Woman's Hour - Why do children lie and when can it become a cause for concern?

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Young children may know they can deceive others but their first lies are often more humorous than effective. Imagine the child who claims not to have eaten any cake while her mouth is still full, or who blames the family dog for drawing on the wall. But is lying actually an important sign other cognitive skills are also developing? As a child matures how does the nature and motivation behind lying change? And is it ever a cause for concern? Consultant child and educational psychologist, Laverne Antrobus explains.What is it like to have to care for young children or the elderly while facing the bushfires and extreme heat in Australia? The Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria are currently being ravaged by bushfires and temperatures exceeded 40C in every state and territory at the start of the week. How do you look after the vulnerable in such a difficult situation? On Monday’s phone-in we talked about making and breaking habits. A review of the available international research and research at the University of York looks more broadly at how science can help us understand how people makes changes to their lives . Ian Hamilton a Senior Lecturer in Addiction and Mental Health tells us more about the findings and why the impact of addiction on women is not fully understood.In 2013 Catherine Gray was at rock bottom, feeling suicidal and drinking far too much. Six years on she has made significant life changes and completed a trio of books, the first, The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, the second The Unexpected Joy of Being Single, and now, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary. She joins Jenni to describe how she made it her mission to learn how to be default happy rather than default disgruntled. Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Kirsty StarkeyInterviewed Guest: Dr Rob Gordon Interviewed Guest: Sara Lander Interviewed Guest: Calla Wahlquist Interviewed Guest: Laverne Antrobus Interviewed Guest: Ian Hamilton Interviewed Guest: Catherine Gray

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Friday the 3rd of January. Good morning. You may have seen a photo on our social media sent to us by the mother of the pictured child. Covered in red lipstick, he denies having played with her make-up. Why do children tell lies even in the face of incontrovertible evidence?

Following Monday's programme on making and breaking habits, the science of addiction. And Catherine Gray, who wrote about getting sober and being single, on her latest book, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary. Now, as I'm sure you're aware, you'll have heard it in the news, the fires in Australia have reached horrific proportions and people in the worst affected areas in the south and southeast have been told they must leave their homes as worse is expected this weekend. Already it's known that at least 20 people have died,

hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and two naval warships have been picking people up from the beaches near Melbourne to take them to safety. Some of the people needing help will be young and fit, others will be especially vulnerable, either children or elderly people. How are they being helped when even the young and fit are terrified? Well, Calla Walquist is a reporter for The Guardian. Dr Rob Gordon is a clinical psychologist who advises the Red Cross.

And Sarah Lander lives near Sydney and has four children from four to 16, and they all join us from Australia. Sarah, what's been your experience so far of the fires and the heat wave? Well, we've been relatively lucky where we are. We live surrounded by bush and we're definitely in a bushfire prone area. Hello? Sarah, hello. We seem to have lost you. Let's try Calla. Calla, are you there? I am here.

Great. We'll get Sarah back in a minute, I'm sure we will. Now, you're based in Melbourne. How have you been affected? Well, I spent the first three days of this week down in East Gippsland, which is one of the areas that has been most affected with these fires, the most recent run of these fires. There's a 550,000 hectare blaze sort of in the forest in the middle of East Gippsland, which as of tomorrow morning will be burning back towards the coast where a lot of people are situated. And we've just been hearing story after story of communities in these places where they haven't been able to get in contact

with those who stay to defend their homes. I spoke to people at caravan parks and also just under bridges and at small sort of barbecue areas where people are not meant to camp in Bansdale, which is the easternmost point of Victoria that you can get to at the moment with the road closures, where people have just been camping in their cars for days because they've had to leave these bushfire areas.

