The Psychology of your 20s - 244. 5 steps for creating a 'soft life'

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

The idea of a 'soft life' originated from a group of Nigerian influencers who chose the term to describe a way of living that was comfortable, joyful, minimised stress whilst prioritised self care and simple beauty, in comparison to hustle culture, burnout and urgency. In today's episode we are going to go through 5 practical tips to make this gentle life your reality, including:  The 'Picture This' exercise The new way to approach your To Do list  How to organically regulate your nervous system Creation over consumption  Rethinking our ideas for success I also have a special announcement at the beginning of the episode! Thank you again for all the support. Preorder my book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/755841/person-in-progress-by-jemma-sbeg/  Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast For business: [e-mail]   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of your 20s. Before we get into today's episode, I have a really special announcement. And if you're listening to the episode in the week that it is coming out, you might be some of the first people to know. I wrote a book and come 2025, it will be yours. It is called Person in Progress. And much like this podcast, it's a psychological roadmap basically to your 20s with even more studies,

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Without further ado, let's get into the episode. Today, we are going to be talking about how to create a soft life in your 20s. And what I mean by that is how do we create a life of simple pleasures, of joy, one that is gentle, happy, successful, without feeling heavy and frustrating as everything so often feels these days. It is a daily reality for a lot of us in this decade. We are so focused on progress and success. It's been drilled into our brains. We are focused on not falling behind on this like predetermined race course that we all are traveling on. And it means that our lives, firstly, no longer seem like ours. And at times they don't even feel enjoyable. All of our

attention and our energy is like focused on work. It's focused on school. It's focused on achievement. And it's dictated by like this urgency culture to be doing it all and to have it all together right now. to be rushing from one milestone to the next, from one place to the next, I think it's time that we slow down. It's my belief that when we really buy into this during our 20s, this like overarching perspective and attitude towards life, and we don't have the occasional reminder that life is short and we actually need to enjoy it. We end up being overwhelmed by unnecessary stress and we prioritize productivity rather than being kind to ourselves, being gentle to ourselves, experiencing the world, shaking off that philosophy as well, it becomes harder the older we get.

So it's a very formative period where we can rewrite the script that we have been taught on how to enjoy our lives. That is what we want. We do not want to be operating at this really high stress frequency for, you know, the next 30, 40 years are never slowing down. I think it also comes down to this very important thing to remember, which is that in a culture of hustling and in the culture of success, you don't need to burn out to prove that you deserve good things. You don't need to deny yourself simple pleasures to prove you're a good person. We want to take a more, I would say positive psychology approach. We want to take our mental health and our emotional health seriously by deliberately choosing and

pursuing a soft life. The soft life is about slowing down. It's about adopting a lifestyle of enjoyment, comfort, ease, simple pleasure. And it came from the Nigerian wellness community and from black female creators who were sharing this new approach in the last two to three years that really combines agency, ambition, freedom without the need to sacrifice. what you enjoy and to always put others above you, put yourself under this intense stress, you go easier on yourself, you appreciate the details of life rather than rushing through them. If you want to read about the exact history of this term, there is an amazing article by Anscape, which is like an online journal titled The Soft Life Isn't as Easy as It Looks Online.

And they interview some of the originators of this term. It's incredibly fascinating for, you know, where their desire to embrace the soft life and promote the soft life really came from. I like to think of it as well as really living similarly to how our ancestors would have lived long ago. They would have woken with the sun. They would have felt their feet on the earth. They would have watched the trees move, watched the sunset, enjoyed like the sweetness of the berries really savored it. They would have done just what they needed to. survive and then rest easy at night with their clan. They didn't have to do lists. They didn't have

teams meetings. They didn't have Microsoft Word. They didn't have keynote presentations that needed to be done for their boss. And this soft life is about appreciating that obviously circumstances have changed. So we need jobs. We have these responsibilities. This is an element of who we are. But choosing to return to a life before productivity to find us in the time that we have. We want comfort. we want low stress. So let us jump into five ways you can really create that life for yourself at this pivotal point, how you can reprogram, re-socialize, retrain your brain to see this as the version of success you should be pursuing.

