The One You Feed - Midlife Reinvention: How to Create Your Own Script for What Comes Next | Allison Aubrey

Starting point is 00:00:00 Fear cuts off intuition. And when we're cut off from intuition, we just can't move forward. Like, we stop ourselves before we start. So I think when I say learn, earn, return, what I really mean is return to that child within. The person who could laugh, the person who could be goofy, the person who was vulnerable, because there, that's freedom. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.

Starting point is 00:00:37 quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

Starting point is 00:01:06 This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Alison Aubrey was 12 or 13 when her grandfather took her to Churchill Downs to watch the horse's race, and he told her to watch the third turn. He said that's where the horse nobody expected finds a second wind and surges. And she asked him, why is it there? And he said because that is where you can see the home stretch. and a sense of urgency arrives. If not now, when?

Starting point is 00:01:42 Decades later, she's in her 50s, 25 years into a newsroom career, and the word waiting for her was retire. It is not a word that she wanted. Her new book, Your Turn, is what she went looking for instead. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Allison, welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:02:02 Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. We are going to be discussing your one, wonderful new book called Your Turn, How to Create a Midlife You Love. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

Starting point is 00:02:30 And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchildren stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love that parable and I love that you start this way. What comes to mind for me is that Alexander Silsen-Metson quote, that idea of the line between good and evil doesn't cross continents.

Starting point is 00:03:04 or states, it divides the heart of every man or person. And to me, that idea is that we all have good and evil within us. Like, we can be called to the light and we can be called to the dark. And really, when you can sort of see the light, when you can sort of feel that divine spark, you're called to the light, but it's a choice. And just like you say, it's which one you feed. I love that. That is a great quote. So take me into why you decided to write a book about midlife, besides, I assume being in midlife. But there's lots of us that are in it that aren't writing a book about it. Tell me about that. Absolutely. Well, really, I wanted to write a book about midlife because I wanted to know how to find a midlife pivot.

Starting point is 00:03:55 So I have worked inside of a newsroom for 25 years, and I love being in a newsroom. You feel like you're at the center of a lot of things. There's always excitement. You're always living in present tense, always on deadline. And as I watched people 10, 15 years old or retired, not just from the newsroom, but my own parents and people here in my neighborhood, I would start to hear excitement. Like, oh, the bucket list of trips or renovating the house or buying that, building that cottage you always wanted to build. And people started out with such excitement about leaving the workplace.

Starting point is 00:04:31 And oftentimes what I heard when they came back after a year or I would see them again or touching base with people I've known my whole life, they would say, oh, I miss the workplace. I miss the connection. I miss that sense of purpose. And so it started to dawn on me that if some of the people I've known my whole life who are a bit further ahead, if they're struggling to sort of make that transition from full-time work to a life that is full of purpose and joy in this post-work period that's coming for all of us at some point. What does that crossfade look like?

Starting point is 00:05:08 What do we need to start doing now in our 50s or earlier to kind of set the stage for a life of joy and momentum and purpose when we're no longer exclusively focused on parenting in the paycheck? Yeah, when I started my one-on-one coaching practice, I don't know, it's probably been nine. years ago, I was surprised. And one of the things I was, the thing I was surprised by was how many of my clients were people who were retired. You know, I expected it was people who were trying to build a business or finish creative project or move up in the workforce. And yeah, I got those people, but I got a lot of retired people. And it was because when all structure disappeared, even if they had a general idea of what they wanted to do, they found it really, really hard to do it. And so, So I do think that transition is really a big one.

Starting point is 00:06:02 And it's one that I think those of us that are still working, I certainly feel. And I feel like it's oftentimes an in-between place. You know, midlife sometimes feels in-between things to me. Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it. I think the literature, the scientific literature, I'm a science reporter. And I revere the scientific process, the ability to sort of ask a question, look at data, evaluate. And I think when you look at the data, like what's super duper clear about making this transition and as you call it, this in-between space, which I completely agree, it's sort of like you're on this

Starting point is 00:06:38 bridge and you're going to leave something behind. And as you cross it, you're crossing into something new, you've got to have some ideas about and some intention about what's going to be on the other side because it doesn't just happen. I mean, we know from the science that having a sense of purpose, people who in survey data, that they have a sense of my life is worth living. I have something to do when I wake up in the morning. When you have that sense of purpose, whether it's big or small, doesn't matter, it's linked to less cognitive decline and longer lifespans. Very early in the book, you bring up some depth psychologist, particularly James Hollis, who's a deaf psychologist slash youngian. And I've interviewed James and several of those people,

Starting point is 00:07:25 and I always find their work, I find it confusing. And your book kind of hits this from a couple different angles, which is, let's just say you're having a midlife malaise. Is it because your psyche is calling out for a deeper purpose? Is it because your hormones are changing? Is it because you're taking care of yourself isn't on point? I always find these questions so interesting when you get into them, trying to sort them out. And I feel like there's a lot of that that starts happening even more in midlife because there's a lot of factors coming together at the same time.

