WHOOP Podcast - Why We Need to Invest in Our Emotional Health with Dr. Guy Winch

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by Dr. Guy Winch. The licensed psychologist and author is a relationship and emotional health expert with one of the industry's most highly regarded TED Talks. His TED Talks have been viewed over 30 million times and his books have been published in 28 different languages. Kristen and Dr. Guy will discuss how Guy began studying emotional health (3:15), the approach and skills involved with emotional health (5:50), the dos and don’ts of emotional health (10:25), dealing with rumination (15:25), getting space to grieve properly (26:55), managing self-esteem (32:50), dealing with heartbreak and finding your identity (35:05), creating a social circle in line with your own values (44:20), the timeline for recovering from emotional damage (49:15), the global outlook on emotional health (53:25), and developing the right work-life balance (57:25).Resources:Dr. Guy's WebsiteTED Talk - Why We All Need to Practice Emotional First AidTED Talk - How to Fix a Broken Heart Dear Therapists PodcastSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top performers, athletes, researchers, scientists, and more on a mission to unlock human performance. That's right. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. And this week's episode, WOOP, VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes, is joined by Dr. Guy Wynch, the licensed psychologist. an author is a relationship and emotional health expert with one of the most highly regarded TED talks in the business. Kristen and Dr. Guy will discuss how Guy began researching emotional health.

The approach and skills needed to improve emotional health. For example, simply expressing gratitude once a day can be a major driver. How to deal with rumination? The connection of breathwork and stress to emotional health. They touched on how important the breath and heart. are to signal relaxation to the brain. This is fascinating. Getting space to grieve properly, redeveloping self-esteem after a failure or breakup, have to work to fill the holes in your identity that have been created by a loss or breakup. That's a key theme. Ways to have a good

work-life balance. They touched on the pros and cons of working from home and how the pandemic has opened people's eyes to the importance of connection. A reminder, if you're new to whoop, use the code Will W-I-L-L when you're checking out, get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. That is join.wop.com. If you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast to whoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. Here are Kristen Holmes and Dr. Guy Wynch.

Dr. Guy Wynch is a licensed psychologist author and keynote speaker whose books have been translated into 30 languages. His first TED Talk, Why We All Need to Practice Emotional First Aid, has been viewed over 13 million times and is rated as the fifth most inspiring talk of all time on TED.com. Dr. Wynch's work has been featured in outlets such as the Boston Globe, NPR, the Atlantic, and Business Insider. Dr. Guy received his PhD in clinical psychology from New York University, did postdoctoral work at NYU Medical Center, and opened a full-time private practice. So WOOP is not just a wearable for athletes or those looking to improve their

performance, it is a comprehensive tool that helps people evaluate how various behaviors, habits, and patterns in their life can manifest both physiologically and psychologically. But honestly, I feel like what gets a lot of attention is the training behavior side and how we recover from training. But I think what is really missing from the conversation is the mental and emotional side and how that moves around our physical health. Dr. Guy went so, so happy to have you here to kind of discuss and go deep on all things emotional health. We really appreciate you being here with us today. Thank you so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here. So I'd love to start off by just talking a little bit about your history. What got you excited and, you know, really going down the path of the science behind emotional health? So I was always interested in psychology, and when I got my PhD, during that training, it became very clear to me that I'm actually not that interested in psychopathology. In other words, severe schizophrenia or bipolar or, you know, very severe psychopathology interested me less. What interested me more was everything that happened before a diagnostic category. So to be classified as having, it's a major depression, you have to have this many criteria out of this many.

But if you're missing one of those criteria, you're not officially depressed, but boy, are you depressed? And it always seemed to me that the preventative side of things, everyone who's suffering before they get officially, and if they ever do, get officially diagnosed, all the regular slings and arrows of regular life, we don't really address things like loneliness or heartbreak or rejection or stress, even rumination. You know, that's not something that gets a diagnostic category that insurance reimburses on. And to me, it was much more compelling. How do we help people avoid getting mentally ill? How do we help people live a much more thriving life? And I consider that emotional health, with a line to mental health coming at the diagnostic point. So I was always interested in emotional health.

And then when I graduated and started my practice, I kept into the habit of, it was a PhD, it's a research degree, and I kept the habit of looking at the research. And there was a lot of research about emotional health, things that are not about the mental health aspect of things. And I started taking that research and seeing if I could translate it into tools or interventions that I could offer my patients. And then I would see which resonated, which worked. And I slowly began to acquire this toolkit of interventions, of tools, techniques, tricks, mind hacks to really boost our emotional health. And, you know, over the decades, the research has really mushroomed in so many different ways. But that's how I really started getting into the science of emotional health and what it can do and what it can teach us.

So I guess it's safe to say that you see it really as, you know, an opportunity to build skills. You know, what would you say are, you know, if you were to kind of a laundry list of skills that help buoy emotional health, what would be a few that you would want to highlight? So I'm going to mention a few, but before I do, I want to mention the approach. And you're talking about physiological, you know, like athletes. You're talking about athletes. You're talking about training. Well, when you're trying to push yourself to achieve certain physiological milestones

in running, in whatever the sport is, the idea that you would be able to do that without training is ridiculous. Of course you have to train. And to the extent that your goals are far from, where you are presently, you have to train quite a bit. That should be the approach to emotional health. It's not a part-time thing. It's something that we need to be aware of and we need to be mindful of and we need to practice every single day because life happens every single day. So if you want to be healthier emotionally, it's something we had to be aware of. A few of the things

that I practice every day, and I recommend everyone does, for example, and these are all evidence-based scientifically. So gratitude is an amazing thing because we evolved to look out for danger. There wasn't an evolutionary advantage to being happy and pass along your genes whether you're happy or not. There was to scouting the horizon for dangers. And so we're much more biased in that direction. We will pay attention to the negative much more than to the positive. We will note what's lacking in our lives much more easily than we will what we have. And so gratitude exercises are a way of balancing that aspect of things a bit, by on a daily basis, noting the things for which we're grateful. And the best way to do that is in narrative form. It's not just about sitting down and

going, well, I'm glad it's sunny. All right, you're glad it's sunny. But I'm not grateful for the sun because the sun will rise or not based on your gratitude. You can be grateful. It's a sunny day because for you that is associated with well-being and the outside, outdoor season beginning, and you like the feel of the sun on your skin. And so you can craft a little bit of a story. It doesn't have to be a long one. But the worst way to practice gratitude is jot down a paragraph a day about something you're grateful for and why,

and do it in a little bit of a story of why that matters to you. That little exercise, it takes five minutes, has such profound effects on our optimism, on our happiness, on our truly emotional health, and our physiological health, because they're obviously connected, which we'll get to. So gratitude is one thing that I practice every day, and I highly recommend that people do.

