The One You Feed - The Happiness Formula: Using Your Body to Transform Your Mind with Janice Kaplan

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

In this episode, Janice Kaplan explores the happiness formula and how to use your body to transform your mind. She discusses the powerful connection between our bodies and our minds. Drawing from her latest book, What Your Body Knows About Happiness, Janice shares groundbreaking research on how our physical state directly influences our emotions, thoughts, and overall well-being. You'll discover how simple bodily changes—like posture, movement, and even temperature—can dramatically impact our happiness. Key Takeaways: How your body sends signals to your brain that shape your emotions Why small physical changes (like sitting up straight or smiling) can boost your mood The surprising ways environment and sensory input influence perception and behavior How chronic pain can be “rewired” in the brain and why movement is key to relief The underestimated power of touch and human connection in emotional well-being Why new experiences—no matter how small—can dramatically improve happiness For full show notes, click here! If you enjoyed this episode with Janice Kaplan, check out these other episodes: Ruth Whippman on the Complexity of Happiness How to Unleash the Power of Happiness and Success with Emma Seppala Hope for Healing Chronic Pain with Yoni Ashar Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Go to a farmer's market and buy a fruit that you've never tasted and taste that. I think there are so many ways that we can awaken our experiences. Our brains, again, great as they are, as we've been saying, like to let things go. And it's much easier for our brains if everything is the same. They don't have to pay attention. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. 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. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

There's a common idea out in the self-help psychology world that our thoughts create our reality. And while that is true, some of the time, it's not the full story. Because what about those mornings where you wake up feeling off before you've even had a thought? Or the days when your mood shifts just because you stood up a little straighter? Those are certainly experiences I've had that have made me wonder, well, are my thoughts the whole thing? And that's where today's guest Janice Kaplan comes in.

Her latest book, What Your Body Knows About Happiness, reveals something surprising. Your body is also shaping your emotions, often before your brain even catches up. We dig into why posture, movement, and even the weight of a clipboard can influence how you feel. For me, this conversation put words to something I've sensed for years. Our bodies aren't just reacting to our emotions, they're helping create them. It gives credence to one of my favorite phrases, which is, sometimes you can't think your way

into right action, you have to act your way into right thinking. And once we understand that, we can start using our bodies to change our minds. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hey sis, it's Dr. Joy from Therapy for Black Girls. We've had 400 episodes of conversations, growth and healing.

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Hi, Janice, welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, it's a pleasure to be here. We are in our studio in Columbus, Ohio, and you are with me, so that is always a pleasure when we get to do these in person. So I appreciate you coming over to do this. You're in town to give a talk for your latest book, which is called, What Your Body Knows About Happiness.

How do you use your body to change your mind. And you'll be talking tonight at the library about that and that's what we're going to be talking about right now. But before we do, let's start like we always do with the parable. 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. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent, they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you how that parable applies to you, your life, and the work that you do. I absolutely love that parable and it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. It's such a perfect way of talking about so many things that matter and I had not heard it frankly before I discovered it through you but I realized that it's very much what I've been talking about and writing about for years because the book I did, The Gratitude Diaries, was really about that idea that it's how we look at events, it's what we bring to the world, it's what we bring to the experiences that we have that matters.

And we spend so much time thinking that it's the events that are shaping us. And in truth, there are always different ways to look at them and always different things that you can get from them. And as your parable suggests, it's really up to you whether it's going to be the good or the bad, whether you're going to look back on a day and say, what a great day I had or what a terrible day I had. And I think once you realize that you have that control and that you have that power over your life, it makes a big difference. Right. I always like to think of it as it's not the events

themselves, exclusively. It's not only how we think about them. It's a co-creation. The things that happen to us matter in life and how we respond to them matters often far more. Absolutely. And when you think about, there are certain people who you know that if they're gonna get sick, they're gonna tell you how horrible it is, they're gonna be sick for a week, they're gonna be complaining endlessly, and there are other people who are just gonna say, yeah, I'm okay, and who are just gonna move on. Right? And of course there are terrible things that happen. And of course there are terrible circumstances that people go through and I certainly never,

ever would undermine that. But I was so struck when I wrote, and we'll get to my new book soon, but when I wrote The Gratitude Diaries and I toured extensively and talked extensively with that book. And I knew that when I wrote that book, it was about bringing my life from good to better. I've, you know, I've had a good life and I don't pretend otherwise. But I spoke to so many people who would come up and thank me and tell me how the book or the sense of gratitude had helped them through. And they would tell me these dreadful situations,

health issues, suicide, family tragedies. And I was always so moved by that to realize that, yeah, you got to wake up the next morning. You have to put your feet out of bed the next morning and you get to figure out how you're going to feel when you do that. Yeah, it's interesting because mindset stuff like this or self-help or however we want to categorize it in the political dialogue of the last few years, and I'm not going to go into politics, is presented as something that is for the privileged. And I understand what people are saying by that, right? Like if you're going to meditate an hour a day, it's a privilege to have

the time to be able to meditate for an hour a day, etc. But I think if we look back at, and it's the reason why I am, and I think a lot of people are inspired by people like Victor Frankel who is showing these same ideas were helpful in the furthest thing from privilege you could possibly have in a concentration camp, right? These things were useful and valuable there and so they are ways of looking at and thinking about the world that serve us regardless of where we are and I think that painting these things out to be things that are only for the privileged is the wrong way to look at it. Again, I understand what's being said, but I think it sends a message that people who

aren't don't have time for this stuff. And I think we all have time to at least reflect on how we view the world and respond to it. I completely agree. And some years ago, I co-authored a book with a woman who had had a truly terrible tragedy in her life. In New York, it was known as the Wrong Way on the Taconic Accident. It was a pretty famous accident. There were documentaries about it.

