The Wellness Scoop - How to lead a more fulfilled life, let go of ‘perfection’ and the power of a daily gratitude practice with Sarah Stein Lubrano

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

I’m joined by Sarah Stein Lubrano from The School of Life, a global organisation of psychologists, philosophers and writers dedicated to helping people lead more meaningful, fulfilled, and resilient lives through useful tools and resources We discuss: Why you need define what success means to you How to create a mindset for a more fulfilled life How to let go of the need to be ‘extraordinary’/’perfect’ The importance of the quality of your relationships on your wellbeing and happiness How to engineer more meaningful relationships Why you need to get used to tolerating discomfort and ambiguity Each week I unpack a wellness trend with GP Gemma Newman. This week on Fact or Fad we’re looking at having a daily gratitude practice. 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 dot com. Wellness. What on earth does it mean? And why would we need to unpack it? With over 58 million hashtags on Instagram, the topic has really never been more prominent. But, and there is a but here, three in five of

us feel that wellness is incredibly confusing. We want to feel healthier, we want to feel happier, but we have no idea what's clickbait and what's genuinely health enhancing. Who's an expert and who's peddling absolute nonsense? And look, I am right here with you on this. At times, I've also found this world really hard to navigate. So welcome to Wellness Unpacked, our new podcast hosted by me, Ella Mills, author, entrepreneur and founder of Deliciously Ella. This series aims to do just as it states, unpack the world of wellness with expert guests. These guests will be sharing with me and with you their three pieces of advice for a better life, to feel healthier and happier. This is a show and a conversation

that's about progress. It is not about perfection. It's about helping you make small, simple, sustainable changes. And within that, I'm going to be testing out a different wellness trend every single week. Intermittent fasting, celery juice, collagen, ketogenic diets, CBD, you name it, I'll try it. I'll then unpick the trend, separating fact from fad, with my friend and NHS GP, Dr Gemma Newman. And together we'll be equipping you with the tools that can genuinely make a difference to your life and wellbeing, and equally helping you potentially put to one side the trends that may make a little bit less difference. So are you ready for episode seven? Our seventh guest on

Wellness Unpacked is Sarah Stein-Lobrano who works at the School of Life and if you haven't come across the School of Life before they're a a brilliant learning resource. So they publish books, host courses, do events on all sorts of different self-development topics. From self-awareness to building confidence, improving relationships, your career. And of course, today's topic, failure. Something that Sarah and I are going to be discussing in depth. In that conversation, we're also going to be looking at this idea of leaning into psychological discomfort. So you know that horrible feeling where you're waiting on feedback from something, or you've got to have a difficult conversation, or there's something you just know you've got to do,

but you're very nervous about it. We are going to be equipping you with some tools to better manage those feelings. I'm really, really looking forward to be equipping you with some tools to better manage those feelings. I'm really, really looking forward to you listening to this one. So Sarah, the first question I really want to ask you is what does wellness mean to you? How do you define that word? Yeah, well, I work at the School of Life and we use a very specific kind of idea for wellness, which is this Greek word eudaimonia, or like human flourishing is sometimes how it's translated. And the idea really is that it's not so much about, you know, the exact condition of your body, although the Greeks were very interested in fitness and, you know, eating

right things and whatever. But it's about the condition of your life as a whole, whether you could look back on it and be proud of it, whether you could find meaning in it. There's a sort of lovely line from, I think, Aristotle that says, you know, count no man happy until he is dead. And what they really meant by this potentially is that you don't really know what the meaning of your life is until long after it's passed. So when we work on things at the School of Life, when we write our books, when we create our videos and so on, we're thinking about how to improve people's wellness in this specific sense,

which is, did you live a life that was really meaningful? Did you have relationships that actually mattered to you? Did you do some kind of work in the world that made it a better place? Are you happy with the choices you've made? I've heard other people talk about this as your sort of your obituary life instead of your CV life.

It's not really about achievement. That's a big theme for us. I absolutely love that way of looking at it because I think sometimes when people think about wellness they think about a very closed definition of it and about exactly what you ate for breakfast about a workout you may or may not do and so on and so forth and it can feel I think quite depressing sometimes at times and not necessarily as kind of meaningful in a wider sense of the word. And I think that's incredibly exciting. And I know your three pieces of advice that you've shared in terms of trying to improve everybody's year really tap into that.

And I wondered if we could start with your first piece of advice, the thing you feel everybody listening could benefit from knowing to truly improve their health and their well-being? Yeah, well, this one is a bit spicy, but we have a lot of things at the School of Life on the concept of failure. And I know that a lot of discourse in the wellness space about failure is essentially that you should be tough and you should experience failures and you're going to learn and grow from them and then you're going to succeed. And failures are like these little stepping stones on the path to success. And maybe that's okay if you're learning, I don't know, French or something.

But we think that's a really bad way of thinking about failures in general because we think that a lot of things people see in their lives as failure are really just a profound part of the human condition. You know, very bad things happen to people all the time for unfair reasons. And if we see failures as only things that we should somehow bust through on the path to success, we won't be able to properly mourn and grieve and identify what it really means to be alive in this world.