They've had to flee the bushfire. I spoke to a woman, a single mother, whose 10-year-old son has asthma. She moved him out of the region where the bushfire was coming, but they slept in her car in a 40-degree night until the next morning when they could go and buy a tent. I spoke to a woman who was 77 years old who'd been told to leave the house that she had been living in. She'd been told by her son to get out and she was waiting to hear whether he survived the bushfires. It's been a fairly traumatic period for a lot of people in Australia and just over the past few days, as you said in your news bulletin earlier, we've had tens of

thousands of people in East Gippsland, in North East Victoria and in the south coast of New South Wales who've been ordered to try to get out if they can before tomorrow morning when those northerly winds are going to come back and we're going to have extreme bushfire conditions again and we could see

significant loss of property and maybe even loss of life again. I mean obviously it's tremendously difficult for everybody. But I've just seen a tweet from Cathy Lett, who, of course, is the Australian author who's very well known here. And she said, our friend Natalie had to jump into Lake Conjola and tread water for an hour with three 70-year-olds. So how difficult is it for people who are responsible

for older people who may be vulnerable and young children? It's tremendously difficult, particularly in some of those more isolated communities. I went on Wednesday to speak to the people at Lake Tyres. It's a Gamayakurna community, an Aboriginal community in East Gippsland. It's fairly isolated, surrounded entirely by forest. And the woman I spoke to there was named Charmaine Selling. She's a fire chief.

They've got one ute, basically, that has a water tank on the back, and they've got a population of about 40 people, many of whom are elderly many of whom have respiratory conditions and she was talking to me about how they've got canoes lined up at the front because they're right on the beach and their final evacuation plan if they can't get anyone out is to get them in the canoes and leave and these are people who really don't want to leave their homes because they're people who have been pushed off their land many times they've been born in this lake tires mission and spent their whole life there um and the responsibility that

was weighing on her to keep this whole community together she's also the paramedic for this small community it's just immense rob i know you're also in melbourne how have you been affected by the fires this time around i know you were affected sometime in the past. Yes, well, for me, there's my own defence of my own house. I'm in a bushfire-prone area that was surrounded by fire in Black Saturday, and summer's always an uncomfortable period for me. But these fires are a long way from me, luckily. But I've probably done already about 10 to 12 radio interviews

based on my experience of having worked with bushfires for 35 years through Red Cross and other agencies with really many different groups wanting to get the information out about how parents can deal with this, help their children understand it and then the same with older community members because once you get an event like this that's completely outside normal routines people who may have very good skills for parenting and communicating don't actually know whether they can trust their uh their intuitions or their past experience

because this this is completely different now as should talk about it? As Calla just said, there is evidence that some older people have been reluctant to leave their homes. How can they be persuaded that they are in danger? I think, you see, what it points up is that we, psychology is that we live our lives on the basis of our routines and our assumptions and expectations based on past experience. If you haven't seen a fire like this, then you can't imagine it. And when someone tells you it and you look around and the trees are just wafting in the sky and there's a bit of smoke in the distance, you cannot imagine that you will have unleashed forces that make you absolutely powerless. And so there is sort of two groups.

People have been through it and people haven't. Now, unfortunately, there's been research on this that shows the best time to get education about disaster preparedness is in primary school. And you don't have to be elderly to be reluctant. You only have to be middle-aged. And in my experience of working with many couples and people in communities, women often perceive the threat more accurately but tend to exaggerate it but that's of course a safety factor when it is in fact very dangerous men often minimize the threat or are reluctant to give full credence to it and so you often get this conflict in couples between should they leave or not. So it's very important that people have

sorted that out and know when they're going to make their move rather than leave it to the moment. Let me bring in Sarah. We have Sarah back again now who has children. Sarah, how are your children coping with the smoke, the heat, the fear of actual fires? They do get very anxious and whenever there's a bushfire anywhere near us or there's smoke that smells particularly fresh, there's a lot of questions. There's a lot of, are we going to die? They get quite over the top panicking, I suppose. and I guess it's my job as a parent to try and

calm them down we do take the threat very seriously and we do have a plan in place and I think that really helps that everybody knows what they're supposed to do they have done things like packed up a few of their favorite belongings that we can take in an emergency and they know what the score is on particularly bad bushfire threatening days then I ship them off to their father's place he lives in the middle of the city and it's kind of a bit like city kids in London being evacuated during World War II out to the country like they feel like it's a little bit of a holiday. So I guess they are very adaptable, but they look to you for that kind of reassurance that you are in charge. And how do you control your own fear, Sarah?