And is there a difference between what's happening kind of in the brain when you're receiving gratitude versus kind of giving gratitude? So I can't quite speak to that. I don't do functional MRI studies. I read them. And the way they are done, actually, having a conversation with somebody who does that research, because the way that's typically done is you'll have somebody, you know, lie in the function of MRI and think of something they're

grateful for. It doesn't necessarily get prompted to be done in narrative form. The form that I suggest, and if you want to get the most bang out of your bucket, and this is not something you can do every day. But for once in a while, if you want a real lift for mood and for everything, then think about someone who was really meaningful, influential, helpful, did something that really made a difference to you over your life, in your life at some point. It can be 30 years ago. It can be something small. They had no idea it was having that impact, but you were having that kind of day with that small thing, and write them a letter telling them what the context was for you, what they did, whether they remember that or not, and the impact that had on you.

that evokes really powerful gratitude because you're thinking about it in the context of your life and in the context of what it did. And it's often people who, and I've done that number of times already. And many of the times people, like, not even quite sure they remember what I'm talking about. But it's even more impactful for them because then they're realizing, oh, I did this small thing. I had no idea. It had that significant and impact. So I hopefully study those kinds of things in the functional MRI because doing, reading or writing a letter like that while you're,

lying there, that will, I think, activate perhaps other areas of the brain that the regular one does not. But this is still something that we're, you know, obviously researching and trying to understand fully how that works. So interesting. Okay, so gratitude. Excellent. What are, is there, what would you say is the next, the next skill that you would recommend for emotional health? Okay. So because it's emotional health and there's as many, if not more, don't do's as there are dues. And so because, like I said, our tendency, we evolved for certain purposes that were not quite suited for modern day life. And so this tendency to scan the horizon for danger can turn into anxiety. And the concern about whether your social standing is okay in the tribe, when we were hunter-gatherers, was super important because if you were going to be ostracized, then you're going to die.

You're not going to survive alone. And so it was super important to know that you're well positioned and not in any kind of danger in the tribe. It's not a life or death situation today if we have a falling out with a friend. But that legacy of the importance will cause us to ruminate and nauseam to sit and spend five hours going through one version of a fantasy argument or a fantasy telling off that you're never going to have to your boss or to whoever. And the impulse to do that is incredibly powerful. It's a rabbit hole people spend a lot of time in. And when they're in that rabbit hole, by the way, all they're doing is they're marinating in stress and in cortisol and doing major damage for their body, depressing themselves, stressing themselves, again, for a conversation, they even will tell you in a moment they will never happen. So we have a lot of tendencies that are very unhealthy.

And so a lot of what I practice is catching those and stopping them and not indulging them despite how compelling that might feel to do. Is it safe to say that that is kind of our default is to ruminate? Not everyone's. No, it's a personal thing. Some of us have a much bigger tendency towards doing that than others. Some people are remarkable at shrugging things off, at compartmentalizing, at, you know, reframing things. So, I'm not bothered by it. They're not the majority, but there are many, you know, who do that.

And, you know, and it's all some kind of bell curve where, you know, distribution where some people do it a lot at the ends and very little at the other ends and most of us do somewhat in the middle. But it's a very strong tendency and the more stressed we feel, the more likely we are to do it, the more upset we feel, the more depressed we feel, the more anxious we feel, all of those things feed the tendency to ruminate. And just to clarify something for, you know, the viewers and listeners, it is useful to self-reflect. on our experiences, that's something we do by default, to gain meaning, to get understanding, to get our bearings, to get, you know, action items out of it.

It's natural to do that. There are healthy and unhealthy ways to self-reflect. The unhealthy ways involve a form of rumination where you're really just spinning and having the same unproductive cycle of thoughts over and over again. you'll relive that argument that you had or you'll again have the fantasy argument or you'll really think of how unfair this is and then you'll go through a greatest hits of all the times you were treated unfairly of course you're feeling horrible as you're doing this you know a difference between physical and emotional health is like if you sprain or break a leg and you think back to the time you broke your leg your leg's not going to hurt from the recollection you think back to a time you broke your leg's not going to hurt from the recollection you think back to a time you you're incredibly aggravated, you will get aggravated, even if it's 30 years ago. So every time we marinate in those things, we are literally reliving those wounds, picking at scab, this is what I call it, and it's really bad to do because it doesn't lead anywhere. We're not gaining insight. We're not figuring

anything out. We're not getting new perspective. We're not finding the silver lining. We are just marinating in the bad. Sometimes we'll do it alone in our heads. Sometimes we'll call a friend and tell them about the horrible thing that happened and then we'll call another friend and tell them about the horrible thing that happened and we can call 10 friends and tell them the same story and they're all going to say the same thing. The validation feels useful but the ROI is terrible because you might feel validated for a bit but that's going to last for two seconds and meanwhile you've just put yourself in a bad mood and you've painted a picture of the world as being really negative which is going to impact your perceptions, your mood, your confidence, your self-esteem

and all kinds of other things. Would you say folks are more vulnerable to rumination and not being able to start the cycle when they're sleep deprived, under-recovered? I would imagine that's the case, but would love to hear your thoughts on just how some of the kind of physical, like physiological things can kind of manifest

and heighten some of those responses to, you know, some of these natural tendencies that we all have? Yeah, when we are depleted, energy-wise, because we've over-trained, underslept, undernourished, whatever the thing is, we're depleted not just in physiological resources, but in mental resources as well. So all our thresholds will get lower, that threshold above which we get triggered for anger, or we start to ruminate, or we get upset, or we get anxious. All those thresholds come down.

We are much more prone to do those things because, you know, our reserves have been taxed. So as a general rule, it's not true for everything all the time, but as a general rule, if you're feeling that you're physiologically depleted, unrecovered, unrested, it's going to, that's how you're going to be in the mental side and the emotional side certainly as well. So you need to know that because then if you're going into a situation where that might not be the best time to have a really important talk with your partner, your wife, or your husband, whatever it is, because you might not be in the best frame of mind for it. like after you're recovering from a marathon, maybe not the best time to do a 10K the next day kind of thing. So we have to be aware of where we are physiologically because that's going to impact where we are emotionally and vice versa. Amazing.

