Small Ways to Improve Your Everyday Life Right Now | Gretchen Rubin

Is it possible to learn to spot which state your nervous system is in and move from suboptimal states to much better ones? The subject of how to work with your own nervous system is called Polyvagal Theory and today’s guests Deb Dana & Kaira Jewel Lingo will give us a primer on what that exactly means. They will also talk about how our nervous systems are connected to the nervous systems of other people, and how we can learn to co-regulate our systems for the betterment of others.  Deb Dana is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, who is a clinician, consultant and author specializing in complex trauma.  Her work is focused on using the lens of Polyvagal Theory to understand and resolve the impact of trauma, and creating ways of working that honor the role of the autonomic nervous system. She has written several books, including Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory.    Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality and social justice. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, with a focus on activists, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, artists, educators, families, and youth. She is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons for Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption.    This is the third installment of our series called, The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together. In each episode we bring together a meditative adept or Buddhist scholar and a respected scientist. The idea is to give you the best of both worlds to arm you with both modern and ancient tools for regulating your emotions. In this episode we talk about: The basics of Polyvagal Theory A fascinating and easily graspable concept from Buddhist psychology called, “store consciousness” The interconnectedness of our nervous systems and the responsibility that creates for all of us How to handle being annoyed What happens when we beat ourselves up with “shoulds,” and how to stop doing that The value of simply knowing, in the moments when you’re stuck, that those moments are impermanent How to allow your suffering to inform your life The value of “micro-moments” Two ways of caring for painful states without suppressing them And the power of action and service in overcoming anxiety Full Shownotes: www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/deb-dana-kaira-jewel-lingo-522

14 Nov 20221h 11min

A common idea in the west is that our feelings or emotions should be viewed with suspicion, superseded or overridden by rational thought, and that your mind is a battleground between emotions and rationality. But on the show today, guests Lisa Feldman Barrett and John Dunne are going to offer a very compelling science backed argument that disputes the notion that thinking and feeling are distinct. Furthermore, they argue that understanding how emotions are actually made can be a life or death matter.  Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett is among the top 1% most-cited scientists, having published over 270 peer-reviewed scientific papers.  She has written several books, including How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain. Her TED talk has been viewed more than 6.5 million times. John Dunne holds the Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities at the Center for Healthy Minds of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice, especially in dialog with Cognitive Science and Psychology. He earned his PhD from Harvard.  This is part two in a series we’re calling The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together. In each episode we bring together a meditative adept or Buddhist scholar and a respected scientist. The idea is to give you the best of both worlds to arm you with both modern and ancient tools for regulating your emotions.  In this episode we talk about: Lisa’s scientific definition of emotions John’s Buddhist contention that emotions, as a category, do not exist in Buddhism  The difference between suffering and discomfort What we can do to master our emotions including understanding what Lisa terms as our “body budget”  Becoming more emotionally intelligent Mastering our feelings in the moment Whether or not pain is an emotion and how it works How and why to be present in the here and now The upside of unpleasant feelings Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/lisa-feldman-barrett-john-dunne-520

9 Nov 202246min

In western culture, there's been a long held view that our ability to reason should be placed above our emotions. But the hard truth is that our emotions are there and they're non-negotiable— and If you don't know how to work with them, they can own you. The good news is that you can work with them and that there are many systems for doing so. To boot, you can learn a ton by listening to your emotions in the right ways.  Today’s guests, Shinzen Young and James Gross will help us understand how to work with our emotions and offer both techniques in modern science and ancient wisdom in order to do so.  Gross is the Ernest R. Hilgard Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant. He teaches something called Unified Mindfulness, which you will hear him describe in this conversation. This is part one in a series we’re calling The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together. In each episode we bring together a meditative adept or Buddhist scholar and a respected scientist. The idea is to give you the best of both worlds to arm you with both modern and ancient tools for regulating your emotions.  In this episode we talk about: James’s “modal model” for understanding what emotions are and how they work James’s five different types of strategies you can use for regulating your emotions Shinzen’s contention that emotions have two sides to them How we can experience emotions with more fulfillment and less suffering via a mindfulness training he calls “focus factors” James’s “process model of emotion regulation”  What James believes are the elements that unite science and Buddhism Shinzen’s contention that anyone can experience massive benefits of mindfulness training if their meditation practice has four key components Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/shinzen-young-james-gross-519

7 Nov 20221h 2min

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 Nov 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 Okt 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 Okt 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 Okt 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 Okt 202255min