And the woman's three children had been in the backseat of a car driven by her sister-in-law. The woman went the wrong way on a highway in New York, and the three children were killed. Can you imagine anything more horrible? Somebody connected us together. We met, and the first time we met, she was suicidal, as you can imagine.

Her three small children had just been killed. She was a very religious woman, and frankly, she wanted to go join them in heaven. And as we were talking, she was so frail and so fragile and then at some point she said, and I'm so grateful to my friends because after this happened they came over every single day and I'm so filled with gratitude to them and I couldn't have gotten through if not for them. And she was going on and on about her gratitude to her friends. And this was well before I wrote the gratitude diaries but I think it was one of the things that stuck with me

and then inspired me afterwards, because I thought if somebody in this position can use the word gratitude, then who can't? And I think that speaks to a really important truth, which is that you can be in a huge amount of pain and you can also be grateful for certain things. Like we can have multiple coexisting emotions or feelings about things, right?

She was on one hand despairing, on another hand starting to see like, oh, well this part of it is okay, this part of it's good. Yes, and being grateful doesn't mean accepting things as they are, right? If there are things that you can go out and change, if there are events that you can change in your life or in the world or in any way, go out and do them. But if not, we have to take stock and see where we are. And appreciating where you are at the moment doesn't mean you don't

want things to be better going forward. And what you were saying about happiness being an advantage of the privileged, we're always looking at people who have more than us. And we don't do a very good job at looking at the people who have less than us. And think about all the people who are looking at you or any of your listeners or any of the people who think that they don't have enough and are saying, boy, I wish I were in your position. So turn it around that way and it gives you a different perspective. Yep. So let's now turn our attention to your latest book. And you tell a story early on about how, you know, gratitude was useful to you in a situation but you

realized it wasn't the whole story. Maybe walk us through that story which sort of is the origin of where this book came from. Right. Well, I had written theitude Diaries and I do believe the things about reframing situations, looking at things from a different perspective actually do work. I'm not going to have anybody's sympathy as I tell this story because I was going on a vacation one day. But it was one of those days where you feel like everything is going wrong, you lose your luggage and everything feels like it's going wrong. And I was standing in a very small airport and I was trying to do those gratitude games that I had taught myself. Like, well,

my luggage is lost but I'm grateful because I have a bathing suit in my carry-on so it's going to be okay. And my husband was teasing me about it but I was trying really hard. We're on vacation I don't want to be negative and cut to we get to we were actually going to an island as I said nobody's gonna Have sympathy for me on this story and yeah, so I'm on a boat and All of a sudden I felt differently all of a sudden the Sun was shining the water was drifting by And I suddenly felt happy and I realized I didn't have to do any of those reframing, rethinking, gratitude games. I suddenly felt different and I thought

what just happened and how can I put myself in situations where that happens again? And the epiphany if you want to call it was that our bodies are constantly sending information to our brains. And we don't realize the power that our bodies have to change how we feel, to change the happiness we feel, to change the joy or despair that we feel in a moment. Yeah, I've thought about this ever since we started the show. And it's a question that I've asked in a thousand different permeations over time because it's the question of one view of emotion is that thoughts cause emotion and we all know what that's like. If you told me right now that our podcast had just been cancelled from iHeart, I would feel terrible, right? My thought would cause a feeling, you know, the information. But it seemed to me that it also

went the other way. Like there were days that I would wake up and before I'd had a conscious thought, it was like the weather just inside fell off. And then my thoughts all took on the color of whatever that internal feeling was. And so I was like, so it's clearly not a one-way thoughts to emotion or thoughts to body sensation. There's clearly feedback going on back and forth. And so you sort of talk about, you have a line early on that I think is great. You say the connections between body and brain are thrillingly complex. You have a lot of great both personal stories and studies throughout the book that show, wow, you know, there really is this connection that goes both ways.

Tell me one or two that feel thrilling to you, the thrillingly complex aspect of this. Well, there are so many and to just first to pick up on what you just said about how you feel and which comes first. It goes back a hundred years ago to William James, the psychologist and philosopher who gave the example of you're walking down the street or I guess you're walking through the woods in his case and you see a bear or I like to tell that story if you live in, you know, I live in New York, you're walking down the street and you get to a dark alley and all of a sudden your heart is pounding, your hands are sweaty and you feel scared. So the question is, do you feel scared because your heart is pounding or is your heart pounding because you feel scared?

Well, most of us are brain-centric and we think, I see the bear or I see the dark alley, I get scared, it makes my heart start pounding. Now we're talking about obviously split milliseconds here, but newest research seems to suggest that it works the opposite way, that your body responds first and your brain is constantly scanning your body and your brain is going, ooh, chest pounding, hands sweaty, I think we're scared. We better do something and run away from that. Now, obviously it happens a lot faster than that, but people get very dubious about that because they want to think their brains are in control. But we know that the body has a lot of power. If you touch a hot stove,

you're going to pull your hand back well before you can think about it. If you run into the street and a car is coming at you, you're going to be happy that your body knows to leave that scene well before your brain can even register that the car is coming. You really don't want your brain to have to tell your eyes to blink 9,000 times a day and what would happen while you were asleep to your breathing. So we implicitly understand that things like that occur, but on a bigger level, we forget that our brain, brilliant as it is, is just a three-pound blob sitting in a very dark right. And it is completely reliant on the sensations, on the environment, on the information that it's being fed.