So, you know, people have relationships that were beautiful and then fail. They never managed to achieve a very beautiful dream that they had about doing this or that activity in life that brings them meaning. Things go catastrophically wrong all the time. You only have to look in the news to see that the world is full of things we might identify as failures. And we want to resuscitate this idea that failure is simply something that happens because of misfortune a lot of the time. And it doesn't mean, of course, there aren't, you know, causes of inequality that we should absolutely address, but that also human life is simply unfair and sometimes even what you might call tragic. And we think it's really important

to be able to look at our lives as a whole and accept, firstly, that things are going to happen to us that we fail in, that we may never, you know, turn into a tool to success later. They're simply there to be grieved and understood and mourned. And secondly, that also there's lots of areas of sort of mediocrity in our lives that we should welcome and embrace. And that it's fine to be mediocre in lots of areas as well. So that the very few things that we manage to succeed at are really choices and that we appreciate just how fortunate we are when they happen. There's so much to unpack from that, but I want to dive in if it's okay to start with by

defining how you see success, because I think it's such an interesting word in this unpacking of our lives and our happiness and our mental well-being, I think in particular, and the relationship that success has with our happiness and therefore our well-being, but how, I guess, if we could start you in particular, define success. Yeah. I mean, the way that I often talk about it when I'm talking to people at the School of Life about failure and success is that we point out that it just means to sort of excel in a particular area, right? So you could be a success at, you know, cooking or a success at real estate investment or a success at looking at clouds. It could be anything, really anything.

Of course, we've now in our particular capitalist society tend to talk about successful people as the ones with very shiny degrees and very large bank accounts and very, you know, important positions within a large corporation or something. But actually, you can be successful at looking at clouds and really appreciating clouds. You can be successful at being an aunt or uncle or something like this. And so then that puts the pressure gently back on us as individuals to think about what kinds of success we actually want. And this tends to be the exercise we ask people to do is to say, okay, what do you mean successful? Successful at what? And the important thing to point out about that is that these are not all compatible,

right? You may be very, very bad at a sort of Zen Buddhist calm by necessity if you are successful at real estate investment. These things may not go together very well interesting and how does accepting where success sits within your life translate into feeling like you've got more meaning you've got more happiness you're living the life that you want I think for me something that's been a big challenge the last few years is that I of course I'm saying all of this but you know I'm a complete hypocrite in lots of ways I did the Chinese degrees and the, well, not enormous bank account, but you know, the perfectly sensible for London living bank account. And I think I really struggled to know when to get off of that path and figure out what it was I wanted to do. And right now I'm in the

process of writing my second book proposal because the first one didn't go anywhere. And I'm realizing that the thing I really want, like really want, is I want someone to be reading the book who gets it. There's a beautiful line from a group of writers called the Invisible Committee where they say, there's no point in writing a book unless it's to a friend. And I think I'm looking for that friend. So I guess my point here is,

I think that I'm perfectly fine at what we call conventional success. But what I really want, what I actually need to focus on in success is this idea of the friend, the friend at the other end of the book. And that switches really hard, because people will ask you to do 1000 things just to be, you know, conventionally successful, and no one else is going to prioritize me finding that friend who's going to read my book as much as I will. So I think it's very interesting when you say accept failure it's part of life it gives people permission almost to stop chasing and running to a point about things that may not actually truly make

them happy at which point to some degree what's the point in it but then within that when does the emphasis then go back on to us it's okay to let go of it but then within that when does the emphasis then go back onto us it's okay to let go of that but then equally trying to find those things that are meaningful sit within you as opposed to I think there is a slight tendency in our culture today to want things to come to us versus us to go to them that's interesting I hadn't thought about that last bit um yeah I think that's that's certainly possible I think also in a way it's about relinquishing ambitions. I think our society is very good at telling us like you should have lots of ambitions and you should never let them go. And tenacity is the only real virtue.

And tenacity is a virtue. Fortitude is a virtue, a very old fashioned one that I like. But I also think it's virtuous to relinquish ambitions. I think we have to. I can't imagine how you could pursue one or two really well without relinquishing a whole bunch of other ones. And I don't think that we have an equally robust cultural sense of what it means to say this is a valuable ambition and I have let it go. I have failed at it and that's that. Which of course doesn't make it easy regardless. But it would be nice if we were better at it as a whole collectively absolutely I think that is an incredibly powerful piece of advice and I want to ask you on that do you feel within that acceptance it's about again this pressure that I think a lot of people feel but I think in particular women feel to do it all to be all things to all people all the time and certainly in my experience that is impossible and you've got

to relinquish elements of that you cannot be everything but I do think there is this modern myth that you can be you can have a massive career and a massive social life and be a really hands-on parent and so on and so forth and yeah actually there just truly aren't enough hours of the day absolutely I think it is worse for women I mean I'm 31 years old and every question I get is either like, well, are you going to have the family or are you going

to have the career or how will you juggle them? Or, you know, I mean, there's lots to say about feminism here and how we should expect the same trade-offs for men. But I also think

