The Psychology of your 20s - 450. The psychology of the quarter life reinvention

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

In this episode, we explore the psychology of the quarter life reinvention: the period that can come after the confusion, uncertainty and identity crisis of our early and mid-20s, when things finally begin to fall into place. We look at how the quarter life crisis can transform us, the stages we move through, and why sometimes everything has to fall apart before we can rebuild a life that feels more like our own. We explore:• The difference between a quarter life crisis and a quarter life reinvention• The ‘locked in’ and ‘locked out’ forms of the quarter life crisis• The four stages of the crisis• The signs that you’re entering your reinvention era• How experimentation, risk taking and new experiences help us rebuild• The role of narrative psychology and rewriting the story you tell about your life• Why learning to tolerate uncertainty may be the key to finally moving forward Watch on Netflix: HERE Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [e-mail]  The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You're hired to fill the space. with you. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everybody. I'm Gemma Spike, and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast and thank you for joining me for another episode as we break down the psychology of our 20s. So today I want to talk about this kind of this idea or theory that I've been playing around with and exploring in kind of recent months. I talk a lot about the quarter life crisis on this podcast, which is, you know, the period in our early to mid-20s when we're just struck by all these compounding questions and fears all at once and it feels like everything is going wrong. We have no sense of stability, no sense of direction, purpose. Our lives are falling apart. But equally, we feel like our lives are just starting and we're the oldest we've ever been, where the youngest

we've ever been. It's like this crazy moment. It's a ride of passage, even though it feels like no one else has ever experienced it before. And it's very terrifying because we kind of hope to exit it as quickly as it starts and we hope that we exit it better than how we entered it. That's our quarter life crisis. We kind of have no guarantee of where it's taking us, but we just kind of have to have hope. The quarter life crisis, you know, is a lot about shedding all things and the destruction of an old life. But there's this other phenomena that accompanies it that I think is spoken about less, mainly because, A, it's very subtle. And B, it's something that can only be recognized in hindsight.

And it's the idea of the quarter-life reinvention. This thing I have seen time and time again where people emerge from their quarter-life crisis at 26, 27, 28, maybe even in the 30s, completely different people to who they were at 22, 23, 23, 24. And it's not just normal development. Something intrinsic shifts in them, but also physical and emotional. And at the tail end of the quarter-life crisis, they get this almost second-puburn. or second growth spurt that completely changes the trajectory of their lives psychologically and

emotionally. Unlike, again, like I said, the quarter life crisis, which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter life reinvention is the expansion and growth of something. And it is this transformation that seems to only be able to take place when everything unnecessary has fallen away. So, I want to talk about it today. I want to talk about the psychology. behind it, the phases that we move through when we go through a quarter life crisis, and how to know when you are getting close to the reinvention stage, how to get yourself there, not faster, but with less friction and what to expect. So without further ado, let's get into the psychology of the quarter life reinvention.

So the idea of the quarter life crisis, I know I've kind of explained it already, but I think it's one we're fairly familiar with. It is a distinct period in our lives where we experience a rapid onset of confusion, self-doubt and anxiety that we aren't living our lives as we should be. I think the kind of fantasy and ease of our childhood, of our teen years, of our early adulthood seems to just like slip away overnight and we basically realize almost all at once, like wait a second. Like this is getting very serious.

And soon after we are like, well, if this is getting serious, do I want to be in the life this is leading me to? It's definitely going to cause you to examine a whole lot. And there is a choice. Keep going this way or pivot, redirect change. The choice to redirect or the moments where we feel forced to redirect are where a lot of the tension and the anxiety come from. It borrows its name, the quarter left crisis, borrows its name from the more one. widely known, well, I don't even think it's more widely known anymore, but the original idea of the midlife crisis. The midlife crisis was a critical life stage, first observed by the psychologist

Elliot Jacques in the 1960s, who kind of stood in front of this co-holt of British psychologists and said, all of us, a lot of people are going to go through this period at midlife where they get really depressed and they get really unhappy. And we need to talk about it. And he had seen it time and time again in patience. He'd read about it in biographies. He'd observed it in himself and family and friends. People reached what he called the crest of the hill, the halfway point of life, and realized the, you know, the trajectory so far had been up and up and up and up. And now inevitably, they're at the top of the hill, they're halfway through life and it's all down. It's leading towards death. The years are fewer in front than behind. It's a very existential moment for