Yep. I think that it's important to talk about the role the body plays in comparison to the brain because as you said we're so brain-centric. More and more as I think about this, I start to think we're dividing these things into two things, and they're not. Our brain is a part of our body. It's all wired up. Like, we keep dividing them. Again, I think there are useful ways of, you know, for making that distinction. But I also think it makes a lot of sense to just think of this as a unified system. I mean, we'll get to some of this in the book. When you start to realize like how pain both comes from a sensation in your body, but is also processed and amplified in your brain,

you realize that you can't separate these two things from each other. It's a body-brain partnership. And you're right, it's a very tight partnership. Let me give you a couple of examples of stories that really surprised me that was kind of fun research. There's one that was done out of Yale by a professor named John Barge. And he gave people either a cup of hot coffee to cold or an ice coffee to hold. And they didn't realize that this was even part of the experiment. It was while they were in the elevator on the way up to his lab. And then they were asked to evaluate how they felt about certain people. And the people who were given the hot coffee to hold described the people as being kinder and warmer

than the people who were given the iced coffee to hold. Now, this seems crazy, right? But what's happening is that somehow the sensation of warmth is sending a message to your brain of warmth, and your brain is misinterpreting that or holding on to that as it's evaluating the person.

There was a similar study that was done with resumes where people were given resumes to evaluate. Now that's a kind of standard psychological test and if I gave you a resume to look at and you knew this was an experiment, you'd think, ah, she's testing for unconscious bias and I'm not going to get tricked by the name or where the person lives or anything like that. What you might not think of would be the weight of the clipboard on which the resume was sitting. And it turned out that the people who were given resumes on heavy clipboards found the people as being more serious and better potential

candidates than the people who got them on light clipboards. What is it? Maybe the body metaphor was heavyweight versus lightweight. And there are stories like that that go on and on and the research is actually really good and really impressive. Things like that are just amazing because we think we are these creatures of a great deal of rationality, and we are influenced by so many things we just don't understand. And we don't understand how they go together. We don't understand how the weight of the clipboard interacts with how I feel this morning. And so when I think about all that, I learn to take my mental perceptions,

hold them a little bit more loosely. You know, like how did I arrive at this conclusion? It's probably not as straightforward as I thought. Well, it's great that you think that and you're aware of it because we're not usually aware of it. There was another study that intrigued me. It was out of a business school, a professor who is now at the University of Michigan,

and he was looking at negotiations. He was having people negotiate for a car, and that was theoretically, of course. But during these car negotiations, he found that when people were sitting on hard chairs, they negotiated harder than when they were sitting on soft chairs. So what's going on there? Well, maybe when you're sitting on a hard chair, you're feeling edgy. There's some message that's coming from your body and you're a little bit tenser and maybe you're a little more on edge physically and so you respond by negotiating your body and you're a little bit tenser and maybe you're a little more on edge Physically and so you respond by negotiating harder when you're sitting back in a soft chair You're comfortable, you know soft chair soft hard who knows?

And so if you ask the people when they were negotiating what influenced you nowhere on the list We've ever be a chair chair, right? Yeah, you never think of it And if you realized it you initially might be appalled. Mm. Yeah, you never think of it. And if you realized it, you initially might be appalled. Right? I think about these fundamental things that affect us that we don't think about. Now, one that I do know affects us, but I was just talking with my partner about it last night, and I've used this on the show a number of times, but it is how easily even the smallest amount of friction causes you to do or not do something. The classic example I give is my guitar.

If my guitar is on the stand, I'm going to play it like ten times more than if it's in the same spot in a case right next to it. That's ridiculous. It takes three seconds to open the case. I mean, like, what kind of weird animal am I that that's the case? But I've learned not to fight it because it's unquestionably true. And so I think the point of learning some of these, and I think we're going to get into a lot of them as we go into your book, is we can learn these little things that we

can do with our bodies that are going to change how we feel overall. Right. You know, it's a very cold day here in Columbus, Ohio. Indeed it is. And if we had not had this lovely session scheduled, I would not have left my hotel room this morning. Yeah. Right? You know, friction, certainly weather influences how we behave, how we feel.

Sure. I think that one we're usually a little more aware of at least. So, let's talk about how your body can make you happier. What are things we can do with our body that can improve our moods? Well, some of the things are really small and we can do it right now. Everybody who's listening, sit up a little bit straighter or stand up a little bit straighter. There's really good research showing that when you sit up straight, you are able to access positive emotions much more easily. When you're depressed, you naturally slouch. And so if you're slouched, just because that's how you're sitting as your brain, as we said before, is scanning

your body, it's going, ooh, slouched, we must not be feeling so good today. And it becomes very easy to access negative emotions when you're in that position. And simply sit up a little straighter and it'll give you more access to positive feelings. There's been great research about smiling. And it goes way back to an early study that I'm sure you're familiar with where people were told to put a wooden pencil in their mouth and some of them held it in such a way that it made their facial muscles in a smiling position and some in this frowning position. And the people who were smiling ended up being happier and finding things funnier. And that research has challenged a lot.