that it's just something that we put on ourselves as well. And if we could relinquish, you know, I think we should also just create a script where it's okay to be like, sometimes also a mediocre parent. I think that's really important. And we have a phrase that we like to use at the School of Life from the psychologist Donald Winnicott, which is, he used to use the term good enough mother, which is very telling. And we use the

term good enough parents. But we really think that people should focus on good enough parenting and actually good enough everything else as well. That's really the idea of mediocrity. You're doing okay, and okay is fine. Yes, of course, the children could have an amazing Montessori set that you built from wood or whatever. But actually, the main important thing is they ate something and went to bed, right? And when the kids grow up, that's what they're going to remember, that mom was there, not that mom did some cool art project or whatever. So I think it's much harder for women culturally still, especially in many places, to say, like, I'm just a good enough mother. That's it.

Not perfect, not amazing, not there all the time doing other things. But I can only imagine getting through it like that in the future, what would happen to me. I absolutely love it. I think it's my mother-in-law actually kick-started a project in the UK called Sure Start, which unfortunately isn't quite living and breathing as it used to be, and that was the whole premise of it, my mother-in-law actually was um kick-started a project in the UK called sure start which unfortunately isn't quite living and breathing as it used to be and that was the whole premise of it was about empowering people to be good enough because um that is actually more than enough but

I think we imagine this Instagram perfect version which is um yes close to impossible a lot of the time and there was a stat actually um which I wanted to pick up on which was that about 20 of us feel the pressure to be extraordinary which i think is really quite something so no longer is great or brilliant enough but actually we have to be extraordinary we have to be the best of the best better than everybody else i mean this almost seems insane at this point totally and i think uh we have a lovely little line in one of our books something like the sign of a healthy child someone someone that you've raised well, is that they have no desire to be famous. And I think that's so true. You know, like, why do we have to be the best? Isn't that just about beating other people? Can't we just be pretty good and have made a nice

impact in at least one or two other people's lives? I think it's a really deranged thing. And I think, you know, we have to really reflect on this and think, first of all, I do think it's driven very much by every bit of capitalism from the way we're hired to advertising, whatever. But I also think it's worth saying that, you know, only we can redefine that for ourselves still. And this is part of the whole joy of mediocrity thing. It's like, you're not necessarily that much better off if you're the best of the certain thing right and and stopping trying to be the best might be the first step before you can even

really think about what else you want to do what you actually want to do for its own sake and in terms of practical applications of all of this people listening saying yes that's exactly right i need to let go of a lot of the pressure that I put on myself I don't need to be the best of the best of the best I'm doing a good job that's enough and it's okay I don't need to excel in absolutely everything I do we did a podcast last year um with a gentleman called Oliver Berkman and he really something really stuck with me was he was talking about the fact that now even in our hobbies we want to be the best so you take up yoga let's say and you go and you do it for your classes and you're like this is great this is time out I

feel calm brilliant and then you start looking around the class and saying they can stand on their head they can do this I've got to do that too and suddenly your hobby which was meant to be the hour of peace and calm and quiet where who cares how good or not good not that those are really terms you can bring to the practice if you look at it properly as such but if we apply this this lens to it and suddenly you need to be the best in the room at that and you start pottery because it's calming but now you've got to make a vase that's good enough to give to your granny yeah and it's almost like this pressure is then kind of pouring into every aspect of our lives and I'm just thinking in terms of people listening wanting to make practical

changes in their life where do you go about embracing the fact that it's okay not to be the best at everything yeah I think that's a great point I think um well here's here things I do I mean right we we can only begin with us I firstly, that I like to do my hobbies badly. I really do. I don't actually understand how to knit baby sweaters, and I've never figured it out. I just knit all the little pieces, and then I stitch them together, baby who's you know usually they're far too large or far too small for it and and probably they put it away for the rest of time but but I'm okay with this I've decided you know this is fine I'm not good at this and that's fine um and I think similarly you know um I've started also I used to post like during the pandemic all the things I would cook I say oh look how beautiful they are and recently I've started posting all things have gone horribly wrong with my baking because our oven doesn't actually work right and I'm imprecise and fussy and just

things go terribly wrong. So I think there's something about really enjoying the fact that like in most areas of life, we can screw up a lot. And it's kind of funny. So I think that's part of it. And I think the other part of it is realistically to just genuinely look at, if you're a London person, your calendar and take things out. Be like, I'm not doing doing this I'm not showing up to this random networking event it's not happening so that the things that are in the diary are like the things you really want to be there and I don't think either of these things are actually that easy as much as I'm saying that they're enjoyable they are enjoyable but they're not easy yeah I totally agree do you know what it's so interesting my daughter's about to have her third birthday and because of COVID it's the first year at nursery where you know what it's so interesting my daughter's about to have her third birthday and because of

covid it's the first year at nursery where you know everyone's having birthday parties and everything and I've been feeling really guilty because that was something where I just had to say to myself really trying to be a hands-on mum really trying to do my work which I love and it gives me a huge amount of meaning and I know there's some things with my children I just can't do and I almost felt like someone gave me permission yesterday because they were saying the one thing I promised myself I would never do was put stress on myself about throwing the world's best birthday party for a toddler and it was so funny because it's something I've been feeling so guilty about and it's just it's those little things isn't it just letting them go and realizing like actually your time and attention is more than enough often in lots of circumstances and you don't have to go above and beyond and