many people, and he observed people doing very irrational things, very strange things to maintain their sense of youth. Suddenly, they're leaving marriages with people they seem to love. Suddenly, they're spending all their savings on ridiculous things like red sports cars. They're having these out of the blue, they're quitting their jobs, they're doing crazy stuff, is what he said. And so he originally only identified one point like this in our life. And then people kind of took that idea and they said, wait a second, I think this happens more than once. Eric Erickson, the famous psychologist, said, I think this happens in our 20s, but it didn't really gain traction for a while that it would happen during our 20s. People thought people were too young. But then as our life

expectancy increased, you know, the global average has gone from 52 in the 60s to like 74. These days, that's a 40% difference, if I have my math correct. Like when that happened, people were like, okay, yeah, this is more distinct. There is a crisis that happens around our 20s that we can't ignore this. Just simply more life to worry about we're going to have more moments of crisis. What we realize now and what I have to give credit for to the authors Alexander Robbins and Abby Wilner for articulating for the first time in their book, The Quarter Life Crisis, is that life is not this big clump of years stretching out before us one after the other, often just slightly different but mostly the same. There are these inflection points where things change

rapidly all at once and our identity, our future, our hopes and dreams seem to just be flipped because of things within and outside of our control. Like a breakup, grief, losing your job, like you move to a new place and then six months past and you're like, who am I? Like, who am I? I don't even recognize who I was six months ago. All these things can trigger this cascade of other changes. And with it, a complete instability and a reassessment of like, what do I want from my life? Who am I? What am I doing here? That's the quarter life crisis. And it's a funny thing because it's not just contained to a couple of years at 22 or 23. It can be experienced as young as 18. It can last for seven plus years or more. And something I rarely see spoken about,

is that you can have more than one quarter-life crisis. In fact, you will likely have a couple, two, in fact. And they're very, very different. This 2019 paper published in the journal Emerging Addothood found that these two distinct types of quarter-life crisis are called the locked-out and the locked-in quarter-life crisis. The locked-in-kind is when you feel trapped in your circumstances and you just don't know how to change.

the locked out kind is when you know you need to change, but you don't know how to access the next part of your life that you want. You have a better idea of your desired life. You just don't know how to get there. And both of these moments are equally crisis creating. When I reflect on, you know, my own life, when I reflect on my own life, but yeah, when I do, I can see these two types of crises so distinctly, especially in hindsight. You know, I went through such a confusing period, maybe like three or four years ago where it was just like, none of this is working, nothing is changing, I feel stuck here, I don't want to be here, I don't know what I want. I was working a corporate job. I was dating these, like, quite frankly, like these losers. I didn't really exercise. I

didn't really have any friends because all I did was work and all I did was sit at home. And that was my locked-in crisis. And then I kind of forced my way out. I kind of like violently crossed that threshold by just seriously having a pep talk with myself and being like, hey, you don't want this. Get out of here. And what followed was this waiting room period where I felt good about myself that I'd gotten out of those situations, felt happier because I'd escaped. What I saw was my main containers. And then in like 2024, 2025, I experienced the second kind of quarter life crisis, which was the locked out kind, where it was like, all about striving and trying to picture or obtain something better. And just not knowing how, not knowing if it would

work, it was kind of like, wait, didn't I already do the hard part? Like, I got out of that bad situation. Surely this next bit is easy. And through those years, I was so fixated on, like, how do I do something about this? What do I do? What do I change? What I didn't realize was that something was kind of shifting in the background. Small events, small things were accumulating. And they've brought me to where I am now and what I've experienced specifically in the past six months, which is what we're talking about today, which is the quarter life reinvention. And it happened very slowly. The big distinction between the quarter life crisis and the quarter life reinvention is that your quarter life crisis is all about shedding. It's all about

removing yourself from situations and it's all about goodbyes, it's about grief. The Quarter Life Reinvention is all about expansion and addition and things coming in to fill the space the crisis left. Both of them will stretch you. They just stretch you in different ways. It's as if for me, everything reached its final point. Everything has been building up for this final chapter of my quarter of my quarter life crisis where the cycle is complete. There's been one last struggle and I've emerged as like the person this period was meant to make me into, if that makes sense. At some point something just switches, it switches over and the actions and the decisions you made sometimes years ago come back around and finally pay off and you suddenly look in the

mirror and you're like, wait, I really feel like myself again. I strangely look like myself again. You notice every small change you have made, and there is this sense of calm of like, I push through this. For example, and this may be a bit of a tangent, but for the first time in a decade, I'm like, I have my natural hair color again.

