Overwhelm Is Reversible. Here Are the Best Strategies From Psychology and Neuroscience | Claudia Hammond

A road map for taking the pressure off. Claudia Hammond https://claudiahammond.com/ is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. She is Visiting Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Sussex and is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind. Her latest book is Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off https://www.amazon.com/Overwhelmed-Ways-Take-Pressure-Off-ebook/dp/B0FGCPS4MW. In this episode we talk about: How to define "overwhelm" – and modern causes for its existence Why the search for perfection is futile Claudia's three-part recipe for handling overwhelm Antidotes for the comparing mind What we should all know about procrastination  How to not let the news overwhelm you What we learn from regret – and how to stop beating up on your past self A key technique for worrying less The case for nostalgia How to get into a "flow state" Related Episodes: If You Want To Be More Productive, You Need More Rest. Here's How To Get It. | Claudia Hammond https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-you-want-to-be-more-productive-you-need-more-rest/id1087147821?i=1000712402020 Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age https://www.amazon.com/Art-Rest-Find-Respite-Modern/dp/1786892804 The Keys to Kindness https://www.amazon.com/Keys-Kindness-Kinder-Yourself-Others-ebook/dp/B09TQM7FC7/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=gzy4R&content-id=amzn1.sym.299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_p=299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_r=141-9976842-2413604&pd_rd_wg=GBhAL&pd_rd_r=b7f06e72-abb3-4b6f-a58e-d47608edd720 Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception https://www.amazon.com/Time-Warped-Unlocking-Mysteries-Perception-ebook/dp/B009NGHNN4?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&th=1&psc=1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.k1u65onjk9jaCCUAf6f8ERso7RYGfyTE1T0N9AzRyh20rmRNhADFs4KsxuXt57oCf1znQhwUZTWjb18AffXhBa9EbKQbm592GY1MOXjLWgPu6KPRK43Hh5Lc65MrhS_m2giFV2OPwtxDA9NzhlaqchdcKI-tTxugm0cEu-76AbtxDiQuXbdxqiPh12qIgVWscZD9YEQB433qxxfLmx94zvfp-c7OUWUmQWixSC-j8iQ. HWgpwn-L3OMnk8om0lHwWQoLdkIcxJs2SkEAystsor4&dib_tag=AUTHOR Mind over Money: The Psychology of Money and How to Use It Better https://www.amazon.com/Mind-over-Money-Psychology-Better-ebook/dp/B015CXV7RY/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=2OAdE&content-id=amzn1.sym.299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_p=299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_r=141-9976842-2413604&pd_rd_wg=zh5YX&pd_rd_r=92fbeaf5-d1b6-40d9-9e49-835a6ac1c9c6 Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Rollercoaster-Journey-Through-Feelings-ebook/dp/B0046H95TK/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_4?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=TIkj0&content-id=amzn1.sym.299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_p=299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_r=141-9976842-2413604&pd_rd_wg=J6GhD&pd_rd_r=762c7aa6-f232-4a12-9c01-45263ab048e2 Claudia's BBC Podcasts https://claudiahammond.com/radio-podcasts/ Thanks to our sponsor: Function: Visit functionhealth.com/Happier http://functionhealth.com/Happier or use the gift code Happier25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? There's a tendency to think about overwhelm as a distinctly modern problem. But people have been worrying about this issue for millennia. Socrates said, "Beware the barrenness of a busy life." And more recently, Soren Kierkegaard said, "Of all ridiculous things, the most ridiculous seems to me to be a man who's brisk about his food and his work." Both of those quotes haunt me because I think I am a little too busy. So anyway, what I'm trying to get at here is if you're overwhelmed and overscheduled, you come by it honestly. Not only as a member of Homo sapiens, who, as we've just established, have been worrying about this for millennia,

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  but also because we now live in what many people believe is an age of overwhelm, where even though we actually have more spare time, many of us feel like we have too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. The pressures seem relentless, pressures from the outside and pressures from the inside, pressures that we put on ourselves in an era of rising perfectionism. Okay, so that's all the bad news. The good news is that there are things you can do about overwhelm. There are evidence-based strategies from psychology and neuroscience. And my guest today has written a whole book about both the problem and the solutions. And that book is called "Overwhelmed." My guest is Claudia Hammond. This is her second time on the show. She is many things.

• 1:46Dan Harris?

  She's a visiting professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Sussex. She's the host of BBC Radio 4's "All in the Mind." And she's written many, many books, including, as I said, her latest, which is called "Overwhelmed." In this conversation, we talk about how to define overwhelm. We talk about the modern causes of overwhelm, why the search for perfection is futile, Claudia's three-part recipe for handling overwhelm, antidotes for the comparing mind, what we should all know about procrastination, what we can learn from regret and how to stop beating up your past self, the interesting case for nostalgia, how to get into a flow state, and more. Don't forget to check out our new app, 10% with Dan Harris.

• 2:30Dan Harris?

  You can sign up over at danharris.com. There's a free 14 day trial if you want to check it out before you give us your credit card information. If you sign up, you'll get a library of guided meditations, regular meditation challenges that we organize, weekly live meditation and Q and A sessions, and then of course, this podcast without the ads. Speaking of ads, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with Claudia Hammond.

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• 3:54Dan Harris?

  Claudia Hammond, welcome back to the show.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me back.

• 3:57Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. Okay, overwhelm, big subject, really important one. It's a reason why I wanted to have you back on because I definitely feel it myself sometimes. Just for the sake of clarity, how are we defining overwhelm in this discussion?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's interesting because it's not an official mental health term, but it's a word we use a lot. I'm thinking of it as when we feel that everything is all too much, as if there's ever more to do, less time in which to do it, and we're just feeling completely overwhelmed by it. And that could in the end lead to people being burnt out and having physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion, and difficulty sleeping, and persistent feelings of dread. But it needn't get that far. You could just be overwhelmed in what's going on in daily life, and that could be coming from outside because you have so much going on, you have perhaps caring responsibilities. And you're working two jobs and there's just too much on.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  And some of it could come from within as well. It could be internal pressures of you thinking you need to be absolutely perfect and do everything absolutely brilliantly. And it can be a combination of those two.

• 5:03Dan Harris?

  Is there any reason to believe that overwhelm is worse now than it has been in the past?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Well, it's interesting. The word certainly gets used a lot more now. We know that there are rising mental health problems, particularly among some age groups. I think a lot of people would say that they're more overwhelmed now. I mean, it's interesting when you look at time use studies back in the past, then people often on average have a bit more free time now than when those time use studies started and were done in the thirties and forties. But I think it's certainly something we feel now, that we feel that there is this pressure.

• 5:39Dan Harris?

  That's interesting. So we have more spare time now than we did in the past, or at least at certain points in the past, and yet we feel more overwhelmed. My mind goes directly to technology, but is there another explanation?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  I think it's a bit of technology, but not completely. You know, I think it's too easy to try to blame everything on phones and on social media. I think that is some of it. I think particularly when it comes to perfectionism and particularly perfectionism about image and how you look physically, then there is a lot of good evidence about teenagers and others as well, making comparisons with more people. We've got a far bigger group we can compare ourselves against and find ourselves wanting against if we can see thousands and millions of people on social media as well as just the people that we used to know when we couldn't do that. So I think that is part of it and there is that always on feeling the boundaries between work and non-work, work and leisure, if you like, are getting blurred.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  It may be harder to feel you can completely switch off. You can be contacted at any time. There's all those things. But I think as well, there is just a sense of pressures around us. I think there's a real sense at the moment that many people are experiencing where they're feeling overwhelmed by the news, by what is going on in the world. And of course, bad things happened in the world in the past as well. There was often all sorts going on in the world. But it does feel a lot of people at this moment will say they feel that lots of things seem to be going wrong all at once and that they feel a bit more hopeless about the future and particularly with climate change as well. So I think there's lots of external things going on that are not to do with phones as well.

