The Wellness Scoop - Happiness, Change and Emotional Resilience

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Renowned psychotherapist Julia Samuel talks about learning to face our difficulties with self-compassion, expectation versus reality, the relationship between happiness and change, escapism and building a strong foundation with her eight pillars of strength.   Julia Samuel This Too Shall Pass See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with me, Ella Mills. I am missing my co-host, husband, and business partner today, Matthew Mills. But our missing my co-host, husband and business partner today Matthew Mills but our podcast for anyone that's new today Delicious Ways to Feel Better is a weekly show that's focused on everything that matters to us at Delicious Cielo. We believe that feeling good is a holistic 360 degree approach to our lifestyles and that wellness is about so much more than just what we eat or how we exercise. It's our relationships both with ourselves and with others, our mindset, our sleep patterns, our stress levels, how we look after

ourselves just generally on a day-to-day basis. So on this podcast, we'll be breaking down all of these sorts of topics, looking at absolutely everything that impacts on our mental and our physical health and sharing small, simple changes that'll hopefully inspire you to feel that little bit better. So I've got a couple of questions this week. First of all, about the course that I'm taking. So I've mentioned it before, but I'm taking a nutritional therapy degree at the moment. But I've also been in the middle of my next round of 500 hours of yoga teacher training. And as part of that, I'm taking an eight week course called mindfulness based stress reduction, which has been absolutely

fascinating. I know mindfulness is such a buzzword. It's something we've talked about a lot on here and something you hear a lot about. But I think really for me trying to get under the skin of exactly what mindfulness is, although it does have a lot of definitions. There's a summary from the course actually from the founder of this course, John Kabat-Zinn, which is mindfulness is paying attention to moment-to-moment experiences whilst suspending judgment and with acceptance and I've really enjoyed trying to bring that into my everyday life one of the exercises for the course for this week has been actually to do something that you do every single day taking a shower cleaning your teeth walking the dog getting a coffee and do it without distraction and trying to implement that mindfulness. So just

in the same way you meditate, you just bring your mind back to the here and now to what you can see, hear, taste, just to bring that into those day-to-day activities. So I actually chose to do it with going to get my coffee because that's the highlight actually of every day at the moment. And it's just three minutes up the road, but I always take my phone. I find myself always kind of distracted by an email or this or that, and so I haven't taken my phone all week, and I just take the coffee slowly. You actually really taste each mouthful of it and each sip of it and just really notice what's around you rather than letting yourself think about that meeting later or that meeting yesterday, and it's amazing what you notice right in front of you, the flowers, etc. And I really enjoyed

that and I found it really rippling into the rest of my life and going out with the girls and not taking my phone and being more present with them. And there was a quote on the course this week that I just wanted to share because I thought it was so relevant to all of us who live our lives often at kind of ultra high speed, which is just something I'm trying to address at the moment, which is most people miss their whole lives because life isn't when you're standing on top of a mountain looking at the sunset. Life isn't waiting at the altar or the moment your child is born or that time you were swimming in deep water and a dolphin came alongside you. These are just fragments, 10 or 12 grains of sand spread throughout your entire existence. These are not

life. Life is brushing your teeth or making a sandwich or watching the news or waiting for the bus or walking. Every day, thousands of tiny events happen. And if you're not watching, if you're not careful, if you don't capture them and make them count, you could miss it. You could just miss your whole life. And that's by Tony Jordan. But I really liked that. And I'm just trying to take that on board at the moment, especially while we're still at at home I think it's easy to just allow the kind of monotony of the everyday being the same to just escape from us and actually there's a lot in it and actually one of the other questions we had this week is whether we could share a few more tips on separating from work boundaries switching off and energy management so huge topics I think energy management is also