Would you say, you know, kind of staying on rumination for a second just because I feel like it's such an important, I think you say the feature of the human experience, right? But there's making sense of a scenario and then there's ruminating. So maybe just talk through how do you help a patient who is, you know, kind of going beyond just making sense and really kind of constantly ruminating.

How do you get them off that track? You know, how do you get them into a healthier place in terms of thinking about this problem? So actually, let's look at an example of an athlete who, you know, trained for a long time for a race, an event, competition. Or the Olympics and didn't make it? Yeah, that'd be me. Well, yeah. Okay, so that, say that. You know, I'm so sorry for that, but say that. That's right. It's absolutely devastating. And it's, and because you train for such a long time,

the window to succeed is so small and the window passes. The weight is so long. You might not be in the same condition. It's often people really dedicate years and years and years for that one goal that then doesn't happen. It is extraordinarily natural to grieve that, to really be in a tailspin about that. and to ruminate about, oh, if I've just done that different, if I've just done this different, if I had, if I were able to just, maybe if I could go back mentally, I know I kind of felt shaky in that corner, but if I could have just taken that corner again,

and you can spend hours doing that, and days and years and months, and you can thoroughly feel like, what's the point of trying if, like, you put so much into something and then it gets snatched away from you? I can go on and on and on, but, you know, not to believe of the point, but you can go down those rabbit holes.

Now, when something like that happens, there's a due diligence to be done for sure. It is highly useful to look at what you can learn from that experience, what you can learn from that failure, as it were. And what you can learn from it, you have to approach that with zero judgment. It is useful to say, for example, I should never have gone to that party two days before the race because even though I left early, it was a distraction, I shouldn't have done it. Legit. Not legit.

I'm such an idiot. Why did I do that? I'm a loser. You know, I'm never going to get like that. Not useful. Because the message was shouldn't have gone to party. All the loser idiot stuff adds zero value and does a lot of damage. And it is our want to become very self-critical in such moments.

Now, an adaptive way to think about those things, is to do the due diligence, to give yourself time to grieve the loss when it's a big deal. But to then move on. In other words, you're in the mire. Don't get sucked into it waist high. Try and, you know, wait in, feel what the feelings are. Get informed by the emotions that are coming up for you. You'd be surprised because maybe you feel loss and devastation and embarrassment and all kinds of things, but maybe there's also a bit of relief. Maybe there's also a bit of not too bad because it was such a sacrifice for your personal life

or your professional life or and, you know, maybe now this frees you up to do this. And emotions are complex. So figure out what the feelings are, get informed by them. But then you have to get yourself away from the rumination. So to do that, you have to, one option to do that is to reframe

because the urge to ruminate is about the urge to scratch that wound, to reframe is to take the toxicity out of that poison, to take the barb, loosen the barb that's kind of lodged in your head that keeps you spinning. One way to reframe this kind of experience was that this is going to make me stronger because now I know what it's like to really dedicate myself, to really train, to really get there. This didn't work out for me because of A, B, and C. I learned what I needed to from that. where else can I take, I mean, maybe I'll just try again and figure out what I do

differently, or where else can I take this wisdom and apply it in other areas of my life that I can benefit from the lessons that I've learned? How can I turn this disappointment into fuel, into motivation, into drive? How can I use this moment in which the eyes are on me for not succeeding to strengthen my personal relationships to feel more connected to the people around me? people care about me. They're reaching out. It's an opportunity to actually feel the love of the people around me, to feel the support, which I don't ordinarily do because I'm too busy training. There's a lot of different ways. I'm just giving some examples I'm throwing out,

but in every situation, you can look for a different perspective that's less toxic and less dramatic and has more pluses, more, you know, and doing that helps release the urge to ruminate as much. And ultimately, with rumination, if you just keep going back, to it, what the research says is a two to three minute distraction will get you off that cycle. It's like craving for cigarettes for people who stop smoking. The craving is not consistent. It's a wave. Just you've got to ride that wave.

So the same with the urge to ruminate. And what the research says, two to three minutes of concentrating on something else. So reading a book's not going to do it. It's too passive. My go-to is whirdle. It's good for one rumination day. So that's not so good. But, you know, it can be anything that requires concentration and memory task.

Try and remember the names of the kids who sat around you in grade school, whatever, order of a song's in a playlist. That concentrating for two minutes is enough for that wave to pass and then go about your business and repeat the exercise if the rumination occurs. Breathing techniques, I feel like, are money for me because it's really hard to think about anything as you're breathing, you know, and focusing on a specific kind of cadence. Because you're counting your breaths. Yeah, exactly.

Right. You have to count. Yeah. But here's the other why. That's the two reasons of breathing more than two. But the other reason that breathing is really important is when you are ruminating about dramatic things, up goes your heart rate. Up goes your blood pressure. Right.

And your breathing becomes more, you know, shallow and more accelerated. You're getting less, you know, oxygen. So slowing your breathing, doing, you know, box breathing. Box breathing technique that you prefer is a way. of slowing your breathing, it is telling your brain, it's a brain hack, you're telling your brain, really, because if it were that bad, would I be breathing this slowly? No. So it couldn't be that bad and you're activating your parasympathetic nervous system and your brain, right, and your brain goes, oh, I guess it's not too terrible because we're breathing really slowly and down goes the heart rate

and all of those things. So it's actually a really holistic response to do the breathing along along with these other exercises, breathing is an amazing thing to regulate when we're disregulated. Yeah, definitely. It's definitely something we, we shape the feature built into the app. Well, we measure stress. It's called the stress monitor. And we have breathing techniques that you can use to kind of, if you recognize you're in kind of this heightened state of stress, you have the ability to deploy this. It's called the physiological sigh. It's a double inhale, followed by an extended exhale, and it, you know, calms the nervous system and reduces anxiety and your perception of stress in the moment and even after the session's over.

So we really anchor around breathing as an awesome strategy to kind of deal with, you know, perceptions of stress and yeah. Right. And let me just say about it because that mimics a sigh, right? That the double inhale exhale mimics a sigh in a way. And sighing is, you know, people have the wrong idea about sighing. they kind of think like, well, what's that a sign of this or that? But it's actually an amazing release and it's actually an amazing recalibrator. The same is true of crying. By the way,

people think, oh, that's a sign of weakness. No, it's actually a great recovery mechanism because it releases a lot of stress and you kind of, you know, reset after a cry. And so some people have trouble crying. Crying stimulates the Vegas nerve. Yes. It's a very, very useful thing that we judge very incorrectly. I totally agree. Like when I have a good crime, cry. I swear like my next day recovery is so much high, like my heart rate variability is higher next day. Like I always, you know, whenever I just, it's part of this, I think just that release and just that acknowledgement. And, you know, there's an element of, you know, kind of grief and let it go. And, you know, I think that comes along with crying that it's, I think is really powerful.