And talk about the psychology behind it. Talk about the mental impact. All of that and more after this short break. There are of course a few straightforward ways to embrace a soft life that we hear about. quite frequently, you know, prioritize self-care, especially self-care that isn't just about self-improvement, but a genuine generosity to yourself, setting boundaries with people or situations which are emotionally taxing. Another important one, practicing gratitude, incorporating rest, treating yourself every now and again, all very important, all pretty well-known

for a good reason. But with that in mind, I really want to focus on five more specific things that are a little bit different and that you can do daily, weekly, monthly, that have an evidence base behind them. The most significant one in my mind, in my opinion, comes down to gratitude. And that is number one, go searching for joy, go searching for things to savor and embrace the kind of little things that are presented to you every day. Saver, you know, the crunchiness of the apple that you had for breakfast. Saver the fact that you found that perfect shower to. temperature, your cup of coffee, the little kid like giggling on your bus, the joy of your daily walk. You know, wake up without an alarm once a week. Choose a slower pace for your meals. Reconnect.

Joy as an emotion, it is so overlooked and so often confused with happiness as well, but it's a lot deeper. It's a lot more profound. Joy is elation. It's delight. It's like this whole body experience of synchronicity, almost like, you know, the best way I can explain it is the sense that in that moment you exist right now just to experience this. This is the reason you are put on this world. This is such a human experience to feel joy. This is what we're here for. Here is the thing. The more you go searching for joy, the more it tends to find you, even when you don't want it to because once our brain starts searching for a certain kind of stimulus moment thing, like a joyful thing, it becomes naturally more attuned to the presence of such things in our

environment. So noticing joy makes joy more evident in your everyday. It's kind of like when you notice a yellow car and you can't stop noticing them. Like there is this green car near my house. It's like a lime green car. And now anytime I'm in a new city, a new suburb, sometimes even a new country, I see that car everywhere. I always notice it being around. Having that search for joy, that personal search for joy, is really, really helpful for your health and your life satisfaction. So there was a study published by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and it found that when we regularly experience joy day to day, something we take for granted, something we don't tend to focus on in health literature,

it triggers a number of psychological but also physical changes. Better blood flow, better focus, a better mood, all things that make for a softer life. Now, that was one study, but there was another one from 2019 that was a research paper that is the perfect example of how embracing joy makes you more holistically well. So this paper measured the impact of an intervention called Picture This. I love this intervention. It's very similar to the exercise that I'm going to talk about in just a second. But in the picture of this study, the research has asked 200 of their participants in the experimental condition to use their smartphones to take at least two photographs of an event, moment, place that made them feel joyful.

and they have to do this each day for three weeks, and then they uploaded those photographs to a server for the staff to kind of look at. So the researchers gave them some examples of things to take photos off. You know, you could take a photo of the sky at sunset. You could take a photo of a good friend of getting a really good grade on a paper or a test that you worked hard for. They were also instructed. This is the second part. They're instructed to focus on the physical sensations.

and the cognitive and emotional response that they had in that moment that they decided to take a photograph. This is actually called sensory perceptual sharpening, noticing how your senses respond to something that you're perceiving. Basically, what they were doing in this not-so-sly way was forcing their participants to take note and take notice of joy and capture a photo of the source. over that period, all these 200 people, their mood improved, they became more grateful, more motivated, they expressed that they enjoyed their life more. For some people it was actually quite a profound experience. They were like, I just didn't realize how much beauty my life had.

It really seems to show that daily experiences of awe, curiosity, gratitude, love, that can put the average person on a trajectory of gross, success. and we know that a soft life is about being present and immersed in experiencing whatever you get the privilege to enjoy and whatever you get the experience to, you know, to feel. Taking inspiration from that study and I love this study. I've talked about this on the podcast before and I've talked about it on Instagram, but I have my own version of picture this and it's called the smile file.