an interesting one from a health perspective, especially from a gut health perspective. We've got another gut health episode lined up in about six weeks time. So we'll get really into that there. But I think switching off and trying to limit screen time to up to two hours a day. And it sounds so silly, but I find just having those controls in place really, really helpful because otherwise it's so easy to work all night long and spend all night staring at a screen. And for me, it certainly doesn't give me as much as actually talking to Matt, going for a walk, being with the girls, doing something I like. So I really recommend doing that on your phone because I think forcing yourself into it isn't necessarily the worst thing, especially as I said, while we're at home so much at the moment. So on today's episode, we're going to be exploring actually all of this a little bit deeper and going into that sort of very elusive concept of happiness. I'm going to be talking to a psychotherapist called Julia Samuel, and she's been writing extensively at the moment

about dealing with change and what we feel as beings as we change, how we develop from it, and what stalls us in our growth and our development. And I think we can all acknowledge the reality of life is that we never know what's coming next. So much of how experienced the world is out of our control. And therefore we do need the inner resources to manage those experiences to get the most from everything. Julia's book is called This Too Shall Pass. And it just really succinctly points to the reality that both the really good and the really bad does pass. Nothing in our lives is stationary and that life is just a set of alternating phases, a period of change followed by a period of stability followed by more change.

And the more we're able to adapt to that, the better. So welcome, Julia. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hi, Ella. I'm thrilled to be on your podcast. Oh, thank you. I wanted to start actually with a quote from your book that really resonated and I feel sets the scene for what we're going to be talking about today. And it goes, if we have the courage to face our difficulties with self-compassion, learn to know ourselves rather than distract ourselves, then change can bring growth. With it comes the liberating humility of being grateful in the present while having hope for a positive future. We keep growing throughout our lives. We're in the process of becoming. It is

not a place at which we arrive, although if we knew the direction in which we are headed, we are more likely to thrive, to live a life that has meaning, a reason for being, and a sense of belonging, a life in which we love and are loved. And I absolutely love that. It really resonated about being able to be present and not always looking into the future, but the importance of self-compassion. And your book, This Too Shall Pass, is absolutely amazing. And This Too Shall Pass is an expression that I love. And I wondered if we could just start with why you felt this was such an important topic to talk about and why change is something that actually is really a relevant concept for us all to gauge and understand. I mean, I wrote the book because in my sort of 30 years practice as a therapist, whatever the presenting issue that comes with the person

walking through the door, they always had a problematic relationship with change. And that usually comes from change brings about a feeling of discomfort at one end or fear at the other. We are negatively biased. So we look for dangerous human beings. That's our evolutionary propensity. And so when something new comes along, even if it's what we choose, like getting married or having a baby, it's unfamiliar. We're stepping into a new landscape and our whole being goes on alert, like, oh, I don't know. It's not like when I really know what I'm doing and where I'm really comfortable. Like whenever I'm sure you do something new with your

work or in your family, it's always like you put your toe in. And I think often people feel everybody else just does this without even bothering and they just step into change. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to recognise that everybody has a difficult relationship with change. And the key is to support yourself through it, rather than thinking that you can will or perfect yourself out of it. And that it feels uncomfortable. Pain is the agent of change. And so it's kind of recognising those signals. Emotions are there to give us messages like, ooh, alert, something new is going on,

so that we respond to it accurately rather than pretending it's not there and sort of trying to push it away, which of course creates quite a lot of problems. And just before we go any further, when we say change, what exactly are we referring to? I presume it's both the big and the small. And that's why this is, again, absolutely applicable to everybody, no matter what stage you're in, in your life. I think it's internal change. So

as a woman going from a young woman out into the world, working into your first relationships, maybe into committed relationships, menopause is similar for men in their version, but also big life events, working abroad, a blooming COVID pandemic, you know, changes that are imposed on us that come out of the blue and are unexpected tend to be more frightening, more intense because we have no preparation. So that feels even more intense. And one of the topics that feels like it comes up and it felt relevant to your book, and it's obviously it's such a kind of confusing, elusive topic is that concept of happiness. It's something that we're all chasing. But as I said, it's kind of ever elusive and something you can

never fully perhaps grasp, because everything changes all the time. And how do you see the two topics of that slightly confusing, elusive sense of happiness and change linking together? I think I agree that happiness is elusive. And I think it's a bit of a chimera to aim for. I think when we feel in alignment with how we are on the inside, who we find ourselves to be, and how we're living on the outside, and we feel connected to people, we feel relational, then we have a sense of well-being. We feel physiologically and psychologically at ease with the world. There may be things that are difficult. And then we have moments of

