406. How to romanticise your 20s (even when they suck)

Your 20s are sold to you as the “best years of your life” - which is hilarious, considering how many of us spend them underpaid, overthinking, heartbroken, living in transitional housing, and finding a new identity every 6 months. So what does it actually mean to ‘romanticise your 20s’? In this episode, we break down romanticising as a real psychological skill - how your brain constructs meaning, why attention shapes what feels like reality, and why building a coherent life story matters most when your life feels messy. We explore: • Why your attention changes your experience • The neuroscience and cognition of meaning-making • The role of emergent adulthood • Why narrative psychology is so important • Five grounded ways to romanticise your life Watch on Netflix: HERE https://netflix.com/thepsychologyofyour20s Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s https://substack.com/@thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Our favourite sources: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4324396/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224545.2025.2563539 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3045747/ The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:04Jemma Sbeg?

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• 1:49Jemma Sbeg?

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• 2:52Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology.

• 3:09Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode of the show. Today I am finally doing it. I'm doing a much requested topic or episode, which is my guide to romanticizing our twenties, even when they suck. I think we've all seen videos or posts online about the importance of romanticizing your life, of like romanticizing your nine to five, romanticizing your commute, your morning routine, whatever it is. But why does this actually work? What does the psychology and the science say about these practices?

• 3:51Jemma Sbeg?

  And the biggest question of them all, is there any evidence? Is there any evidence that buying yourself the flowers, pretending you're the main character, using the good cutlery, the good candle, work? The answer, I'm going to give it to you straight away, is yes. There is so much evidence. Honestly, so much evidence, I could make this a two-parter, that romanticizing your life does things to your mind, does things to your brain, does things to your body that improve your quality of life. So today, we are going to talk about that. What romanticizing your twenties should actually look like. Of course, the neuroscience and the psychology behind why and how this practice will quite literally change your reality and change the timeline you are on. But also my five personal favorite.

• 4:37Jemma Sbeg?

  You know, romanticizing techniques and tips that you probably are not doing or you may not have even heard of. So without further ado, let's get into the episode. When people talk about romanticizing, it often gets confused with sugar coating or even toxic positivity, like kind of like you're supposed to spin everything into a lesson and you are immediately meant to treat your pain like it is this gift, it's this amazing thing, everything happens for a reason, everything is how it should be, everything is redirection. We have to be careful with this because it can turn into what we call in psychology emotional bypassing. Basically, not actually letting yourself feel the full spectrum

• 5:22Jemma Sbeg?

  of emotions and therefore emotionally depriving yourself of a big part of your human experience. Like, we don't want to be doing that. Instead, romanticizing our twenties, as I see it personally, is choosing to experience your life as something you are actually experiencing, not just something that is happening to you or against you or with you as a victim. This is a mindset that honestly really has its roots in the eighteen hundreds with a movement called the Romantic Movement. Um, to give you a history lesson, like the Romantics were a group of people who really believed in the, the purpose and the importance of feeling experiences, getting the full complexity of it all,

• 6:07Jemma Sbeg?

  feeling deeply as a way to truth and enlightenment, even if it was more painful and messy than rationality. It is definitely a shift from this idea that your life is just a series of difficulties that you need to fix to acknowledging that your life is an unfolding story. Despite whether this chapter is hard or not, ultimately, there is a purpose and ultimately feeling is part of that purpose. Just notice for a second what I'm not saying. I'm not saying the hard chapter is fun. I'm not saying you have to be grateful for it. I'm saying it can be a chapter without being the whole story. And this is such an important emotional skill to develop during this decade because

• 6:51Jemma Sbeg?

  guess what? Bad things are gonna happen to us in these years and the next. It's just without a doubt, it's the promise of life. Breakups, job rejections, loneliness. There is immediate pain there that has to be respected. And then there is the second layer of meaning that we get to control. And by doing so, that will actually shift your lived reality. Romanticizing your twenties is any form of exercise, practice, mindset shift that allows you to see your experiences as meaningful, even if they are actually terrible. Before we get into some of the specific practices for doing this that I have for you guys, how does this actually work?

• 7:35Jemma Sbeg?