above and beyond again and that doesn't necessarily actually mean as much to people anyway that was doing good enough parenting exactly which I think is probably more than sometimes we realize it is and sometimes I wonder with these things when we put pressure on ourselves to be more than good enough do we sometimes actually become worse because we're feeling this intense pressure that can make us maybe less relaxed and less present which is something I've certainly been thinking about a lot recently and I feel that leads on quite nicely to your second piece of advice which is putting time into relationship growing skills and I think yeah it's really interesting and something people listening might have come across before but they're actually

your relationships are the number one predictor for your happiness not again what we've just been talking about kind of financial success or career success these more western ideals of success. Yeah that's right so I do lots and lots of research in psychology. My PhD is partially in psychology. I'm working through a PhD slowly and imperfectly. And something that comes up again and again and again and again in the sort of empirical literature is just that after a certain point, of course, you know, poverty really, really destroys people's lives. But once you're, you know, somewhere in the middle class, there's a point where more money doesn't add very much to your happiness.

And the better predictor at that point of your overall life satisfaction and well-being across a number of areas, even your physical health, I think, is the quality of your relationships with other human beings. In some studies, it's like whether men have a good relationship with their mothers. In some, it's the primary relationship in your life, like usually a romantic relationship. In others, it's about how many friends you have. But essentially, one of the absolute best predictors of whether we're going to have a happy and meaningful life in this big sense of wellness is whether we're good at having relationships with other people.

And something that we work at at the School of Life, but also something that I've tried to live out in my own personal life as best I can, is that these are not, these don't happen by fate. Unlike a lot of other things, unlike a lot of things I've talked about in the past with, you know, failure and achievement, this is something that we can, to a certain degree, control. And by that, I mean, steer and importantly, improve in ourselves. That I think a lot of people look at others and they say, oh, well, that one's sociable or that one's really lucky and just happens to have a couple of really close friends. And we think that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. That friendship and cultivating strong relationships with other people is a matter of specific,

concrete, learnable skills. I could take you on like a long trajectory of why I think we've got this idea of wrong in our culture and we think it's sort of like just happens to us but I'm not going to bore you with that right this moment but I do think that it's really important to go back and stop having an overly romantic view of sort of the right friendships and relationships just happening to us and instead to think about it as a set of skills that we can cultivate because that's the best news that we've got the most meaningful thing in your life that you could have is something that you can learn over time to get better at having. So we actually teach these skills at the School of Life. We have classes on communication and on calm and on resilience

and on playfulness and all of the skills that help us build those kinds of connections with other people. And I have found this immensely helpful in my own life, not only the actual materials of the school of life, but just more generally, you know, I was a very unpopular kid. I was shy. I was awkward. I'm definitely not the most neurotypical person anyone's ever met. I had a couple of friends in high school, but they were also shy nerds. And when I went to university, I was far away from my parents for the first time. And I was allowed to go places because I didn't live in an American suburb without a car.

And suddenly I had options, but I had no expertise in how to build friendships. And the only really good news for me at that point was that everyone else was more or less starting out in the same place. And I just worked at it. It was not that I was a natural. I wasn't a natural anything, but I just worked at, okay, following up with people when I met them and, you know, trying to remember things about their lives and asking them about it and learning to really listen and not immediately just say back something that was on my mind. And I think that the fact that I now have lots and lots of strong friendships and relationships is skill. It's not talent. It's not charisma. It's carried over into other areas

of my life where I can do public speaking. But the reality is it's something that I fought for for years. And I think I also was forced to learn because I kept moving. So I moved to Europe after graduation and I lived in London, which is a lonely, lonely place for a small American, let me tell you. British people are not always the friendliest. And I just really had to learn to make friends. But now that I have those skills, they have saved me so many times. And so I just really want to emphasize that I think that the biggest joy in our lives is our relationships with other people. And this is one thing that we can get better at, that we can really, if we decide now,

I'm going to get better at my relationships with other human beings, and we work on it, we can do that. like you might never get another promotion in your life you might get fired the economy is in shreds right now all kinds of other things are going to go wrong we're not really in control of our health past a certain point although it's really good to work on it but our relationships with other people we can do that now and we can learn to get better at it so many questions on this one which I love and the first actually is in terms of that what have you found are the kind of key skills that you can work on that make you a better friend and add that level of depth and richness to create those true friendships as opposed to potentially the more kind of

transactional friendships? I think the first thing is friendship is almost like an inverted world from the world of achievement if it's a meaningful friendship because if you think about the few people you might really really love in your life you don't love them because of their achievements or if you do I don't know maybe we need to like do some reflection uh you know the people I really love I almost love in part because of the things that have gone wrong in their life and the way that they've dealt with them with humor and grace and resilience and so on. And it turns out basically that the reason that we like and bond with our friends is because they're being vulnerable with us and they're telling us what's actually difficult in their life, what they're worried about, what they're anxious about, what they're embarrassed about.