Because, yes, you're responsible for children, but you must be scared yourself. Some anxiety medication. I'm talking with my friends. I think there's something about having kids that makes it easier to, you know, it depends on your personality, but, you know, you do try to set the example for them. So while I might be feeling panicky inside,

I try not to show it too much. I try to act like I'm in control. But I also think that, you know, for me, I've grown up in bushfires, owned my entire life, and this is a very scary, depressing time. And this is unprecedented what we are seeing, but I feel better for having a plan as well. And I know that I'm not a big risk taker as well. So I will be out of there as soon as the fire starts anywhere near me. And you just have to hope for the best and hope that you are one of the lucky ones as

well, because obviously things can change very quickly. But how do you know, Sarah, where to go? Well, you've mapped it out in advance. So you'll think about your escape routes. You know, you'll think, okay, you think through possible scenarios. Okay, I'll take, if a fire starts here, then I'll take this road. If I can't take the road, the worst possible, worst case scenario, we'll go down to the beach. I think, you know, bushfire areas in Australia have all kind of practiced for this to a certain extent. But I mean, what people are living in down on the South Coast at the moment is, you know, we've never seen it before. So I have, you know, for me, it's all still fairly kind of, you know,

in a worst-case scenario, but they are living the worst-case scenario. And, Rob, how do people recover from experiences like this one? Look, you know, when you get that fear, you get the adrenaline rush the adrenaline rush brings you right into the present moment it brings parents and i think sarah described how she gets terribly focused on what she has to do i think of that as going into the role that's a protective uh element and the children will be frightened but we know that children are very resilient particularly if their parents recognise and focus on the children's state. And there's a lot of

research on children in disasters from the US and the UK and it shows that the key factor that determines the child's vulnerability or outcome is the relationship and the communication with their parents. So the parents are able to tune into their children, talk to them, as Sarah's describing, explain that they're frightened, are we going to die? No, we're not going to die because this is what I'm doing about it and this is how I'm going to stop it from happening.

And so, yes, so you pair the threat with information and then re-establishment of routine as quickly as possible. And that's where children then loosen up and start to process it through their talk, drawings, play, whatever else. And that will probably take a year or two. Dr. Rob Gordon, Kala Walquist and Sarah Lander, thank you all very much for joining us this morning and the best of luck to all of you and everyone around you.

Thank you all. Now, we put a picture on Twitter recently which made us laugh and I'm sure it amused you too. It was sent to us by Crystal, and it shows her son, then aged two and a half, wearing a red sweater looking absolutely angelic with something bright red all over his face. She asks, have you been playing with my lipstick, Ralph? He replies, no. The evidence of the untruth is clear. Why do children tell lies? What do we learn about the development of their cognitive skills from their ability to tell fibs? Well, Laverne, Antrobus is a consultant child and educational psychologist. Laverne, why would a child lie in the face of obvious evidence of a misdemeanor?

He had been playing with the lipstick. He absolutely had been playing with the lipstick. But what's so delightful is that in his mind, he thought he could carry through an idea that, you know, was his own. But the evidence was there. And I think this is what's so fantastic about children lying. I mean, it is quite an ordinary developmental stage. That's what we've got to remember. And as you've said, it starts to give us some clues about how children understand their own thinking and the thinking of others. So in his mind, mummy couldn't see

that he had this lipstick on and he was going to keep this as a secret for himself. What's going on when, for example, a teacher asks a parent whether they'd enjoyed their weekend in Italy? They hadn't actually been away. The child had put it in their newsbook. Well, I mean, show and tell, tell us your news is one of those situations I remember as a teacher. And children will tell a fib or a lie because they're a bit bored. They want a bit of stimulation and actually they're experimenting. They want to see what happens if they do say the things that are in their mind. So I think for that teacher and the parent, you know, they have to start to sort of uncouple, you know, what's going on for the child that they felt in that moment. Yeah, I don't want to talk about just playing basketball in the park.