• 7:13Dan Harris?

  Fair point. I could imagine some people listening to this and thinking. Are there not times when overwhelm is necessary, given exogenous factors like a sick kid or a sick parent, or what we may compute as emergencies globally that we want to get engaged in? So is there a defense of overwhelm?

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think in a way it's right to be overwhelmed by the idea of climate change and what might happen to the planet if we don't do something about that. That is an overwhelming existential thought that inevitably overwhelms us. And there will be certain times of life when people are going to feel more overwhelmed than others. And those hopefully won't last forever. Children don't stay tiny forever. And hopefully, some of those things will change. But if it's that kind of external overwhelm, then what we need to look for is strategies to cope with that. If it's a more internal kind of overwhelm, then there are different strategies where perhaps we need to be changing the standards that we set ourselves and really trying to understand ourselves and why we're feeling the way we do, and to then look at what we can do about that.

• 8:17Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so your whole book is dedicated to what we can do about that. Sachet through all three parts here. The first is acceptance, which may sound a little passive to some, but actually is extremely helpful. One of the things you recommend under the rubric of acceptance is, and this is actually the title of chapter one, "Your to-do list will always be there, and that's okay." Say more about that.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, in one way, that sounds like a kind of depressing thought. And you think, oh, I'm going to be overwhelmed by my to-do list forever. But I think there are certain things we need to accept. And one of them is that to-do lists will always be there. So it's possible that you get through your to-do list in one day. But the next day, if you've got to the end of it, there will be some more things on that list. And that's okay. And the reason I say it's okay is that if you've got things to do, that is a sign of a busy life, that is a sign of an engaged life. And many of those things that you've got to do, I mean, many of them are boring, you know, they're boring admin. But even if you're booking something, you know, you're reserving something that's boring. But it may be that you're reserving something that's going to be fun in the end. You're booking to, I don't know, go for a meal or something nice like that.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  That these are signs of a busy life and things that we need to do and that we shouldn't feel oppressed by our to-do lists. And we shouldn't feel we've necessarily got to get through it, that there are things that we can delay. We haven't got to answer every single email. And some emails, if you don't answer them, go away. And people will come back to you if they really need a response. I mean, I'm not saying don't answer any of your emails, but that if it's urgent, somebody will get in touch with you again. And some things get resolved before you've got round to answering, which is quite nice. But also, to-do lists can be beneficial. So there is research showing that if you do a to-do list, that you actually write down, you could write it in your phone if you can resist social media and everything else that might keep you awake, or write it down on a piece of paper.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  But that if you write down what you're going to do next day, you're cognitively offloading it, you're getting it off your brain, and people are able to get to sleep faster. If they make quite a decent list, people will get to sleep, in the studies, fifteen minutes faster. And so that's a nice fifteen minutes instead of lying there trying to get to sleep, maybe. I love the study, it's amazing, because it's almost like mind reading. But there's a study where if you put people in a brain scanner and look at the activity going on, and you give them a list of faces to remember and a list of architectural drawings of buildings to try to memorize, and those activate different areas of the brain. So you can tell which people are thinking about, in a way. And then they tell people that they're going to get a reminder later on about the faces, they don't have to remember those now.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Then you can actually see the change in the brain activity as the brain offloads the faces bit and stops the activity in that area, because it can delete that, it doesn't need to do that anymore, that's extraneous information. And so writing things on lists does help us to offload it and not have to try to remember those things. And that's why if you're going to try this technique at night, it is important to actually write those things down. If you just go through in your mind all the things you've got to do, then your mind thinks these are things I must remember, I must concentrate on remembering these, and that might have the opposite effect from the one you want, because that might make you feel more stressed. But I think it's interesting, because you think in a way that thinking, writing down a list of what you're going to do before you go to sleep would be the last thing you'd want to do, because it would make you feel so busy.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  But it doesn't, it can be really used to your benefits or something, to offload and let you sleep and let you relax.

• 11:37Dan Harris?

  I'm a huge fan of lists. I'm also a Buddhist, the Buddha was a huge fan of lists himself. Speaking of lists, you also recommend gratitude lists. Can you say more about that?

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is in a way one of the most popular interventions that has been within psychology and well evidenced as well. Sometimes it's called gratitude lists, sometimes it's called three good things. And the idea here is, this is a different type of list to do before bed, and I'm not saying do them all, choose the one you like. And this is where you write down three good things that have happened that day and then think about why those things were meaningful to you, why those were things you enjoyed. And this is research that came from the sort of godfather of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and also Chris Peterson. And they got people to do these lists. And a month later, the people who did the lists had higher levels of happiness and decreased depressive symptoms versus a control group who wrote about their early memories or three things they were

• 12:30Speaker 03

  looking forward to. And I think what is so clever about this, and I tried this out myself during the pandemic, during one of the long, long lockdowns, I was miserable and I thought I'm going to try this. And obviously, there were limited things that you could do in a day that were nice then. But however, there were still three things. And so you soon start looking out for things to put on your list. And so you, I don't know, have something really nice for lunch, or somebody says something at work that makes you laugh, and you think, oh, I could have that as one of my three moments that I enjoyed today. And it makes you start looking for the positive. And I think that's why it's so powerful, rather than the list itself, it's that it actually changes your thinking during the day, because you start thinking, well, what am I going to put today? And you want it to be a bit different from yesterday, and you look out for things. And that counters

• 13:12Speaker 03

  the automatic negative bias we have to notice things that are negative more, which we need to do, because you need to notice if a, I don't know, if a cat's following you up the street, that doesn't matter. If a lion's following you up the street, that really does matter. We need to notice the negative to stay safe. But the trouble is, that can make us feel miserable. And we don't always notice the positive things that are going on. If you show people a photo of a crowd of people, and there's one happy face and one angry face, people are much faster to spot the angry face than the happy one. And we need to be, but it means sometimes we need to counter that a bit by looking for some positive things. And this lists of three good things really help you to do that.

• 13:49Dan Harris?

  That's great. I do that myself. Just to reset for the listener, we're talking about Claudia's three-part recipe for handling this pervasive sense of overwhelm. The first part is acceptance. Within acceptance, there are a bunch of subcategories. We've just been talking about the fact that your to-do list will always be there and that's okay. Another aspect of acceptance is kind of your jeremiad against perfectionism. There's a chapter called "The Search for Perfection is Futile." Can you unpack that?

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, we have this idea that in the future, we're going to be better versions of ourselves, that we're going to be more organized, we're going to try really hard, we're going to be more successful, we're going to have more spare time, and we're not going to be as tired. And we know that perfectionism is on the rise. There is research about that. More people are agreeing to statements such as "it makes me uneasy to see any error in my work," or "I must work to my full potential at all times." And so it appears that gradually we are holding ourselves to higher standards. And the problem with this is, it's well evidence that people who have extreme perfectionism have more of a fear of failure. They feel insecure, they blame themselves if it goes wrong, and this can be exhausting and

• 15:04Speaker 03

  demotivating. And yet perfectionists don't do any better at school or at work. And in fact, they're more likely to overwork and to burn out. And if you think of extreme perfectionism, there was a meta-analysis, so they bring together all the best studies, and they follow people for up to four years. And they found that extreme perfectionism was associated with more depression, more anxiety, more eating disorders. And we often have these kind of future selves who are superheroes. We think we should be able to be good at everything, and that we can do everything. And it's simply not the case. Humans have succeeded by specializing, and we don't have to be brilliant at everything. You don't have to... Cook amazing meals as well as being amazing at your job and staying as fit as possible.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  You know, it's nice if you can stay as fit as possible, but we don't have to look a certain way, for example, and that it can really harm us. And this is perfectionism that that comes from within where we've got this idea that we must be perfect, if you like. And I think it's really troubling that that is on the rise when it doesn't help people to be happier and more successful.