And it's interesting to see that manifest in the data. Yeah. And sometimes people come to me and they'll argue with me and they'll go like, well, I never cry. And I'll be like, well, I'm. So sorry, and I hope one day you do have access to your feelings. Good. That's a shake him up. I like it. That's awesome.

You said something I think that's like so important. You said space to grieve. Maybe talk about creating space for oneself. Because I feel like in today's world, there are so many distractions. We have access to food. We have access to social media. We there's just, we can watch Netflix for hours on end, you know, with shows that are really interesting to us.

Like, you know, there's an element of, you know, and this sounds so cliche, but actually sitting with our thoughts so we can start to understand what is actually coming into our brain and whether or not those thoughts are serving us. But, you know, I think there's distraction, but there's also creating space for yourself so you can kind of sift through some of those emotions because they'll surface in, and I think, maladaptive ways if we're not, if we don't actually deal with them. So maybe just talk through like, what does. space actually mean? And we can take grief as an anchor point potentially, you know,

thinking about it from, you know, romantic heartbreak or, you know, the loss of a loved one and maybe use that as an example. So, you know, yes, I completely agree that we need the space to sit with our thoughts, but it's our thoughts and our feelings that we need to sit with. And we are remarkably, our emotional vocabulary tends to be very limited. Some more than others, but we generally are, see, you know, when I ask people, well, how do you feel in that moment? I get primary colors, right? It's like, happy, sad, angry, I don't know, you know, not great. You know, like, so I tell people all the time, and I truly do use this myself. There's something called the emotion wheel where you have a wheel of all the different emotions grouped by kind of category here, all the angers, resentments,

the this, the this, the da-da-da-da, the positive ones, challenging ones, all of them. And I say to my patients, and I say to friends even, and I use it myself, and in a moment I'm feeling a lot, it's difficult to unpack, and I start looking at the wheel, and anything that registers on the radar, there could be a two here and a ten there, but, and when you start, there can be 20 different feelings that you're experiencing in that moment. That's a lot of data. That's a lot of information to actually look. at and go, okay, if I'm feeding all of these things, then you figure out what's this about and what's

that about and why some relief there? Why some, you know, why some happiness there? Oh, yeah, because we don't like that person, so I didn't mind. You know, like, it just, you know, to really kind of, you know, unpack what's going on. That we need the space and time for. And it's especially true when we're grieving. It's true of every emotional injury we sustain, to be honest. When I said earlier that it's very obvious for people who are active that they need time to train or they need time to warm up or they need time to cool down. This is the training when it comes to emotional health. This is the time that you devote when something big happens in your life. It doesn't, you don't get over it automatically. When I talk about heartbreak, romantic heartbreak, for example,

I have a TED talk about it. It has over 15 million views. And the reason it has so many views is because people's idea of romantic heartbreak is time, just give it time. And A, that is useful. And B, there's so much more we could be doing to make that time shorter and to make our suffering less, except that we're not aware of what those tools are. And again, they're involved do's and don'ts. That's true of any kind of grieving. There are things we can do to process the grief. and it's not one size fits all different people need different things there's some people who need to talk about it all the time there's some people who would rather not but there's you don't have to talk about it but you have to process it grief means you are getting your brain

adapted and your heart adapt heart not literally but you know emotionally um adapted to a new reality of a loss and that takes time it doesn't happen on a dime you know it takes time to accommodate for you wake up in the morning oh that person isn't there or that person broke up with me or that goal of mine that I've dedicated so many years to is now gone it's a you're a different person in a way after a loss and so it takes time to sit with to adapt to to process to understand to see how it impacts the different areas of your life and to experience the feelings that it evokes and so we sometimes don't do that naturally. When it comes to heartbreak, our tendency is to do all the wrong things, right?

Our tendency, I know, this person broke my heart. I'm going to spend 16 hours of every waking moments stalking them on social media. So I can see this curated version of that they put out in which they seem terribly happy and feel miserable by it. You know, I mean, that's what people do. Hours, I know it's not good for me. I know it makes me unhappy, but I just have to see what they're doing. You don't have to. You're allowing yourself to. You're indulging. indulging a bad urge. If you had the urge to slice your arm open, hopefully you wouldn't indulge it because you would realize, well, that's silly. But those negative, emotional, psychological urges, we indulge way too much, A, because we don't know that it's that damaging.

And once I explain to people how and why and the extent to which it is, people go like, okay, maybe not. But there's one. Another one, we become significantly, when it's a romantic breakup, we become intensely self-critical. In our effort to understand the why, which is important, we feel that it's necessary to review all our faults and shortcomings. And then, you know, oh, if only I were this, if only I were that, if only I didn't, if only I did, your faults and shortcomings, like if there are things you can work, if it was like, oh, I should never have said that to his friend and the lesson learned there. Maybe there's something to be taken away.

But I'm not tall enough. I'm not rich enough. I'm not big enough. I'm not this. I'm not this. Those, what's the point? You know, you can, what you should be doing in that moment is entirely the opposite. After a heartbreak, after a romantic rejection even, there's not to be heartbreak,

you should be listing all the qualities you bring to the table, not highlighting what you don't. Your self-esteem is already hurting. You don't need to savage it further. You want to actually revive it. And that is happening, that happens by really focusing on, well, here the things that I know I have to offer that other people have or would appreciate. Let me focus on those. going to make me more hopeful for the future as opposed to feeling like, I'll never find anyone because you just reviewed everything that you think is wrong. Would you say higher self-esteem,

well, higher baseline self-esteem, the shorter, the time to kind of get over their rejection? In general, yes. Self-esteem is a buffer, is a buffer for rejection, for anxiety, for certain things. Our self-esteem fluctuates. Some of it, some of us are set at a regular. baseline that's higher than others. But there's a Goldilocks zone for self-esteem. Too high tends to get brittle. Then you fall into the narcissism range. And then you, you know, you might think a lot of yourself, but you are also intolerant of any criticism or any negativity because internally your self-esteem is, it might be high, but it's brittle. It breaks easy. So that's not good either. Too low, then you're too self-critical, too unconfident, you know, see yourself in a really

negative prism rather than a realistic one. There's a happy zone in the middle. But self-esteem, I always say it's like having a bad hair day, but I used to have enough hair to have one. It's like you wake up, you can wake up feeling like crap about yourself. And you can wake up feeling great. And why, you know, maybe who has some correlations and answers that we can get to in terms of self-esteem and why, you know, what's happening to us physiologically, what happened during the night or the day before that promotes that. But in general, you know, like it can fluctuate And there are other programs to improve self-esteem. They don't work because they give you an initial boost of a day or two.