Some people also have a to-da list. These are your only instructions. Very similar to that exercise once a day. All you have to do is take a photo, screenshot, or take a note of something that has brought you joy or something that has seemed so magical to you. Almost like someone has placed this thing in your life and gone like, ta-da, look at it, enjoy it. I made this for you. Savor that moment.

Find one moment every single day. Focus on the sensations. I think life becomes so much easier to enjoy and it's so much more gentle when you have this like outside armor of gratitude when that is the first thing that any experience that comes at you will have to penetrate an armor of gratitude. So moving on from that, our second step for adopting a soft way of living and a soft way of flourishing in our 20s, every single day I want you to remove two things from your to do list that you cannot do. Let me tell you, there is a lot we can do in a day.

There is 24 hours. That's a lot of time. But there is a lot more that we actually don't need to do. We actually never need to do. We just convince ourselves that we're lazy if we don't do it. If you grew up in an environment where you were called lazy for relaxing or you were an overachiever, every single piece of your worth was tied to what you can do in a day, your grades, how impressive. have you looked, you know, these days you may feel quite an intense internal conflict or guilt

when you aren't busy. And so you feel like you have to earn your rest by creating more tasks, more challenges for yourself day in and day out. But the idea of being quote unquote lazy, it has no place in our soft error because reducing your stress by reducing how much you have to do, it's actually not laziness, it's deliberate, it's actually quite hard to do, and it is about providing yourself with space to be human rather than just being a product of how much output you can produce. Another version of that, so you can remove two things from your list today, this is a version of that that I swear by, and what I do is I have my to-do list, that is the things I really need

to do. Couldn't do them any other day. essential for my job, essential for living, essential for being a good friend, being a good partner, paying taxes, you know, those kind of things. That's my to-do list. Then I have my I would like to do list. This is the things that I would really kind of like to get done. I would really like to get around to. It's not going to be the end of the world if I don't do it. And then I have my extras list. This is the things that I would do if I have like a shit ton of time. But none of those things. are essential. Anything on my I would like to or my extras list doesn't need to be done today or tomorrow.

Eventually they might even fall off the list altogether and nothing's going to go wrong. So you have your must list, your I would like list and your extra list. Why is this important? Well, too often, and I'm guilty of this as well, but too often we put every single small thing on our to-do list from our small tasks to our large ambitions, and it's just not helpful. I do think that we tend to do this as a way of organizing or structuring our thoughts and a way of visualizing and finding a space for remembering what needs to get done, but it has the ripple on effect of making us insanely overwhelmed because we have no vetting process. We have no vetting process as to what actually deserves to be on our daily

agenda. It's like everything from do the dishes to find my birth certificate, to get a new job to like insert huge task here. Because of this, we never actually finished the to-do list. Every day a new task is kind of carried over. You've added on more items, which you can't do anyways. Then you don't do them. You feel like a failure. Even when you already did all the things that you already needed to do. So why is it important to have a realistic list rather than an ambitious list? It's because of how our brains prioritize and think about unfinished tasks. They become rather intrusive. There is a natural spotlight on everything that we haven't done rather than on what we have done.

So this is due to a psychological phenomenon known as the zygonic effect, which basically says that we tend to fixate on interrupted tasks or incomplete tasks more than others. When we feel like we have, I hate using this word, but failed to do something, something that we needed to do. This creates this underlying cognitive tension, and it means that our brain keeps coming back to it, keep saying, hey, we haven't finished that yet, we haven't finished that yet. Even as you're trying to switch off, even as you're trying to fall asleep, even when you are totally exhausted, even when actually there's no need to do that thing today.