It's been done over and over again. But I think there are now 128 studies around the world that have been looked at, and it really holds up to be true. Now, you would like to think that your brain is smart enough to know the difference between a real smile and a wooden pencil in your mouth, but in fact, it's kind of not. There's something called the facial feedback hypothesis, which says that the muscles in our face are constantly sending information, and that's one of the ways our brains are figuring out how we feel. Well it's one of the reasons that I'm not gonna get this exactly right but that Botox can be used as an antidepressant because you can't frown

with it, right? It takes away your ability to make the frown which somehow makes you better and I'm always amazed by that smile one. And again, we're not talking about like, I smile and my problems melt away, right? We're talking about it's just a subtle thing. But I'm a big believer in feedback loops. I'm a big believer in upward and downward spirals. And if I feel a little bit better from a smile, then I might just feel good enough to do the next thing

that I need to do that's gonna be good for me, which is gonna then amplify that. One of my mantras is little by little, a little becomes a lot. And so this idea of, yeah, sure, a smile that makes you feel a little bit better, so what, but it can be the beginning, and you do that often enough, and it turns into something really different.

I think that's a really good point to make, which is that we're not talking about dramatic changes in feeling or behavior by any of this, but it's really for most of us, it's those small changes on the edges that do make a difference. And I love that idea that you're suggesting that it all builds on itself. And that's absolutely true. I just mentioned the cold, but one of the other things that does make a difference that we can do with our bodies is to go outside. One of the big findings is that people feel better in nature.

Your wellbeing improves very dramatically when you're outside. And it happens to be that when you're near water, one study found that people who were near water two hours a week felt better and improved their wellbeing. And it doesn't have to be by the ocean. If you're by a pond or a lake or a stream or if you're somewhere inland and there's no such thing. Sewer?

Yeah. Sewer work. I was going to suggest just get one of those little electric windmills, you know, waterfalls, those waterfalls that you can put in your living room or plug in. I tried that. I actually think it's very calming. There's something about water that has a very calming effect. Yeah. You reference in this chapter about how our body can make us happy. I always say her name wrong, but Marvelous Miss Maisel or Maisel? I think it's Mrs. Maisel.

Maisel. Yeah. They have a line in there there tits up is what her manager says to her before she goes out on stage But it's really true like you kind of perk up a little bit and you know stand in a certain way Makes a difference right? Yeah standing up straight presenting yourself that you feel good tells your brain that you do feel good It's very interesting that we are able to that you do feel good. It's very interesting that we are able to change how we feel, but we can't necessarily change the message our body is sending. So let me give you an example about that. If you're like Mrs. Maisel and you're going out to do a stand-up act and you're suddenly nervous about it and you're again, we're back to the chest pounding. If you tell yourself, oh, I'm actually calm, everything is fine, your brain is not

going to buy that. Your brain is just not buying it. It's going, excuse me, chest pounding, hands sweaty, I don't think you're calm. But you can turn it around. You can take those symptoms and you say, well, what else do those symptoms mean? Those symptoms also mean excitement. So hey, I'm really excited to go out on this stage. And so if you're interpreting those symptoms as anxiety and you're slouched over and you're scared and you're tense, that's going to be one presentation as you get on stage. But if you use body and brain and let your brain say, okay, no, this is excitement. And excitement means stand up, be ready, strut out on stage, then that's going to be a

completely different presentation. Yeah, and I think that's the thing that I come back to as I go through your book again and again is this dance between the two. Because what you just described there is a cognitive approach to a feeling that's coming up, right? The feeling is generating something, but I'm choosing to think about that feeling in a particular way. And yet there's plenty of other cases where we've talked about where there's a signal coming that never even becomes conscious that is affecting us. And so it's how do we use our body and our brain? And I think it brings together your two books to make ourselves feel better. Yes, and I think so often we just don't have that awareness.

For most people, we live entirely in our brains, and so we're not aware of those signals that are coming. And so, yes, some of them are so subtle that it's really hard to understand, like the hot coffee we were talking about before, or the hard chair. But being able to put yourself in a position where you do say, okay, this is how I'm feeling,

but how can I give that a little twist that's gonna make this situation better? And you know, that works if you're going in to ask your boss for a raise, or if you're giving a toast at a friend's wedding. Think of it a little bit differently. Think, no, I'm not worried that I'm gonna blow this toast and be embarrassed and everybody will laugh at me.

I'm feeling this way because I care about these people and I want to do my best and I want to let them know how much I love them. And my body's preparing me for action, right? This body piece is why I've dealt with depression on and off throughout my adult life. It's been largely well managed once I kind of got out of my 20s. I use a lot of different things to work with it. But if you forced me to say, you only get one Eric, you can only have one, the one I would choose would be exercise, which is a body thing. But it's that because when I exercise, my body feels better, which then the signal that's going to my brain is a more positive signal. And we can see the exact opposite. When you're sick, my brain turns

particularly dark when I'm sick, right? I just have to tell myself like, just don't believe your brain today. You're sick. No time for existential crisis, no big decisions, just, and it's all because, to use the term that you use in your book, the interoception, my internal sense of how my body feels, feels lousy, and body feels feels lousy and that Translates to lousy in the brain Absolutely, and and I so agree with you about the exercise of depression and there have been a lot of studies on that and it is Very very powerful. Yeah, and of course when you're feeling depressed getting yourself up to exercise It's a cruel irony. It's a cruel irony. I agree

to exercise is hard to do. It's a cruel irony. It's a cruel irony. I agree. And even, I find it, you know, even when I'm not in a bad mood, just making myself exercise is sometimes hard. And I always wonder why because as soon as I do it, as soon as I get in from a walk or get off the treadmill or the elliptical or the exercise bike or whatever I've used that day, I feel great.