We went to Italy. But what's the best way to handle fibs like that, which I suspect are not uncommon? I remember my mother going to a beetle drive in my school and being told, oh, you've recovered quickly. And my mother said, recovered quickly from what? And they said, oh, we thought you had a baby boy yesterday I had made up a baby brother and I think I was punished quite severely for it. I mean I think there's a sort of there's an interesting line between imagination and a wish and a want for something and lying and that actually what parents and

adults have to do is try and sort of work out the distance between those two things. I think children often taking risks when they're lying, they want to see, as I've said, what happens, whether or not they're discovered. But also, you know, just to test out theories as to what's going on. I'm not sure that there needs to be sort of massive consequences and punishments for lies such as that. But there have to be sort of measured and understood conversations about why lying does create problems. What's happening when children tell lies about their friends or their siblings deliberately to get them into trouble? I think, again, there's a sort of huge, for me, there's a huge tapestry of emotions behind lying. You know, often people lie if they have cross, if they're feeling angry or fearful or guilty or jealous or envious. So, you know, I can remember hearing

children say things about friends and friendships in the playground that were completely sort of fantastical. And I think, well, why are you saying that? And there'd often be something behind it. You know, they themselves, the individual, might be feeling a bit sort of unconfident or self-conscious and wanting to create something about themselves, create a story about themselves that makes them feel good. So I think that there is a way in which parents and adults have to look at, you know, what's behind the lie, you know, and sort of uncover it for themselves and then talk to their child about it. So as a teacher, how would you have handled that sort of thing if it had come to life? I think I would have said, well, this doesn't seem,

you know, to sort of follow through. I don't't understand this and to give children quite a lot of sort of time to sort of recalibrate slightly you know to not feel that they've got to continue the lie that they can save face I suppose by being truthful and that actually as a teacher I valued the truth I understood the motivation for wanting things to seem, you know, different, but that actually my value was placed on them being quite honest. We've been talking mostly about younger children, I think. I mean, the lipstick guy was only two and a half, to be forgiven. Absolutely, obviously.

What are teenagers most likely to lie about? I think teenagers, you know, for them, it's a really tricky moment in time. Actually, again, developmentally quite important. You know, they're wanting to be quite separate. They're not wanting parents or adults to be in their business. You know, they want to be able to be out there exploring and doing the things in the way that they want to. And I think why it's tricky is because, you know, so if we take, for example, going out partying and drinking, you know, there are lots of sort of rules that go with that, which is that, you know, don't drink too much and you're underage. So there

are some sort of ordinary consequences with that. How you then talk to your parents about it is quite complex. You know, how do you really say, oh, well, mum, dad, you know, I did have a bit too much to drink. Can you pick me up? When you know that your parents are going to be saying, well, you shouldn't be drinking. But how do children judge the morality of the lie? You know, they're told always, you must tell the truth. But they know perfectly well that their dad has a sneaky cigarette from time to time and claims to have quit and always denies he's had one. Yeah, and that's the litmus test, isn't it, really?

You know, how do you create a household where actually the truths are real and the lies are the ones that we all know about? I think that there's a way in which lying becomes, you know, in this in-between space of not hurting someone's feelings or, you know, looking after people. So, you know, granny that's knitted you something that you absolutely hate, you might, your parent might say, well, just say you like it because you don't want to hurt their feeling. So there's a sort of this line of lying whereby, you know, what's the moral high ground?

What do we have to absolutely say? Actually, no, that that tips the bar and we'll have X amounts of consequences going with it. And what is lesser that we can talk about as a family? At what point does it become a cause for concern? I think when things do become quite dangerous, when there's that really consistent and persistent lying from children. I mean, sometimes I think children that I've encountered, you know, are lying almost without thinking. So they sort of have an instant response to saying, no, it wasn't me, punitive or quite harsh often lead to quite persistent lying. Because what children start to learn is that, you know, it's going to be better for me to tell a lie to try and get out of the harsh punishment that might be coming my way.

There have been studies, haven't there, looking at the effects of punitive responses. Is that what the studies tell us, that the harder you punish, the more likely your child is to consistently tell love? Well, I think it's a really helpful framework to have in your mind as a parent, because if you hold this line where you say, actually, what I want from you, darling, is that, you know, you always tell me the truth and I will honour that. Your child then tells you the truth but you still dish out quite a harsh consequence. That doesn't make sense. So I think we've got to be really careful both in schools and at home to be saying we're going to try and separate these things out. We're going to have a consequence for the behaviour that's attributed to the lying but we're going to talk about the lie.