And when we do studies, some people will come out of a self-esteem weekend and say that they're in a much better place that their self-esteem is higher. But when you give them self-esteem questionnaires, there's no difference. So interesting. So, you know, it's, yeah, because self-esteem is a very specific thing. And today we like to talk about self-compassion instead of self-esteem. it's a much more useful concept. And self-compassion means what's the extent to which you have a compassionate internal voice rather than a critical one or a phoning one, for that matter,

a compassionate one in which you just treat yourself as you were the dear friend. In what way do we have to, you know, after a romantic heartbreak, what is a healthy shift in identity? because sometimes, you know, I know that your identity can be really wrapped up in that other human, you know, and, you know, I feel like that's probably not super healthy. How does one kind of think about that? And they might be in what is a kind of a, you know, a great relationship, but they, is it important for them to recognize that, oh, wow, my identity is actually really, really wrapped up in this person? and how do you kind of pull back without making that person feel rejected, even though you might not be breaking up, but you just start kind of pulling yourself out a little bit to kind of reclaim your sense of self a bit. And I don't know, also I think about protecting in the event that it doesn't work out.

And I know that might not be the right way to think about it. But what's your take on how to that? That's a great, great question, right? Because the way we enter into romantic relationships is not sustainable. Right. We get infatuated. Our brain gets addicted, literally, to the, no, truly, to the other person. It looks like addiction.

It looks like we become obsessed. It's like opioid, right? It's like literally. It's very much like an opioid. It's the only thing that makes us happy. Nothing else really matters, you know, and then suddenly we didn't hear from them for a few hours. Now we go into withdrawal.

Now we're in a severe panic. And so we just want to spend every minute with him, every second with him. And maybe at the beginning, if the feeling is, mutual, that's terrific. It's not sustainable. You're not going to be fused like that. You want to avoid codependency because that is a problematic. That's like a blurring of boundaries. It's an emachment that's not actually useful psychologically or emotionally, nor is it sustainable. But it's very much a, what you describe is very much true of a lot of people when they enter in. They're just so smitten and it's mutual and then at some point they realize I haven't seen my best friend in

like three months. I haven't done this. I stopped going to this class I love. I stopped listening to this music because I'm with them all the time and they don't love that artist, so I'm not listening to that. It's very important to reclaim your independence. You have to communicate about it. You have to have a conversation and say, hey, look, this is amazing, almost a little too much so because I haven't noticed, but I've been neglecting a lot of things that I really used to enjoy we're doing. I'm sure you have two. So can we talk about being able to slowly kind of re-engage in some of those other things? It might mean seeing each other a little bit less. We might need to reassure each other that we're very much still in it. But this feels good to me. I want it to work.

And I know that I'm not going to be happy in the long term if I don't do this thing. And if I stop, I stop training, I stop doing this, I stop doing that. Those are not things that are going to make me happy in the long term. I got carried away. And I'm glad I. did because we have a great launching pad. But now we have to shift gears a little bit and make this more sustainable. Is that okay with you? Tell me how you feel about that. Yeah. In a scenario where, you know, there's been a breakup, how do you kind of, and let's say you were really codependent previously. And now you're, you know, you've broken up and, and you're trying to reclaim that, that identity. What would be the process to kind of get back to your sense of self?

So number one, you need to start asking yourself, what do I want to keep that I took on during that relationship? Maybe I was introduced to this kind of music or this kind of food or I got into this habit. You don't have to throw the baby with the bathwater. What is something that I would like to keep, associated mix or no? And what are the things I don't? You know, identity is a real issue because we go from being a we when we're in a relationship to an eye. So there's a massive shift in personal identity from a we, like, how was your weekend? Well, we did this and this and this for the holidays.

Well, we did this for the weekend. Well, we're going to see this film to eye. And that can feel like a huge loss, you know, at the beginning and part of that loss. And so identity reformation is something we have to do whenever life throws a curve at us that's tilted us significantly. Loss often does that physical injury can do that when an athlete has to retire from the sport they love because they no longer. can perform at the professional level. There's a lost gymnasts go through that at very young ages. The dancers go through that at very young ages. They devoted their entire lives. That's who they were. And now they cannot be that anymore. So who are they? There's an exploration.

Identity is not something we curate from, you know, I'll take a little piece of this, a little piece of that. It's something we have to ask ourselves, discover in ourselves, wrestle with. It's a very active process of figuring out, well, what do I think? What do I believe? One example is we all raised in homes in which there was a position on politics, religion, all the hot button topics. And we can adopt wholesale where we came from, but maybe we need to pause and go, but what do I think? And maybe what I think or what I believe turns out to be similar.

Maybe it turns out to be different. Maybe it turns out to be different, but I want to stay with that community so I'll adapt. Maybe it turns out to be different to the point that I really need to not hide that I feel differently. All of that is a result of exploration. asking yourself questions, being honest with yourself about the answers. And what we had to be careful of, again, with, like with a heartbreak and stalking people or with identity and just quickly coming up with an answer that's not well thought through. Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll do eat, pray, love. I'll just go on a trip and da-da-da-da,

and that will be the way. Well, you know, that's a great book and movie, but it's not something most people can, would, should do, right? And I have a newsletter. It's called the do. wrong, the get wrong, do right newsletter because every month it goes through one thing we get very, very wrong and that we do very wrong and how to do it right. It can be things like apologies that we get very wrong because we make them about our excuses rather than about the feelings of the other person. It can be how we deal with rejection, which is to become a self-critical and think it's because of us when often it's not, and there's no point in becoming self-critical. Somebody already did that for you. You know, like there's, so, so, and it's important people

to understand the mistakes so that they don't amplify negativity or they don't make wounds emotional or otherwise bigger. When it comes to identity, part of our mistakes is that we don't think of it as an active question of who am I? When you ask people and if anyone who's listening wants to ask a friend, who are you? They'll get demographics, this age, this this,

I do this, what's on your driver's license kind of thing. That's part of who you are. who you are is what you believe, is what you feel. You might, unbeknownst to a lot of people, spend four hours a day drawing comics that no one knows about. But if you're spending four hours a day on art, you're an artist.

