instead of I am sad, I am noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm curious, though, because sad is. it's not a very specific word. Do you have any advice for how we can find those really specific words? And can you speak to why they're so important? I'm a writer and I still find myself saying stuff like,

I feel really stressed right now. But I don't really know what that means. It's just the first thing I can come to, you know? It's a fascinating area of research. When my father died, I talk about this in my TED talk. I had this English teacher who handed out these blank notebooks to the class. And as I was struggling, I had said goodbye to my father and my mother was grieving my dad. She was raising three children. We were in financial dire straits. And I started as a young girl, as so many young girls do, I started to binge and purge. I started to have bulimia. And it was almost like I was just unable to hold. I was unable to hold or to bear the weight. of my grief. And I was really struggling and I was spiraling. And one day, this English teacher

went in front of the class. And I remember it like it was yesterday. She went in front of the class and she handed out these blank notebooks. And she said to the class, but it was an invitation that felt like it was directed at me. She knew what I'd been going through. And she said, write, tell the truth, write like no one is reading. And it was so remarkable because what I felt invited to in that moment was this ability to do away with how I thought I should feel and instead start to engage with how I did feel and I started to write it down. And this literally shaped my career. It shaped my life. It shaped my career because what I started to realize is that all the people who were praising me for being strong and telling me to just be positive and now it was my job to be the parent that my brother didn't have, all of those forced positivity narratives were actually making me feel worse and worse.

And then this moment in my journal every day of writing, of showing up to. myself and of writing about my loss and my grief and my regret, I started to realize over time that that's what actually was helping me to feel stronger and better and give me insight. And so it shaped my career in two ways. Firstly, I became really interested in the power of language. So we know that if we take individuals who are going to... through a difficult experience, or even people who are facing a scary future experience. You've just been promoted or you're starting a new company.

And we get these people to write for 20 minutes a day for three days. What we find is that this writing exercise, this putting emotionally salient evocative words on paper, that what it does over time, if you look pre and then post the intervention, individuals who write for 20 minutes a day for three days, six months later, have higher levels of well-being, higher levels of goal attainment, better relationships. If they were writing about something really tough, like a job loss, they are more likely to have been rehired. So it's remarkable. And then when you start analyzing this writing, what are the markers of what is going on in this writing, what we find is that people aren't being a polliana, they're not just being positive,

they're not just getting stuck in brooding, but they're also starting to use more insight words. I don't like what happened, but I learned about myself, that experience taught me, so they're starting to use more insight words. So Liz, that's one way that we know specificity of language becomes really, really helpful. But another way, just on the fly, which I know is what you connecting with is very often we use big blanket phrases to describe what we're feeling. I'm stressed is the most common one. Sometimes people say I'm busy. But if you think about the world of difference between stress and disappointment,

stress and feeling unsupported, stress and that gnawing feeling of this relationship isn't working out. I'm in the wrong job. I'm in the wrong career. If you label everything as stress, your body and your psychology doesn't have the ability to sense make about that. As soon as you start getting more granular, you start saying, well, I'm calling this thing stressed, but what are two other options? As soon as you start saying, huh, unsupported, as people are listening, try this with an emotion that you have experienced recently, what you will find is pretty much automatically, your body and your psychology starts to say, huh, that's the cause of my emotion. This is what I need to do in response to the emotion. So it's actually starting to activate what's called

the readiness potential in our brains, the part of ourselves that starts to ready us for movement and for a pathway forward. So it becomes really critical. And this skill is called emotion, granularity. And sometimes the word superpower is overuse, but it is literally a superpower. Children who have greater levels of emotion granularity have high levels of mental health and well-being years later relative to those who don't. So it's really just feeling into it being like, I'm not just stressed. What are two other options? Let me figure that out now. And that'll turn on the problem-solving, almost action-making part of your brain. Yes. And then if you play this out, I had a colleague who used to describe everything as angry. That was his term.

He kept on saying, I'm just angry. I'm angry with the organization. I'm angry and my team is angry. And I started to say, what else? What are two other options? What else might you be feeling? And he started to say, actually, maybe I'm scared. I'm in a new role, maybe I'm scared. And maybe my team is not angry. Maybe my team is actually feeling untrusting. It's actually remarkable because you could see the difference. If you go into a meeting, I'm angry and the team is angry versus I'm scared.

I'm in a new role and the team's looking to build trust. It's a completely different conversation. And a couple of months later, I went out with a whole group of people and this guy's wife happened to be there. She was talking about this at the table and she said, that literally changed the relationship because he would come home from work and he would say, you seem angry. And she would be, I'm not angry. I'm just tired. or I just need some more help. So this nuance around emotion is very powerful and yet also so simple in its power that you can use it in a meeting or you can use it in the midst of a difficult conversation.

Absolutely. I would love to end with a little game if you're into it. I will share a situation that people might be feeling hopelessly. or just feeling a lot of negative emotions around. And I would love just one thing we could do if we're struggling with that thing right now. Yes. I'm actually really curious about this because of your history with growing up in apartheid South Africa. But what about people who are feeling like the political situation or having a government

that's unaligned with their values is just making them feel like they can't function in the world right now? Your difficulty motion signposts something that you care about. see what steps you can take in your community that bring you closer towards that value. Even if that feels hopeless unto itself, like, oh, I'm just in this tiny pocket and the greater situation is so much worse. Will that still make us feel better? Well, so much of the strength and connection and power that we have within ourselves is born by the strength and connection and power that we have within our community.

And when we look at any change that has happened in the world, any change, that change is not born of hopelessness, that change is born of action. Nelson Mandela just beautifully described how his anger, with his oppressor helped him to sit down with his oppressor. And what he meant by that is that when you're acting into your anger, in other words, I used this phrase earlier, I said, our emotions are data. They're data, but they're not directives.