I asked that question for years on the podcast because I was like every time I do it, I feel better. Every single time I'm like, I'm glad I did that. You would think if you understand reward learning theory that I would run to exercise. I think that what I've gotten from evolutionary psychologists is sort of even more important than reward learning theory is basic like law of least effort. Like as an animal, your job is to conserve energy and anything that takes a big amount of energy is going to face some degree of resistance. Right. And I talk about that in the book too. There's a wonderful book called exercised by a professor at Harvard who was an anthropologist. And he looks at that and you know he explains that any hunter gatherer worth his salt would not run a marathon. You know, that's just a crazy thing to do.

Precisely. You've got to be balancing reward versus effort. You know, you've got a great story in the book that shows how our physical response often precedes our brain, and it has to do with you and your husband in a car together. Would you share that story with us? Yeah, my husband hates that story, but it's... He's not here though, so... He's not here, right. But it's absolutely true because he is usually the driver when we're in the car. And he's a good driver, but when you're driving a lot or I guess when you're a guy driving, you tend to sometimes drive a little too fast or get a little too close to a car.

I will always gasp when he's too close or he puts on the brake. I'll go, and it really annoys him. It just annoys him. As I was doing this book, I realized that what I have always known, but I now had the research to show it, I'm not gasping on purpose. I'm not thinking first, oh my goodness, you're going too fast or, you know,

got a little close to that car and then gasping to give him the information. My body is responding. My body is responding in a moment of fear. Now, if I could actually stop that gas before it happened, I would because it's not worth the argument that follows in the car. Right, right. But yes, that is an example.

It's a great example. Like if I'm in the passenger seat and somebody's driving in a particular way, there are times I cannot help my foot like mimicking it's on the brake pedal, right? It just does it because it's just, you know, that's the habitual response. Right. The other funny thing with driving is the opposite of that or sort of what you're describing that that physical response where I talk about I think I think I tell the story in the book of driving and there was a small child in the backseat with me and he was saying, which is the brake? Is it on the right or the left? And I'm trying to drive and, okay, I guess it's,

and now are you putting your foot on the brake? Are you putting it on the left foot or the right foot? And you completely cannot drive when somebody's making you think about it that way, because it's just not how you think your body is responding to that. So that's a little bit different than what we're talking about,

but it is responding to that. So that's a little bit different than what we're talking about, but it is those physical responses. So, listener, consider this your halfway through the episode integration reminder. Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far

and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it? If you want to keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise, I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge

to stop and be present in your life. And they're a helpful way to not get lost in the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at OneUFeed.net slash SMS and if you don't like them, you can get off the list really easily. So far there are over 1,172 others from the One You Feed community on the list and we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on over to OneYouFeed.net slash SMS and let's feed our good wolves together. That story about you and your husband comes from the chapter about senses. What are some other ways that we can use our senses to improve our mood or our happiness? I think we don't always realize the power of touch.

You and I have the pleasure of being in the same studio right now. So much of our lives lately is on Zoom and is remote. Because for very good reasons, we've become fearful of touching people. Touch is a very powerful mood changer and a very powerful, we need touch as human beings. A positive story about my husband. He's a wonderful man. I adore him. Just don't get in the car with him. No, I'm just kidding. We had some silly argument one night, not terribly long ago. We got into bed and I could feel that tension with your partner sometimes. I thought we can have the 20-minute discussion

of what just happened. Nobody was right or wrong. It was just something silly. And instead, I just reached over and touched his arm and just rubbed his arm for a moment. And I could feel all the tension just disappear from the room. And we just, you know, we were able to then, it was gone. There was nothing further that needed to be discussed. We both fell asleep very happy. And I think that power of touch and of letting somebody know how you feel that way is really important. Yeah, I love that story when I read it. So senses play a role, our environment plays a role also. And you talk about places and you reference a quote in the book that people

often say which is some variation of like wherever you go there you are meaning wherever you go you take yourself with you I was a drug addict in my early 20s and I tried to move different places to try and sudden I thought if I just am somewhere else it'll be different and it didn't turn out to be different and yet environment and where we are does play a role share a little bit more about that are does play a role. Share a little bit more about that. It does play a role and I think what you said earlier about nothing is as dramatic as we like it to seem. So I can understand why drug

addiction did not end by moving to a different place. But maybe it had a smaller effect. Maybe in some places you felt better. Maybe in some places you were able to take a step forward that you might not have been able to do elsewhere. And with other support, what I will say for sure was avoiding certain places was really important. As I was getting sober and I had other support, it was really important that I not go to where I used to buy drugs. So place does play a role, right? You know, so even in the same story I'm telling, I can give you the flip side of it where, yeah, place matters. Yeah. In less dramatic circumstances, the idea of wherever you go, you take yourself

with you, I think is not true because you feel differently. If you're sitting in a dark room looking at a back alley or you're sitting out on a beach looking at a vast horizon, you feel differently and you're a different person and you have different experiences. There were some things that fascinated me on that score in terms of how our senses are always working together with each other. And so there was that fascinating study out of the UK where a researcher set up three different rooms and he had them as dramatically different environments. One was meant to feel like the outdoors and one was meant to be like a jazz