happiness. We have moments of joy. But I don't think it's a place we can expect to go to and live that as human beings, our emotions are like the weather. They're constantly in change. And it's often when we don't have high expectations that we have real moments of joy. You know, those big landmark birthdays or your wedding, or we have this expectation of joy, you know, those big landmark birthdays, or your wedding, or we have this expectation, it's going to be glorious. And actually, often people are quite tense, they sort of don't really like being the centre of attention, or even if they do, they feel so distracted. Whereas you can go for a walk along the river and see a flower and have a hug and go, wow, you know, and feel overwhelmed. So it's those moments and being open to them is a lot of

what I talk about in my book is like having the awareness of what's going on inside you. But it's always relational. It's always in relation to what's around you or the people connected to you. It's actually exactly my next question, which is the role of expectation versus reality in our emotions. And you wrote that to believe that life is an upward journey, a stairway to a better place, each step higher than the last, but the reality is far less certain. There are ups and downs and the only certainty that exists is change, I thought was absolutely brilliant. And I can certainly relate to that 100%. And I'm sure anyone listening can, which is that the reality, even if you end up perhaps going to where you want to be, over a five-year period, there are going to be so many

squiggles and ups and downs along the way. And there is no clear line for anybody in their life. That's absolutely right. And I think that social media and virtual connection has masses of upsides. But I think in the 21st century, we have so much bigger expectations because we see so much more about other people's lives. And we have every reason to want to kind of aim for them. But what's much more important is to aim for what fits you for the person that you are their wealth, their longevity, their happiness, and their capacity not to feel pain are those who are in long-term loving relationships or having multiple meaningful relationships. You don't have to be in one committed relationship. And so that matters much more than this idea of being head of your something or making something huge.

Although, I mean, I think it matters because that can give you real meaning. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what's interesting in that, which again, was something that really kept coming up for me with your work was this role of personal responsibility in it. And that again, understanding your emotions when it comes to big life events and changes in your life, it's an active process and something that you have to actively take part in. And that's definitely something I found more and more, which is that this idea of creating an element of purpose and sense of meaning in your life isn't something that just happens. And feeling positive in your life on a day to day basis, again, isn't something that just happens. It is an active process.

And again, that's what I understood from what you were saying, is that being able to adapt to change is something that you have to work at and start to implement practices and foundations in your life to make that the case. Yes, I completely agree. I mean, I was thinking with you,

people's assumptions about someone like you, that you've had success. And so everything must be kind of tickety-boo in your world. And I imagine the internal process of that, and actually allowing yourself and integrating the success that you've had, is not an easy process. process no and I think it's what I really relate to with what we were talking about earlier as well is the fact that even though we have totally honestly had a lot of success in our life over the last six years or so that that we've been together and we've got our two girls and and we are genuinely really happy and the business is in a really exciting place. But it certainly has been really hard at times, it certainly had its ups and a lot of big downs. And it has been definitely very, very intense. And I thought what was interesting, as you mentioned, this concept of having a fertile void of having an element of space in your life to actually integrate all the changes. And whilst obviously there have been upsides and downsides to COVID, I actually found last year a really important

period of time for me to actually take stock of the amount of change that we had had over five years. We had moved house four times. We had moved offices twice. We had gone from literally being a team of three people to being a team of 30 people. We had had no products and having almost 50 products in over 7,000 stores. We'd gone from having no physical spaces to three physical spaces to one cafe. We had launched another three books. We launched the podcast. We created an app. We'd had two children. My mother-in-law had died. My parents had got divorced. My dad had suddenly become gay. Both my parents had new partners. I mean, we got a dog. It had been busy. I think there's no other way to explain it. And I think we'd been in,