So yes, I absolutely do think that children who get themselves into quite a lot of difficulty with lying are trying to resist and avoid quite a harsh consequence. So if you are concerned about a child and you think they are seriously lying, what should you do? I think you've got to demonstrate it from it's always for me demonstrated by how parents behave and how adults behave i think you've got to be quite upfront about your own lying you know and what what you do and also you have to really start early and say in this house we really do value honesty we are going to take up the issues around the behavior but if you tell me the truth then we can talk about why

that's going on. And that's when I think you get an insight into, as I've said, that sort of rich tapestry of emotions around, you know, how a child is feeling that might be leading to these lies. Levan Antrobus, thank you very much indeed for being with us. And we would like to hear from you if you have stories about, you know lies where you knew they were lying but you didn't mind too much do let us know on twitter or email now still to come in today's program the unexpected joy of the ordinary catherine gray learns how to be default happy rather than default disgruntled and the serial the final episode of charlotte andian. Now, on Monday, just before the New Year rush to make resolutions, we discussed habits and you phoned in about how they begin

and how hard they often are to break. Well, next week, the University of York will publish a review of all the latest research on addiction and how scientific studies help us understand why some people become addicted to drink or drugs. It may help the process of breaking such damaging habits. It will appear in a blog called The Conversation. Well, Ian Hamilton is a senior lecturer in addiction and mental health

at the university and joins us from there. Ian, why do some people fall into addiction and others don't is there such a thing as an addictive personality well i think it's a wonderfully seductive concept this idea that we some of us are almost predetermined to develop problems with drugs and others get off scot-free as it were that there is some indication that genetics and biology play a part but as yet we still don't fully understand that and of course the acid test of this is can we predict who will have a problem who won't and it would seem that social and environmental factors we have a clear idea about although

there's still a lot of unanswered questions. So if you think about things like intergenerational problems with drugs and alcohol, those are probably our best indicator of who's at risk. But even then, it's no guarantee that just because your parents drank and one of them developed a problem that you will. So, you know, that's a good example of how little we actually know well one of the really interesting things in this review is how differently the sexes experience pleasure what have you learned from that well it seems from what we know so far that women um in general seem to experience more pleasure in the initial stages of drug use.

Now, on the one hand, that sounds great. You get more bang for your buck if you're a woman than a man. But on the other, you can see the clear dangers with that. If the pleasure is more intense, if the high is greater, that is more likely to encourage or facilitate repeated use, isn't it? You know, if it's something that you're getting a great deal from, why wouldn't you go back to it? So that seems to be something that emerges

from numerous studies that have been done, and again, we still don't fully understand this. So, for example, one study looked at and found that women, when they're premenstrual, drink more alcohol. So there's a once-a-month cycle that would seem to suggest that there's a difference in the way that women on their own approach a drug like alcohol. What does the review explain about, I mean, one of the social things, women's relationship with drugs like alcohol, like the sudden popularity of wine o'clock.

Yeah. So, you know, I think we've been using drugs for millennia, haven't we, you know, those kind of events is that women seem to be more inclined to self-medicate with drugs like alcohol. And it's unclear why this is, you know, maybe just it's that simple. Women just, you know, try and deal with a bad day or maybe something more problematic like depression by using drugs to treat that on their own without getting you know professional help but of course the other thing we'd be keen and curious to find out is it just women are more honest in reporting the reasons for using drugs than men and being able to make those connections because it has to be said you know there are men who pop to the pub on the way home are they doing that for similar reasons or different reasons? Well undoubtedly there's

going to be crossover but what does stand out is women are more likely to report this link between the behaviour of using drugs and a cause which is unhappiness you know on a continuum unhappiness just feeling a bit fed up that day through to something a bit more serious, which could be, you know, the first signs of clinical depression or anxiety or, you know, social phobia, something like that. So something a bit more serious. How do the sexes respond differently to trying to end an addiction? Well, this is, I'm afraid to say, 2020 and we still have very little information on how and what is the best way to treat women, almost exclusively.