And so I often think when you look at parties, and we say this also at the School of Life, that, you know, people are doing everything backwards for making friends. They go in and they say, look at my wonderful achievements and my children are so impressive. And yes, at work, this thing's happening. It's so stressful and busy. What they really mean is like, look at me, I'm so impressive. And that's not at all how we make friends. How we make friends is to say, you know, I don't know anyone else here.

Do you? It's quite weird. What's that guy talking about? I'm honestly ignorant. And then the person sees you've got a bit of vulnerability. So I think there's something about starting with vulnerability. And I also think there's something about skipping a lot of the intermediate talk that people think is polite. I mean, obviously, you shouldn't immediately ask somebody about their sex life, maybe, unless you're in the right kind of party. But, you know, you want to start with something that's a bit personal, that gives them at least the opportunity to share with you if they really want to.

And yeah, I wish I had done this more in my first few years at London because it took a long time to make friends. To say something like, what do you hate most about your colleagues? That's kind of an interesting question, right? Right off the bat. And then you can get into, you know, sex lives by the fourth drink or whatever. I love that. And in terms of building on that, so you've got vulnerability and sort of skipping the small talk, but in terms of then creating more depth and thinking about the, let's be honest, slightly strange world we live in today so we kind of at the touch of a button connected to our friends except for in many ways it feels like we're not connected at all and it struck me recently actually because a friend of mine a very close friend doesn't really use social media and she was saying how much that's added to her friendships because instead of seeing a photo

of the fact that I went to stay with my mum this weekend or that my daughter did this that weekend. She asks me about it and I now she's godmother to one of my children and I now deliberately send her photos and will tell her about what May, her goddaughter, has done because I assume no knowledge. And I think it adds a lot of richness. But I just wondered from your experience in terms of building these friendships where the online world fits with the offline yeah I think that's a great question I kind of want to do her technique now um I think that's really lovely and I guess what it points to for me is that it's it's the intentionality and it's sort of the one-to-oneness of connections that makes them rich right that's kind of the tricky thing withality and it's sort of the one-to-oneness of connections that makes them rich, right? That's kind of the tricky thing with social media.

It's one to almost an unlimited number of humans. And I probably should take her technique. But what I do that's not as good but still possibly helpful for those of us who can't quite quit social media is I actually just have a reminder in my diary to message all my friends. And when that reminder comes up, I message them all. And I understand that some people might say, like, that's really mechanical and robotic and caring and cruel. But to me, because something is artificial doesn't make it less important. You know, insulation in houses is artificial, and I'm very grateful for it. And, you know, birthdays are a social construct, and we should definitely do them because they're fantastic. And so, yeah, I think there's lots of ways to engineer a more meaningful connection um I should quit social media but

until then I just schedule this one-to-one checking in and I think also maybe just trying to ask questions about what isn't posted you know like did you manage to have a meaningful conversation with your mum um or you know whatever the question is that goes beyond that first layer that we actually share with everyone can be helpful, hopefully. It's a really nice way of thinking about it, about skipping that layer that everybody else sees and trying to get into something that's quickly more meaningful. And it's really interesting looking at your three pieces of advice because it feels like number one is accepting almost, you know, failure happens and that's OK and we don't need to be the best. And it's semi in our control and semi out of our control the second one obviously as you really eloquently said is the fact that actually our happiness is so predicated on our relationships

and that is completely within our control within reason and we can really invest in that but then the third one to me of tolerating discomfort and leaning into ambiguity almost feels like it's the essence of it is completely accepting that you can't really control anything that happens in life and so accept that and um and move forward with it are you crushing your bills defeating your monthly payments sounds like you're at the top of your financial game. Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card, the credit card that rewards your good financial habits. Earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month. Level up from bill payer to reward slayer.

Terms and conditions apply. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. 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. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-b-s-y-n dot com. Yeah, yeah. So this is the core of the academic research that I do. I'm very slowly and perfectly finishing my PhD at Oxford. And one of the things I'm looking at is called cognitive dissonance,

which is the discomfort that we feel when we notice contradictions between our own actions and beliefs. I'm looking at it in the context of politics. But it's also part of a huge body of literature that's more generally in social psychology and in neuroscience and in other fields of psychology about how difficult it is for us to tolerate what we might call sort of like psychological discomfort. So it's not that, you know, we're a bit hot or cold physically, it's that we actually feel something like discomfort in our brain. And one of the main things that causes us this discomfort is not knowing and not understanding. So for example, in learning design, which is something I do in my professional

life, where you design learning experiences for people, one of the main things that you're fighting against is that when people get frustrated because they don't understand something right away, they often quit, right? Because it's uncomfortable. It's actually uncomfortable in your brain to say, I don't understand how to do this. It turns out that one of the best ways of predicting whether people are going to eventually learn something is how well they can tolerate that discomfort, how well they can think like, I don't understand this, but I'm going to try again. Similarly, we're very bad at dealing with ambiguity. That's another form of psychological discomfort where we

just need to know what's going to happen or we really want to understand, you know, is this person good or bad? But as psychologists as old as Melanie Klein have noticed, you know, most people are neither just good or bad. They're really complicated and there are things about them that are quite twisted and others that are incredibly lovely and gracious. And so the ability to have mature relationships is also about this ability to just sit with psychological discomfort of like, this person is really complicated and confusing and it's ambiguous and I don't know what's going to happen and I'm going to proceed anyway. Now, I'm not that great at tolerating psychological discomfort. That's why it interests me. I struggle so much and I struggled a lot more a few years ago, I would say.