Starting point is 00:08:08 Yeah, absolutely. I think the short answer is I think it's a yes and. It's all of these things coming together. I would say you bring up James Hollis. What I distilled out of my conversations with James and reading his books is, pretty simple. For me, he talks about this midlife passage, right, where you pass to the stage of life where you're not living by societal expectations. You're creating your own script. And I think the societal script is a good one, right? For Gen Xers, I think that the expectation was sort of

Starting point is 00:08:43 learn, earn, and then retire, right? Like be as good of a student, it goes as far as you can academically, then get as, you know, great of job as you can get, go as high and far as you. And you're you can get because the world is your oyster, right? And oh, along the way, have some kids and a mortgage and a spouse and lots of responsibilities and don't complain about it because, look, this is all an opportunity. And then at the end of 25 years, you do have a lot to show for it. I'm extremely grateful for my career and for my kids. But I also think that you hit a point where you're like, wow, this societal script is a lot, right? And a lot of it is based on keep going, right? Right? Keep chasing those accolades and keep.

Starting point is 00:09:23 chasing those things that society says are really important. And what I was starting to feel inside was like, I've done the things. Like, I have followed the societal script. I have done the learn and the earn. And when I started to hear that that next chapter was retire, that's when I was like, ooh, no, I do not like that word. Right. I mean, that word retire. I mean, listen to it. Tire, retired. It's like you're just tired. You're giving up. And it just really misses the mark for what we can look forward to. So I needed to redefine midlife. And really the process of writing my book

Starting point is 00:10:00 and my curiosity tour helped me see what's possible. And more importantly, helped me believe that a third turn, a third quarter, this passage into like this life that is led by heart and intuition, it's my own script, not the societal script, that it was really possible that this could happen, not just for me, 65 million gen Xers like me. Yeah, talk to me about the third turn.

Starting point is 00:10:28 What analogy is that? Yeah, sure. So I grew up in Kentucky in Louisville. And when I was like 12 or 13, I went to Churchill Downs, the home in the Kentucky Derby. And often in a horse race, there's the front of the pack and the race starts out. And there's a lot of horses sort of neck and neck. And then something very unexpected happens, usually around the third turn of the track, as they call it. And my grandfather later said to me, he said, Alison, pay attention there.

Starting point is 00:10:58 This is when the horse and the jockey that he least expected finds the second win and surges ahead. And that's what makes the race exciting. And I sort of said, well, why? Like, why here? And he said, because when you can see the home stretch, when you can see the finish line, a sense of urgency arises. It's sort of like now or never, right? If not now, when. Now, decades later for me, I thought, wow, what an amazing midlife metaphor.

Starting point is 00:11:28 You just a minute ago said, learn, earn, retire. And I think you've rephrased that into learn, earn, return. That's exactly right. Yeah. What are we returning to? Yeah. Well, it picks up on the sort of horsetrax circle that we're not the alpha, the omega, right? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:11:46 I'm starting to think in circles, right? I think we're returning to the child within. And what I mean by that is part of the work I did in writing this book and sort of excavating my own wishes and dreams for the future was to go back to the kid I once was. And I realized that as an eight-year-old, I would roam the woods behind my house and I would come home like muddy and my hair in a disastrous ponytail. And I was just carefree and blithe and like that was my happy space. And I was mercurial, but I was also like fun loving and a little goofy. And I laughed a lot, right? Kids laugh a lot.

Starting point is 00:12:25 And I realized that I had left behind a lot of my most joyful parts. That's somewhere in this striving life of accomplishing all these things and being on deadline and raising three children that I wasn't laughing as much and that I'd left a kind of like joyful part of me in the dust. And when I really started thinking about my own third. turn. It was very clear to me that I needed to bring that back. I also realized that I had a lot of fear about the future, and I don't think that's uncommon. Like this ticker tape would run through your mind of like, oh, are the best years behind you kind of thing. It's like a kind of time anxiety, right? And time is a thief kind of thing. And I realized that I just really needed to sort of get away from that entirely. And I think in bringing freckles back, I sort of like.

Starting point is 00:13:16 go of fear. And I realized that fear cuts off intuition. And when we're cut off from intuition, we just can't move forward. Like we stop ourselves before we start. So I think when I say learn, earn, return, what I really mean is return to that child within, the person who could laugh, the person who could be goofy, the person who was vulnerable, because there, that's freedom. You make the analogy in the book between midlife and adolescence. Where are the parallels there? Yeah. So one of my intellectual inspirations behind my thinking here was Mary Catherine Bateson,

Starting point is 00:13:59 who was the daughter of Margaret Mead and wrote several books on this stage of life. She's now deceased. But I read one of her books five or six years ago. And at that time, she created this idea of what she called the second adulthood. that this in between sort of 50 to 75 in a 100-year lifespan, let's just say, optimistically, by 2050, there's going to be an estimate at 3.7 million centenarians. So at a time when it is possible to have a 100-year lifespan, 50 to 75 is kind of the third quarter, right?

Starting point is 00:14:33 50 is the start of midlife. And when Mary Catherine Bateson started writing about midlife, she called it a second adulthood, which I really liked. She kind of likened it to Eric Erickson's phases of deposition. where you're asking these key questions between adolescence and adulthood of who am I? What is my self-identity? Like, what's happening to my body, you know, as teenagers become adults? And thirdly, like, what is my generativity, which was Erickson's word, or what is my purpose?

Starting point is 00:14:59 And these are tough questions. When teenagers ask these questions, we expect that they're going to be angsty, that they're going to be broody, that they're going to be full of hormones. And we give them a lot of space, right? We talk it up to, like, sort of teenage angst. or even we have a term, teenage rebellion, we expect it. As I entered this phase, which I entered just as my daughter, Lillian, who is 15 now, was sort of going through this adolescent process and still is,

Starting point is 00:15:28 I started to think, you know what? Our experiences are really mirroring each other here. She's asking, like, who am I? What do I want to be in the world? And I'm also asking, like, who am I now, right? What is my purpose now that so many things are shifting? our relationships and our responsibilities at this stage. So I call it a second adolescence.