• 16:07Dan Harris?

  Agreed. And yet you also argue that overconfidence is not good.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. And I think this is an interesting one, the overconfidence, because in one way we're often told, yeah, you need to be as confident as possible, you need to fake it till you make it, exude that confidence and it'll be great. Now, there are benefits to appearing confident, but also, again, we don't have to excel at everything and we don't have to think we should. And sometimes too much confidence is not a good thing. And, you know, I love these things about the number of people in a YouGov poll, twenty-three percent of men think they could win in a fight with a king cobra with their bare hands, you know, no weapon or anything. Thirty-eight percent think they could beat an eagle and seven percent think they're gonna, they're gonna win in a fight against a grizzly bear, I'd like to wish them good luck with that one. And another study found that people were really confident about being able to land

• 16:56Speaker 03

  a plane if they had to without an instruction. And then they even showed people a video from the back of the cockpit of a pilot landing a plane. There was no sound on it, you couldn't see the pilot's hands, so you couldn't actually see what they were doing. And yet even more people then felt they would be able to land a plane. A pilot who watched this video said it was one hundred percent useless in terms of that. There are occasional stories. There was one in Florida of a guy who did land a plane, but he had air traffic control talking to him, and it happened to be someone there who was also a flying instructor, and they talked him down and he did it brilliantly. But a lot of the time, we don't and we can't do these things and yet we believe we can. And then I think that sets us up for more disappointment if we're overconfident.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  And we even pretend to know things we don't know, you know, like this study where they asked people, have you ever heard of cholerae or the plates of Parallax? And forty percent of people would say, yes, they have. When they were in a list of scientific terms, then they'll claim to have heard of these. And we don't even like asking the way, and we don't mind at all when other people ask us the way, and we understand that they're new to the area, they don't know, we don't think they're stupid, and yet many people are reluctant to do that. And this kicks in really early. Experiments with five-year-olds show that they don't like saying they don't know something, because they already know that reputation is important when they're so young. And I think this adds to the pressure that can overwhelm us, that we feel we've got to be brilliant, and often overestimate how good we really are at things. And I think what we need is

• 18:24Speaker 03

  a kind of expansive realism of who we are, what we can do, and to accept that that's okay, and that we're good enough.

• 18:31Dan Harris?

  The two-part question, the expansive realism you're describing is that, I imagine that would be good for both overconfidence and underconfidence, which often expresses itself as perfectionism. And if I'm right about that, how do we achieve it?

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is very true. So it's a question of trying to get the right thing. And there are some people who are trying to get the right balance. There are some people who are very underconfident. And one of the chapters is about, you know, no one else knows what they're doing either, that there are a lot of people who experience what's known as the imposter phenomenon, commonly referred to as imposter syndrome, that they feel everyone else knows what they're doing. And, you know, people like David Bowie and Maya Angelou, you know, Einstein, said that they felt they were imposters. But of course, we all think that they're all clearly amazing. So we think that they're not imposters, but that we're the real imposter, they're fake imposters. And I think in order to deal with all these things, and to try to get the right level of what we can do when it comes to the overconfidence, I'm really interested in some work there is on humility.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Daryl Van Tonga, who's in the States, has done really interesting work. Humility almost feels like a bit of an old-fashioned thing these days, but that actually there are real benefits of that. And in fact, people value friends who are humble, and romantic partners in particular, who are humble and actually like them better. There are advantages to being humble. But also, I think we need to deal with the perfectionism that success doesn't just come through wanting it more. And I think we get told that a lot. If you really want it, you can get it. You can be a pop star, or win Wimbledon, or whatever it is you want to do if you really want to. And there's a real survivorship bias going on there. You know, we we hear tennis players are interviewed. They they win the US Open and they're interviewed and they'll say, oh, this is something I've wanted since I was so young.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  And maybe loads of I wanted to win Wimbledon, loads of us wanted to, but weren't talented and weren't prepared to put in the many thousands of hours and hard training as well. And winners of Oscars, actors will say that they've dreamt of this since they were children. But of course, we only see the survivors, if you like, the successful people saying this. We don't see the thousands of people who also wanted to win an Oscar and be an actor and who didn't get to do it. Which makes us feel bad when we don't get to do those things. So I think this realism is about realizing. What are we actually good at? What are our actual strengths and focusing on those? And not trying to be good at absolutely everything and giving ourselves a break. We say much

• 20:51Speaker 03

  meaner things to ourselves than we would ever dream of saying to a friend. And I call this the kind of would you say this to a friend test? Whenever you're having this kind of negative self-talk to think, well, would I actually say that to somebody else? No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be that mean. I'd I'd give him a break. So I think we need to give ourselves a bit of a break and that will take a bit of the pressure off.

• 21:10Dan Harris?

  So to my mind, and you should feel free to push back at this, but much of what we've just been talking about, whether it's underconfidence or overconfidence, imposter syndrome or savior complex. It's all about what the Buddhists would call comparing mind. You're comparing yourself. It's about status. And I believe you write about this in the book. For me, one of the most effective ways to handle this, because I suffer from this too, is self compassion, which is a kind of bland term. And I sometimes joke that it sounds like vaguely auto erotic, but it's it's just the ability to kind of take what you just said, would you say this to a friend? And then talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend.

• 21:54Dan Harris?

  And so I'd just be curious to see how all of what I just said lands with you.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Oh, totally, totally. I think loads of this is about self compassion. There are really nice exercises. You know, there's one called sort of compassionate self-touch, which it sounds even more dubious. But where you, you know, put one hand on your chest, say, and one hand on your belly. And you take a couple of deep breaths and you bring to mind something that's bothering you, perhaps a mistake that you've made, perhaps you've made a mistake at work. And it's really bothering you and you spend a moment thinking. I tried my best. I am human. I'll learn from this. I won't do this again. But I was really trying. And this is what a friend would say to try to reassure you in that sort of situation. And to just say, you know, we're all human. We all fail sometimes. And this is me and that's okay.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  And this doesn't mean I'm bad. This doesn't mean I'm bad at everything and always will be. It means that one thing happened. And we can deal with one thing happening.

• 22:48Dan Harris?

  Yes, Ava, I do this all the time. And as I often joke, I don't want anybody to see me doing it, but I do do it.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:56Dan Harris?

  In under acceptance, another thing you talk about is the fact that not all stress is bad for you, meaning that we don't need to have an allergic reaction every time we feel stressed. Oh, this is overwhelmed. I need to pull myself out of this tailspin. And this can be a little counterintuitive based on everything we've just discussed. So I'd love to hear more from you about that.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, we don't need to banish all stress. And in fact, there isn't a way of banishing all stress. But in fact, it's more than that. We need stress in order to perform well. We know that nerves sharpen our thinking. They help us to focus. But I think the word stress has a bit of an image problem because we tend to think of distress whenever we hear the word stress. But there've been so many interesting studies about how you can reappraise stress. And they do these really mean studies. It's one version, it's called the Trier Social Stress Test, where they suddenly tell people they're about to have to give a talk in front of lots of people and that it will be assessed and evaluated. And the people who are evaluating their talk will stay there with a, sit there with their arms crossed, stony faced,