there'd been so many exciting parts of it and so many intense emotional parts of it that we'd been in. There'd been so many exciting parts of it and so many intense emotional parts of it that we'd basically been on this hamster wheel for five years where it had become normal basically to just be in this go, go, go, go, go phase. And I definitely felt last year when I was pregnant with May, our second daughter and COVID happened and we had to kind of retreat and we actually moved house on the first day of lockdown and it actually allowed this as you you called it this fertile void a sense of space of retreating from that intense busyness because obviously we were just at home and it allowed me to really take stock of everything and actually realize that there was a lot to process and while so much of it was good, it was still a lot. That is a huge amount. I mean, work-wise,

with your private life, and the fertile void is an incredibly important aspect of change. So I think one of the messages I really want to get across is that how the process of change takes much longer than the external events. So, I mean, you listed a huge number of changes, moving house, moving offices, developing aspects in your job, your mother-in-law dying, your parents separating, your dad coming out, them having new partners, you having two babies. I mean, that is a huge, huge amount of change. And the change process internally takes much longer than the van or the birth or the new office. It's probably three times as long and it needs time.

And also it's not in our control. So we kind of expect our internal operating system to be like a Mac operating system. We can just press update and we adapt. But actually, we need this fertile void to kind of move in and out of it, to allow ourselves time to think about things, to process things, to feel the discomfort, to kind of recognize what from the past am I going to hold on to that's important? What do I want to kind of move forward with? Where are the new areas that I'm interested to go? What do I need it to enable me to do that? And this surprising upside of COVID is that a lot of people have had that time where they've slowed down and integrated a lot of their past. And I'm wondering now you're saying it, are there things that you will do differently now as a result? Will you go slower, for instance, or how will you support yourself differently having gone through a slower year? Yeah, it's a great question. And I definitely have more questions on it. But I think for me personally, I definitely found almost an uncomfortableness in the beginning of COVID. Because I think like

so many people, you just go so fast. And that just becomes your norm. And I think for lots of people who live in busy cities, that's just the reality of what life is. And then when you slow down and you suddenly have time, it's almost uncomfortable to sit with where you are because you're so, so not used to that. And almost that sense of, I have to say, there is no boredom in my life now with two under two. But at that point there was, you know, Sky would sleep for like three or four hours a day. And that, that did actually create quite a big space of what on earth do I do with my time? And I just, yeah, I've lost any ability to be slow, I guess. And actually I took a real kind of restock of what

I wanted to do. And I actually signed up for a nutritional therapy degree, which I started with the biochemistry of last year. So that's the next four years of my life. And yeah, I'm doing the next 500 hours of my yoga teacher training, just sorts of things I've always wanted to do and said I didn't have time to do. And I guess have refocused priorities. And it was definitely a really good moment personally, as you said, to actually take stock of all the change that's happened and the learnings from that. But I guess outside of COVID, that's not easy to create, which I'm sure you see all the time, which is that sometimes when things are uncomfortable, instead of sitting with them, we don't have to sit with them because we're so busy and we hide in our busyness. And I thought there was an irony of the fact that so much of what we talked about before, and I felt was a big part of conversation pre-COVID was,

I'm so busy, help, I'm so stressed. How do I manage that? Then COVID happens and lots of people have a little bit of extra time because there's nowhere to go in the evenings and you're not commuting. There's nothing to do on weekends, perhaps, especially if you don't have tiny children. And so actually that does clear up quite a lot of time. And then it's help. I have too much free time. I don't like this. What do I do? Which I think there was a kind of irony in, but I guess there's so many questions from that, but how do you create that space for reflection in for want of a better word, normal life? And then two, how important is it to not keep running away and hiding in the busyness of life and actually process what it is

you feel about what's happening in your life? I mean, I think structure really matters. And within the structure, we need to prioritize not a huge amount of time. And we know that sort of tiny habits can make an enormous difference. So even if you put aside five or 10 minutes to do a breathing exercise that you can get on your app, or you put aside 10 minutes to go for a walk outside, the combination of those two, taking exercise for 10 minutes, doing a breathing for five or 10 minutes, that lowers your whole body system. So then you're not on high alert. You have much more capacity to take in information, to think about information, and also most importantly, to connect to others. Busyness is the most sort of common anesthetic. I mean, there's drugs,