In some ways, this is sometimes helpful, you know, when you're really under the pump, you don't want to forget things, you don't want things to slip off the list, but you are not meant to feel. that way all the time because then everything becomes about what you didn't do with your time rather than prioritizing what you chose to do with your time in order to be more present in your life. So this is my new rule for myself. Yes, I have my must like and like my extras list. But I also say if any sentence starts with I could, such as I could do this, I could add more things to my to-do list. I could sign up for new projects. I could, you know, add this extra element

that's going to take a lot of time. I could find time in my day. I have to shut it down. Any sentence at this time in my life when everything is so busy that starts with I could is I can't. I only have space for things that are urgent, for things that are important, for things that I want to do. Because I was doing all this stuff before that just really drained me enormously and it actually didn't even matter. Like it had no impact on my life. It wouldn't have made my life better. It wasn't really doing anything. It wasn't important. It wouldn't have mattered whether it was done or not. And it made my life heavy. And, and, you know, it was things I didn't even care about. And the things that I did care about, I wasn't able to prioritize because I was carrying the stress of these tasks that were

unnecessary. You know, someone said to me recently, I think this really does summarize it. If you don't have to struggle, don't. Don't force yourself to struggle just because you think it means you deserve more, just because you think that people are going to think you're lazy if you don't. So tip number two, cut down that to do list, please and thank you. We're going to take a short break, but when we return, I want to discuss my remaining three steps or pieces of advice for creating that soft, tender, gentle life that you deserve. in your 20s. Stay with us. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange, modern world.

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podcasts. One of the other crucial elements of creating a routine and a lifestyle that lets you go slowly and at your own pace is developing a better relationship with stress. Now, that probably sounds unrealistic, undoable for many of us. Stress is, of course, it's a necessary part of life, you know, like it or not. you are never going to eliminate it entirely, nor actually should you want to, because you'd miss out on so much important information. But we can get better at regulating our nervous system so that it's not being triggered by unnecessary stresses, things that are minor stresses, things that really don't deserve that much attention and energy.

You know, the daily hassles. Stress has an impact. We want to be selective with when it is. activated because when our fight or flight response is consistently set off, it changes our immune system response. It suppresses digestion. It reduces our body's ability to heal itself. There are so many cognitive impacts. It actually does put your body under a lot of tension. It's like a vigorous workout for your body. And, you know, workouts are great. Workouts keep you healthy. You don't want to be doing like four or five of them a day. It's going to put a strain.

It also just like doesn't feel nice. That's like a pretty simple way to say it. I've noticed though that so few of us realize how often we are actually being pushed into that stressed state, how often our environment is triggering a response that was meant for survival. But this is not a matter of survival. You know, a workplace deadline, missing a train, having an argument with a friend is not a matter of survival. But we cannot help but feel like this insane stress. response and this fight or flight response is being triggered because we have been trained by our environment to be more an edge. So this is a long way of saying number three, if you want a soft life,

we have to improve how we regulate our nervous system in organic ways, in ways that we are evolutionarily and our ancestors would have regulated their emotional response and their stress response. A regulated nervous system like that turn, it has been getting a lot of buzz online recently. I've noticed this. What it basically means is that your body and your mind can effectively respond to stress. So it is not the complete removal, the complete absence of stress. It's actually important to note that it is about having this important two-way street relationship with stress where stress is welcomed, but it is not allowed to dominate.

You are able to return to a balanced calm state after it is past. And that state, that balance is called homeostasis. It's crucial because it means that your nervous system isn't overreactive, it's not stuck, it allows you to be flexible, it allows you to adapt to various situations, you are not a tense creature. Here are some ways that we can get to that regulated state. You need to have a process for grounding yourself

and for remaining present when everything in you is calling to panic. I always repeat to myself, just be where your feet are. Just be where your feet are. And that means taking off my socks. I don't know if that's gross for some people, but whatever. Take off my socks. I take off my shoes. I just place my feet on the floor and I say,

the only thing that I'm going to concern myself with is whatever is 10 centimeters from where I'm standing. This is my zone, this is my present, this is what I can control. Not the future, not others, not the past. I'm going to take a moment in the stress state to be where my feet are. This is even better when you combine it with like a natural environmental setting. So this kind of grounding, it's called earthing, when we combine that centering technique with nature. earthing really focuses on realigning your electrical, your neural energy with the earth. You know, those words, they might not sound scientific, but the research behind this type of grounding,

it really is the best study that I've come across this ever. It talks about how our lost connection with nature and the earth has basically caused our nervous system to, no longer have a stable environment in which to calm itself. You know, we no longer sleep on the ground. We rarely walk barefoot outdoors. We live and we work inside. We spend so much of our time disconnected, like up far above the ground in high rises, not out in nature.