In part, that's part of who you are. And I, for example, can cook a meal for people, and if they literally expel it back onto the plate, my feelings will not be hurt. Because the cook is not a part of my identity, It's not something I do well, think I do well, that's important for me to do well. So, you know, if I get criticism there, it bothers me less. If somebody will come and say, you don't understand anything about what's going on with me,

I'll find that more upsetting because as a psychologist, I would hope I would. And so, you know, it's so the different aspects to our identity, to our self-esteem, and those different aspects have different meanings and they're complex. There are overall sense of identity. and our identity, how do I feel as a partner? How do I feel as a son? How do I feel as a brother? You know, and good brother, bad brother, good friend, bad, like, what are my qualities?

What do I bring to the table? All of this is an exploration. So you start by asking a lot of questions and seeing what resonates with you emotionally, what comes up, what you feel, and it's a process. And the process of identity formation is a lifelong process because we go through changes and losses and adaptations all the time. We're not the same. Yeah, and it seems like that kind of part of retaining the sense of self that is so important,

the more we kind of have a clear definition of who we want to be in the world, it seems as though that would be a real buffer to a lot of the vulnerable, you know, being, that would make us a little less vulnerable, I would think. And I think a big piece of this, too, is environment, you know, kind of creating an environment where we can reinforce that identity, you know, and an outlet for the things that enable us to kind of almost practice that identity. Maybe if you want to talk a little bit about that, because I think, you know, oftentimes that's where we kind of go wrong with emotional health and that, you know, our environment, our friend group are, you know, aren't in line with the things that we say we really care about and that we value. and as a result, we get this mismatch in terms of our behaviors and what we say we care about and the person that I want to be in this world. So maybe talk a little bit about emotional health and just environment and boundaries.

Okay. So emotional health, you know, when it comes to identity, it's you, if you're an athlete, say, and you don't have a social circle of athletes, you don't get to express. You can tell them this or that statement, but, you know, really discussing. You don't feel a part of a community of athletes. And that's really damaging to your sense of identity. It's almost like you have to bury a part of yourself that's super important. And so we get validation and we get to explore identities when we have a group affiliation of people who feel the same about themselves, so we have that in common with.

And there's huge power to that group affiliation. Because the research is, for example, that when people encounter bias, if they're really affiliated with the group of people towards whom that bias went, they are much more buffered because they're almost like sharing the insult with the group rather than sustaining it individually or being picked out individually. It feels very different to face bias when you feel like you're standing alone versus when you feel like, no, there are people behind me who feel the same, know the same, experience the same and would understand completely if I told them what just what just happened. So that group affiliation part is super important for our identity. It's where we really can

strengthen and can experience that those aspects of ourselves. And again, it's not writ large. We're not one thing. We're many things. So that group affiliation, let's say you're a black person and you experienced bias, being with black people, you know, because you can't be black or not experienced bias, so they will get it, hopefully. know, and that is very, very strong, you know, in that way. And you asked about boundaries. It's the subject of the most recent newsletter. What we get wrong about boundaries is when we're, you know,

and I'm talking about the boundaries we try to set with other people to let them know when they're stepping on our toes. That's my analogy of it. Like somebody stepped on your toes. They didn't realize, oh, didn't realize you had a toe there. I do. So you just stepped on it. And when you set boundaries with someone and you say, hey, so this is where you don't step because that's where my toes are. That's where I have a sensitivity or that's where you do something that I don't find comfortable or pleasant. What people get wrong about that is they think it's a one step process. It's hard enough to have the talk with someone about boundaries. That look, this happened. And when they're done, everyone's like, I got through it or there was a fight or whatever it was. Boundaries is a two-step process. The small, small step step,

is the first one, in which you set the boundary. The big step is everything that happens thereafter in which you maintain the boundary. Boundaries always have to be maintained. We don't live in a magical society where your requests gets internalized and adhere to immediately by all around you. That would be nice, not the case. Even people who care about you will get it wrong a lot. So as long as you know that and you know that you need to maintain the boundary, remind people, do it as nicely as possible, as non-confrontationally as possible. If you don't, you're giving them the message that, you know, that thing that I said, it really upsets me when you do? Sometimes it's fine is the message you're giving when you don't

maintain the boundary, which is confusing to the other person, so they'll do it. So even in boundaries, it's important to be actively maintaining them. And again, I get back to the message about emotional health, which is it is an active daily process of self-examination and getting the information, because it starts with the fact that this information is not out there, people don't know it, so they don't know what, how to do and when. But even once you have that information, that's where the work begins. It's like you can get all the equipment, but then the training begins, and you've got to show up in the gym, it won't happen magically. Right. And it's so, it's crazy because you think about, I mean, I think about myself, like how much I program my workouts

and like think about my when I'm going to do cardiovascularly and strength perspective when the recovery modalities I'm going to engage in which has a correlation you know a relationship to emotional mental health for sure um but in terms of like really carving out like actual real time to think about my emotional health you're dead on no one does it i mean i point oh oh oh one percent of the population is engaging in some sort of like like real time that is set aside each day And I, you know, meditation, mindfulness, I think these are all paths potentially. But what would, what would that time frame like really look like if we're thinking about, like, building this muscle, this skill of emotional health? Like, what does that time frame need to look like for us?

So, okay, let's distinguish between injury recovery and maintenance and training. So the injury recovery is, recovery is I got rejected. I sustained a loss. I had a failure, I had, you know, like something that really... So like emotional injury where you're just... Emotional injury, it tilts you off the track. It tilts you off your center and you just want to soldier on and keep going. There are really specific tools and techniques.

My book Emotional First Aid was that, Becky, is a tool to use for daily life, small stuff, small stuff. But you can treat those injuries. I, you know, I sustain failures as much as everyone else, but every time I do, I am in the spot. My best example of this was like I was about to give a really important talk. And three weeks before the talk, I had a rehearsal. And it got torn apart. Torn apart while I'm on stage rehearsing, you know, in the room was like, this is bad. And I was like, we're ready to go. It's three weeks away. And what went through my head is, you wrote so many articles and chapters about failure. Do it. Do what you need to do. So it's like, I was.

don't be frozen you know do and I immediately it bounced me out of it and I immediately started like remembering okay here's what I would have suggested for someone to do in that moment

do that and I certainly and to get the emotions you know to get this not dysregulated I immediately became intensely curious about what was the direction they thought I should be going

and what do they what is it they think the right thing would be listen really carefully if they think this is bad they're not just saying this is bad they have an idea

so listen be there and work with them and collaborate with them now as you're on stage and sweating bullets do it now and i have that on video in fact and i went to look at it in like a week or two later um after i had rewritten the thing and it was approved and and and nicely so and i was and i was like so proud of myself for being able to implement my own advice in a difficult moment and the point of that is it's difficult it's really emotionally uncomfortable but that That's the training. That's the idea that you're sustaining a wound. Triage it now.