alcohol, sex, gambling, there's every kind of anesthetic, but busyness is the go-to. And it's almost like it's a badge of honor. You know, I'm incredibly busy and it's partly because I'm really curious and I love what I do, but it's also because I kind of want to prove to myself that I'm good enough. You know, there's this underlying kind of sense of, if I don't prove myself, then I'm somehow failing. And I think one of the kind of learnings is to recognize that performing is only one aspect of the cake, performing and achieving, and that we need to work out for ourselves what are the other slices in our cake and what are we going to prioritize so i guess for you at the moment it would be matt and your kids as well as your business so with two young children how do you create enough space that you can be the mother you want to be that they get the mother that you want them to have and allow yourself to work because mean, the thing I've worked a lot with people is that you

often people who do a lot, they kind of think that the work gets the best of them and home gets the worst of them or that they fail in both. And so in some ways, it's learning to say no. And in my eight pillars of strength in the book, what I talk about is recognizing within the structure your limits and learning to say no. Like learning that having a good no is really important so that you prioritize what really matters and you keep a clear boundary of what you can actually do and what isn't possible. Do you think there is this kind of complete myth of having it all? Because I certainly feel that more and more and especially as a woman and the vast majority of our listeners are women there is this challenge and I know it's something

that I get asked about all the time and I certainly have felt that there is an impossible thing and that you cannot have it all and especially I think as you start to have a family and you've got the responsibility of your children alongside your work if you are choosing to do both but even if you're're not, if you're just doing one or the other, it's still so much. And I certainly feel for me at the moment, my capacity is work and it's my children and my family. And I don't really have space for anything outside of that if I want to be sane and be able to give what I'd like to give to those two pillars of my life, which is what's most important to me at the moment.

So, you know, I'm the first person to say I have basically no social life and that's okay. That's a compromise because those are my priorities. But I think it's something that we're not brilliant at understanding that we have this myth of, you know, we can have it all, but actually we can't have it all. It's impossible. I think it's completely impossible to have it all. And I think even to expect that you can have it all is sort of setting you up to fail and then not enjoying what you do have. And I think in life that often there's phases in life. So your phase in life is a young baby life and a growing business life. And so you're prioritizing that and putting friendships aside. In five years

time, you might be able to reprioritize. Your children will be at school, your business will be even more established. So then you can put in time to have fun, go for weekends with friends or whatever it is. But I think that women have particular difficulties. I mean, all the research and the data this year has shown that women have fared worst professionally through lockdown, that they've taken up most of the parenting and domestic duties. I think some couples really do co-parent. I still think it's quite rare. And that's something that needs to be negotiated between a partnership, how you both earn enough money and co-parent because, you know, there are very practical reasons why men and women have to kind of negotiate it. But it is by no

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l-i-b-s-y-n.com yeah absolutely and i definitely for me that's something i've come to recognize more and more this sense of having it all and then you feel like you're failing because as you say you're not able to commit everything you want. And you're basically living in this constant state of high alert because you're trying to do more than is humanly possible. And as you said earlier, this sense of social media and this sense of comparison that exists in the world today, I think makes that really challenging. But you mentioned your eight pillars of strength, and I'd love to talk through that because I think that feels very important. And obviously, number one is your relationship with yourself, which, again, feels like it's kind of paramount to absolutely everything.

Yeah, I mean, the pillars are there because when we're going through a process of change, we feel very vulnerable and everything is more difficult. You know, just even going shopping, you can forget your shopping list. And often people walk around feeling like they have a layer of skin missing. I think people have felt that a lot this year. And your whole body goes on alert, looking again for danger. So these pillars are kind of structures to hold you steady when you feel like you've been tilted. So some of them are knowing yourself, so having a relationship with yourself. And the big thing in relationship with yourself is turning to yourself with compassion. And what I hear a lot is people's shitty committee,