You know, some of us wouldn't spend more than an hour outside a day. Everything is loud, busy, or vestimulating, urgent. That never ends. And all that external information means we, need to be constantly on so our threshold for stress has been lowered. But when we practice earthing, we return our body and our mind to the place it evolved from, to where it belongs, to where it can recalibrate itself and feel calm. And a grounded body is a healthier and stable body. The most fascinating part of this study, though, and you can't have to see it to believe it.

Because I read this and I was like, I need some more evidence of this. I need something. I need a graph, I need a picture, they had them. Basically, in the study, they looked at thermal imaging of a person's body before and after-earthing. So thermal imaging basically looks at body temperature. And lower body temperature would typically mean less inflammation, perhaps even less pain. That was very clearly documented in these images. People were talking about how even spending 30 months.

minutes, earthing themselves. So just basically grounding, using nature. They felt more calm, their pain from certain chronic health problems or certain joint pains, things like that, was relieved. They felt less stressed, less like almost even hot, less jittery. All of these coming down to nature's innate capacity, it's innate role as our friend and as our collaborator in handling our motions. So there's some other things that you can do to help with that regulation. Cold showers in the morning,

that's a big one at the moment. Personally, don't like it. No, it works. Not for me, but just to put it on the table. You can also do progressive muscle relaxation, which is beautiful. You can get guided versions of this online, which I really recommend.

This one was something that I thought of or I was like, huh, this would really work. And I tried it the other day and it was actually very, very interesting, unplugging from your phone or your headphones when you go for a walk. So we often, you know, you and me both, we are listening to podcasts, we are listening to music. We are calling our friends. We've got our noise cancelling headphones on. We got earbuds in. Instead, next time you go for a walk, take your headphones off, just pay attention to your environment. And it means that we

don't experience this disconnection between what we're listening to, like our senses and what we're seeing. So our eyes and our ears are not processing different information. I just think that all those options are free. Like you can literally do them tomorrow. But it really just like reconnects your mind and your body to your environment in a way that our current situation and our current work, life, travel, existence doesn't really promote. This really brings me to my next big tip. Look at this amazing segue I'm about to perform because my next piece of advice is really, really related to that. And it's related to how we treat self-care as a consumerist act when we should be focusing more on creation. Self-care is really, really important, but it's so often associated with spending money and having more, more skin care, more candles, more luxuries, buying yourself little things.

This is all really, really nice, right? I do it all the time. a joy getting a new little trinket. It's a joy getting something that you've really worked hard for. But it can also make self-care unattainable. And after a while, I would make the argument that it makes self-care quite shallow if you can just like buy yourself a better mood. It's of course going to give you the dopamine hit that you want because it is an act of consumerism. And companies are great at leveraging that to get you to think that self-care really just means buying more things. really just means consuming more things, thinking it's going to make you happier.

There was a really great Vox article written about this in, I think, June or July this year. It's called How the Self Care Industry made us so lonely. And it talks about how self-care used to be a term that meant nurturing yourself by filling your cup with community and creation and rest, expression. All of these are so psychologically nourishing. But nowadays, those things are harder to come by and they're harder to prioritize because we are. So disconnected, those spaces aren't as available, those communities aren't as available. And so we replace them with what we can buy or what is most convenient and available, which can actually make our lives quite heavy. We talked about this in