club and so forth. He gave people glasses of whiskey and they were holding the glasses of whiskey as they moved from room to room. After they had spent a certain amount of time in that room, they were asked to take a sip of the whiskey and describe right down how they felt about the whiskey. And the people described the whiskey differently in each room that they were in. So, when they were in the outdoorsy room, they described the whiskey as tasting grassy. And when they were in the jazz room, they described it as tasting brassy. They were picking up different subtleties in the whiskey. And he pointed out that they were holding the whiskey glass the entire time. So at the end of it, they knew nobody had been tricking them, they had been tricking themselves, that how you

experience something is affected by where you are. Now, we would think how something tastes shouldn't change depending on where you're drinking it or tasting it, but it does. And it tastes different depending on what the lighting is in the room. It tastes different depending on the color of the plate. I talk about another researcher who wrote a paper called the Provençal-Rosé paradox, which is that wine always tastes better, rosé wine always tastes better in the south of France than it does anyplace else. And I've certainly discovered that with Paris, you know,

you have a meal in Paris and it just is wonderful. Everything tastes good. Try to have the same meal at home, not going to taste as good because when you're in Paris, you're not just eating the food, you're eating the environment. You're taking in the beautiful cafe, the experience, the sense that you're in Paris. And so, being aware that, yes, place does make a difference and it does change how you experience things and how you feel about things is really important. Yeah, you tell a story about being in Paris and going to the doctor. Right. I had an eye infection and we needed medicine.

It was a very complicated story and the pharmacy won't let you do it. You have to go to this doctor and we climb up these stairs and it was this ancient room and this ancient doctor and we ended up spending half a day doing that. And at the end of the day, I said to again, my beloved husband, that was so much fun. What a fun day that was. And he said, what are you talking about? You had to spend half the day dealing with medicine. And I said,

it was such a great experience. Wasn't it fascinating and fascinating to see that doctor and to go into that house? And yes. So having a different experience, being in a different place can have such a different resonance than you would expect. Yep. Yeah, my partner, Jenny loves, loves, loves France. And I've been able to observe very clearly in her and I'm not saying like I don't have the same things happening with me. It's just sometimes easier to see with someone else the things that I don't think she would like in the US. She likes in Paris or in France because it's French. Like she has this association with it.

She sees through a different lens because it's a place she has really good feelings about. Absolutely, and I bet everybody who is listening has something somewhere in their house or apartment that they bought on a vacation that seemed like such a great idea and so charming and delightful and adorable when they saw it on vacation. And it is now way in the back of a closet somewhere because when you got it home, you

went, what? Yeah. Because, yes, when we're excited about something and part of it is also just the idea of having a new experience because it is very powerful. New experiences wake up our bodies, wake up our brains, we feel alive. And when you feel alive, you feel better. And that's probably what your partner is experiencing in France in part. And also the joy of being somewhere new, seeing new things.

And yes, it does make everything you touch, see, smell or taste feel better. Yeah. Something I've realized about myself over the last few years is that I am in the personality test, they talk about different traits of personality, there's openness to new experiences, is a personality trait, right? I think I'm very high on that. And the combination of both the pandemic and I'm a long time Zen Buddhism student and Zen Buddhism is kind of focused on like, just pay closer attention to what's right here and it will become special. And I believe that that is true. And I believe that I need new experiences. I mean, I just do better with them. So I have to really sort of consciously court them. And I think it's easy to understand why we would feel better in Paris. And most of our life is not a vacation, right?

Most of our life, you know, we can't just be like, well, I'd like to feel better. So I'm going to fly to Paris. So it's more subtle than that. What are some of the subtle things that we can do to use place as a way of improving how we feel. Well, I don't think you need to fly to Paris to have a new experience, right? You can drive on a different route to the grocery store than you usually take, and you're gonna see things a little bit differently.

I live in New York, and I took a subway to a part of the city that I had never been to, and I explored it for an hour or two, and I felt like I had been to Berlin. I mean, it was like I had been to some exotic place that I'd never visited before. You know, go to a farmer's market and buy a fruit that you've never tasted and taste that.

I think there are so many ways that we can awaken our experiences. Our brains, again, you know, great as they are, as we've been saying, like to let things go. And it's much easier for our brains if everything is the same. You don't have to pay attention. And again, you've mentioned evolutionary biology

and it makes sense, right? When everything is the same, you don't have to worry. As soon as something changes, you better pay attention because it may be a danger. And so in a bad way, I was at a one person show off Broadway the other night, a wonderful comedian, by the way, named Gary Gullman. He was in the middle of one of his very touching pieces, by the way. And there was a siren outside. It's New York. And he got distracted. And you could almost see him get distracted. He's smart and quick enough

that he was able to make a joke about it it He then did some improv about the siren for a couple of minutes And then he went back to what he was doing, but he got distracted because a change in the environment Distracts you and that can be a bad thing if you're trying to do a one-person show, but in most of our lives It's a good thing to have that distraction to have something new to have something that tells your brain wake up and pay attention Yep, and I think that term distraction is a term that we often associate negatively, like it's not good to be distracted. And I'm going to use that to segue to where I wanted to go next, which is talking about the complex relationship between our body and our brain when it comes to pain. And we'll get to how to work with it more, but the spoiler alert is distraction is part of that.