Every intervention we have, every treatment we have has been tested on men rather than women. So we're in a situation in a new decade where women going into treatment if they do get there we know the vast majority don't even get into treatment for a variety of reasons that they'll be offered something which hasn't been tested on their gender now they might it might be that we are lucky collectively in that what works for men will also work for women but

i'm a bit suspicious about that i think there's significant differences that we've already discussed about you know pleasure and about the reasons for use that would indicate we need more tailored treatment for women so I'm hoping by the time we get to 2030 and maybe if we have the chance to have this conversation again we'll have something a bit more specific to show about what works for women. What are the reasons why women don't get into treatment? Well, they can be very practical things, like offering childcare. So if you have children, it's not easy to go somewhere where you might be a couple of hours. It's perhaps not the friendliest of environments,

despite the treatment centre's efforts to make it that way. But also, more seriously, women who have problems with drugs tend to have experienced intimate partner violence, and unfortunately, most of that is perpetrated by men who also are in treatment. So you can imagine the scenario where you're walking into the reception area of a treatment centre, which is heavily populated by men, and many of those men will have histories of intimate partner violence and have exploited and manipulated women so it doesn't leave you in in the most

relaxed and optimistic position waiting for your appointment so I understand why women don't go I think some forward-thinking treatment centers are offering women only sessions so that they know that even in the reception area it's only other women that will be in there they don't have to i am feeling comfortable with men being there as well and offer child care so it can be very practical things as well as kind of more detailed problems how good an idea is it to resolve to quit in new year you know maybe do a dry January? Well I think it works for some what's interesting about the science on this it seems that spontaneous attempts can be just as successful as these planned ones so going through

December thinking right you know I'll do dry January or I'll become vegan or whatever it is and planning it that way seems to work for some people, but it doesn't work for everyone. So the good news is that, you know, if you decide after listening to this program, wouldn't it be great? You know, I'll change some aspect of my life. So it doesn't have to be Lent. It doesn't have to be the 1st of January. It can be any day. I think what amplifies the chances of success with this, planned or otherwise, is thinking about when your energy and motivation is at its best. So you'll know, or if you tend to it, you'll work out which day, which time is the best day to start rather than just the 1st of January or, as I say, when Lent is.

How long can it take to turn that corner? Well, there's good news and there's bad news on this so the good news is it can take just a few attempts to to you know become vegan quit alcohol whatever it is you know take up exercise the bad news is for some poor individuals it's going to take over 30 attempts and so a range there of anything from six to 30 attempts, the science would suggest, is what's ahead in terms of trying to quit. But the good news is it will happen.

So the science is with you on this. Just keep going. How necessary is it to have some sort of help and support? Maybe go to Alcoholics Anonymous or if you're trying to lose weight to join a slimming club those kind of thing well to put it this way what what this again what the science seems to suggest is that shame and guilt work very well so any kind of you know slimming club exercise club any kind of social or group effort. We think the reason this works,

apart from just feeling part of something, is that you haven't just said to yourself, I'm going to do this. So the contract isn't just with yourself, it's with, you know, your peers. And that's a harder one to break and get out of than just thinking to yourself, right, I've had enough, I'm not going to carry on.

So by, you know, publicly saying you're going to do something to your family to the club you join and a part of seems to bind you into success in a more meaningful way and the success rate seems to be better than just trying to do this on your own in hamilton thank you very much for joining us this morning. Now, six years ago, Catherine Grey did turn that corner. She'd been at rock bottom, feeling suicidal and drinking far too much. Then she wrote The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober. A second book was to follow The Unexpected Joy of Being Single. And now she's published a third, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary. Catherine, let's deal with the sober bit briefly. And now she's published a third, The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary.

Catherine, let's deal with the sober bit briefly. How did you quit the drinking? So that was six years ago now. And it's really interesting what you said about it's not going to happen overnight. It didn't happen overnight for me. It took five months of stopping and starting. And I just put together more and more time and eventually it clicked and the social aspect was very important but I tried AA and it wasn't for me so the way that I found my social sort of support network was through social media

so I found them through Facebook and Instagram and that was that provided the accountability that I needed rather than I think he talked about guilt and shame. I felt more supported and accountable. And that was really, really useful for me. How did this book come about finding joy in the ordinary? Well, it's kind of the third point of the triangle, because six years ago I was suicidal I was researching painless ways to commit suicide and when I quit drinking that didn't cure everything I was still very dissatisfied and low and disenchanted and so I started researching how to change that because I knew if I didn't change my thinking I would end up drinking again so I kept coming up against gratitude and sort of re-enchanting the everyday

