Neuroaesthetics: How Art Can Improve and Extend Your Life | Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Can gratitude be more than just a platitude? Our guest today argues: yes.  DaRa Williams is a longtime practitioner and teacher of meditation. She is one of the guiding teachers at Insight Meditation Society, a graduate of the Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Society Teacher Training Program, and also has a clinical mental health private practice in Manhattan. DaRa also says, only semi-facetiously, that she believes gratitude can be considered the fifth Brahma Vihara.  In this conversation we talk about: How to start knitting gratitude into your everyday life Whether gratitude is possible when everything sucks How to avoid spiritual bypass The opportunity that suffering brings for happiness How to take our suffering less personally The power of reminding yourself that you are nature And our unconscious fascination with creating difficulty Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dara-williams-295-rerun

2 Marras 202259min

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- There are all sorts of ways to struggle with getting things done. Maybe you’re a procrastinator, maybe you’re somebody whose energy flags in the middle of a project, maybe you’re too stubborn and don’t know when to quit, or maybe you’re somebody who sets too many goals and gets burned out. Whatever your situation, we all struggle with motivation. The good news is that there’s a whole crew of scientists who study best practices for getting things done, including today’s guest, Ayelet Fishbach, PhD. Fishbach is one of the most eminent players in the field. She is the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. She is also the author of Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation.  In this episode we talk about: The crucial first step of setting goals How to pick the right goals for you Whether it’s more effective to have a goal that is positive – where you’re aiming to achieve something specific – or negative – where you’re aiming to stop doing something Whether to-do lists work Whether incentives work Best practices for monitoring your progress The importance of celebrating milestones  The importance of negative feedback Why the 10,000 steps per day goal makes motivational sense even though it’s been proven to be scientifically arbitrary  And how to know when to let go of a goal Full Shownotes: www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/ayelet-fishbach-525

31 Loka 202257min

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- We’re sharing a very special episode from a frequent guest of the show, Esther Perel. In this episode, “Love in War with Esther Perel: Ukraine,” you’ll hear a couples session led by Esther, between a husband and wife whose family has been torn apart by the war in Ukraine. Through the lens of relationship, you experience both the horrors of war and the relatability of intimate relationships. Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of many books, including Mating In Captivity. She’s also the host of the podcasts Where Should We Begin? and How’s Work?.

28 Loka 202255min

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- It is so easy to be pessimistic and, in fact, we are evolutionarily wired towards it with a built in negativity bias. This bias can be super useful, because it keeps us on guard for threats. But like all biases, it can warp the way we see the world. This is why optimism can be incredibly helpful. We’re not talking about blind optimism here but more about grounded, realistic and reasonable optimism.  Our guest today, Robin Roberts, has come by this skill the hard way. Not only is she one of the boldest of the boldface names in the news business, where she is forced to confront crime, war, and natural disasters on the regular, but she’s also come through two very serious bouts of cancer. Roberts is the longtime co-anchor of Good Morning America. She has a new book called, Brighter by the Day: Waking Up to New Hopes and Dreams in which she talks about how she has honed her optimism chops, and how you can, too.  In this episode we talk about: How to strengthen your optimism muscle Making “one day, day one” Operationalizing your goals Robin’s meditation practice Napping during meditation How she gets enough sleep given her crazy schedule Envisioning the victory  Flipping the script so that instead of thinking “what could go wrong?” we think, “what could go right?”  Full Shownotes: www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/robin-roberts-516

26 Loka 202254min

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Friendship might not necessarily be something you’ve considered to be an urgent psychological and physiological issue. One thing we explore a lot on the show is that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life, and sadly, in many ways, it’s harder than ever to make and keep friends. With loneliness and disconnection on the rise, our society just wasn’t constructed for social connection, and recent data suggests we’re in a friendship crisis, with many of us reporting that we have fewer close friendships than ever. Our guest today is Robin Dunbar, an Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University and the author of numerous books on the development of homo sapiens. Dunbar is perhaps best known for formulating “Dunbar's number,” which is a measurement of the number of relationships our brain is capable of maintaining at any one time. He is a world-renowned expert on human relationships, and has a ton of fascinating research findings and practical tips for upping your friendship game. In this conversation, we dive into the science behind human relationships, the upsides and downsides of maintaining friendships on social media, the viability of friendships across gender lines, and what science says you can do to compensate if you feel you are currently lacking in close friendships.  Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/robin-dunbar-372-rerun

24 Loka 202255min

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Relationships can be tricky. Especially if you find yourself upset with someone, and instead of talking it through, you let it fester until one moment you completely lose it and end up having to apologize. If you’ve ever felt like you had friction with the people in your life, or that you’ve been taken for granted, today’s episode offers you solid strategies to cope.  Sister True Dedication is a Zen Buddhist nun and teacher ordained by the great meditation teacher and author, Thich Nhat Hanh. She edited several of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books, including The Art of Living and Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. She was born in the United Kingdom, studied history and political thought at Cambridge University, and worked for BBC News before ordaining as a nun at the age of 27. In this episode we talk about:  The six phrases – or mantras – that Thich Nhat Hanh recommended people use in their relationships Keeping misunderstandings “dust free” Taking action to make sure anger doesn’t fester The importance of recognizing that our understanding of the world is always partial Bringing mantras to work How Sister True Dedication went from journalism to the monastery Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/sister-true-dedication-514

19 Loka 20221h 6min

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- You may remember hearing a massively viral story from a few years ago about a school in Baltimore that gave students meditation, instead of detention.  Ali Smith, Atman Smith, and Andres Gonzalez founded the Holistic Life Foundation and are the authors of Let Your Light Shine, which recounts the story of their work helping traumatized children in one of America’s most underserved cities, and how mindfulness tools can help children and communities not only survive, but thrive.  In this episode we talk about:  The story behind their meditation-instead-of-detention initiative Their experience asking principals to give them the most challenging students What it’s like working in one of the most violent cities in the world The results from teaching students yoga and meditation How we can apply the lessons they’ve learned to meditation and life Content Warning: Explicit language. For a clean version of this episode, please listen on the Ten Percent Happier app or at tenpercent.com Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/ali-smith-atman-smith-andres-gonzalez-513

17 Loka 20221h 6min

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- One of the great perils and problems of our age is that we sometimes become too entrenched in our views and attached to being right.  According to guest George Saunders, the antidote is something he calls “holy befuddlement.”  George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English. His most recent book, Liberation Day, is a collection of short stories that explore the ideas of power, ethics, and justice, cutting to the heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans.  In this episode we talk about: How George Saunders creates “holy befuddlement” in himself and in his readers How shaving down dogmatism can help us be, in his words, less of a “turd” How to deal with heightened expectations we might have of ourselves Healthy ways to enjoy praise What it looks like to cultivate a relationship with our self, to the extent that the self exists The importance of moral ambiguity in his work The impact of meditating – or not meditating – on our creative work  And forgiveness and coming up short Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/george-saunders-511

12 Loka 20221h 3min