I think something about my 30s mellowed me out a little bit and I can just survive a bit more of it. the sort of meta skills involved in in living a meaningful life is tolerating this sort of low level but very significant kind of discomfort that happens when we're trying to make sense of our lives it's very interesting because i think you so much of the research i've come across and the people i've been lucky enough to talk to about meaning and happiness and finding that more rounded life that so many of us probably all of us really want is this ability to be present and in that it is letting go of what the future is but sitting as you're saying with that lack of knowledge and control and ambiguity so many of us find almost impossible and again yeah I don't want to harp on about it too much but this online world feels like it makes it more difficult I know for me

sometimes when I'm sitting there and I've got a difficult thing at work to do or a difficult conversation I need to have or just something I don't want to do the first thing I do is I pick up my phone and I just start scrolling yeah and sometimes you know it's the evening and I do is I pick up my phone and I just start scrolling. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, it's the evening and I need to tidy up and I need to sort this out and I need to do these various bits of admin. And it's an hour and a half later and all I've done is watch videos of cats. And that's fine if it's what I wanted to do, but I didn't actually really want to do that. That wasn't a particularly pleasurable experience. Yeah.

I just didn't want to do the things that made me feel uncomfortable, send that person that message or admit that I can't come, you know, take that thing out my diary. And I just wondered what you found are, again, skills that people can work on because this area is what's out of our control, but are there skills that we can start to embody that make it easier? Yeah, I think so. In particular with this kind of discomfort, I honestly think we just start to embody that make it easier? Yeah, I think so. In particular, with this kind of discomfort, I honestly think we just have to look at it as though it's some other kind of pain. You know, like if you have an injured foot, or you're in labor, my friends have gone through labor, right? There's lots of techniques that use to manage the pain. It's not that you're

experiencing it. But, you know, you might discover, okay, if I just count down from 10, or if I, you know, distract myself as much as possible or if I make everything else a little bit more comfortable so that when I when my foot hurts, when I experience a contraction, then it's sort of variable. Whatever it is, it's about sort of knowing that the discomfort is there, but finding ways around it. And I think the same applies to this kind of physical discomfort. The reason the phone is soothing is because it it's a distraction, right? It's a distraction. We associate it with calm.

And I can actually scroll without even looking at the things and I find it calming, which I've done to show myself like this is how the phone works. It's a soothing device like a child with a pacifier, right? So I try to find reasonable ways of tolerating discomfort. Like if I've got an email and I'm waiting for a response and I'm really uncomfortable about it, I will just either try to take myself completely away from the phone and be like, this is the hour where I'm cleaning my kitchen and going on a walk and the phone is in another room. Or if I can't do that, I will try to immerse myself in something that is like a treat, you know, like I'm going to read through this new book or whatever. And so I'm constantly I'm just managing the discomfort. And I think that's sort of living with the grittiness of life anyway. Like something uncomfortable is happening over here

and I'm still going to try to live over here in the meantime. But yeah, any pain management technique works, interestingly, quite well for this kind of psychological discomfort. Distract, make everything else a little bit nicer, you know, countdown. Sometimes on a plane, I'll just count down from 100 if there's turbulence. I just count. None of this is magic. It's just what we've got to hand as tools isn't it absolutely someone once told me if it takes one minute just do it you'll feel so much better and i've really tried to tattoo that on my mind if it is for example turbulence or the email

canceling something whatever it is giving people bad news the admin washing you know the dishwasher etc just doing it but in terms of thinking about that in the bigger sense of life and obviously we've had that with covid but you know whenever you turn on the news you've obviously got the kind of atrocities of the war in uk going on, the nervousness of the Russia kind of Western world conversation, you know, impending recession, all the extraordinarily terrifying events around us. And obviously, we've just come through the pandemic as well. And thinking about this, learning to live with the ambiguity of the world around us. How do we get comfortable with that because I know some of the things are you know people say well I just don't look at the news anymore because I find it too difficult

but it's a question for you because sometimes I wonder is that too extreme these things are happening around us and to some extent is it feels to me quite important to know about it but how do you know about it without worrying all day every day about things that may or may never happen? Yeah, I think that's such a good question. And this is actually something I'm trying to work through in my research right now. But one of the things I found really comforting is that when you look at triggers for this kind of discomfort, it turns out that one of them is whether people feel like they have what are in sort of jargon psychology language called affordances, whether they have action possibilities related to the thing they're trying to understand or close the ambiguity about. And that makes sense in a way, because if there's ambiguity, but there's nothing you can do about it, it's less pressing than if you actually might need to take a decision in the future and you don't know what's going on. And the beautiful sort of inversion of this, if we can get to it,