  Like, I feel like I've been teasing this this whole episode, but like psychologically, clinically, scientifically, whatever. What is the perspective? What is the mechanism that makes this effective? The biggest reason romanticizing your life or your twenties works and makes your life and your twenties better is because of the power of cognitive reappraisal. So the theory behind cognitive reappraisal, which is one of the most famous theories in psychology, basically says you can change your emotional response by changing how you think about a situation, even if the situation stays the same. Because your thoughts are half of the reality you're experiencing, by controlling those thoughts, you can give yourself a better outlook and a better outcome. Cognitive reappraisal,

• 8:19Jemma Sbeg?

  it's basically just a reality regulation strategy that is so well documented in the research because essentially we know this. Two people could be experiencing the exact same thing. But the very fact that their past or their intentions make them think about it differently would change the experience of that moment for them.

• 8:39Jemma Sbeg?

  And how you experience that single moment, the moment that you are in, is really all that reality is ever based on. For example, a two thousand and thirteen meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies, um, I don't even know how many they did, hundreds. It found that when people successfully reframed negative stimuli. So basically, we're able to say. You know, this isn't all bad. This is what this could actually mean for me. I'm excited rather than anxious. I'm excited to see this unfold. The effect of this, of not just accepting negativity as it was, was visible in the brain. Often there was increased activity in the networks involved in cognitive control,

• 9:21Jemma Sbeg?

  meaning making, um, and also reduced activity in brain regions associated with heightened emotional reactivity, such as the amygdala, which is very famous for that. So when we employ this reframing strategy, we're not, again, we're not changing the physical event. The physical event still sucks. What is actually happening to us is that we are just tapping into a psychological mechanism that our brain already has, like our brain already has this ability to think differently about a situation. Sometimes it just forgets to use that because we are so emotionally overwhelmed by all of this stuff landing at our doorstep at once that we just don't use it and we just find it easier just to accept things as they are.

• 10:07Jemma Sbeg?

  Models in in cognitive neuroscience will often describe the brain as a prediction machine. It uses past experiences to generate expectations about what is gonna happen and what will happen next, basically. And then it updates those predictions based on incoming sensory data or like incoming environmental stimuli. Part of that data it's using are your deliberate thoughts and how you choose to interpret something. That is part of the data set. So this means that what you expect therefore shapes what you notice. When an event, life, happens, it means that that perception will be different. I feel like I'm going on a lot about this. Why does this matter for your twenties?

• 10:53Jemma Sbeg?

  Well, When you're experiencing a time full of ambiguous situations, the brain leans hardest on what it can predict and and what it can expect to overcome that uncertainty. So if your internal model believes you're behind, if your internal model keeps telling you like, nothing works out for me, I'm always gonna fail. It's easy to take that as a fact if you never question it. And it's easy to apply that same narrative to entirely neutral situations. You know, the quiet weekend becomes evidence that you lack friends. The endless job hunt becomes evidence that you're just not smart enough. That isn't always true. People are busy. The job market is tough right now.

• 11:37Jemma Sbeg?

  Sometimes you have to take yourself out of that situation and view it differently and view it objectively, whether that is through a romantic lens or something else entirely. So romanticizing though, it's basically, it's choosing that deliberate pathway. It's saying, I'm gonna reprogram how I am seeing this and give my brain a broader, kinder, more realistic hypothesis for why things are happening to me. Like, this is a hard part of the story. And I'm gonna get over it. This is my origin story. This is what's gonna make me more resilient in the future. This is just part of life's ups and downs. There are other reasons that these things are happening to me

• 12:21Jemma Sbeg?

  that may not just immediately be the reason that I understand, which is that nothing good happens to me, life sucks. This is terrible. I'm not gonna be able to get through it. That shift again, that can change what your brain sees as evidence. It also really comes down to the power of attention, right? I feel like we talk about attention so much on this podcast because it is your most lucrative tool, your most lucrative resource when it comes to your mental wellbeing.

• 12:51Jemma Sbeg?

  It is our way, attention is our way of basically allocating our mental resources. Your brain is processing so much information, more than you could ever consciously experience. If you listen to our Conscious Versus Unconscious Mind episode, you will know this very well. There are sounds you don't notice, facial expressions you don't register, body sensations you tune out, thoughts that flicker by too fast to catch. So the brain has to be selective and it has to develop the systems to be selective. Attention is that selection system. It decides what gets priority processing, what gets amplified and what gets kind of pushed into the background or like basically just ignored.

• 13:37Jemma Sbeg?