• 23:59Speaker 03

  giving no encouragement at all while you try and falter your way through this talk that you didn't know you were going to have to give. And this is to make people feel as stressed as possible. But they do all sorts of clever things beforehand, like one group will be told to say out loud, I am excited, while another group is told to say, I am calm, and to try to believe that beforehand. And then when they give the talk. The excited groups talks are rated as more persuasive, competent and confident. And so what we need to do is reappraise, even if you notice, you know, that racing heart that you might get because I don't know, you're at a wedding and that's your turn to give the speech and your heart is really racing and you feel really nervous and you think, I hate this. I don't want to feel stressed like this. Rather than try to banish it is to reappraise it and to think, no, this stress is excitement.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  You know, I'm feeling excited here and the reason I'm feeling excited, and I think this bit really makes a difference, is because this matters to me. And so you're doing something at work that's difficult and you feel really stressed. The reason you feel really stressed is because this really matters to you and you want to do it really well, but you can turn that stress to your advantage and lots of studies will show this works. There was a study with teenagers in America, they were 15 year olds taking biology exams. And then they told them beforehand, they gave them a paragraph to read about the benefits of stress and how this can sharpen your thinking and help you to concentrate and help you to do well. And I thought it was really interesting, this one, because it made a particular difference to the students from low income background. They got higher marks when they were told about the benefits of having these nerves and how this could really help them.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  So you can reframe that racing heart as thinking, this is a challenge. And if it goes well, you're going to feel a real sense of achievement and purpose. And people with this, it's called a stress is enhancing mindset, rather than the idea of mindset that stress is debilitating, even have a more adaptive profile of the hormone cortisol. And so it will rise and fall because we need it, it will rise and fall to help them through it. Sometimes you'll see on TikTok and all sorts of things, people saying they want to, you know, banish cortisol forever. We don't want to banish it. We need it in order to get out of bed in the morning and get up because that's quite a shock for the body going from lying down asleep to standing up and doing stuff. So we do need it and it can help us. And Alia Crum, who's at Stanford, a psychologist doing amazing work there, showed that we

• 26:12Speaker 03

  can, just what's showing people a few videos about this can change people's mindset. And even months later in a company, she found people still were able to have this stress is enhancing mindset. There is a weird paradox with stress because having some is good. It's useful in those sorts of small situations. But of course, we also know that chronic stress is harmful to the body in lots of different ways. It's harmful to our cells, it's harmful to our cardiovascular systems, it's harmful to our brains. It's harmful in lots of different ways if it's chronic. But when it is for certain occasions, when we're doing things, then we can embrace that stress. I've certainly found that. Knowing that you feel stressed because it's about something that's important to you, which may be your children, maybe you're stressed because your children are stressed and are unhappy and you're trying to sort that out.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  One of the reasons you feel stressed is that it's just something important to you. And it almost comes back to the self compassion again, the sort of accepting, yeah, I do feel stressed about this and there's a reason for that. It's because it matters.

• 27:05Dan Harris?

  Amen. Coming up, Claudia talks about some strategies for overcoming procrastination, how to not let the news overwhelm you, avoiding regret and more.

• 27:20Speaker 04

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• 27:51Dan Harris?

  The first part, as mentioned, of your recipe for dealing with the feeling of being overwhelmed is acceptance. Then there's a whole section on next steps. And it starts with a discussion of procrastination. Curious why you started there and what we should know.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just think that procrastination is something, again, people beat themselves up so much for because they think it means they're a lazy slacker. But a lot of us will experience this. And again, this is something that we can look at very differently, that sometimes it's seen as a time management problem and people use strategies that might help them with that. But actually, it's more of an emotion management problem. And research has shown that it is often to do with the fear of failure at a task. So you might put off something in particular because it makes you feel uncomfortable or you think you won't be very good at it. And so you do everything else instead. You put washing on, you clean the entire house from top to bottom. You do all sorts of things that aren't as urgent as the task you need to do, even when that causes you more trouble later on because you haven't done what you needed to.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  And in the short term, of course, we feel better, which is why we do it. Because if we postpone this thing we didn't want to do, you know, I postponed for a long time writing a will because I didn't really want to think about it. I didn't want to think about that I'm going to die and what to do. And so I just put it off for years, but it was always there on that to do list on my phone and I've got in an app waiting for me to do it, but I wouldn't get around to it. But I would feel better every time I postponed it because temporarily you feel better in the short term and that's why we do it. And again, because we often have these unrealistic views of ourselves in the future and these standards we're holding ourselves to, we genuinely believe that we will do these things better if we do them in the future rather than doing them now. We believe that in two days' time, we'll have more spare time.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Why will we have more time in two days' time than today? Unless it's the weekend and you're at genuinely free, then we probably won't. And so that's why I wanted to look at procrastination as something we really can tackle and something that makes us so unhappy in a way.

• 29:49Dan Harris?

  So what are your thoughts about how to tackle?

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's all sorts of things. So one is, I think, to recognize that you do it. And there were studies with German students where they reminded them of their past resilience, how they dealt with setbacks before, and they sent them two texts a day for two weeks, asking them what they were tempted to postpone that day and what the consequences might be. So one is to bring to mind that you're procrastinating rather than ignoring it. You can try all sorts of practical things like laying out your desk at the end of the day so that the thing you need to do first is there. Lots of people recommend not turning on your computer and then looking at your emails first because that usually gives you some more work to do, but to do the most important task first. Sometimes this has been called in books, swallowing the frog. Do that.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  Do the most important, difficult tasks straight away, disabling alerts, muting your phone, but also accepting that some parts of a task are difficult and that that's okay because that's going to get you to the thing you want and try to turn it into a challenge. Break it down to smaller parts is one that is often recommended because we know that immediate rewards are more motivating. And then there's specific strategies people may have come across, if then strategies, where if a friend might suggest having a mid morning coffee and you can't resist that and that's going to distract you from what you were going to do, that you decide in advance, if your friend suggests that, you're going to suggest meeting them after work instead. And research shows if we do that, we're two or three times more likely to stick to our goals. So you can have these strategies ready.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Another is from research, and everything I do in this book is evidence based. I'm obsessed with evidence for these things, is to form a concrete picture in your mind of the thing you've got to do and then to look for any pleasures in that. So perhaps you're really stressed because you're throwing a party and there's tons to do and you're putting it all off. But try to think, well, I'm going to take pleasure in the separate task, you know, that one is choosing the music. Uh, that could be quite fun or reframing it. So the big job of clearing the loft, instead of clearing the loft, it's sifting through life's memories and that sifting through life's memories might feel like a more positive thing. But again, not being too hard on yourself. There was a study which found that students who didn't do enough revision for their exams and then didn't do very well in their exams

• 31:59Speaker 03

  actually did better in their next set of exams if they forgave themselves for having procrastinated rather than for beating themselves up about it, which made them more likely to in fact do it again.

• 32:08Dan Harris?

  Right back to self compassion.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:11Dan Harris?

  We talked earlier about a major source of overwhelm for folks, which is the news. And you have a bunch of thoughts on how to not let the news overwhelm you. I'm very curious to hear what those thoughts are.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Yes, some people are turning it off altogether or not, not looking up news in any way together and just avoiding it. A Reuters Institute report last year found that four in 10 people, and this was done in different countries, are sometimes or often just avoiding the news altogether because they find it too overwhelming. And those who consume no news said it had left them feeling too emotionally drained and anxious. I think there are things we can do about this. One is not to have news alerts on your watch or your phone that are giving you headlines all the time. Unless, you know, you're a journalist and you've got to. If you've got to for your job, then you've got to for your job. But the rest of us, we don't need to know at that exact moment that the bad thing has happened. It's okay if we find that out a few hours later. If it's really close by, you know, if there are

• 33:08Speaker 03

  riots in your city and you need to know that, your chances are you're someone else is going to tell you that, you're going to find out that. We don't have to know the news immediately. And well, I think we've always become very accustomed to that. And the problem is that the bad news then pops up in the middle of when you're doing something good. And this also happens, of course, with bad news from friends now. A friend might message you and tell you that something terrible has happened, somebody's died maybe. Or they'll ring you and tell you that, and that does interrupt what you're doing, but at least you can come for them. At least there's something you can do about it that is positive for them. But with the news, there isn't. There's usually nothing you can do and that makes you feel even more helpless. But also we know it can be really harmful. An extraordinary research from Roxanne Cohen Silva