and finding beauty in the most workaday moments and even though my Britishness was like oh no that's way too cheesy and twee for me I gave it a go and joined a gratitude group and started writing gratitudes every day and it completely turned my mental health around. What did you express gratitude for? Because the ordinary, I mean, what is the ordinary? Well, an ordinary day. So the way that I would define the extraordinary is the holiday, the new car. And when you look at social media, people tend to brag about those moments. They don't talk about the little moments like a tasty sandwich they made or a nice conversation with a neighbour or, you know, having a little

chat with a robin. And that sounds so twee, but these moments are in every day if we look for them. But our brains don't because we have negatively biased brains, which reacts more passionately to the negative and remembers it more. And so it's neuroscience. Our brains look for negative things more than positive. You write about something you call the hedonic treadmill. Yeah. What is that? Okay, well, it's very inconvenient for a start. It's based on a theory called hedonic adaptation.

It means that when something good happens to us, it wears off really, really quickly. So say, for instance, we get a promotion or we buy a house or we get married or have a baby that will wear off quite quickly and then we start chasing the next thing and thus it's like being stuck on a treadmill that's stuck on an incline. We're never quite satisfied we're looking for the next thing but one of the ways you can override the hedonic treadmill and this is proven is through gratitudes and random acts of kindness so you can undo it it's just a matter of thinking your way out of it and changing your perception you say that children are very badly affected sometimes by the hedonic treadmill how how did it affect children um it's not so much that but i i started thinking about

when i the people the children in my life start feeling dissatisfied and i noticed and this is completely unscientific and based on a couple of dozen kids i know but i noticed that it was around the age of four when they go to school and they start seeing other children's backpacks and other children's scooters and other children's parents and they're exposed to that sort of comparison society and also they start doing things like watching youtube and and this this cult for watching other kids open presents so they become obsessed with consumerism and consumerism lives and dies on us thinking we don't have enough if we have enough we don't buy. Two other terms you use are maximiser and satisficer. What are they? So a satisficer is someone who is very satisfied with their lot.

They are probably the happiest people you know, but they don't really want a promotion or a bigger house. I unfortunately am a maximiser, I always want the next thing and you can tell if you're a maximiser if you do things like spend a whole day researching a holiday because you want the best possible option. So Steve Jobs was a classic maximiser. He spent eight years choosing a sofa and it's just where you want to see all the things before you make a decision. And it seems like a good thing, but it's actually something that can drive you a bit mad. So how have you resolved that? I tend to set myself time limits. So say, for instance, if I'm looking for a new bike, I'll say, right, I'm just going to look for bikes within two miles on eBay. Or if I'm going to do

a piece of work to stop myself maximising myself into a 2am finish, I just give myself five hours. So there's ways that I get around it now. Now that I know that I'm a maximiser, I can fix it. Now, you said that you learned to make yourself happier when you discovered gratitude. How did you stumble on that idea? I saw a shout out on a Facebook group that somebody was assembling a gratitude group

based on the premise that a grateful heart never drinks and at first I thought that's really corny but then I thought about it and thought hang on I'm really resentful, I'm unhappy what have I got to lose? The only thing I've got to lose is my disenchantment so I gave it a go, I found it really difficult at first but now I can sit at home and rattle off 30 gratitudes from a normal day when nothing really amazing has happened. And you put those onto Facebook and

share them with other people who are in the group? Not anymore. I was in that group for about a year and then I had the practice down and now I just do it in my notebooks at home and I don't share it. But that, I've just got myself into the habit now. I've been doing it for six years. So now I'm literally looking for things to be grateful for, which means that I find them. It's confirmation bias. It's just psychology. So it works. When you look back, though, on what got you into such a mess that you say you were drinking, young at 12, latched onto it very quickly,

thought that's the answer. And then the addiction drove things like relationship problems, career problems. It all just became this snafu of my life going downhill and the addiction tightening its grip. And that led to the rock bottom. But I had hundreds of tiny rock bottoms. And yeah, that was where I ended up. You moved on after the unexpected joy of being sober to the unexpected joy of being single. Yeah. Is there still unexpected joy in being single? Well, I'm actually seeing someone now. But I took a long time off and it really reset the way I think about it I'm not reliant on my relationship to make me happy I know if it doesn't work out