  We can understand this through what we call, well, I guess it's like the idea, the idea of biased competition. Um, it's this model that was proposed by two American psychologists or I guess neuroscientists way back in the day, I think in like the nineteen nineties, which is not way back in the day, but a couple of decades ago. This model basically argues that stimuli compete for neural representation by basically brain space. And what attention does is to, is turn our biases towards whatever is currently relevant to our current mindset and our way of seeing the world. Basically, our attention is guided by our goals, guided by our self-knowledge,

• 14:16Jemma Sbeg?

  guided by our expectations that we get to set deliberately. So if you start to notice good, if you start to notice that everything goes right for me, if you start to believe that everything goes right for you or whatever it is, like your brain focuses on that more. Basically, like a big part of romanticizing your twenties is saying, let's, let me recognize the ordinary. Let me recognize the good. Let me recognize what I'm grateful for, things that signify a life of abundance, things that signify a plan, that signify things are getting better. If I focus on that, this fine tunes my attentional system to basically search for that more, meaning it becomes a larger, more meaningful part of my reality, meaning

• 15:01Jemma Sbeg?

  that my behavior and my reality continues to match my expectations because of how I choose to react in response. When people say like, what you focus on expands, this is the more scientific way of understanding that. What you consistently attend to becomes more salient, more encoded, more retrievable, and more likely to form the basis of your sense of self, and more likely to form the basis of your sense of your twenties, basically. There's one more psychological reason that romanticizing our twenties works beyond attention, beyond these, this resource allocation.

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• 16:10Jemma Sbeg?

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• 16:48Jemma Sbeg?

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• 17:31Jemma Sbeg?

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• 18:16Jemma Sbeg?

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• 18:54Jemma Sbeg?

  Let me quickly return to that one final thing I said I kind of mentioned before, which is the role of the narrative, the role of having a story for your twenties and believing that there is this underlying current of things, things working out or things taking you in the right direction. I think this is my most talked about matter on the podcast. I'm sorry if you are a frequent listener because we are returning to it yet again. It is just so essential to literally every single thing you choose to do in this 10 year period of your life. Like narrative psychology, if I could, if I could have every 20 something, no one term, it would be the idea of narrative psychology. It's the idea that there is an objective story of what's happening in your

• 19:38Jemma Sbeg?

  life. That objective story may be, you know, I don't have as many friends as I want. I don't like my job. My job is not fulfilling. I don't have the money I need to do the things I want. And then there is the narrative that you tell yourself about that story, which is that, you know, it's what makes it meaningful, what makes those objective experiences meaningful and sentimental. Like, again, that story of, yeah, everything, this is actually important, this, this suffering is important. I am getting closer to what I want. I am learning important skills. That's why I'm going through this. This is the story about the story. In the early 2000s, researchers based in Germany wrote this fantastic, this huge fantastic paper, talking about this

• 20:22Jemma Sbeg?

  and talking about the idea of life story coherence. And it basically means that you are able to organize events in a way that makes sense over time, especially through casual coherence, basically how your experiences are shaping you, and thematic coherence, like recurring themes that you carry with you. That coherence develops over your twenties. And actually, a 2014 study published in the Journal of Personality, looked at, looked at the autobiographical narratives of personally significant events from all these people, like 103 students, I think.

• 21:01Jemma Sbeg?

  And what they did was they looked at the story people were telling themselves about their lives. And they coded these stories based on whether they were coherent. Based on whether they contained content about their identity, based on whether they were inherently optimistic. And what the researchers found was that participants who constructed a more coherent narrative of events, like this thing had to happen to lead into this thing, and this thing had to happen to lead into this thing, and failure was redirection, and this all makes sense in the flow of my life, they had improved psychological wellbeing. If you are able to take moments of failure as lessons, if you are able to think that your story was building to something greater. If you are able to see that everything in life is connected.

• 21:44Jemma Sbeg?

  Even the hard ba- parts, like even the hard parts are still fascinating and still worthwhile in some way because they capture a part of the human condition because they are necessary stepping stones. That will make you happier. That made these people happier. This is why it is so important to reflect or create a story for your life. To explain your experiences, even the ones that suck. That is so protective. So with that in mind, let's jump into some of my actual tips for romanticising your life. Actual tips for connecting to a story about your life.

• 22:21Jemma Sbeg?