I'm suddenly wearing less makeup. I have this, like, deep ease in my relationships, my hobbies that I had when I was a child have come back. Like I've been up late reading at night. My spark has come back. It's like this, I've returned to the self as a different version of the self. This is your quarter life reinvention. And if we think about the quarter life crisis is four stages, I do think that it is the final stage and the research supports that. We're going to take a short break here. When we return, I want to explicitly talk through those four stages, how to tell when you're at the end of the fourth stage, the one that I'm currently in. And I guess what we need to do to get there. So stay with us. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies?

Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell. Connection is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinker. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.

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traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us.

Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there is a theory put forth by three researchers in the UK that our quarter life crisis, or what they call the early adult crisis, their article, happens in four stages. So these researchers, they conducted 50 structured and

in-depth interviews with different types of people in their 20s to try and see if the quarter-life crisis followed any specific kind of route or like had any landmarks to it. And what they found was that yes, yes, it did. There was a route, there was a progression that a lot of us will follow. The first stage was that locked in or locked out trigger. Something makes us realize like, I'm not happy, and I would like to be happier. The reason we feel trapped in this moment is often extrinsic is what they found. So it's social pressure, family pressure, financial pressure, relationship pressure. Something makes us feel like we should stay or we can't leave, but we reach a point of crisis inevitably. We're maintaining our false outward identity becomes too much. The distress is

too great. The unhappiness is too bitter and we break. We're forced or something forces us to change pretty rapidly. This moves us into the separation and time out phase. We detach from the old commitment or way of life. And this brings about the most emotionally intense stage of just like panic and shame and anxiety and pressure. This is the crisis period. It's also where we experience a transitional state we know in psychology as the identity vacuum. The identity vacuum can happen at heaps of different times in our lives. For example, it often occurs quite profoundly for new immigrants, new parents, people going through divorce when we retire. It also happens during our quarter life crisis.

And it's as the name describes, everything has been sucked up. And we're left feeling empty, untethered, and grieving our old self. How long we stay here depends on a few things. But these researchers believed it really depends on critically how much time out you give yourself to reflect, grieve, maybe travel, rediscover, try new things. How much time you're going to. give yourself to do that, all of which pushes you into the exploration phase. This is where we are actively trying and also somewhat failing at putting our identity back together. Our identity still

remains quite shaky. It's still in the vacuum stage, but we are trying on new things and throwing them into the vacuum. We're trying on different identities, see if they fit. I tried being a runner. Didn't fit, but I needed to try it. I tried reinventing my wardrobe, my style. I thought I might be somebody who likes parting again, which I wasn't. I was just trying on different things. The trying is the important part. Nothing works for a while. You feel hopeless, but it is behind the scenes what is propelling you into reinvention

and the rebuilding phase where, as we spoke about, the accumulation of our courage and our risk and our hard decisions pays off. This is the final stage, the quarter life reinvention. and here is how you know you are in it and what it demands of you. Firstly, you know you are in the final quarter life reinvention stage when a few things about your life start to feel more settled, but not in the I have settled way. What I mean by that is that you've found ordinary aspects of life you actually like and that fit you better.

It's not that you've settled by any means, it's that you have chosen deliberately and you are happy with those choices compared to your previous choices. You feel good about them. Secondly, you start genuinely making decisions because you want to make those decisions, not because others want you to. It's like there is this additional layer added into your decision-making process that you haven't had before where your own urges and your own instincts matter more, which means, thirdly, you stop performing. There is no longer this character or persona you're trying to play. You experience something we call in psychology identity congruence.

Basically, there is an alignment between your core self-image, your core beliefs, desires, and also how you act. Carl Jung literally called it the dropping of the persona. You essentially feel like a more enlightened and perhaps confident version of yourself, of one you probably haven't felt in a very long time. Next, you find you can manage your anxiety around, is this all going to work out? Even if that comes slowly, you feel more secure.

This has been the biggest sign for me that I am on the tail end of my own crisis. My mental space used to be dominated by thoughts of like, how do I know this is the right decision? How do I know I won't have regrets? What if this all goes wrong? What if the outcome isn't what I exactly expected? And now I can look at those thoughts and be like, okay, I'll make it work. I know I can trust myself. I know my character is strong. It's like the lessons of the crisis are all landing at once. They're finally making some sense.