So there's my fancy segue. But let's talk about that relationship between our body and our brain and how it relates to pain. Well, it's important that you said it that way because it is our body and brain that relates to pain. And we don't usually think of it that way. We think of pain as being very localized and physical. And we should make the distinction between two kinds of pain, between acute pain and chronic pain. Most of the research that we're going to be talking about has to do with chronic pain. An acute injury, if you fall down and break your leg, if you cut your hand, your body is crying out in pain and it is for a reason because something has happened and it's saying, emergency, do

something. But what tends to happen is let's say you're out shoveling snow or you pick up a child and you wrench your back. There's an immediate pain. It lasts maybe for a couple of weeks with a lot of people and in fact, something like 80% of Americans have chronic back, shoulder, or knee pain, the pain never goes away. You just continue to have that back pain and you go, boy, it's ever since that day I shoveled the snow. Well, physically, you've recovered.

Physically, whatever injury was done is gone and if the pain has lasted more than, I think they say three months, it's now considered chronic pain. And what happens is that the pain signal is going from that localized area in your body up to your brain, and your brain is interpreting it and sending it back out and telling you you're in pain. What happens is that long after the physical pain is over, it is continuing and your brain is continuing to send the message. And so most of the research into chronic pain now is focused on how do we change the signal that's coming from the brain?

Now this is a really hard thing for people to accept because people will say, hey, I'm sorry, you don't understand, my back hurts. Don't tell me otherwise, my back hurts. It's not all my head. And you know, there's a wonderful doctor at Stanford said to me, it's not all in your head. I understand it is not all in your head. It is in your brain, but it is not in your head.

And I said, wait a minute, isn't your brain in your head? And he said, yes, but there's a very different nuance to that. When you tell somebody it's in their head, it means they're making it up. When you tell them it's in their brain, you say, of course you're feeling pain. I have no question but that you're feeling pain. Nobody is suggesting that you're making up this pain, but understand that the pain signal is coming from your brain and not from your back. One way I like to think of it is, remember those electrical circuits

that you did as a science project when you were a kid or for your kid, and the goal was to get a little light bulb to light up? And if you break that circuit anywhere, the light bulb goes off. Well, I think of that as being a pain circuit and the light bulb is the pain. And what you're trying to do is turn off the light bulb. And it doesn't matter if you turn off the circuit at your back or in your brain, you're still turning off the circuit.

Yeah, my mother has suffered chronic pain for years. I feel like I live in this nexus and I've interviewed people about this idea. And I think it's another one of those things that gets to be a little bit tricky and nuanced because sometimes it is physical signals from the body. Sometimes it's the brain stuck in this on position. Sometimes it's a combination of these things. So it gets very difficult to sort out. But I want to break this down into two separate areas. I think one is what actually happens in our brain when that pain circuit gets locked on. The second piece is I also want to explore

what happens to our perception of pain depending on how we relate to that pain. You talk about both these things in the book. So let's stay first with the one we've been covering, which is this pain circuit sort of getting locked on. I interviewed somebody, Yoni Ashar, I believe is his name, a doctor about this. And one of the studies they've done that showed this was they were able to see that as pain moves, and you may have talked about this a little bit, as pain becomes chronic, they start to notice

where it is in the brain starts to move and it moves to areas that are much more memory related, meaning there's a memory of the pain. And again, none of us are saying you're not feeling immense amounts of real pain. It's just like you said, where kind of is it coming from? Now let's also talk about though, you call it the cycle of rumination, magnification, helplessness, right? This is an amplifier of even perhaps legitimate pain that's still coming from our back. This is a way I think we amplify. Right.

And the more we worry about pain, the worse it gets. And the less we move, which makes our pain worse, and the tensor we make our muscles, which makes our pain worse. And yes, it was one study that was looking at, I believe it was post-surgical pain. And it found that the number one correlation to what caused post-surgical pain was not the skill of the surgeon and it was not where the surgery was done. It was how much the person worried about being in pain beforehand. And so, how you feel about your experience makes a huge difference. And the reason that some of the studies that I'm sure you've seen and that I talk about in the book on behavioral therapy for pain work

is because it gives you a different way of thinking about the pain. And pain is scary. When you're in pain, wherever it's coming from, whether it's your back or your brain, it's scary. And to get a new way of thinking about the pain, to be told, okay, let's laugh at this pain. It's coming from your brain.

Your brain is tricking you. Don't worry about it. You're not going to hurt your back by going out and walking. You're not going to hurt yourself no matter what you do. We got to figure out a way to stop your brain from sending these signals, but stop worrying about your back. Changes how you think about it and changes how you feel about it and changes how you move. And so I think that's one of the reasons that kind of behavioral approach has been so effective in so many clinics. Yeah I think with post-surgical pain the other thing and I was just reflecting with another guest recently about this because we've been through it and a friend of mine went through it recently which is

people come out of surgery and they're in pain and they think there's something wrong. Whereas if they've just been told, by the way, we just did back surgery, don't expect that when you come out, your back's going to feel immediately better. You're going to be in some degree of pain because post-surgical pain is a real thing. But what happens is people get themselves all amped up like, what's wrong? What's wrong? What's wrong, the surgery didn't work, all of that, when what you're dealing with is the very normal acute pain that comes from having your body sliced open and something done in it. It's that rumination magnification helplessness loop that somebody's in in that case. Whereas if they understood what was happening, they could turn down that rumination, they could turn down that magnification. That's a great example.