Okay. Just because I feel angry doesn't mean I need to lash out at everyone on social media. When I feel angry and it's signposting my values, what that is doing is it's prompting you to step towards your values. And that's what Nelson Mandela was describing. He was saying, my anger at injustice helped me to sit down with my oppressor, because in sitting down with my oppressor is how I could rework the history of our country. And so often our difficulty motions are inviting us into the space,

of singular action. And because by now you already know that I don't give quick answers, there's also power in thinking about what is in your control and what is not in your control. So there's a lot of power sometimes in letting go or holding lightly, things that you know you cannot immediately or in any future time enact upon. But very often within our communities and our context, we do have actions that we can take. Would that be the same for something like climate change? Definitely. Take the actions that you can, especially ones that connect you to your community

and work on holding lightly the things that you can't control. And the things that you hold lightly may change over time as community grows force. I often think about the words of emotional agility that reality will always have its way. Reality will always have its way, and we never solve problems through denial of our own emotional experience or denial of the reality of what is going on in the world around us. And so finding ways to use your voice is profound and important, and the world needs it. What about dealing with something like a chronic or serious illness? So this is something that comes up a lot for people in different contexts.

The first thing that I would say is that I think a lot of the narrative is the Just Be Positive narrative. And the first thing that I would invite is compassion. Compassion, connecting with yourself and connecting with your own emotions and the truth of your emotional context and thinking about how you can move in the direction of what matters. I had a friend who was in hospice and she was this remarkable woman who, her whole life had loved to dance. She loved, loved music and dancing. And when she was in hospice, she, a couple of days before her death, wrote this letter to a group of her friends. And it was just so remarkable. And she said, in the letter, you know, I'm using this time to connect

with what I value, which is the people that I love. And even in this moment, I am a connecting with the people that I love. And she ended the letter by saying, I'm in a space that I feel is sacred for me to have because many people are not granted the opportunity to think about who they want to be in life and in death. And she ended the note by saying, and it was so beautiful, brings tears to my eyes, go well and dance if you can. Oh my God. And I remember that. I think about that so much, you know, dance if you can and everyone's version of dancing is different, but dance if you can. Let's just do as a last one, what if you feel like the life you want isn't attainable for you.

Like you're never going to get the job you want, you want to be married and you can't find a life partner. Is there something that we can do in that type of situation? I'm going to use this term of happiness because I think we can interchange. things. We can say things like, I will be happy when I have this life. I will be happy when I have this marriage. I will be happy when. And as soon as we start chasing happiness as an end goal, there is a paradox. And the paradox is that we start becoming unhappy about our unhappiness. and we are less likely to actually move towards the thing that's important towards us.

So what I would say is that it's helpful to think not in terms of end goals, but rather valued directions. And often happiness, authentic happiness, comes as a byproduct. of that life direction. And so based on the happiness research, what I would say is that when we chase these kinds of goals, paradoxically, we are less likely to achieve them. If we instead start imbueing our lives with a greater sense of what the value is, it's not just that job, it's meaningful work.

It's not just that job. It's being creative. It's not the marriage, it's feeling connection with others. The more we move in the direction of our values and we make courageous choices in the direction of our values, the more likely those things that we desire will come to us, but they very rarely come to us when we chase them. I love that. This isn't a casual question to end on, but.

you talked about happiness, so I feel like I have to ask it. What do you think is the purpose of life, Ben? Like, I assume you wouldn't say it's to be happy. I would definitely not say the purpose of love is to be happy, which you wouldn't believe because I literally wrote a 90 chapter handbook called the Oxford Handbook of Happiness, which was all about the research on what makes people authentically happy. And what tends to make people authentically happy is when they live a life that feels compassionate towards themselves and others and is meaningful. That's authentic happiness. And I think when we move more in ourselves but also in our connection with others in that

direction, the more profound and powerful it is. and a lot of the other trappings become less important. Liz, I mentioned this a little bit in my TED talk, but there's this beautiful phrase in South Africa, Sawabona. And Saobona is a greeting that you hear every single day on the streets. And it basically means hello. You know, it's like Saobona, yeah, well, Saobona, it means hello.

But when you literally translate Saobona, the literal translation is, I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being. And I think my work, what I hold to, is that everyday life is saying to us, are you agile? Are you going to be able to cope? Are you going to be able to manage in this changing world? But really, what life is asking is, who am I going to be today? Am I going to sowabona myself? Am I going to sowabonah others? Who am I going to be today? Well, Susan, Sawa Bona, and I really appreciate every moment of this

conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much. I so appreciate it. I hope you loved this episode. This is definitely one I'm going to come back to again and again. Go well and dance if you can. Ugh, that line. It hit me in the feels. If you want to learn more from the great Dr. Susan David, definitely head to susendavid.com and take Susan's free five-minute emotional agility quiz, and you'll get a free 10-page personalized report with more strategies to help you become more emotionally agile. And before I let you go, if you haven't joined the Healthier Together podcast club Facebook group yet, what are you waiting for?

It continues to grow, and the conversations keep getting better, so definitely get in there. I will link the group in the show notes, or you can just search Healthier Together Podcast Club on Facebook, and it should come right up. You can also join the in-person clubs, which have kicked off in many cities around the world. So if you signed up, keep your eye out for an email. And if you want to sign up, you can either email jenn at lizmoody.com or check there should be like a link or something like that in the Facebook group. If you're new here, make sure that you're subscribed so you do not miss out on any future episodes. We have amazing ones coming up, including an episode about overcoming pain, unlike anything that you have heard before.

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