And so the dread, when I didn't have those lessons, is fading. Your intuition also gets louder. You have a deeper sense of knowing about what you want, as I said, knowing a little bit of how to get there, knowing that you need a bit of audacity. And finally, I think you just feel more present. You feel more in your own life. I think this signifies the shift out of survival and panic mode into curiosity and building mode. We know from extensive psychological research that when we are facing life-changing circumstances and our body and mind is under and immense stress. Our capacity for creativity and for curiosity and for expansion and trial and error and fulfillment is much lower because it's not a survival priority. As we exit this stage though,

those states of being and emotions become more available. And so does our sense of presence. It returns to us. It is basically like our brain is like, okay, it's safe to just be again. And And with that, I would say also comes a renewed feeling of gratitude as well. Literally, like, two days ago, I experienced one of the most intense waves of just like, oh my God, I'm so happy, I'm here. I'm so lucky, thank you, thank you, thank you. I was like riding my bike back from the farmer's market. I was listening to Ethel Cain, and I just felt this deep sense of appreciation.

I think I literally was like singing on my back. I was like, oh, thank you, set it out loud. And I was like, oh, I haven't felt that in a while. everything around me is like well how it's just fallen into place and as much as you guys know I just like the sentiment everything happens for a reason it undeniably felt that way those moments were feeling stuck for so long or feeling like it was never going to make sense they just made sense i was like oh god like that needed to happen didn't it that needed to happen now a disclaimer here for me if you've been following the timeline this took about three and a half years

And I'm sure I'm not over it entirely. I think being alive always has its uncertainties. I'll slide back, slide forward. We also know from the research we mentioned before, including that 2019 paper I spoke about, that this can take much longer for some people, sometimes even a decade. People's circumstances are different. Our past hurts, trauma, our base level of self-esteem, the resources we have available to us, very practical things like finances and our obligations, can speed up or slow down this process, specifically because of how much experimentation we feel that we can do. But I do think there are some critical things that are available to us so that we can graduate from the quarter-life crisis to the quarter-life reinvention stage faster.

Now, these aren't intended to rush the process, but they are intended to ease the process, if that makes sense, like to create less friction. And I think the most critical thing that gets us from stage two to stage three and then to stage four is one very simple ingredient, and that is just doing things. That is experiences. The curse of the quarter life crisis is that it can completely paralyze us and cause us to feel like no choices are available to us. Nothing will change.

This uncertainty is forever. That inevitably prevents us from taking the kinds of risks that will help us shift timelines. The antidote for your crisis is the very thing that your brain is saying, do not do, which is just doing things and experimenting and taking a bit of a like fuck around and find out approach to your life. Like that is the only way you get through a quarter life crisis. When you are already at rock bottom, any movement will have to be upwards. That's just the laws of physics, really. Nothing you can do can make it worse if this is the worst it's ever going to be. My friend Victoria has this saying,

you can't keep asking the universe to send you more ideas for how to move forward if you are not using the ideas you already have. And I have to agree with her. If you don't show your willingness to try things, you're not going to receive more ideas for things to try. So if you want a tangible way to enact this and to just do more stuff, write down a list of everything you think might make you feel better, every single thing you have even the slightest desire to try, every single risk that feels possible for you to take in the capacity you have now and

be methodical, work through them. Even simpler, challenge yourself to just try or do something new once a week. And it doesn't even have to be big. It could be reaching out to an old friend. It could be going to something alone. It could be a solo hike. It could be a free lecture in your city. It could be going on a date with somebody even if you genuinely don't feel like it. Novelty and newness pouring that back in pushes you further towards the re-advention stage. Change requires some kind of movement. Any kind, so you have to get moving. an additional thing that I believe really helped me get to the reinvention stage. And again, it might not be the same for everybody.

But it was also doing a little bit of reflection and analysis on how I wanted to feel in my life versus how I felt now. And then what needed to change and doing that with complete honesty. For example, I wanted to feel surrounded by people and love. At the time, I felt very lonely. Those two things can't be the only thing on the page. What's the solution? I was like, okay, I'm going to go to events where I can make friends.