Starting point is 00:15:51 I agree that we're in like the third quarter, 50 to 75, if we live to 100, optimistic, which I hope if you live to 75, I'm closer than I think I am. So we've got these years. And sometimes it seems to me, and maybe I just feel like I've always been on a different developmental path, but that like there might be multiple turns in this period. About 12 years ago, I started this podcast, and then about six years after that, I started doing it full time. And so that was a big chain, leaving the software career behind all of that turn. And now it feels like I intuit something else.

Starting point is 00:16:29 And it seems to me that if we're around from 50 to 100, there could be multiple turns in here. I love that. And I hope that there are. And I 100% agree with you. I think the third turn doesn't mean that you're making one pivot to do one new thing or that you're going to commit to some project that you're wedded to 50 to 75. What I mean by it is really a mindset shift. When you're in the third turn mindset, you're living by your own script. You're living by intuition.

Starting point is 00:17:03 You're living by heart. There might be 55 different things you try. And that's the freedom of this stage of life too, right? You just have to commit to a shift in your mindset that this is a stage of opportunity. When I was in ninth grade, I started working at a restaurant right next to my high school, and I was there every single morning before class because I was obsessed with cinnamon toast that they had. I never got tired of it. So when Kachava came out with cinnamon French toast flavor, I was going to try it no matter what,

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Starting point is 00:18:29 Go to kachava.com and use code feed for 15% off your first order. That's kachava.com code feed. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A-com code feed. One of the things that I love that you did in the book, you obviously did a lot of research, your science reporter, but you also went out and found profiles of women who had done something different in their third term. First, tell me about what your worry was about who could make this sort of third turn, like what kind of people could, and what did you discover?

Starting point is 00:19:07 and then maybe tell us about some of the people that you discovered. Absolutely. I think I was worried that this stage of freedom was reserved for like billionaires or Olympians or social media influencers or movie stars that it wasn't for the average folk. It wasn't for women and people like me who've been in the trenches working and parenting for three decades, right? I really wanted to know myself. Like, what does a third turn look like for people who have caregiving responsibilities who might still need a paycheck? I mean, keep in mind, women retire with 30% less than men. Many of us, I don't need to tell you, have responsibilities on both sides, aging parents and children, even after they launch, we're still parenting.

Starting point is 00:19:54 So I wanted to know where were the people like me. And I indexed for that when I set out on my curiosity tour. So one of the first places I went was Maine where I had seen an image of a woman named Christy Callagian and she was up on stage singing and a friend had showed me this image. She's a photographer and she said, oh, I was doing a shoot at this of my friend Christy and she showed me this woman who if a picture paints a thousand words, this one painted one word like transcendence. This woman was just like up on stage, singing her heart out.

Starting point is 00:20:30 Like the world was her oyster, and she was at the center of doing the thing that made her heart sing. And I said, I'd have got to meet this woman. I imagine she was some sort of like famous musician on a big tour. No, no, no. She is not. She has a day job. She's a physician's assistant in Maine. She has children, right?

Starting point is 00:20:49 Lots of responsibilities. And when she was 50, she decided to kind of step back on stage for the first time singing after many decades. As a young adult, she had lived in Italy and been part. of the music scene. This had all gone away for 30 years while she was working and parenting, and she was determined to bring it back. She worked really hard to get her voice back. She put on a house concert for her friends, and her friends were blown away to make a long story short. Within a few years, she became the lead singer in this band, which travels up and down the coast and gets paid to perform at different events and weddings. And I went to see her, and I was

Starting point is 00:21:28 blown away, right? Like, when she stepped on stage and took the lead vocals with singing Lizzo's about damn time, I thought, wow, girl, like, you are owning this. It is about damn time. Yeah. I stayed playing music into my adult years, but the last 15 years probably I had moved away from really playing in bands and really from writing songs. And something in the last week has happen. Sometimes there's magic in a particular guitar, and I got a guitar from a friend of mine, and I have written a song everyday since. After like a decade of a drought, it's just like, boom, I hear they all come. It's thrilling. Wow. It reminds me of a story. I met a woman. Her name is Leslie. I met her on a flight from like California to D.C. And when she got on board, she'd put an

Starting point is 00:22:19 instrument in a carrying case up above in the overhead compartment. And about midway through the flight, we lost Wi-Fi and I said to her, oh, I noticed you were carrying your instrument. Do you play violin? It looked like the shape of a violin. And she looked at me and she said, no, I don't play the violin. And I thought, okay, I'm kind of a talker, but maybe she's not a talker. And there was this pregnant pause. I think I glanced back to my book.

Starting point is 00:22:44 And then she kind of, a minute later, she said, I play the fiddle really excitedly. Don't mix those two up. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, oh, wonderful. Like, I kind of, I don't know a lot about string instruments. I kind of thought they were the same instrument. She looked at me. She said, oh, they're the same instrument.