• 33:48Speaker 03

  at the University of California Irvine, she did research on the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. And she found that people who were Consuming six or more hours a day of either TV or online coverage were nine times more likely to have levels of acute stress than those who are watching less than one point five hours a day. And even, this was higher, and this is the really staggering thing, it was higher than for the people who were present. Because for the people who were present, there's a beginning, a middle and an end to the story. It's terrible, and it's terrible for them that they were there, and traumatizing, but there is an end where they go home and they survive. When you watch it on a loop, there is no end point. There's just this cycle of distress. And that was back in 2013. And of course,

• 34:30Speaker 03

  now it's even more available. In terms of what you should do, I think it's acknowledging the feelings, trying to work out, does the news affect you differently at different times of day, you know, observing yourself for a few days and what happens. Do you find it easier to cope with if it's in the evening than first thing in the morning, listening to perhaps a drive time radio show or watching TV news in the morning? Is that setting you up well for the day or badly for the day? How are you feeling about that? Some people will differ in this. So monitor how the news items affect you. Do they make you feel panicked? I noted that Roxanne Cohen Silva now says she only ever listens to audio news or radio news and doesn't watch the videos because they stay more in her mind. But also, we need to embrace the uncertainty and try to accept the nuance of what's going on in

• 35:15Speaker 03

  the news as well. But it is complicated. Everyone's not all good or all bad. But I think as well as switching off the alerts, it's really good to choose one bulletin to listen to or watch, or one website that you believe is reliable, and to pick your fixed times to do that. That maybe when you get home from work, maybe on your way home from work, you will then catch up with what's happening in the news. And then reading something more, perhaps a long read somewhere, something that's more nuanced and in depth about it, that doesn't just leave you with the panicked headlines. People sometimes blame makers of the news for it, producers of the news, and will say, you know, all we need happy stories. And every so often, there are attempts to do happy news bulletins, and happy podcasts

• 35:56Speaker 03

  and so on. They never do quite as well as the actual news. Because the nature of news is, it's not news that no one was murdered in London last night. You can't keep saying that every day. But if a hundred people are, then that has to be on the news. The news is by definition going to be mostly negative because it is about what's new and what we need to know about and what's urgent. There have been lots of attempts to do things like sometimes called solution focused journalism or constructive journalism.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Particularly with things like climate change that can make people feel particularly helpless, where there are stories deliberately covered about climate change, but also the difference that something has made and how, say, air pollution has come down in a certain place or emissions have come down in certain places, showing that action can make a difference. Because I don't think we should turn away from the news altogether, because we need to know what's happening as citizens to be able to make decisions about, well, how to vote, but also how to act, where we might need to act and put pressure on politicians, say, or policymakers.

• 36:52Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I completely agree. And I think worth noting that both of us come from the belly of the beast, having worked as journalists. It's more art than science, in my view. It's understanding your own nervous system and, you know, how much can you take and when? And it's about walking the line between being an engaged citizen and a crazy person. I will add on top of your excellent recommendations, three others. One is from a meditation teacher named Sebene Selassie, who's a great friend of mine and a name that many of my listeners will know. She has a policy of no news before noon. It's not my policy, but I think it works for her. I think it might work for a lot of people, so I'm just putting it out there. Another strategy that I pursue personally, which is just in terms of tech hygiene, I

• 37:34Dan Harris?

  put my phone away either before or right after dinner, and unless I have to, I just don't come back to it until the next morning. And then finally, this is a much bigger picture thing. Another great meditation teacher and great friend of mine, Joseph Goldstein, talks about when viewing current events, to occasionally try to view it from the perspective of the planet Venus. Because, you know, as horrible as many of the things that are happening in the news are, and neither I nor Joseph nor you are trying to gaslight people and tell people that everything's fine, but as difficult as many of the news stories that we're following are, from the perspective of Venus, it's a little different. So just to pull back and have a perspective is really, really helpful. So, any thoughts on what I just said?

• 38:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that latter one in particular fits in with all the research that's been done on the overview effect, where astronauts who go to the space station, and I've interviewed some of them, will Come back and say that they're allowed to take your little package of space for their own personal stuff and usually take a couple of paperbacks. And they'll always say they never read the books at all because they spend any of their spare time, which isn't much because they have to work really hard. But they spend their spare time looking out the window back at earth because it's absolutely staggering to see it from a distance like that. And that also this really puts things into perspective and often makes them feel very protective of the planet. They often become environmental campaigners sometimes afterwards. But that it allows them to step back and feel and take some perspective. And you know, this is something I'll talk about later in the book, thinking, you know,

• 39:02Speaker 03

  it's not about you, it's not all about us as individuals. And this is why we can't get to space, but by just going out and being in nature or taking an awe walk, where you look for things that strike awe in you in order to get some perspective. And think, you know, this huge, great, tall, beautiful, I don't know, redwood tree that you're looking at is amazing and it doesn't care that, and all the beetles around it, they don't care that your work project's all going wrong and you're really stressed and not happy with, you know, what's happening at work, that life is going on. And I think that the reason that helps us get perspective is that it reminds us as well that time moves on. If you're out in the woods, you see bits of decay as well. Time moves on and things change. Now, in one way, time moves on towards an ending we don't like, but you're not necessarily stuck in where you are now.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  And one thing I think is really amazing and really does work is to observe when you're feeling really stressed about something, maybe something that keeps, is keeping you awake at night, to see how quickly that is resolved. Now, sometimes it's not resolved quickly, you know, you may be worrying about a really serious illness or something that you've got to cope with months, maybe years of uncertainty with. But sometimes, I noticed this the other week, and it's something I was really worried about linked with work, and I couldn't sleep and was awake half the night worrying. And I thought, I'm going to watch and see when this is resolved. I sent an email next morning and it was resolved by ten thirty in the morning by me asking somebody something and them explaining something I hadn't realised. So in fact, it was such a waste of me not being able to sleep because actually it was resolved really quickly, but often it's a few days. But it's well worth doing that exercise of trying to see how long things really take

• 40:32Speaker 03

  and that helps us put things into perspective as well.

• 40:34Dan Harris?

  I always think about the fact that in Buddhism, the word for equanimity is upeka, which is from the Pali language, the ancient Indian subcontinental language in which the teachings of the Buddha were written down. And it literally means looking over. So it's right back to your point about the overview effect, you know, looking at the issues of the day in your life or in the culture from the vantage point of like a cliff or something like that. And it naturally calms us down.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think this is one of the reasons why evidence does show that as people get into middle age, they can often cope with things a bit better. And it's partly because they've got the perspective of having seen it happen before. It can seem like all the news is really terrible now. It also seemed like all the news was really terrible, I mean, about, I don't know, 1990, 91. There's different times where that happens and some things resolve, some things get better, some things get worse, but it's always moving and it's always moving on.

• 41:31Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'd rather be alive now than in the late 30s.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 41:35Dan Harris?

  I think another thing about being in middle age, or in my case, approaching technically a senior citizenship, is that death, which you refer to as something we don't like thinking about, but it does put things in perspective. How much time do I want to be worrying about Trump, given that I have how many summers left? I don't know.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's very true. Yeah, and that time definitely does put things into perspective and allow us to also then think about what are the things we really do want to give time to. And I think one of the things that can happen with overwhelm is that there's often an idea that because we think we'll have more spare time in the future, that we might postpone the things we really want to do until we're less overwhelmed with everything else. Because we think next year it'll all be simple and I'm going to, I don't know, join a choir or do something you've really wanted to do. And then we don't quite do that because it's busy as well. And I think gradually, as you get older, it's easier to see that if you don't do these things. Then you're not going to get to do them.