You're right, because if you come out of surgery and you know that it's going to be painful and you were told you're gonna have a miserable three days and then by the end of the week you'll probably start feeling better, you're gonna deal with that so much differently and it's going to give you a very different experience. My dear husband, who we've mentioned a couple of times, is a doctor. And I have the advantage of that. You know, I'll get a cold or the flu or whatever and he'll say, yeah, you're going to feel lousy for two days. But I'm seeing this all over. Everybody's got it.

And after a couple of days, everybody gets better and then you're going to be fine. Fine. No problem anymore. Two days, I can deal with it, right? Precisely, yep, yep. You know, you talk about your own back pain in the book, and I've talked about my back pain before, which has really been managed largely by, A, how I think about it is a big piece, and how I talk to myself about it, you know?

Instead of saying my back is killing me, I'll be like, oh, there's some tightness in my back. But the other thing that you talked about is you started doing core exercises. And the core exercises may have helped with the back pain because your core is taking weight off of your back. So yes, it may be helpful. But you talked about how it was also helpful because you felt like you were able to do something about your pain. You went from helplessness to a position where you had some agency. I think that is so important and I use that even now. And I don't have particularly bad

back pain by any means, but you know, we all get those twinges or those moments we feel a little stiff. And I do find that as soon as I feel that way, I go, oh, I'm just going to go do a few, you know, tummy tightening exercises or this or that, or the, you know, the four exercises that I've learned to do. And it does give you that sense, I'm just gonna go do a few tummy tightening exercises or this or that, or the four exercises that I've learned to do. And it does give you that sense of I'm doing something and I'm able to make this better. I'm able to make this go away. I think I suggest in the book that I think my back pain improved much faster than my core did.

There was no way that my core had gotten stronger when my back pain went away. But it was that sense of, okay, I'm back in control. It's funny you say that though, because I recently was having some low back pain. And so I did my like, okay, what did I used to do? What exercises did I used to do? And looked them up and started doing. And you're right, they probably couldn't have helped as quickly as suddenly I started feeling a little bit better. I think they do help, of course, right? It's both and. The body is sending real signals that are important and our brains are amplifying and modifying and choosing how we perceive those signals. You know, we get embarrassed when we talk about something like that and we say like, oh, that's just the placebo effect. The placebo effect is a good thing. We should see that as a

wonderful positive, not something to be embarrassed about. It's your body making you better. It's your brain making you better and able to take over instead of drugs or other things having the same effect. So it's wonderful if you're able to enact the placebo effect. The amazing thing about the placebo effect is that sometimes it doesn't just change your perception. It's changing actual biomarkers that people can measure, right? It's crazy that that is happening because it's easy to see how the placebo effect might make me think I feel better. But when you're actually able to measure things that show that people indeed do feel differently, you're like, wow, this is really kind of a remarkable thing. 100%. And it's a great thing. If our bodies can manufacture the chemicals

that we need, bravo. That's what we need. Yep. So listener, in thinking about all that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Not your top 10, not the top 5, just one. What is it? Think about it. Got it? Now I ask you what's one tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing you can do today to put it in practice? Or maybe just take a baby step towards it. Remember little by little, a little becomes a lot. Profound change happens as a result of aggregated tiny actions, not massive heroic effort. If you're not already on our Good Wolf Reminder SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a tool you can leverage to remind you to take those vital baby steps forward.

You can get on there at whenufeed.net. It's totally free and once you're on there, I'll send you a couple text messages a week with little reminders and nudges. Here's one I recently shared to give you an idea of the type of stuff I send. Keep practicing, even if it seems hopeless. Don't strive for perfection. Aim for consistency and no matter what, keep showing up for yourself. That was a great gem from recent guest, Light Watkins. And if you're on the fence about joining,

remember it's totally free and easy to unsubscribe. If you want to get in, I'd love to have you there. Just go to oneufeed.net slash SMS. All right, back to it. So I'd like to end with kind of where you end the book, which is with what you call the Body Mind Happiness Plan. And in it, you have us walk through a different aspect of body-mind connection each day. I'm going to just read what they are, so

listeners kind of get the pick, and then I'm just going to ask you to comment on one or two of them. So Monday is creating a cozy environment, so we sort of talked about how our environments matter. Tuesday is whole body happiness. Wednesday is time outdoors. Thursday is reinterpreting body signals, which is what we were just talking about. Friday is movement and exercise. Saturday is eating for pleasure. And Sunday is walking and creativity. So if you would just pick one or two of those to leave listeners with a couple practical strategies they can use based on your plan here.

Well, let's go to the last one. The walking for creativity because we haven't talked about that. And it was fascinating to me to discover that, you know, most of the time when we're dealing with a problem or a work problem, we hunch over our laptop more and more and we, you know, we just, I'm going to sit here till I figure this out. And you should do the opposite. Get up, take a walk, go outside because the fluidity of your body encourages the fluidity of your mind.

Creativity in your body, movement in your body causes creativity. And to realize that, you can almost feel it. And so put yourself, I think, in the positions where good things can happen to you. Allow yourself to be in those places that are beautiful. Allow yourself to be outdoors. Allow yourself when you're unhappy to say, I just want to taste something that's going to make me happy and just a tiny taste that will awaken my senses and make me feel good. So I think that pleasure of letting your body move, letting your senses experience things

is really very helpful in any situation that you have. Wonderful. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for coming here to sit down with me in person. And the book is called, What Your Body Knows About Happiness, How to Use Your Body to Change Your Mind. And we'll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and where they can

find you online. So thank you. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to OneYouFeed.net slash join. The One You

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