Starting point is 00:23:05 It's a different attitude. And she described how learning to play violin as a classical musician, you have to play someone else's music. You can become competent at that, and that's very rewarding. But ultimately, you are reading somebody else's music. And the stress of it is, like, making sure you have. hit every note just right with the other instruments in a sort of orchestral setting. And she said, over time, that just wore me down. Like, it just felt more stressful. Like, the performance element

Starting point is 00:23:37 was overwhelming. Then when she made the shift to the fiddle, suddenly like you making your own music this week and feeling so great about it, it seems like you're, you have a spring in your set from this. She said, I started making music from my heart. It was just pure improv. I was playing what came to me. I was playing by intuition. And as she told the story, she just lit up. It was very clear to me. I got chills listening because I realized that she made this very simple swap, which is key to midlife reinvention for a lot of people. And that is to go from the performance mindset, which can be very stressful, right? Pleasing the cheering fans and the stand or the audience to this other mindset of play. So think about that shift from

Starting point is 00:24:24 performance to play. Which one sounds like more fun, right? It's play. And that's what I took from Leslie's story. That is a great shift. And it's a shift that even knowing it's the shift to make is sometimes really challenging. I'm working on a couple of upcoming keynotes, which I want to do it because it's fun. And yet I get in it and it feels like I got to get the performance right.

Starting point is 00:24:52 The fear starts to creep into it. Is it going to be good? Is it going to be good? And I was just asking myself this question the last couple of things. How can I get back to making this more fun? And I don't think I know the answer quite yet. Yeah, it's like you in launching a book, right? There's a lot going on.

Starting point is 00:25:08 How does that become play in a way? Yeah. Let go to that fear. How do we make it fun? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely going to be a performance angle to giving those keynotes for sure. But if you've done the prep work, then and you've used the, your brain to organize and structure. Once you've done that, like, let go of that process and start

Starting point is 00:25:29 plugging into the intuition, right? Right. Yeah, this is actually the hard part, I think. It's the doing those reps to get it right, to get it constructed, because then when I do it, that's my happy place. You write in your book about finishing your book, right? You get to this point, and it just, at certain points, it gets hard. You're like, wow, this is a struggle. And I think that's kind of where I am, but I'm so close to being at that playpoint. I think it's a good question. I keep saying, like, how can I make whatever this thing is more fun, more enjoyable? I agree 100%. And I am sure you are going to through this process. You're going to push through. Yeah. Well, thank you for the support, the cheerleading. Well, look how many times you've already done it, right? Like, the evidence all points

Starting point is 00:26:15 to you accomplishing the things you set out, right? Why would this be different? Why would this be different. Yes. That's what certain people in my life always encourage me. Why would this time be different? I don't know why I'm like, well, this time, yeah, I figured it out up till now, but this time, you know, I talked to people who've written like three great books and they're working on their latest book. You know, like New York Times bestsellers. Like, I don't think I can do it. I'm like, what do you mean? You've written like three New York Times bestsellers. Of course you can do it. And it'll be like, yeah, but that was then. I don't know if I still have it. The doubt never goes away. I mean, this whole part of our conversation here, is reminding me of a woman in my book, Genevieve Villamaro. And Genevieve had this amazing success opening this restaurant in D.C., a Filipino restaurant. And she was given these amazing reviews by, like, Pete Wells in the New York Times and Bon Appetit. And it was like her restaurant was being called one of the most important restaurants in America. This is like everything she'd ever hoped for and worked for became reality.

Starting point is 00:27:18 And during the pandemic, she lost. the restaurant. And to make a long story short, decided for a number of reasons after a few years to close it. Part of that was just, it's really hard the restaurant business to keep things going. And what you were saying about like, can I do it? Like, should I do it? Should I go for it? Right. This questioning happens for like a lot of type A drivers, right? Because you have this period of sort of transition, this sort of crossfade between doubt to like this reckoning of like, oh, yeah, I've got something else in me. And for Genevieve, what was so interesting is that she walked me through this year-long

Starting point is 00:27:58 process when she was starting to sort through. What was it from running that restaurant? Like, what were the skills and talents inside running the restaurant business that she could parlay into another phase of life? Like, what was she really good at? Because running your restaurant is a lot of different jobs. It's managing people and being the PR phase. And there's so many jobs wrapped up in that.

Starting point is 00:28:21 And so when she sort of like pulled out the things that she loved most about the restaurant, a few of them were her love of food and her love of teaching. And so she had this idea to start teaching classes where she would help people take recipes that were sort of oral tradition in their family and kind of write the story of their family in a recipe. And when she first had the idea, her heart told her right away. Her heart leapt. You're like, oh, I'm excited by this.

Starting point is 00:28:46 Let's do it. And then she spent a good year talking herself in and to it and out of it. Oh, what if people never come? What if nobody's interested? What if this is too hard to pull up? What if this? What of that? Three things to talk yourself out of it.

Starting point is 00:29:01 And that's fear, right? Fear stops us before we start. It cuts off intuition. And finally she mustered like on this slow crossfade between self-doubt and belief. She finally broke through. But I think it's like a part of this decision-making and transition that I really resonated with. And I think seems like pretty ubiquitous people making these kinds of transitions. Yeah, I do think doubt is just endemic.

Starting point is 00:29:31 It can be worked with. But I think at least my experience is that there's a phase in doing anything meaningful that it gets hard. It gets particularly hard. I mean, maybe hard all along. But there's a phase where, at least for me, where I'm just deep in it and I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to find my way through this. And knowing that that's there is actually helpful because I'm like, oh yeah, okay, I've been here. I've been here. Just patience.