• 42:31Dan Harris?

  Hmm.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  And that we can't always wait for all the overwhelm to be over.

• 42:36Dan Harris?

  And you'll tell me if this is an appropriate segue here, but that kind of makes me think about your chapter on regret.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. I think regret is an interesting one to look at because fear of regret can sometimes stop us doing the things we want to do. And often people will say, oh, it's the things, we regret the things we don't do rather than the things we did do. But actually, when you look at research, it's not quite like that. And it all depends on the timeframe. So for recent events, we often regret actions. In fact, we regret that I shouldn't have taken the train today. I should have gone on the bus because the train broke down. I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I'd made a different decision. Whereas studies where they get people to look back at their lives, then they are more likely to regret the things they didn't do. But what's really interesting is that people will sometimes say that cliche of no one on their deathbeds wish they'd spent more time at the office. It's not quite true. In fact,

• 43:26Speaker 03

  there are some people who spend a lot of time, say, perhaps devoted to work, who will say they wish they spent more time with their friends and family. And then there are people who did spend a lot of time with friends and family, often look back and then regret and say, oh, I wish I'd done more career wise. And I think there we have to, it kind of comes back to acceptance again, that we can't do all of it. And that sometimes it can be a relief that, you know, that ship has sailed, that we can't do every bit of it. Not every option is open to us forever. And that the trouble with the things we didn't do is that we idealize them. So we think, oh, if I'd, I don't know, if I had taken that particular job I thought about, applied for a particular job, I'd have got it. It would have all been brilliant. It would have been amazing and I'd have completely loved working there and it would have been great.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  And we think of the ideal version of what might have happened, but of course, we never see the counterfactual. We don't know that. It may not have been like that at all. And also I think we forget that we were a bit of a different person in the past. So. You may regret not having done something because you didn't have the confidence to. But you weren't the same person that you are now. So again, this is a kind of don't beat up your past self. Your past self made the decisions they did for the reasons they did, because that's what they felt they were able to do. But it can affect our decision making in the future because we know we hate loss, but regret is useful too, because we learn from it. There's an experiment I like with children where they get to pick from a box. And one box has got Mickey Mouse on it, one box has got SpongeBob SquarePants on it, and there are tokens inside the boxes.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  One's got one token and one's got ten, and they choose their token and they get stickers for it. They fix it so that whichever they choose, they get one token. And the kids think this is great, and they're really little, they're like five, six, and they think this is good. And then they show them that the other box had ten in it. And at that age, some of the children feel regret and some don't, and they get them to come back next day and they can pick from the boxes again. And the children who say they felt regretful then choose the other box, they learn from their decision. The children who didn't experience regret yet because they hadn't developed that yet, don't choose the other box. They choose the same box again and make the same mistake again. So we do need to feel regret in order to learn from it. But we don't want it to take over.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  And I thought one of the most interesting findings on regret, when I was looking into all the research on this, is that people didn't regret time that they spent on hobbies, even if they've given those up since, which I thought was really interesting. And that in a way, we need to stop idealizing the alternative lives and again, not beat ourselves up for it. And holding on to those regrets can lead to rumination. And also, of course, if you've made a choice, don't look for the counterfactual. So if you've chosen to go to one place on holiday, don't look up the weather in the other place if it's raining in your place. And if you did the lottery for ages, played the lottery and always chose the same numbers, don't carry on looking up those numbers if you've stopped playing the lottery, because you don't want to know, it's better not to know.

• 46:15Dan Harris?

  Another practical piece of advice in your book for this, again, pervasive sense of overwhelm is that limited choices can be liberating. What does that mean and how do we, you know, operationalize that for ourselves?

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think sometimes the number of choices we have to make can add to our sense of overwhelm. And our choices are increasing with many things. And now, when you want to make a choice, you know, say you're just buying something online, a bath plug or something simple. I find myself, I'm sure lots of other people do, looking through loads of reviews to try and decide which one should I get because there's so many choices. And actually, that's kind of a waste of time, you know, a plug is a plug, it'll probably be fine. And it's tiring to have those choices. And sometimes having too many choices gives us more opportunity for regret. And also, people can fear that their choices are personally revealing about them. Now, I'm not, absolutely not saying that having no choices is no choice is a good thing. But there have been studies, and they've been argued about a lot, about where people

• 47:14Speaker 03

  actually will buy more things if they have fewer choices than if they have more, and that they can be just overwhelming. There was a study with a car dealership in Germany where people, if they were buying a new car, they had sixty seven decisions that they needed to make about what colour every bit inside it would be, what kind of windows they'd have. And that actually, this was completely overwhelming. For the interior colour, they had fifty six options. And so people would soon start saying, oh, what's the default? So they'd stop picking and then they'd just pick defaults because they didn't want to. So choice can be tiring and give us more opportunity for regret. So I think it all depends on, outsource your decisions if they're outside your expertise, but devote the time to the choices that bring you the most meaning. Those are the ones where it's worth spending time on it.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Obama, when he was president famously, had a work uniform he decided for himself because he had enough decisions to make, so he wore the same blue or grey suit every day. And that was one less thing to decide. And it can kind of free your mind. You know, the economist Fred Hirsch talked about the tyranny of small decisions and that maybe we don't need to be making so many small decisions. Maybe some things can be automatic. Maybe it's okay to just have the same sandwich if you want to for lunch.

• 48:24Dan Harris?

  I have the same thing for lunch every day. For me, it's not really strategic, it's kind of laziness, but.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's still one less decision to make, isn't it? And if you know you like it, then you know you like it.

• 48:35Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Claudia talks about a key technique for worrying less, the importance of taking breaks, the case for nostalgia, and how to get into a flow state.

• 48:48Speaker 05

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• 49:17Dan Harris?

  Okay, so as established, your book, which is again called Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off, has three parts. The first part is acceptance, the second part is next steps, and the third part, which we've already started talking about, is the bigger picture. We talked about how you start this section of the book with a chapter that's called, "It's Not All About You," and that's a good thing. And it talks about the importance of awe. In this section, you also talk about how to worry less, which, as a lifelong worrier, I am very intrigued by. Can you talk a little bit about this, this chapter?

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so many of us spend quite a lot of our time worrying. And there are so many different strategies that you can use in order to worry less and strategies which, you know, have been evidenced and are shown to be useful. And one is to try to spot the patterns of worry. Are there particular things that always set you off worrying? A really successful strategy was developed by a Dutch clinical psychologist called Adkirkoff. And it's about setting aside a time to worry, and which may sort of sound ridiculous. But it's to set aside 10 minutes a day where you sit at a table with perhaps a piece of paper and a pen, and you write down your list of worries. You think about those worries, and you must spend your 10 minutes worrying about those worries. And the idea is that if other times of day, when those worries just come into your mind,

• 50:37Speaker 03

  because they can do that, they just sort of descend on you, is to, you try to banish those worries and you say, "No, I'm not worrying about that now because I've got my worry time for that." Now, you have to do the worry time for this to work, but he's found that's very effective and even effective with people who are ruminating in a, in a very serious and worrying, harmful way. Other things you can do are to ask, how did you cope with this last time? That probably you have been through something with some things a bit like this. There's that one I was talking about earlier, observing how long things take to resolve. But also checking your worries are accurate. Imagine you're in a court of law. Could you convince a judge that this thing you're worrying about that you think will happen is really likely to happen? What is your evidence? What's your really good evidence that this is likely to happen? And you can mentally time travel.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  You can think to yourself, well, I'm going to imagine myself in three years' time, looking back. Will I be worrying about this at that moment or not? Which in a way, you know, reminds me of the idea of looking at Earth from Venus to try to just get another perspective on it. And one thing we can try to do is to observe worries coming and going. And obviously, this is something people learn with, say, learn mindfulness, is to observe worries coming and going. A bit like kind of trains coming in and out of a station, that you see your worry coming and you see it going away. There are specific things you can do, like talking about your worries in the third person. And this is called psychological distancing. And there was an interesting study in 2014, when there was the first case of Ebola in the US. And lots of people were very worried about whether they would catch Ebola.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  And they did a study with a thousand people and they got some people to talk about their worries in the third person, to say their name. But to say Claudia is worried about whether she might get Ebola or whether her family might get Ebola. And other people did it in the first person. They said, I'm worried about this. And they found that if people did it in the third person, they could actually generate more reasons based on fact about why they personally didn't need to worry too much. So it actually enabled people to kind of look more rationally at the situation. So there are all sorts of strategies people can do and also all sorts of breathing exercises, which people can do to help them to worry less. And the other one is a kind of big one, which is trying to find ways to accept the uncertainty and to live with uncertainty.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  And that nothing is certain and we have to try to find ways, ways of living with that and settling on the fact that we can live with this uncertainty.