I'm going to be available to hanging out with people. I don't know that well. I'm going to put myself out there. I wanted to feel healthy and I wanted to feel strong in my body. At the time, I wasn't exercising. I wasn't eating well. I needed to change that. And I needed to like, remember there was a step in between that needed me to do something. I actually did this as a general activity where I put, I did like three columns. I was like ideal state, current state, three things that are going to get me there. And I just committed to them one at a time. Not all of them, one at a time. slowly and surely, and some things didn't work at all, but progress still happened with the things that did. Another thing this really taps into is the power of narrative psychology. This is the idea that we have a specific story we tell about our lives, and sometimes that story is inaccurate and it restricts us. To experience progress, we have to work on correcting that story or making it more accurate. For example, your current story might be bad things always happen to me. I've never been that lucky. Every time I've tried, I have failed. And you know what? You might have a lot of evidence for that. Heaps. But even if you have evidence, you believing that will always be your

story and expecting things to continue to go that way will inevitably create a self-fulfilling prophecy stemming not just from your experiences, not just because you have supposedly bad luck, but because you also have limiting beliefs. Psychology would tell you that to shift from stage three to stage four, a critical thing would be to examine that story, the story you tell of your life and rewrite the parts where everything happens for the worst possible reason, everything fails into a story where that is just a little bit more helpful. One way of doing so is thinking about what good things in your life have only occurred because of failure, because of your bad luck. What are the things that

couldn't have happened if that thing hadn't had worked out? For me, I had a real narrative around, like, well, friends always disappoint me and relationships always fall apart. I always end up lonely. Firstly, that wasn't true. It wasn't true. But secondly, even in the times it was, it wasn't helpful. So I thought about everything in my life I was grateful for that only happened because of a breakup, only happened because a friend had disappointed me or because I'd been let down. And I thought about how it all contributed to the person I was today. And if there was even a slither of myself today that I liked, I had to be grateful for the things that put me in the position to be there.

More generally, I think you need to have a real unconditional optimism and trust that life is working out. And it is working out in ways that you don't understand yet. but that will one day be clear. Again, this doesn't mean toxic positivity. It doesn't mean undermining when things have gone wrong, but having the narrative that focuses on the things that have gone right, on the story that is being built, perhaps even imagining every single failure

and moment of uncertainty as just stories you will one day tell that contributed to your success and self-realization. I think about this a lot. When something bad happens to me or something, a failure occurs, I'm like, I can't wait to tell this at a dinner table when I'm 60 and be like, and then guess what? And I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. And then here is the plot twist. I think about my worst moments as my plot twists. Finally, I think getting to the quarter life reinvention stage also involves just being okay with not knowing. You will spend most

of your 20s. I will spend most of my 20s. Perhaps most of my life, your life, our lives, we will where most of our life not knowing, because that is what it means to be human. That does not guarantee a bad outcome. That is your anxiety. Psychological research on the intolerance of uncertainty shows that there are a lot of people who expect the worst. And when people do practice sitting with, I don't know yet, without forcing premature resolution, they actually make better long-term decisions, even if it feels unnatural. They feel calmer sooner. They make better choices, compared to people who just want to just want to escape the discomfort, even if that means a negative guaranteed outcome. If you're having a really hard day and you're questioning, is this going to work out? A, I promise

it will. B, it's okay to just say, I don't know, but I know I will be okay if it doesn't, because I'm tough, I'm smart, I've always made it through, I'm still alive, I will make it through this again, or whatever has to happen, I will make it through that. That is, dare I say, the biggest takeaway and the biggest asset, you could have during that waiting room identity vacuum space. That is the price of experiencing your quarter life reinvention and coming out of it on the other side transformed and self-assured. And in a really great place, the price is the uncertainty. The price is the couple of, I was going to say months, it's probably going to be years, a couple of years where you're just like, oh my God, what the heck?

is this going to be okay? You're paying your, you're paying your dues, you're paying your taxes to the, look at how much better it is, gods. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode, especially as I test out this new theory. Has this happened to you? Do you see this process taking shape in your own life? Do you think the quarter life reinvention is a thing? And if you haven't been through it, what do you hope it brings for you. Leave a comment down below if you are listening on Spotify or send me a DM, The Quarter Life Reinvention. Legit? Has it happened to you or not? This is also your friendly reminder that you can watch full episodes of the podcast on Netflix if you haven't done so yet. We have a really cool new set. I regularly repeat outfits, so if you want to check that out,

you are more than welcome to. There will be a link in the description. What else is down there? substack if you want to read a full episode transcript and see where I got these studies from. There are links to the studies in our substack transcripts. There's an Instagram down there. There's an email address that I don't know if you want to email me. Your thoughts. Sometimes people do. I would love to hear them.

But yeah, just hope you enjoyed the episode. I hope that it's brought you a sense of peace and calm and that you feel better about, I don't know, the tough situation you may or may not be in. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. Thank you again for listening, and we will talk very, very soon. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Hoda Kotbby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotbby. You know, I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out. You're not hired just to fill time and space. You're hired to fill the space. with you. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard,

and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are with. us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.