Starting point is 00:29:58 Patience. Keep walking patience. But when you're in it, it still feels incredibly real. Absolutely. I think another thing to sort of seems relevant at this moment is that part of what helps us push through is to know our. why? Like, why do you want this? Like, why is it important for you to do these keynotes, right? Answering that question, why, that can really help you muscle through the tough times. I think of so many of the characters in my book. One of them is coming to mind right now, a woman who's in her

Starting point is 00:30:29 mid-60s named Kathy Bullhouse, and she's actually the CEO of this, like, $5 billion company. And she grew up in poverty, had many siblings, her mother worked in a factory, and she tells this story that every night her mother would come home with these like stained hands because she died grandfather clocks in a factory and worked her work to the bone every day and still didn't have money for like nice vacations or Christmas presents and she started to think like how is this fair my poor mother comes home from work every day and we still can't afford the things that other people have and so she developed this question that really centered her life on like what is fair And she said to herself, she made a pledge to herself that if she ever became the boss, life would be different for anybody who worked for her or with her.

Starting point is 00:31:17 Well, lo and behold, she is the boss. Like, she is CEO of a company that is valued in the billions of dollars. And she has private equity investors. And what she has done is she has made sure that every single employee has an equity stake in the company. So that when the company resells, if she makes money, if the bankers make money, every single. everybody gets a payday because to her, it's solving for fairness. And that is her why. So I think that when we're going through these hard times, difficult, challenging, when we're asking, is all of this worth it? Right? Because there's work involved with any of our big ambitions or any of our ideas.

Starting point is 00:31:57 It's always important to come back and ask that question. What is my why? Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can't keep doing this. But I valued everything I was doing and I wasn't willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That's when I stumbled into something I now call this still point. method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do,

Starting point is 00:33:02 but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I'd had eight years ago so you don't have to stumble towards an answer. That something is now here and it's called Overwhelm is Optional. Tools for When You Can't Do Less. It's an email course that fits into moments you already have taking less than 10 minutes total a day. It isn't about doing less. It's about relating differently to what you do. I think it's the most useful tool we've ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full but you still need relief from overwhelm,

Starting point is 00:33:39 check out, overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed.net slash overwhelm. That's one you feed.net slash overwhelm. And so as you've navigated a little bit of this shift by writing the book, by living it yourself. What do you feel has emerged as your why? Hmm. My why is I feel at my best when I am interviewing people and helping people see things that

Starting point is 00:34:11 synthesize information and help people see things in a very simple and relatable way that they might not see for themselves. So I feel like in 25 years of reporting and most of them. and most of it's science reporting. What I'm really doing is sort of taking complex information, and I'm synthesizing it or marinating it down to the few key things that you need to know and trying my best to explain methodologies and the why and to put a story in there so that it's relatable.

Starting point is 00:34:43 And I think what I've realized is that I love doing that. And my why has not changed. But what has changed is how I want to do what I want. want to do, right? So when I go on Morning Edition or all things considered with a three-minute story about, here's what the cyclospora outbreak is about, right? I'm giving you information. And that is a public service. It is part of the job. What I'm not able to do in a news setting is to do what my heart is now calling me to do, which is sort of to fuse my knowledge with my wisdom, because I think at this age, we're in the wisdom stage of life, right? And

Starting point is 00:35:23 And in an essence, that's kind of like why I wrote this book and why I'm sort of casting a different future for myself. I think back to this dream that I had when I had a book proposal sitting on the side of my desk, unsure if I was going to finish it, right? Because it's hard to write a book proposal. And I had a dream that woke me up in a start. I was in the dream, Stevens Keep, who's the host of Morning Edition was saying. And NPR's Ellison Aubrey joins us now.

Starting point is 00:35:50 And it was just dead air because like the honest. era light was on, but I was stuck in my bed. And in my dream, I was literally like, stuck in my bed. I couldn't get out, right? And so I woke up and I was like, oh my God, like, what day is it? What time is it? I grabbed my phone. I'm like, did I just miss Morning Edition, right? Was I supposed to be on up first? I had this panicky sensation. So I had scheduled this interview with this guy named Ian Williams, and he has live interpret it 10,000 or some thousands numbers of dreams on the BBC. He's a British guy. And we started the interview and I told him about this recent dream I had that had woke me in a start. And he said, oh, very interesting. What do you think that dream is

Starting point is 00:36:30 about? And I said, I don't know. I feel like it's like an anxiety dream that I'm fearful that I'm getting too old to wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning or I'm fearful of missing a deadline. and he said, how many deadlines have you missed in your career? I thought about it. I answered zero. I have literally never missed a deadline. And how long have you been doing your job? He asked.

Starting point is 00:36:53 I was like decades. And he said, in over 20 years, you've never missed a deadline. And now you think that dream was that you're scared to miss a deadline? I don't think that's it. I kind of sat there quietly. I said, well, what do you think it is about? And I'll never forget this. he said, I think you have something to say that you can't say on Morning Edition.