they kind of attack themselves and turn against themselves when they're having a hard time, like they're somehow not coping. So I think a huge thing in relation to yourself is know yourself, don't distract yourself, and be kind to yourself, be as kind to yourself as you would to a friend. The other big thing that's been so difficult in lockdown is connection to others, is your relationship with others, your family members, but also we need a village, we need different inputs in our lives, not just our partners and work colleagues. And so that's really important. That sort of sense of connection is where we feel safe and where we have a sense of belonging and meaning is often through relationship. Then there are attitudes and habits of ways of managing emotions your relationship with time

intentionally doing things where you kind of have structure and limits so that there are different habits that you can develop that can support you so that you don't feel completely out of control is the idea of it what sort of things would that be i think the the structure comes from because often you feel like you've been thrown into this very unfamiliar place, like you don't have a route map. So if you create a very simple structure of doing a bit of exercise and meditation to set you up for the day, sort of intentionally opening for the day, set up realistic targets that you have for the morning, what you're going to do for the day.

And so keep it in the day when people are really suffering, which they can do through change. I say keep your skylines very short, like every half an hour to an hour, because time changes when we're suffering. Future looks terrifying and foreboding. So to keep your skyline today in the next few days, and people often want to go back to the past. And you can intentionally move your attention to look at the past and sort of process the past and kind of name what that is, but then turn yourself to the light. Hope is the alchemy that turns life around. And where you put your energy has a big influence on your outcome. Absolutely. And I certainly have found that myself of having when things feel out of your control in your external environment, obviously, COVID has been the ultimate example of that, but still

change at work in your family life where you directly cannot change it, but you are directly impacted by it. Having a semblance of structure and routine, even as you say, it's very small things that has always helped me create a sense of grounding and calm. Although I must say, I think sometimes the times in our lives where we need those things the most are the times that we find it hardest to do them. So when life feels good and there's a sense of ease in life, the idea of exercising or going for a walk or maybe doing a meditation or something actually feels quite nice because you're able to sit or just be with yourself without distractions.

Whereas I know for me, when life feels difficult, and I know I've heard this from a lot of people talking about practices like meditation, is this idea of sitting with your thoughts when you're in a slightly uncomfortable place feels really terrifying. And I think we can kind of push it away and become ostriches and sort of hide in our emotions and pretend it's not happening. I think that's right. And I think that's when we need to co-op people to help us. You know, so for meditation, for me, isn't finding kind of Nirvana and meditating for an hour and a half. I think if you just breathe in for the kind of seven and out for the kind of 11, whatever's going through your mind, that will slow your system down. And one of the things I say in the book is JFDI, just effing do it. Because you're never in the mood to get up extra early to

exercise. You're never in the mood to get up extra early to exercise. You're never in the mood to do the things that necessarily are better for you because that feels annoying when you're stressed out. It's like people are so angry and you often want to turn against yourself and just eat chocolate and coffee. But don't give yourself the choice. Just say to yourself, I'm going to give myself half an hour where I prepare myself for a day where I spend 10 minutes going for a walk, five minutes exercising, maybe five minutes journaling. Altruism really puts you in a good mood, helping a neighbor, doing something for somebody else. And then you have much more energy for your day. And then your outcome for your day

is much more likely to be one where you feel satisfied. I totally agree that. And it's funny because I always told myself, oh, I don't have time for this and I don't have time for that. You know, you're so busy. And actually today is actually day 40 of meditating every single day before life starts. Yeah. I just felt myself frazzled, just, yeah, two small babies and not enough sleep. And it's really interesting because although the day is so busy and the kids keep you so busy, there is always 15 minutes and I just don't look at my phone instead. So instead of checking emails or scrolling Instagram for those 15 minutes, I meditate and I haven't had to change anything

to find that time. I just don't lose myself looking at the Daily Mail online or something like that. And that's the bit that I found really interesting because I always said, I don't know how people do it. I'd never have that time. And I felt really resistant to that. And actually having now taken away this kind of mindless, unnecessary distraction, which I distracted myself with there is absolutely that time and your soul is nourished as well I found it astonishing and a really interesting example of like the little things I know that's what you said is that it's not trying to find nirvana over an hour and and I'll do it and I can and this morning I could