Don't let it fester. Don't let it get infected. You know, be on it. And so, so A, treating injuries, you know, is one thing. And the other is the building up is working in your identity, working on gratitude. I think mindfulness and meditation, especially mindfulness meditation are amazing. There's so much research about that. I'm not, you know, again, it's all evidence-based stuff that I tend to go for here.

and those are wonderful things. I'm not great at meditation. I practice it intermittently. I'm not very good at it because I haven't spent enough time training the muscle to be able to sit and do it for sustained. And by sustained, I mean, 10 minutes, I'm not good. You know, like, you know, it's like, I open my eyes and I'm like, well, that must have been an hour. Oh, look, three minutes.

You know, it's like that. But it's like there's a lot of muscles you can train. That's not the one I focus on. But I should and I know that and it's on the list of things. But there's so much you can do to train emotionally, psychologically, to beef up yourself, to learn things, to reframe difficult things so that they're more optimistic when you feel discouraged to restore your motivation, when you feel rejected to restore your self-esteem, when you feel helpless to restore a sense of control, when you feel anxious to restore a sense

of certainty. I can go on and on and on and on. There are active things we can be doing every day to beef us. self and especially to address the impediments that we should be doing in a natural way like we do when it comes to our physiological and physical health, but we know less about the emotion and the psychological health, so we don't do as much. But that's where the training is. Do you feel like the world is becoming more aware and more conscious of just some of these tools that exist and at least, you know, we're not there yet in terms of practicing these

skills regularly, but do you feel like the conversation is at a better place, you know, globally around mental and emotional health? Yes, and I think the pandemic did a lot there. I'm a psychologist who writes books, has TED talks, skips talks. That's, you know, but I'm not, you know, the head of this department at this university. And a year and a half ago, and this is, this is a slight humble brag, but you won't dodge me for a minute. I got invited to 10 Downing in England to speak to the British government, and they said, we want to hear what your recommendations are for mental health policies we should institute across the UK. And I literally said to them, that's amazing, why on earth are you asking me?

And their response was, because you'll be talking to policymakers and bureaucrats and those kinds of people, and we need somebody who can talk to people and not talk at people, and you're good It's not an academic lecture. This is a conversation. Correct. We've had those. It bores them. They don't do anything.

And so I went in talking to them about work stress and about, because one thing I knew, all of them, maybe they're depressed, maybe they're anxious, all of them are stressed. The nature of the beast when it comes to being a civil servant in any government. And so I talk about work stress and how they need to think differently about work stress and the idea that the interesting thing about work stress is that we don't experience. don't experience it at work. We're too busy. We experience it outside of work in the form of worry, anxiety, rumination, all of those things. And because that's the case, we have much more control over it

than we actually think. And so I just went in with a whole, you know, and I gave those talks a lot of different companies because that idea of how you manage yourself and your own stress is super important. And that really spoke to them. And they even instituted law based on the talk at some point. And so the idea that again, I apologize for the Humboldt-Brack,

but the point I wanted to make is I don't think that would have happened pre-pandemic. I think the pandemic made the point with everyone, like everyone who thought, I'm immune, I don't need this, I don't get depressed, I don't get lonely. Well, the whole world shut down and we don't know if the fabric of civil society is going to hold, let's see how you feel right now. So I think after the pandemic, you know, people were much more open to the idea. Unfortunately, this is a window that will close very soon because as humans, we like to not think about, you know, those kinds of things and just assume that we're all robust and immune. And so that awareness in, you know, in the shadow of a huge worldwide global event is not going to last once life comes back to normal and it's already almost there.

And so there is a window of opportunity for people to get. informed and to take on board half the equation that they've been missing. I love that. I mean, there's no question. Our thesis at Woop is very much around, you know, it's not what's happening in your craft. Like, during those eight hours that you're, you know, in the emergency, you know, your acute care surgeon, like, you know, dealing with a huge trauma that that just happened or, you know, a military operator, professional athlete, like your craft, that's kind of the easy part. It is the other, you know, kind of 13, 14, 15 hours of the day, that that's what you need to manage. And I think that's, that's where the opportunity is really, you know, to, and I love that you had this opportunity to

kind of talk to folks about that concept. And, you know, when you, when you talked about kind of work stress and the stress that's happening outside of work and how to manage it, did you kind talk about it from like a physiological and psychological lens in terms of like how you actively manage stress and just yeah yes yes yes i mean first of all uh you know um when you're ruminating about work in the off hours you are going to have sleep disturbances that's what the research shows you're going to eat unhealthy of foods because you're trying to soothe you're going to be more if you're chronic you're going to be more at risk for cardiovascular disease because you're flooding your system with cortisol and other unhealthy hormones and mental states over big

hours of time and unnecessarily so. So you're literally, you know, predisposed. I also spoke about loneliness, for example. People think loneliness is unpleasant. Yes, it's unpleasant. It will also kill you. Loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It impairs longevity. It will make you infirm and sick compared to somebody who's not lonely and it will kill you early. The chances of an early death rise by 30-something percent with chronic loneliness. These are huge physical and longevity manifestations. There's research even about smiling and mental attitude that you look at the smiles of kindergarten kids in these very long-term studies and you count the crow's feet around their eyes and those kids on average live longer than the ones with fewer

crow's feet just in terms of the smile and their approach to the world because when kids smile with crow's feet that's an authentic smile when they just put up the thing it's not so you can see the kids who are able at that point to really connect to a happy moment and that's hugely impactful to how long we live and the health we have so yes the mind-body connection is is huge we're at you know we're at the initial stages of the of that mountain of you know, excavating exactly all the ways in which it operates. I'm excited for the years to come because I think we'll discover so much more. And that doing that will give us all kinds of pathways, not just to emotional and psychological, but to physical health and performance in athletics and

other and every other domain because it impairs thinking, cognitive thinking, you know, for example. So I'm very hopeful that we'll learn more and more about those things. And I'm very hopeful that private citizens with whoop, with other, you know, devices and with a sophistication that is just starting and will come, will become much more informed about their own mental processes, physiological processes, the connection between the two, and be able to have much more control over this aspect of their lives that we literally didn't have any control over a short while ago. Yeah, that's so beautifully said.