I can be just as happy which is such a refreshing change for me because before I put everything on the relationship and that working out what do you do if you wake up in a bad mood or you find yourself feeling envious of somebody else's success or somebody said something nasty to you? How do you deal with that? Well if I wake up in a bad mood I've got a list of 26 things that make me happy and these are things like dancing around the kitchen, going and finding a dog to pet, writing anything, even a grocery list, unpacks my brain. If somebody says something nasty to me, I tend to, if I'm really angry with them, I'll write the letter where I vent at them, but then I'll write a thank you letter. So thanking them for everything that they've done,

because generally if it's someone you love, they've done good things too. I was talking to Catherine Gray. Now, lots of tweets and emails from you today. One on the Australian bushfires. Belinda emailed, I live in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia. Most of us generally deal with the heat okay, but the bushfire situation is causing great anxiety across the country. Today is another hot day, over 40 degrees,

so we're all on high alert. Yesterday I was out in the garden and felt my heart race as two water-bombing helicopters flew over on their way to a fire. My risk is relatively low, but I have a firefighting pump and hose running off a tank of water just in case. Thanks for thinking of us over here. On children lying, one email said, We moved from our previous house a few years ago. As we were leaving, we noticed some faint writing on the wall. The writing was just the right height for a child and said, Granny wrote this.

But this would have been out of character for Granny, so we suspected something was afoot. Perhaps one of our daughters may have been the culprit. However, they both strenuously denied it. We were upfront about it with the children, clear that under the circumstances we didn't condone such accusatory in-house graffiti, but laughed about it,

and a few weeks later, my youngest daughter fessed up. Jenny emailed, When my son was about six his teacher showed me his news about he and a friend setting fire to some grass and having to call the fire brigade. I laughed heartily at his vivid imagination and made more effort to make his weekends more exciting. This Christmas I mentioned this to my 44-year-old son and he owned up that it was in fact true. Andrea emailed,

My three-year-old presented me with a two-line bite on her bleeding tongue. Initially she said the troll in the cellar did it. Turns out she put her tongue through the bars of the hamster cage. Another email said, When my son was seven, he had a drug and alcohol awareness day at school. I asked him how his day had been and he confidently answered, It was good. I told my class that you tried cocaine. This was true, but he knew this only because he once asked me if I'd tried drugs.

I said, I have tried it it but I wouldn't recommend it. I toyed with how to handle this revelation next time I saw his teacher. Oh, Miss V, I said bravely, I bet you hear some stories on Drug Awareness Day. Can I just say in my defence that the Coke story was hugely historic? She smiled wryly and said, I love the insight I get during our PSHE sessions, but I have to tell you, he said no such thing. He'd been pulling my leg. Luckily for him, I saw the funny side and we had a good chat about what's appropriate to reveal, what is or isn't funny, depending on the audience, and what he might do next time. And then on the joy of the ordinary,

someone who didn't want to be named sent an email, just a short note to say thank you to Catherine Gray. I have tears rolling down my face as I recognise my cynicism for so many things, especially such as a gratitude diary, realising it is exactly the thing I should try. Now do join me tomorrow for Weekend Woman's Hour, that's at four o'clock tomorrow afternoon, when we'll be hearing from the couple who became the first to have a civil partnership, and we'll hear about habits and how some of us are trying to make new ones or break old ones. And Lucy Edwards, who made history last weekend

when she became the first blind person to present their own show on Radio 1. Do join me tomorrow afternoon, four o'clock. Bye bye. I'm so sorry. I know you listen to a podcast, but I've sort of poked my head in to plug mine. It's called James Veitch's Contractual Obligation, and it's sort of a think piece sprinkled throughout with high octane bursts of investigative journalism. I mean, it's not really, but you know, they only gave me 20 seconds, so what can you do? Subscribe to James Veitch's Contractual Obligation on BBC Sounds. Terms and conditions apply.

All right, back to whatever you were listening to. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.