• 52:59Dan Harris?

  I'll give you two more. I love your list. One comes yet again from my meditation teacher and great friend, Joseph Goldstein. A little phrase he uses himself when he's worrying about something and he recommends other people is, it's not, fill in the blank. So right now, whatever you're worrying about, you might say it's not Ukraine. And that is, you know, it's just a great way to put it in perspective. Another thing that I have found personally, because there's just a continuous thread in my life of worrying about, and really not in irrational ways, about living under a bridge. I've told this story many times, that I have a great grandfather who took his own

• 53:41Dan Harris?

  life, or as the kids say today, unalived himself in the family kitchen because he was a crook and he got busted and lost all the family's money. And I just, that hustler's blood runs through my veins. So like, it's just a consistent thing for me. And one thing that I found really helpful is articulating to myself, and I even have a tattoo of this, of my principal value, which is to be kind of an omnidirectional vector of benefit. You know, I don't always get there, a schmuck in many, many ways, but my north star is to be of benefit, as the Buddhists say, to all beings everywhere. And when I'm in that mindset, the altruistic mindset, my fears of, you know, becoming irrelevant and having

• 54:25Dan Harris?

  this podcast crash and all of my future books fail, really, just, I can see them in a very different light. Does that land for you?

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. I mean, my last book was about kindness and all the evidence that there is of why being kind and spotting kindness around you, as well as receiving kindness, is so beneficial. And so that makes so much sense. And that a lot of people will find it, you know, at moments where they are really suffering and life is really hard. And for that book, I interviewed an asylum seeker who'd escaped from two different countries where she'd then been persecuted and had appalling things happen to her, and was in London and was homeless and then had a terrible time here. And then she got settled. And the first thing she did, wasn't allowed to work at first, asylum seekers can't work here. But one of the first things she did was to start to volunteer, helping others. And even though she'd had such a terrible time, she then, her focus was outward, and

• 55:16Speaker 03

  she said that was the thing that totally turned things around for her mentally. You know, she was feeling very depressed. And that, once she was doing stuff, volunteering for others, it really changed that. And as you say, the same sort of values. Yeah.

• 55:29Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I believe there are studies and I don't have them at hand, but that show that, you know, recovering alcoholics who become sponsors who are helping other alcoholics, same thing with folks who have HIV or volunteering, like there are real physiological benefits of, you know, relapse goes down, you live longer. So, yes, we are, as every TED Talk reminds us, social species. So it's good to harness that to your own benefit. In this final section of the book, which is about tapping into the bigger picture to help us manage these feelings of overwhelm, you also talk about the importance of taking breaks, which I've gotten slightly better at in my own life, but it's always good to have a reminder. Can you tell us what the recommendations are there?

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's hugely important to take breaks and to rest and to not think of that as being something that's lazy. There is so much evidence that taking breaks is good for us psychologically and good for our mental health. And actually, that is what led me to write this book. I wrote a book about rest, the art of rest that we talked about before. And so many people came up to me at book festivals and other events and said to me that that one insight, that one psychological insight of knowing that breaks were good for you mentally, had made a real difference to them. And that was what got me thinking, well, what else, what else is there really good evidence for that would be good if people knew? And that's why this book is about kind of 16 things you need to know that could make a difference. And yeah, and one of those is that it is good to take a break. And there

• 56:57Speaker 03

  is so much evidence for this. And it can even work in unexpected circumstances. And Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay took, they took a 10 minute break every hour as they climbed Everest in 1953 and knew back then that they needed this 10 minute break every hour. I'm interested in these studies that were done in Germany where surgeons in the middle of operations took a five minute break every 25 minutes. And these were operations on children. And it was a three hour operation. And even though they had a five minute break every 25 minutes, the three hour operation took no longer. And they had fewer difficulties and they collected saliva samples from behind their masks while they were operating. And the surgeons also had lower cortisol levels. So they were feeling less stressed and doing the operation better and having breaks.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  Now, obviously, the anaesthetist stayed not having a break and making sure the children were safe. But it shows that if surgeons can have breaks in the middle of an operation, then surely the rest of us can try to have a break, again, without feeling guilty. And in the research that I did on this, that we had 18,000 people take part in, a proportion said that they felt guilty whenever they rested. And I think we've really got to learn not to feel guilty when we take a break.

• 58:04Dan Harris?

  Just to say to the listener, as Claudia mentioned, her first appearance on the show was to discuss her book on rest, and I will put a link in the show notes if you want to go back and listen to that. I'll also put a link to buy that book if you want to go buy it. Also, in this section of the book, on the bigger picture, you have a chapter called "In Praise of Nostalgia." I'd love to hear more about the case for nostalgia.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, you see, I think nostalgia is something that we neglect a bit, but there is evidence that deliberately thinking about some nostalgic memories and immersing yourself in those and concentrating on them can boost mood and increase self-esteem and optimism. It can make you feel proud of things you've done. It can put you in touch with your earlier self, which reminds us that we have a core that persists, which can add meaning to life. But it's interesting because the history of nostalgia is not a positive one. It used to be seen as a psychiatric disease in the 18th and 19th centuries. And in the American Civil War, one of the leading causes of noncombat deaths is listed as nostalgia. And you can see nostalgia on people's death certificates, and they were very worried about people feeling

• 59:08Speaker 03

  homesick. We now know that there are real benefits to deliberately trying to induce a bit of nostalgia. There are experiments where it makes couples feel more romantic and more positive about their relationships. If they get them to think back on some times when they felt romantic together, or they get them in some experiments to listen to music that they associate with their past together, and this made people feel closer and more optimistic. Or there's even a study where it helped people with pain relief. So they did one of those really mean studies where they held a thermal device on people's arms, sort of fifteen times on low heat and then fifteen times on high heat, which really hurt the high heat. It didn't burn them, but it really hurt.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  And beforehand, they either had to come up with every day or particularly nostalgic memories. And those who came up with nostalgic memories could withstand more of the heat. And we know that when we feel, when people feel upset or lonely or cold, people will naturally turn to nostalgia. And people who are more prone to nostalgia, there's a scale called the Southampton nostalgia scale to measure this, on average, show more empathy and are kinder to other people. So I think there are real benefits of nostalgia. And in a way, it scaffolds our sense of ourselves over time. And it's a kind of psychological resource we can turn to because we have these nostalgic memories if we want to. Now, there is one really important thing, particularly if you're prone to depression,

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  then if you're going to think of nostalgic memories from the past, it's best if they're memories which are still congruent with yourself now, so that it doesn't feel like, oh, well, that was another world when everything was better and now it's all terrible, which might make you feel worse. So it's best to perhaps narrow the timeframe to one to five years ago, if you feel you're a very different person with a very different life than you had in the past, so that it's something relatively more recent in case it makes you feel worse. But you can also, there have been studies, you know, you can have a bank of lovely memories on your phone. You could make a list or it could be a little folder of photos of things that make you feel particularly nostalgic, that you can look at every so often to make you feel a bit better.