last week's episodes. If you're up to date, last week we talked about hobbies. I don't know if it was last week or on Tuesday now. Our most recent episode we talked about hobbies. And I talked about how we are so exhausted from how busy society keeps us that often we just want to do what's easiest. We want to have the quickest meal. We want the most convenient way to switch off our brain by scrolling, by watching TV, all of which have their place. But continuously, choosing that as your place to relax, choosing that as your source of kind of decompressing, it's going to detract from your life. It's going to make it a lot less tasty. If you want that delicate, soft, cozy life, you need to make more space for creating things

and more space for expression and dedicate less time, less money, less room to just consuming. So two to three days a week, I want you to do a week. I want you to invest in creation as a way to feel more connected to what you're doing. So your food, your items, your space, your hobbies, take the extra 30 minutes, the extra hour to really pour some care and love into your dinner or your breakfast and to feel proud of what you're making yourself, how you're nourishing yourself. Take an afternoon off. Take an afternoon off on your weekend to pursue a creative project, get a herb garden,

volunteer, take care of someone else, be generous to someone else, put something back into the world. That is a real true act of softness, being open enough to want to give and not just receive. Finally, rethink what you believe success should look like. This is a big aspect of shifting from a productive, heavy life to a slower, softer, gentler life. Typically, And historically, our biggest indicators of success, they are material and they are social. You make more money, you receive more praise, you have more respect, you have a nicer house. But what does any of that actually mean if you are always in a rush anyways? And if you never have this space to enjoy it?

What makes that a more desirable life than the soft life? You know, because quite frankly, you can have all those things and a lot of people have experienced all of those things and still said, I am quite miserable. So let's consider the alternative. A balanced lifestyle. A day filled of variety. Time to just exist. Enjoy your experiences.

Time to socialize to build connection. Room to slow down. Maturing, to me at least, is realizing that is very appealing. That is the outcome we should want. A few weeks ago, I did an episode. I think it's called How to Be Truly Successful in Your 20s, Episode 221. Episode 221, yes. And I really wanted to wreck you to listen to that because when we talk about redefining success,

that's like the best place to turn. It goes so in depth. And it could be a wake-up call that you might need to hear that we're putting so much weight on the traditional notions of success, no fault of our own. That's how we've been socialized, it's how we've been conditioned, how we've been raised. But at their center, they are about self-sacrifice, they're about discipline, productivity, image. The alternative is about giving, enjoying, resting, slowing down, caring.

And, you know, I just think that's more valuable. It doesn't mean you can't still be successful in traditional ways. but it's about kind of opting out of the rap race at some point and being like, huh, this, I can't win in the system. I can't win if I have to just keep being productive for the rest of my life to obtain all these sweet, beautiful joys that they're telling me I'm obtaining because of this work, but never actually being able to enjoy them. Like you kind of start to really see how that's not a healthy cycle.

So choose the gentle life. It's the simple things. It's the minimalistic things, not the flashy things. It's joy, nature, community, creation, a regulated nervous system. That is true wealth to me. And the tips that we've shared today will hopefully bring you closer to having more of that in your life. So in wrapping up this episode, I'm hoping that this left an impression on you or it just made you think that's really what's important. I hope you please do just one of these things.

Just see if it helps. You could even literally just not set an alarm every now and again, slow down, cook a nice meal, see what happens, see if life feels more fulfilling and more rich. If you have listened this far, thank you so much. Just a reminder that if you want to pre-order my book, you can do that right now at this very minute that you are listening. If you just want to check out the cover, if you just want to see what the blurb looks like, I don't know, whenever floats your boat, I'll leave a link in the description. It truly is an honor to get to announce this. to you guys, my wonderful listeners today. As for this episode, as for the podcast, make sure you have left us a five-star review. Make sure you are following along on Apple or Spotify. So you get

alerted when your episodes come out. It's almost December, which you know means the 12 days of guests. I can't wait to announce who is coming on. You can follow us on Instagram if you want a sneak peek of that as well at That Psychology Podcast. And until next time, stay safe. Be kind. Be gentle to yourself embrace the soft life and we will talk very very soon. Hey, what's good y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that

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