Starting point is 00:37:17 And when he said that, every cell in my body knew it to be true. And over the next months, I realized, you know what, I'm going to finish this book proposal. I'm going to go on this curiosity tour because I realized many months into it that thing that I can't talk about on Morning Edition, which is a new show, is this idea of merging wisdom and knowledge to help people find their own third turns and to talk about, like, meaning-making and purpose in this stage of life. You led me right where I wanted to go next, which was into dreams. You have a whole chapter on dreams. Tell me what your relationship was

Starting point is 00:37:58 like with dreams and then what you learned about dreams and how that shaped what came together in the book. When I was a kid, my mother was a very vivid dreamer, and I can remember remember her coming like into my room like in the summertime and she'd be morning time and she'd be like oh my god I had the most amazing dream and I'd be waking up and she'd be telling me about this like specific dream with all these like very like loose like so much detail and imagery and I was like wow and I didn't have those kind of dreams very rarely right and so I thought okay well I'm just not like one of those kinds of dreamers or like maybe my mom's embellish a little bit here, right? And so my idea about sleep, because I've done tons of stories about the

Starting point is 00:38:46 importance of sleep, I was very committed to my position that nighttime was for sleep and sleep was the important thing and dreams or some sort of artifact of sleep, right? Well, little did I know there's a whole body of evidence and a lot of it is just going back to myth, really, like way, way, way, way back thousands of years. And I got very interested in this notion that dreams might be able to sort of make us aware of things that were too busy to see during the day or hesitant to see head on or face head on. I think for me it was during the pandemic and ironically, I was awake at like midnight or two o'clock in the morning. My bed and I just, I'm like, oh, I can't sleep. So I opened up the New York Times app. And there was this obituary of this woman named Rosalind

Starting point is 00:39:30 Cartwright. And she'd been dubbed the queen of dreams. She'd been a researcher studying dreams like starting back in the 1970s, and she died at age 98, I want to say. And I read the whole article. I read it again. And then I read it a third time. And I thought, I have got to know more about this because she posited that our dreams are kind of like a free therapist, that when we can learn to recall them and talk about them, that it's a coping mechanism and that our dreams have a lot to say to us. It's something that I then remember my mother sort of talking about. And I think I was hesitant to hear my mother's messages on this. So anyway, I kind of just did this dive into current literature, and it turns out that there are some fairly recent studies on what's called

Starting point is 00:40:17 dream incubation. And the idea of dream incubation is that you can kind of like plant little dream seeds. You can tell yourself before going to sleep, like, I have a problem or a challenge. And please, the dream maker within, help me think about this challenge during my dream. It sounds totally hokey, but it turns out it's real. And there's a couple of published studies that show that when you introduce people to the idea of dream incubation, that many, many of them actually will have dreams about the very problem that they asked their dream maker to dream about. And they wake up feeling almost like a sense of resolution or at least a clue. And so I just became like, wow, this is real. So I went down this whole path of sort of like practicing dream incubation, interviewing a bunch of experts about dream incubation, and have really decided that dreaming is yet another self excavation tool, right?

Starting point is 00:41:15 Like in this stage when we're searching for what's next, we need to sort of know what's inside. How many tools do we have to see inside? Well, we can journal. We can talk to our friends. And I feel like dreaming is one of those tools that's hidden in Plainting. insight. How do we get better at using our dreams then to be another source of knowledge for ourselves? Yeah. I think that is a complicated question. One thing I will say is that I'm not here to say that every dream that you have means something and I still have dream droughts. If I'm really busy,

Starting point is 00:41:49 I don't remember any of my dreams. So you have to really, really intentionally, like when I first started keeping a dream journal, I was sometimes only able to write down an image, like one word, of an image that I salvaged, right? And then over time, when I realized, like, oh, you have to write them down, like, right when you wake up. Or if you wake up in the middle of the night, write them down there because they'll be gone in the morning, right? When you get better, it's like a muscle, what I've realized, is dream recall is absolutely

Starting point is 00:42:16 a muscle. The more you work it, the better you get. The more you get, right? There's a lot of, like, dream decoding tools. Lisa Marchiano wrote this amazing book about decoding your dreams. And so you can use different devices. to help you sort of index for what does this dream mean. You can also be part of like a dream circle.

Starting point is 00:42:37 One of the most fun things I did on my curiosity tour is I signed up to participate in a dream circle. And it was about eight or ten women. It was very kind of ritualistic. There was, we sat sort of criss-cross applesau style and had candles and did some, there was some sort of music playing. And we were guided by this woman who helped us each recall a dream. And then every single person went around in the circle.

Starting point is 00:43:00 and offer it a little guidance about what they think that person's dream might mean. And what's so interesting about that, you don't have to go to a formal dream circle, but you can do this with your friends. What you'll find is that if that interpretation is right, you'll know it right away. And if it's not right, it's just their fantastical thinking because they don't know you as well as you do. You'll know that too. So it's great insight.

Starting point is 00:43:25 It's sort of like you have 10 minds helping you figure out what the dream means. and you, the dreamer, will know right away what it means. I was going to ask that question about, like, to what degree is there any homogeneity in what people think dreams mean? Or if you start talking to the experts, they all interpret them in very different ways. Well, I don't think very different ways. I think there's two school of thoughts broadly. I mean, there's probably more school of thoughts because in life everything's more complicated than that. But what I came to deduce is that there's sort of two main schools of thoughts.

Starting point is 00:43:57 there's sort of like the Youngian school of thought, which there's literally this internal dream maker inside, like this other within that is connecting you with sort of the broader consciousness, like the global consciousness, like connecting you to the whole. Like dreaming is your way to connect with the whole of universal consciousness, which is lofty thinking and sort of out there and takes a while to sort of understand it. But in the Youngian approach, there are lots of different ways to sort of look at. at symbols, right? That symbols are one way to decode dreams. Like in one of my dreams, I dreamt about stars and stars in Youngian psychology have like a certain meaning. Also, if you dream about a best friend, for instance, you might think that that dream is about your best friend, but oftentimes it's a reflection of your dark side, the side of you you don't want to see. And so if you wake up, You've had, yeah, if you wake up and you've had this.