I love that. Maybe, you know, we're getting toward the end here, but I'd love to ask you just, you know, some folks are still working from home, you know, are kind of remote working. Maybe, you know, what have you learned over the course of the last few years with just now this very new model of work? What have been some of the benefits of working from home? And, yeah, what's your just kind of overall take on what goes right, what goes wrong, you know, in terms of emotional help?

Yeah. Look, the science is that, and this was pre-pendemic, we were as productive, if not more. at home as we are in the office. The downsides, many pros and cons, but just to be very brief about it, the downsides are that that lack of face time can be a disadvantage. If somebody's able to be in the office

and somebody not, then they have more access. They might have certain advantages, more face time with the bus, and that can be an advantage for them. What people started doing at some point, and I gave a ton of talks at the beginning of the pandemic, to so many different companies, saying like you have to add elements to meetings which are connected, emotionally

connective between people, because otherwise people are going to feel hugely disconnected and that's going to impact their employee loyalty, their engagement, their productivity, their happiness, your attrition rates are going to grow. And so people need to feel connected. They don't have a break room to meet in coincidentally. I said like, for example, you go to a meeting, you leave your cubicle you say hello to this one over there you rub the shoulder of that one over there you go to the coffee to the break room you get coffee you chat for a few minutes you get there early you oh how's your kid doing yeah none of that existed when when the group meetings began virtually and and yeah you have to you know you have to introduce it artificially you have to bring in

and again that's a leadership thing the leaders have to start by saying let's do around and check in with everyone about how we're doing. I'll start. I'll say something vulnerable. You don't announce that. You just do it. But I'll say something slightly emotionally vulnerable to, you know, demonstrate to you that it's okay that we're here to support one another, that we're a team, we're working together, we spend more hours together than we do with our families. Let's care for one another, more companies, you know, who have a central tenant of caring, and they're not many, do much better in terms of, you know, the, you know, what they get out of their employees because people want to be cared for when they're devoting so

many hours of their life to something. And so that, you know, how we manage the hybrid models or the work from home models entirely, it is on us to truly make up for the lack of connectivity. Touch can be important. Like some people don't, are not touching anyone. Literally, even if it's a rub on the shoulder, that's an important thing. And of course, these days you want to be careful about rubbing someone's shoulder without consent, but, you know, like friends, et cetera, like we need that. And so it's a really important thing. And I would ask anyone to pay attention if you're working remotely, entirely, or in a hybrid model, track yourself. If you're getting data from your group, get data from your brain by adding to whatever the spreadsheet is, you know, things like, and how did I, who do I speak to today and who did I feel connected to?

and all of that. I love that. What would you say? So if you were to kind of give us kind of your top three or five things to kind of manage your emotional hygiene, what would that laundry list look like for you? Ask yourself, how am I doing? How am I feeling? And what do those feelings tell me, what information can I gather from them?

And when I ask people, how are you feeling? or when I say, ask yourself, at least 10 feelings have to be there. And you don't have to feel all of them intensely. But, you know, understand the complexity of your feelings. Understand why you have them. Ask yourself what you want to do with those feelings, which ones are useful to you, which are not. Get informed because as, you know, it starts with basic information. You know that, you know, you need to, you know, for example, nutrition-wise,

people know so much about what they showed or should not be eating. They do not know what they should be taking in psychologically or emotionally, what's nutritious, what isn't. Again, people ruminate without understanding that it's not just not nutritious. It's toxic, certain kinds of self-reflection like problem solving or, you know, perspective taking or reframing are actually very nutritious. So, A, get informed and then start practices and then track, again, experimental method, track how you do on those practices. is. And so you have data that tells you this works for you. This doesn't. You know, for example, there are many pain relievers on the market. I know, you know, over the counter pain relievers. When I have a headache, there's one of them that works for me. The others don't. I only know that

by trial and error, because there's no magic to it. So this is trial and error. What tends to work for you? You're having a really low day. Who's the friend that really lifts your spirits versus the friend that you're busy, but it didn't really do anything for you. Who made you feel connected? Who made you feel heard, who, you know, again, it might not be obvious to you. Your best friend might not be the best listener. And if they're the best listener, they might not be the best person to express the validation that you need. They might listen to you, go on for 50 minutes about how your heart is broken and go, dude, bummer. Not so useful. We need a little more than that. So like, so ask yourself, like, be intentional and purposeful in how you curate

the people around you, the life you want, the practices you have, see what works for you, make notes of it and and just take it seriously. I love it. So good. Dang, this is so fun. I just, we appreciate your time so much. You've been just wildly insightful and I think our members are just going to absolutely love this conversation. So just thank you for your time today. Where's the best place for folks to find you? I know obviously we'll link to your books and your TED talks and if you have a website, but are you on Instagram, LinkedIn? I'm on everything.

TikTok, we're starting soon, not yet, but we're starting very soon. But just guy winch.com, G-U-I-W-I-N-C-H.com. We'll have links to everything I do. The things I would highlight, you'll have links to three TED Talks there. You'll have links to three books. They're in 30 languages. So if you speak a different language, you probably will find them in your language, even Mongolian most recently.

So hello to everyone in Mongolia. And I also have a podcast called Dear Therapists, in which I co-host, in which we do live therapy sessions. So you'll be able to hear live therapy sessions and in which we give the person advice at the end of the session. They go and do it and they come back and report what happened. So you really get a complete arc of someone's story. And it also gives you a sense.

And it'll make you think because the questions we ask, you know, our guests are the questions that you can ask yourself as well in many of these. situations, articles, all those things. So you will find a link to the newsletter to subscribe. Really, that's the portal that you can go through and you should be able to find everything there. Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you again. Big thank you to Dr. Guy Wynch for coming on the Woop Podcast. Emotional health and relationships are critical. If you enjoyed this episode of the Woop Podcast, please leave us a rating or review. Don't forget to subscribe to the Woop Podcast. You can check us out on social at

Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question, you want us to answer it on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952, and we'll answer your question on a future episode. New members can use the code Will, W-I-L, get a $60 credit on W-W-Acessaries. And that's a wrap this week. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.