is that it might also be that we can sort of take a double approach. If there's something that we can truly do nothing about, maybe we can distance ourselves from it. But I think in a lot of cases, even with, let's say, war in another country, if we can find a way of looking at the ambiguity that points us to action possibilities, even if they're small, then it may become less painful to look at the news. Now, I'm not running some sort of giant psychological study, so hopefully someone else out there will. But the point sort of logically

looking at that kind of research is that we like to be the kinds of creatures who know what actions we might take next. And that matters, of course, in our personal lives. We don't want to have an ambiguous relationship with our parents because we want to know how to treat them. But it also matters sort of politically or socially, you might say, that it might be that we can tolerate a bit of the news about Russia and Ukraine if we feel like'm immensely persuaded that we need to radically change the world. But I think we have to start by thinking about how to manage our discomfort so that we can then take action. And it turns out if we take action, we have a little bit less discomfort too. So I think action is essentially also a way of getting through this. If we can find small possibilities to do something related to the news that we're taking in. I think that's very sensible and finding those, I guess that relates to all three pieces of advice that you've shared. It's finding those small skills, whatever they are for you, that allow

you to kind of accept yourself as you are, accept the world as it is, but also give you a bit more kind of time and quiet and headspace to focus on what really matters for you. Sarah, thank you so much for sharing all your very, very sage advice with us today. So appreciate it. Oh, I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me and us at the School of Life. So I hope you took a lot from what Sarah had to say. I think if I was going to summarize the one thing I wish everyone,

myself included, would remember, it's that it's not normal to succeed at everything. Nobody does, no one will ever. We all fail all the time. And I think normalizing that is just absolutely essential. No one's going to be the best at everything. It is quite literally impossible. Maybe if you're Einstein, it's different, but for the rest of us mortals, it's never going to be the best at everything it is quite literally impossible maybe if you're Einstein it's different but for the rest of us mortals it's never going to happen so probably quit while we're ahead and just embrace the natural flaws of life and I think on that topic of embracing life a little bit more we are going into Fact or Fad where as you know every week Dr Gemma Newman and I put to the test various different wellness trends, things you might have seen on Instagram, maybe on TikTok and we look at whether

or not they've got a lot of basis in fact or maybe they're passing fad. And this week we're going to be looking at the practice of daily gratitudes. They are something that's helped me no end. Can they make us all happier? Let's find out. So Gemma, I know I say this a lot, but I am really excited about this one because this is a practice that for me on an anecdotal level has had a profound impact on my life, which is a practice of daily gratitudes or affirmations, however you want to describe it. And I did have a look at our hashtags. It's 36 million hashtags for gratitude and about 8 million for affirmation slash affirmations. So it's a popular topic. Yeah. And understandably, I also feel that my bias will come into this one a lot because I have truly felt the power of just

feeling grateful in my own life for the things that I have and the experiences that I have and making it an intentional thing I have found particularly useful because sometimes you can just sort of slip into patterns where you might start to think negatively even when things are going well so it's kind of one of those things that, yes, I do feel personally quite excited by. But when I look into sort of the research of it, I think what would be really helpful is just to kind of go back to an understanding of, well, what is it as a concept? And for me, I would sort of define it as an appreciation of what's valuable and meaningful. And it can also represent a state of thankfulness and appreciation. So kind of two things in one.

And you can do it in various different ways, can't you? You know, for me, I do it every night when I get into bed. I just do it by myself and I just sit there before I go to sleep. And I consciously go through three things that day that I feel grateful for and sometimes they might be big things some days it's been a bad day and they're tiny things like a good cup of coffee or the fact that my bed is warm and cozy and I'm really lucky to be in it but just flipping my mindset to to find those, I suddenly feel my body change and kind of soften and calm down and de-stress. It's unbelievable. But other people do it via meditation or they write them down

or they choose a kind of daily positive statement that they live by. Yeah. And there's so many ways you can do it. I find that really interesting. And I kind of think about the example of if you get a new car and then you haven't really noticed that brand of car around before. And then when you get that car, it's suddenly something that you notice a lot more. You think, oh, there it is. There it is again. And life's a bit like that. And gratitude practices are a bit like that. The more that you look for it, the more that you focus on it, then the more you notice it, which is, yeah, it's definitely a winner, I think, for most people's mental health and well-being. And then when you look at the

science behind it, what's interesting is that there are studies to show that a gratitude practice is associated with increased well-being overall. And there was one study in particular where participants were divided into three groups. One group was asked to journal about negative events or hassles that came up. One was asked to have like a neutral life event sort of journal. And the other one was specifically asked to find things about which they were really grateful. And across the various study conditions, the gratitude subsample consistently had a higher well-being score in comparison with the other two groups. And there are other studies that have shown the same effect. Writing letters of gratitude to people in your life that may have gone otherwise unthanked.