  Number one, every good story, every good movie needs a good soundtrack. So if you wanna romanticise your twenties, make playlists for every life chapter and moment. Firstly, music is one of the most widely and most historically used emotional regulation tools across culture. Across cultures, I should say, across age groups. Whether that's for comfort, distraction, for, I don't know, processing anger, it provides catharsis. And I think music also provides a bit of beauty to hard emotions because it allows you to feel it all so deeply. Which again, is part of the blessing of of being alive, whether we wanna, whether we wanna acknowledge that or not. Secondly.

• 23:05Jemma Sbeg?

  A playlist has the potential to do something really quite amazing when you think about it. It creates a container for where you are able to fully feel your emotions. And then return to that later. It contains a feeling based on our associations with those songs. Because of our psychological attachment to music, the memories created with that music last and are able to be revisited. And thought about when you're heartbroken, I think, wh- when you're moving, when you're homesick, whatever. Your feelings can feel very endless, very shapeless. So a playlist gives you emotional boundaries.

• 23:45Jemma Sbeg?

  It helps you move through your emotions and it means that in ten years' time, fifteen years' time, maybe even less, two years' time. You'll be able to listen back to that music, feel the feeling you felt then and appreciate it differently. Appreciate it as kind of like, as, as part of the story so that you gain that coherence, you know? Make sure that you continue and that you try to use music to categorize and appreciate your life. Like if there's a song that makes you feel really ethereal and beautiful, a song that makes you feel really nostalgic, a song that makes you feel heartbroken. Use those songs to bookmark moments in your, in your experience.

• 24:25Jemma Sbeg?

  Think of it, think of like how impactful like a film soundtrack is. It can literally change how you interpret a scene. And it makes you associate certain songs with certain moments. Do that with your life. I want you to make yourself a movie soundtrack to like all the different moments. In, you know, the near, past, future, as a way to romanticize them and feel them even more deeply. And then to be able to return to them when you're feeling differently to understand that those emotions pass, like playlist for. The first week of twenty twenty six winter, for the dinner party with your friends, for your first breakup, for processing rejection.

• 25:06Jemma Sbeg?

  Have those playlists, make these playlists as, I don't know, little companions to the moments in your life so that you can feel it deeply. Tip number two, make, make your alone time romantic and make it really, just make it really, really special. Make it incredibly special to you to spend time with yourself. I honestly blame film and TV and social media for this insidious idea that being alone means you're automatically lonely. Especially when we constantly see these people, these images of others with like their big friendship groups and like their perfect relationships and like

• 25:45Jemma Sbeg?

  their interesting Saturday night plans, like they're at the bar, then they're at the restaurant, then they're like at a show and everybody's having a great time. We want that. But actually, a lot of us in our twenties are alone more than we ever expected to be and more than other people's, people realise we are. Not always physically alone, sometimes it's more, it's more like a feeling, like you have people around you, but no one really knows what's going on inside you. I think this causes a huge amount of disappointment in us. You know, as if being single or staying in on a Saturday night or not having a big friend group means you're doing this wrong. And we don't always realise, like, solitude is important and psychologically protective.

• 26:29Jemma Sbeg?

  Of course, like, community support networks add years to your life, they're so important. I'm not saying like spend all your time alone, but I think making your alone time romantic and special is so important if you wanna feel happy. There's a really interesting paper from um the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that explores solitude as a really important aspect of self-regulation. Basically being able to bring yourself back into yourself. That's the best way I can put it. The research has found that solitude actually helps reduce the intensity of negative emotions when it is something that we deliberately choose to practise. The key here is actively choosing

• 27:12Jemma Sbeg?

  rather than feeling like we are passively being thrown into an alone state we don't wanna be in. A further study from researchers at the University of Reading called this process of of choosing and deliberately cultivating your solitude as crafting solitude. And they talk about the importance of being intentional and making your alone time meaningful and full. Like consciously thinking of a concert or a play or a game you really wanna go to and then deciding I'm gonna do that by myself instead of waiting to be disappointed and feel like I don't have a choice in being alone. Taking yourself out for a cute date, having no plans on a Sunday, so choosing to make it really special for yourself by cooking your favorite meal, cooking like a beautiful, beautiful breakfast

• 27:57Jemma Sbeg?