Starting point is 00:45:00 If you wake up and you've had a dream and your best friend was the person in the dream, you have to ask yourself, oh, wow, wait, maybe that dream was really about me, about my shadow side. Your shadow side is the part of you you don't want to face or you, you don't want to see. And so maybe that shadow side turns up as another person. Anyway, there are so many complex ways. And like the youngians have literally, like I'm not doing it justice because. There is so much written on this. And I feel I've sort of got the tip of the iceberg reading through this decoding book and talking to Lisa Marciano. I feel like there's layers and layers and layers more to go.

Starting point is 00:45:42 It's really cool. On the other side, I said there's sort of two schools. So they have sort of the Youngie inside. The other way of interpreting your dream is more like the way that Ian Williams does it. He's got this book called The 100 Top Dreams. He claims these are over and over and over again. And he's heard these dreams from people. These are sort of the universal dream themes.

Starting point is 00:46:02 He basically says there's a way to interpret them that is pretty on the mark standardized. So for instance, I'm just going to read you a few because these are fun. Like if you're being chased, he says, that's a sign that you can run from something, but you can't shake it. Whatever is chasing you is always some aspect of yourself. Another one is teeth falling out. Apparently people dream a lot about their teeth falling out. He says there's some fear or anxiety in this dream. Yeah, it can suggest your losing confidence or your sense of power is waning, really interesting.

Starting point is 00:46:34 This is another one. You're unable to find a toilet. Wallace says this one is about a situation that is very unhealthy, but you're not sure how to let go of it. Yeah, and this one, I don't know anybody who hasn't had this one, you are unprepared for an exam. You walk in, you're not ready. This is so familiar. year, you realize you haven't studied for the test. This is interesting. Wallace says this really represents self-critique, right? We are our own worst critics. So are you living up to whatever standard

Starting point is 00:47:07 that you have set for yourself? Exams are really the way that we're judged for the first 22 years of our lives or longer. And this reflects how we're judging ourselves. I love that. And the last one I'll do is dreams of flying. I've had those dreams. So if you dream that you dream that you, you dream that you're, you're you are floating or you're in flight, it's really about letting go. It's a sign that you have let go of a situation that has weighed you down. You're like releasing it from the limitations in your waking life. So I include both in the book because I feel like it's not one or the other. It's a both end. I'm fascinated by the exam one. Is he saying that we are critiquing ourselves too harshly or that we're not living up to or not sure.

Starting point is 00:47:58 The latter. I think you're not living up to the standard you set for yourself because what is life at this point, right? Like, I mean, who else is setting standards for you? Like, you are setting standards for yourself, right? If you're raising the goalpost because you think success is here, but, oh, no, it's here. It's higher and higher. Nobody's doing that to you except you.

Starting point is 00:48:16 So that's what it means. My common dream is not that I'm unprepared for an exam. It's that I haven't been to class for like the first five weeks of the semester. And I know I should go. The answer to this is to go to class. But of course I'm like, I can't go to class. I haven't been. Now, this dream happens to reflect reality a little bit because I did everything I could to not go to class.

Starting point is 00:48:43 A lot of people I respect have gone deep into dreams. And it's just never an area I've. really ventured, but I'm always a little bit curious about. Me too. Me too. Yeah. It was writing the dream chapter and learning about the research on dreams, being able to start this dream incubation process really was one of the most exciting parts of the book because a lot of what is in the book is stuff I've been reporting on for 20, 25 years. And this was me really sort of taking a fresh look at something that I had kind of judgment about, right? I assumed that this was soft or not real. And I was stunned to find out

Starting point is 00:49:22 there is a lot of research going on about dreams, yeah. Is there research that shows that working on your dreams can lead to better psychological outcomes? When you say research, like, what are we seeing? Yeah. Well, for instance, some researchers at MIT lab, they created this little device called a Dormio. And it helps you to do this practice of dream incubation, right? And they wanted to know, like, is there a way to systematically help people through this Dormio advice that kind of sends you these messages that, like, a recorded voice will be like, it's time to dream about trees.

Starting point is 00:49:58 And it sends this message to you at the very moment that your brain is sort of like switching over to that state of sleep. And so they're doing some research about when is it that you can be? be prompted to actually set dream intentions. And then there's also some research going on at Stanford University about, you know, how to use dreams and incorporate them into therapy. And I would say that people are casting a wide net and there's sort of a resurgence of interest in dreams by, you know, sophisticated researchers. Interesting. So the latter part of your book deals more more with our bodies, primarily around this idea that if we are going to thrive in midlife,

Starting point is 00:50:47 that taking care of ourselves is sort of a non-negotiable, taking care of ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally. You've been reporting on this sort of stuff for many years. I'm curious, as you worked your way through this book, did you learn some new things or have some new realizations that went beyond like, oh, yeah, I should sleep well, I should exercise, I should eat right. I should spend time with people I love. I would say that for me, the big realization is that I had what I would call a knowledge action gap. And what I mean by that is that it is not the knowing of things that makes a difference, right? Sure, you have to know them. It's the doing of things.