Or writing about your best possible future self is another thing that was studied and the effect that that might have on your mental health and well-being. What's interesting though is that not all studies showed exactly the same kind of results so in people who had post-traumatic stress like veterans for example in a war zone situation the gratitude practice daily only benefited those who had had PTSD whereas the ones who had not been specifically traumatized by events didn't notice any change in their well-being which I find quite interesting and there was a couple of studies one on children and adolescents and one on divorced middle-aged women showed that a gratitude visit or a gratitude letter didn't actually necessarily improve their overall well-being which I think kind of speaks

to the fact that it's not going to be a panacea like it's not going to be the thing that fixes your life because life is hard and we all suffer in various ways. Death happens to everyone. And so we're all going to experience that in terms of people that we love. Hard things happen. But it's nice to see studies that show that when you specifically apply gratitude to your life circumstances, even when things are tough, that it can perhaps increase your overall resilience to stress. It can boost your general well-being and mood, which we know has potential benefits for lifespan and health overall. So, yeah. Yeah, I certainly would, on an anecdotal level, second that in terms of that's how I see it in my life.

I don't think it's that when life is stressful, the stress is really any different. I think what it's enabled me to do certainly is on a difficult day, I think sometimes you have a moment where you can take stock and I find it easier to reframe my thinking and kind of shift the direction of the day than I did before. It's not that I don't get stressed or overwhelmed or upset or worried or angry or any of those things. It's just that I find it easier when I have a moment to sit down to then change my thinking because I find it a bit quicker, as you said, to notice, oh no, that was good or that was good or that was good or I know thinking it's got a little bit more negative. Yeah. And I think it's actually really easy for

us to distort our thinking. When things are going a bit wrong, we can easily catastrophize and think that everything is going wrong and this is a bad day and this is my luck. And then I don't know if anyone else out there listening has the same experience, but then when you start on that sort of negative train, then every stop after that on the day kind of just seems to get worse and worse. So if you flip that conscientiously, purposefully, then it can sort of, you know, really make a huge difference. Yeah, I totally, totally agree with that. So Gemma, what do you think? Fact or fad? I think it's definitely a fact, but that we don't have lots of data to show it's a burgeoning area of research and I think actually in this instance you don't necessarily need a huge body of data to say that you want to give it a try it's free it's easy it has no downsides so yeah I think it's something that anyone can try and see if it works for them. I totally agree because I think in this

section in looking at this I know what we're both passionate about and a lot of people in the space are passionate about is dispelling some of the myths because some of the myths that we've looked at say celery juice can be great if you enjoy it but also it's not a cheap habit and it you know takes some time and and I think it's quite clear there isn't any kind of empirical evidence behind it. So I think cutting through that is important. Likewise, on some supplements, et cetera, you know, it can be very expensive for people. So I think cutting through that's important. Whereas I think on something like this, as you said, it's free. It costs you one minute of your

daily time, maybe two minutes. It's a lovely thing to do and you may feel benefit from it so to me it's quite symbolic of the fact that there are lots of examples of trends or practices or tools that we might do where we don't necessarily need empirical evidence around them ultimately if it feels good it's free there are no negatives to doing it it's just whether it personally works for you or not yeah I agree and in fact it would be a lovely thing to finish on if we could ask our listeners to actually just think of one thing one thing today so far that they feel grateful for even if they feel as though it's been a bad day in other ways is there one thing today that you can feel really grateful for

and if you've got that thing in your mind say it to yourself and then you know you've done your in other ways, is there one thing today that you can feel really grateful for? And if you've got that thing in your mind, say it to yourself. And then you know you've done your gratitude practice for the day. Is there one for you today, Gemma? Recording with you, Ella. Of course. Too kind. You know what? It's a really interesting example because I have had quite a bad day, I would call it. I haven't had a great week and I've been feeling quite stressed and soon as you said that I found my one thing I took Skye my older daughter to nursery today and we were on the bus together I love going on the bus though she loves to go upstairs so she can look out from the double decker and we just had I don't know it's probably like five or six minutes together. And it was just bliss.

Absolutely bliss. Just talking about what she was going to do with her day and what her teachers were talking about yesterday. And just how happy she was to be back with them. And it just, it's amazing, isn't it? Because I was quite caught up in it being a bad day. And I suddenly feel very calm. Good. It works.

It works. It works. Oh, what an episode I feel like these episodes on self-development and our relationship with ourselves for me personally are very powerful and I just feel very grateful that I get to do this week in week out because I I learn a lot that I take into my own life and I hope you feel as you listen along with me that you're getting the same thing into your life. But do let us know. Do let us know what else you'd like to see.

As always, please do get in touch. Rate it, review it, share it with your friends. Let us know what you really think. You can email us podcast at deliciouslyella.com or on social at deliciouslyella. And just remember, if you're making any big changes to your life, do consult your doctor. Next week, we've got a big episode coming up. I'm going to be joined by self-development coach. And as she's been referred to numerous times, the queen of manifesting, basically helping you live your best life roxy nafusi and

then in fact or fad we're going to be looking at adaptogenic mushrooms are they really the answer to lowering stress in your body it's a very juicy episode i cannot wait to see you back here next week thank you so much for listening and again big thank Curly Media, who are partners in producing this show. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts

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