hear the babies waking up on the baby monitor. Like, there's nothing perfect about it by any stretch of the imagination. But it's just that you're consciously committing to it. And I've been absolutely astonished at the impact 40 days, 10 to 15 minutes has had. I feel a whole kind of recalibration. As you said, it calmed your system down enough for you to then handle sitting between two crying babies or no one napping or this weekend, everyone was sick and teething and crying and unhappy. And you're like, okay, I can do this. And it's such a small amount of time to be able to get through the other, or in this case, literally 24 hours in the day. Amazing. Yeah, I've found it really like an eye-opening experience, actually. The power of tiny habits. Exactly. It's tiny habits. And I think it's really easy to overlook

those and think, oh, I'll only get something from it if I'm able to run a marathon and actually like 10 minutes around the block does everything. But one of the other questions that I had around change that I wanted to get to before we finish, because I think it feels really important. I think it's a conversation that people are having more and more is this idea of failure because our expectations are so high. And as you said, there can be big events in your life that are actually really positive. So maybe that is having a baby, getting married, having a job promotion, moving house, new partner, leaving university and kind of entering into the world. Lots of things that actually really are really exciting, but that also perhaps aren't as good as we think they're going to be. And that's, it's always a difficult thing to say.

And of course, there are going to be great things about them, but nothing in life is perfect. Nothing, as you said, this sense of happiness isn't something that you just have. So, and I know the studies show that, that, you know, getting married doesn't make you happy. How do you feel that kind of sense of almost then a fear of failure comes in because you perhaps get the thing that you've always wanted, but it is a big change in your life and actually it doesn't solve all your problems. And then I think it's easy to feel like you're failing as a result. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And I agree. I mean, I think some of it is what you picture for yourself. So what I would define a failure and what you would define a failure is

two different things. But actually, if we change the language, that often changes our kind of attitude. And I think one of the things, you know, everybody knows this, is that when things go wrong, you know, as you say, perfection is a place that does not exist. And I think one of the things that I want people to kind of really recognize is the capacity for endurance, to kind of recognize there are tough times in life that you just have to grit and support yourself in them and manage them rather than thinking that you're doing something wrong and that there's an escape exit. Most things that matter to us most are the hardest work, Our relationships, our children. Having children is the greatest joy, but the toughest job. And it is by no means all joy. There is a lot of sacrifice, patience,

impatience, sleeplessness, desperation, frustration, as well as moments of pure, amazing happiness. But if you're thinking that being a parent is going to be this la-la land of happiness all the time, then you sort of set yourself up to feel like you're failing and that you're disappointed all the time. So I think it's kind of recognizing that, you know, in each day, there are moments of joy and moments of really hard grit stuff that you have no choice in. And I sort of think in the past, they had far fewer expectations. We have a lot of things that are on our side now. And part of it is, I think, can be the knowledge that life is not simple. We are not simple beings. And we need to support ourselves with the complexity and the difficulty of it, rather than thinking that somehow when life is working, it's because everything is humming and

everything is simple and you feel like you're on top of it. I mean, how many days does one feel on top of it? You probably might have that moment kind of 20 minutes in a day or sometimes an hour a day. And there are days that it's the whole day goes really well, but that's quite rare. There's a lot of boring shit that we have to do, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that's where the title, I guess, of your book comes in, which is This Too Shall Pass. And I like that it's actually referencing that it all passes, the best moments and the worst moments. They just keep going. Yeah. Yeah. And then we carry our past in us,

and it influences us like a sort of backpack. But we have to process it and adapt it. And then that we can use that as a wonderful resource to support us and give us wisdom, rather than something that you kind of don't want to look at that frightens us, you know, burying our heads. As a final topic before we close, could we just talk about that actually? Because I think, you know, you have the five central themes of our life, of family, identity, love, work, and our health. But on the family side of things, I think it's such an interesting topic, this idea that we learn our natural coping mechanisms in childhood and that beneath each grandparent and parent are the hidden legacies from their own childhood. As you say, it's the ghost of the