Starting point is 00:51:31 Gerita had that great quote. It's not the knowing. It's the doing. And I have been reporting on these things, as you say, for decades. And it's really an easier task to distill information into like an evidence-based report than it is to take that information and put it to action your life because there's so many crosswinds. And I would say we all have a knowledge action gap, right? And so I started thinking a lot about, well, how is it that we can close our knowledge action gaps? So I went back to my own reporting. It's almost like I was like reading the work of someone else, right? I went back to take advice from things that I'd written like 15 or 20 years ago. And so like a lot of things, it's about priorities. And when you're not doing something you want to be doing, your goal,

Starting point is 00:52:24 your job is to identify the obstacle. Because if you're saying this is important to me and you're not doing it, well, there's got to be a reason. So I will give you one example of, you know, sort of like how my behavior changed. At the beginning of writing this book, I had a battery of tests at Northwestern University at a longevity lab that was getting underway there. And one of the things that I learned is that I was, quote unquote, undermuscled. Like, even though I have a normal body weight and I exercise for whatever reason, walking and yoga wasn't really giving me the muscle composition that is ideal. And one thing I knew already was that. that strength training was important. I had reported on that, but for some reason, I wasn't doing it.

Starting point is 00:53:11 And I was examining my own knowledge action gap. Well, Alison, why don't you? And I started to realize, oh, I have all kinds of preconceived ideas about people who go to the gym to lift weights, right? Like, my comfort zone is doing yoga. My comfort zone is walking. And so I had to overcome sort of like biases about what weightlifting or strength training really looked like. And I needed to find a place in a way to do that. And that just took time. It took me out of my normal routine. And so I would say that one by one, I kind of faced like the knowledge action gap and looked at the obstacles to try to get to how can you get a strength training workout in 25 minutes three times a week. Like, that's not too hard. It's a matter of calendarizing it, just the way you calendarize your kids'

Starting point is 00:54:02 dentist appointment and your work interviews and every other obligation that you have. I think one of the things for busy working moms is that we tend to have this pecking order of work, kids, and then when there's time, us. And I think that's part of this whole midlife process of like taking the time for yourself. Yeah, that knowing, doing gap, I feel like has been at the heart of what I've worked with and taught people for years and years as a behavior coach, that exact thing. Like, we kind of know what to do. It's just like, why aren't we doing it? And there are so many factors that go into it.

Starting point is 00:54:40 One of the things I think is challenging in this area is that there are so many things that we potentially could do to take care of ourselves. We're overwhelmed with this kind of information. How do you think about, like, I'm prioritizing, right? dream incubation and writing down dreams takes time, journaling takes time, yoga takes time, cardio. There's this big list of things that we could do to take care of ourselves. How do you prioritize? I think one of the best tools in the book is called the Brain Care Score.

Starting point is 00:55:15 And I bring it up to answer your question because it's a very simple questionnaire that anybody can take for free online. It was developed by physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, namely Dr. Jonathan R. Roseant. He is a neurologist who's seen many, many, many people with brain injuries and dementia and people are always asking, like, doctor, doctor, what can I do? So I make sure I don't end up like my mother or my husband, what have you. And it turns out that what promotes good brain health also promotes good heart health, right? What's good for the heart is good for the brain. Like we are not separate organs. We are one body. And increasingly, even though our medical system

Starting point is 00:55:54 is broken up into all of these specialties, it's incredibly clear. that what's good for the brain also helps stave off depression, also helps stave off heart disease, right? Like, it's all the same stuff. And so when you take steps to protect the brain, you're also protecting the heart, you're protecting your mental health, you're protecting your overall wellness and health span. So the reason why I'm parrying the question a little bit is that, and I'll tell you what I do, but the reason that I think listeners could be helped by just taking 15 minutes to fill out the brain care score, is because it creates an action plan for you. You answer a series of questions about your lifestyle habits, everything from like, are you eating three, you know, greens a week?

Starting point is 00:56:38 How much alcohol are you drinking? How much sleep are you getting? What is your A1C? What is your body weight? Your cholesterol? All these factors. A few questions also about the social dynamics. Do you have friends?

Starting point is 00:56:49 Do you have a sense of purpose? You get a number answer for each of these based on how you answer. And then you tally your score. And then what you can do is, is you can choose where to start. You now have in front of you a single sheet of paper that says, here are the 13 factors that move your health span and increase the likelihood of you aging well,

Starting point is 00:57:11 and you can't do all at once, but pick the thing you can do today. I mean, here's an easy one. On the alcohol question, on the brain care score, if you have three or fewer drinks per week, you get points. Once you go over that, then you're going down in points. So one place to start, if you're looking to prioritize your health,

Starting point is 00:57:29 is that nobody is here to tell you to be a teetotaler, but can you reduce how many drinks you're having a week down to this number? That'll get you an easy point. Can you double down on greens? You know, can you meet this threshold of a vegetable? That'll get you a point. So some of them are low-hanging fruit. It's an easy way to up your score.

Starting point is 00:57:50 And so because nobody wants to be told by somebody else what to do, this brain care score and what comes with it is a way to gamify good health. And it's sort of like a do-it-yourself adventure. You get to pick where you start. Are you starting with the social relationships? Are you starting with finding a new hobby because you know a sense of purpose is important? Are you starting with finally getting that 150 minutes of physical activity every week?

Starting point is 00:58:16 It's up to you. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I really enjoyed your book while of links in the show notes where people can get access to the book and I wish you the best with it. Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful,

Starting point is 00:58:37 inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link. to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community.

The One You Feed - Midlife Reinvention: How to Create Your Own Script for What Comes Next | Allison Aubrey

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