• 1:01:14Dan Harris?

  This is interesting because I had a lunch the other day with an old friend of War Buddy, but I'm using that term technically because we were combat correspondents together back in the early aughts and post nine eleven. And every time we see each other, we go back and I don't think about that time much, but when I see somebody who I went through it with, I, it obviously all comes flooding back. I find it really enjoyable. Not only to see my old friend, but to talk about these things. However, it's interesting what you said about this congruency issue because I was a lot better looking then and single and, you know, I'm happier married. But, you know, like my life was very different. And yet I don't find that it makes me sad to think back at that time.

• 1:01:57Dan Harris?

  So is that just because I'm not depressed?

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think if people are are happy now, then they can look back and see their, you know, think about their earlier life and consider that. And it can be kind of bittersweet. It's often described as a bittersweet emotion because it's slightly sort of tinged with sadness about, oh, those were the days, they're not the days anymore. It's only if people are specifically feeling depressed and if they feel their life is much worse now, then it can feel difficult looking back at it. But for most people, yeah, it's bittersweet, but it can also improve. There's even studies looking at nostalgia in the workplace about previous things you did with your colleagues. You know, I was a leaving do last week, actually, of an engineer who was left after forty five years. And there's someone we all is very funny and very good at his job and someone we all adore. So it was a sort of massive leaving do.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  And there were all sorts of memories people were sharing in the speeches and so on. And I think at the end of it, everyone I bumped into the next day was saying, oh, wasn't that great? And it reminds you about why we like working here. And so sometimes work can be stressful. And then something like that was a kind of evening of nostalgia in a way and reminded us all why, yeah, it's really great to meet all these people and work with people at a place like this.

• 1:03:06Dan Harris?

  Your final chapter, the sixteenth, and we have not covered all the recommendations in the book. You should go buy the book, but the sixteenth recommendation, your book on overwhelm is called Getting Into The Flow.

• 1:03:18Dan Harris?

  Please tell us more about that.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so this is about the concept of flow, which people might have heard of and which was developed by Mahali Chikse, Mahali, who in the eighties, and he interviewed, you know, thousands of people, teenagers in Tokyo and. Farmers in the Italian Alps and all sorts of people. And I asked them how often they felt that they experienced this sense of flow. And this is when you're completely concentrating with a really clear idea of what you want to achieve, a sense of control over that. People often describe feeling out of time. It's not that time goes fast or slowly, but they feel out of time. And he found then that twenty percent of people said they experienced it every day. Fifteen percent said never, and most people were in between. It's more likely felt more in people who scored high on conscientiousness,

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  less likely in people who felt anxious. And that when they paged people randomly through the day, then the things that often made people were experiencing flow sometimes if they were studying or working. Often it's a creative thing, but that people are quite good at. It might be something like painting or for me it would be gardening. I really don't think about other things while I'm gardening because I just think about that and I love it. And there are certain factors that make it work really well, which is if there's a balance between the skills that you've got and the challenges. So it needs to be not too easy and not too hard. So really absorbing, if there are really clear goals, you know what you're trying to achieve. And if you get immediate feedback and it's in a nice situation. And it can be a small thing, you know, there are micro flows. And so I might get that from, say, playing Wordle.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  It's not too hard and it's not too easy and it varies and it keeps me entertained. And there's clear goals, there's immediate feedback, I know what my score was. And that's something I do every day and that's a nice absorbed moment where I don't think about anything else. And it helps if it's distracting and it has a purpose in itself. And we can see that in studies, the reward system of the brain is activated if people are, say, given maths to do at just the right level for them. And it's a really clever study where they can adjust it to how good people are at maths, where you need to feel absorbed but not stressed about it. And they've done experiments with pianists as well. They wired them up and measured all sorts of things. And the higher their flow, the lower their blood pressure and their heart rate and the deeper their breathing was and the more they smiled.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  And percussionists, they found, of the musicians experienced the most flow, which is interesting. So maybe become a drummer. But there'll be different things for different people. And I think if you can find that thing, I think people are really lucky if they can find the thing that gives them flow. Because. If the rest of life is overwhelming, then for a while, there's this thing you can concentrate on, you can do. And I wonder if this comes back to why people don't regret the hobbies that they've done, is that they get this sense of just being completely absorbed and in that moment.

• 1:06:01Dan Harris?

  I am a drummer and it is one of the rare times when I get into flow. It never happens while I'm writing. I fucking hate writing, but I do it for a living.

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  Writing's really hard, that's why. Although maybe drumming's hard, I can't do it. So yeah, it's hard to me.

• 1:06:14Dan Harris?

  I started when I was 10, so it is very hard. You have to have, be able to do different things with each limb. And it's interesting, because I'm a horrible dancer. I am totally uncoordinated when it comes to dancing, but I can play the drums, as I learned really, really early. And so did my son, who I got him started at six. So that is a great source of flow for the two of us. Many, many guests have come on the show and talked about flow. And I've always felt like, yeah, it's not really that accessible for me, maybe because I'm anxious or self-conscious. And I did have a breakthrough recently where I realized that I do experience flow in conversation. I'm a massive extrovert. And when I'm having conversations, either on this podcast, or I think most especially socially or group creative collaborations,

• 1:06:59Dan Harris?

  I really lose track of time and I'm not thinking about anything else.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know just what you mean. Yeah. If you're really listening to somebody and you're really engaged in that conversation, then nothing else goes on.

• 1:07:10Dan Harris?

  This has been, as it was the last time you were on the show, a complete pleasure and super helpful. Anything you were hoping to get to that we have not gotten to?

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  I think we've covered, you know, a lot of it. There's lots more practical things that people can do. But I think it's accepting that we may be living in an age of overwhelm, but it is reversible. There are things that it is in our control to do. There's lots of external things we can't control. So we need to take control of the things we can in order to take the pressure off a bit and in order to feel less overwhelmed. And I think it's a question of, it's not like all of these different things will work for every single different person. So it is a question of developing your own anti-overwhelmed prescription from all these different suggestions and to experiment a bit and see, well, which ones really work for me and which ones don't. And all the 16 chapters, all the 16 things

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  you need to know are all based on evidence. And so they will all work for some people. And it's a question of working out what works for you.

• 1:08:08Dan Harris?

  Excellent. Great way to wrap up. Final question for you. Can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book and also your other books and your podcasts? Just please just plug everything if you don't mind.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. So the book is called Overwhelmed: How to Take the Pressure Off. I've also written a book on kindness called The Keys to Kindness, The Art of Rest that we mentioned, all about why it's okay to take a break and why we need to do that. I wrote a book called Time Warped, which is all about our time perception and why time sometimes seems to go slowly, time sometimes seems to go fast. And I wrote one called Mind Over Money, all about what psychological research can tell us about money, saving, spending, all the decisions we make about money to help us make better decisions about it. And then my very first book of all, a long time ago, was called Emotional Rollercoaster, which was about the science of emotions and why we feel the way we do. I have two different

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  BBC podcasts. One is called All in the Mind, and that is about psychology and neuroscience and mental health and the very latest research and evidence on that. And the other one is called Health Check, which is on every week, and is about global health and wellbeing all around the world and the latest on that.

• 1:09:16Dan Harris?

  Claudia Hammond, thank you very much.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. It was fun.

• 1:09:24Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Claudia Hammond. Great to have her back on the show. Don't forget to check out our new app, 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to check it out. Finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:10:04Speaker 06

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