nursery. And that triggers these primitive feelings, which I presume are very involved in our ability to adapt to and understand the change and the general turmoil of our life, good and bad. And I wondered if we could just understand that little bit. I know it's often referred to as the kind of the concept of an inner child and that's sort of bandied around a bit and you hear it, but you don't always understand where it comes from, perhaps. I think it's many things. I think it's transgenerational. So people actually are more resilient and more robust if they know where they've come from, if they know the beliefs around, say, sex, money, love, marriage, work of their grandparents and their parents, and that you could write down saying, my mom thought this about work, my grandmother thought this about marriage or my grandfather. So if you know what the sort of, sometimes they're covert, sometimes they're very overt influences that are in you.

But also you learn your coping mechanisms by observing the adults around you. So most of those messages are nonverbal. Families are where we love most and we hate most. They're the hardest things in our lives. And it's never about not having a fight or not having disconnection and rupture. It's about having the connection, having the rupture, recognising it, saying sorry, learning from it and moving forward. So for instance, I was brought up in a household where difficult things were never talked about. So all the stuff that was going on that was hard was hidden underground

and we were expected in a very loving, good way, this is by no means ill-intentioned, to forget and move on and be okay and be happy. And you were just meant to kind of swallow it. And so that is what I learned. And actually, it's not a bad lesson. I use it quite often when I'm out in the world. But it's not enough of a lesson in my relationships as a partner, as a parent, as a grandparent. I have to learn to be able to name what I'm feeling, to learn that I've had an impact on someone else,

to kind of recognize when there's been a difficulty that we need to sort out, we need to talk about it, and then we understand each other better. And after a fight, actually, when you've talked about it, not immediately, there's normally a sort of time lag between you have the fight and then you repair. You often feel closer because you said the things that have been bothering you for a really long time. And then you can understand each other better and you kind of feel seen and known. But that, again, is an adaptive process.

But we carry a lot of our parents in epigenetics. So, you know, your pregnancies now, we know that there's a lot that's transmitted epigenetically into the womb, which is another whole area that is growing. Yeah, I can see that. And interestingly, it's so anecdotal, May, who I was pregnant with in lockdown, is the calmest baby on earth. And I can't help but wonder if that's because she grew the entire time where we weren't going anywhere. And there was this just element of kind of calm and rest. And then when she was two weeks old, we went back into lockdown two, which became lockdown three, four, five, six, seven, eight, a hundred. And I found that really fascinating to see.

I had a grandson born in April who had his parents at home for the last year. I didn't meet him for four months, which was incredibly sad for me, but he is the most stable, easygoing, happy baby. He sleeps, he responds, and basically he hasn't moved. He's just had his mom and dad. And that must make a difference. It must do. All my children were kind of moving up and down. There were tons of people around and there was fun, but it's a lot more to take on as a little baby, isn't it? Yeah. I've certainly seen that with the two girls. Their personalities are so different. And it's just interesting to observe that. You know, Skye, from when she was four weeks old, was coming to work with me. So she was just thrust into this busyness. Whereas May has just had this quiet kind of oasis, basically. And their

personalities certainly reflect that. But Julia Julia I wanted just to kind of sum up if there were just a handful of things that you wish people would take away and remember about processing the ups and downs and the reality of the good and the bad but the nature of change that happens in all of our lives that there were just a few things you wish we all knew? That change feels uncomfortable, even if it's a change we want, and a change that we don't want often feels painful. That the single biggest thing that supports you through change is both how you are in relation to yourself, so turn to yourself with compassion, but it's the love and connection to others. That when we are scared, we need the connection to other people to help us feel safe. And the other thing that helps with that is any kind of movement in our bodies. The cortisol of fear when we're in change sends signals of fear through our body, which

then kind of disables the capacity to cognate and make good decisions. So just even 10 minutes of exercise and five minutes of a breathing meditation would really help balance you and manage the process of change as it comes through your system like a wave. Amazing. Thank you so much, Julia. I'm sure everyone really enjoyed listening to that. I'll put the details for the book in the show notes below. And otherwise, we will see you all back here next Tuesday. Thank you so much. Bye. reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads.

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