  or going for a long hike by yourself, getting your really, like getting your room really, really cozy, getting your skincare lined up for the night, like those small shifts of like, I have a choice here, I have agency, I love doing this. Changes the emotional charge around solitude to make it something you're excited about and you can really gain psychological insight from. I also think for those of us who want kids, like wanna get married, want families, there will be a time in your life when you will look back at these solitary moments with envy and with like a deep desire to have one more night in your own bed,

• 28:36Jemma Sbeg?

  one more li- night alone, one more day where you didn't have to follow an itinerary or tell people what to do. One more day where you had like no plan. Here is that chance. You know, do it for your future self, do it for the future you. Part of that is again, really appreciating every chapter you're in for what you may miss one day, really appreciating. You know, yeah, I'm lonely and that sucks, but one day I'm gonna miss being lonely or yeah, I'm heartbroken and whatever, but like one day I'm gonna be in love and and miss this feeling. In the same vein, I think one of the easiest ways to romanticize your twenties is just to create any kind of ritual. You have rituals around being alone, but rituals for when you get your first paycheck at a new job, rituals for getting ghosted,

• 29:22Jemma Sbeg?

  rituals for every job rejection, rituals for every single first date.

• 29:27Jemma Sbeg?

  These are essential. Rituals sound very spiritual, like prayer, like something like that. But there's a lot of research actually showing that having sacred sentimental practices for key life events or even really minor events like helps people cope with uncertainty by creating, creating something you can control that you find cleansing, that you find calming or romantic. And you can keep returning to it because again, it's something that you control. There's one specific study from two thousand and fourteen from researchers at Harvard. It actually found how rituals can be particularly healing for people going through really hard things, like specifically people who are grieving.

• 30:12Jemma Sbeg?

  That's why visiting grave sites is so important. That's why lighting candles, continuing to celebrate the birthdays of those who have passed um can be so powerful. Because it continues to keep a part of them alive and keep certainty and a sense of control over things that feel uncontrollable. It allows us to feel, again, like, yeah, control, but also like there is some magic. There's some peace, there's stability to moments that are really hard. Everything around you could fall apart and you could still light that incense at the end of the night. You could still make sure that you walked outside for twenty minutes every day. I also think rituals in our twenties make the ordinary feel important and significant,

• 30:56Jemma Sbeg?

  which we sometimes lose by being in such a rush to get places and like tick things off a list and be successful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they help us mark points in time. They help us like maybe even mentally close certain chapters or open certain chapters. So we're like, cool, I'm here. I'm in this moment. I'm not in that moment anymore. Let me give you some examples so that you can kind of see what I'm saying here. Um. The biggest one I think of is like, I have a ritual. When I start a new job, I always use a small part of my paycheck to buy myself something really nice that I know will last, like a gift to myself, like a nice pair of earrings, a handbag, I think I did that one once. Something that I know I'm gonna have for years that signifies this new chapter.

• 31:42Jemma Sbeg?

  This literally started like when I was, how old was I when I got my first job? Fourteen, nine months, like fifteen. And I got my first paycheck, it was two hundred dollars. Uh, which is actually quite a lot of money, but I think I'd worked like a lot of shifts and I bought myself a pair of ripped denim jeans, uh, no, shorts from One Teaspoon. I don't know if you guys remember that brand. Those shorts did not last. They were so ripped, it was almost inappropriate and, but the practice is is still there. I've done that for every job, every contract since. Uh, I actually didn't do anything for my Netflix deal, which I still feel like I need to do. So I'm breaking my own ritual. It's just been very busy, but yeah, I have one item from every past job I've started. Um, another ritual is having a specific first date outfit or a first date perfume.

• 32:26Jemma Sbeg?

  And on the other end of the spectrum, obviously, like different life experience, but having a breakup ritual. After you break up, go get a bad haircut, rearrange your bedroom, take everything they gave you, box it all up, burn it, bury it, store it, that sort of thing. As a cleansing thing to be like, cool, that chapter is done. I'm ready to psychologically move forward. I physically close the door. Another ritual, um, something I actually started doing last year was that I, well, this year I started to walk the number of kilometers as the same, like the age I was turning, I took that age and did that number of kilometers as a walk. That is the most complicated way of describing this, but basically turn twenty six, walk twenty six kilometers, turn twenty nine, walk twenty nine kilometers.

• 33:11Jemma Sbeg?

  Start at nine A M, dawdle along, invite some friends. And it kind of signifies a new year, like I'm doing this hard thing. I'm seeing new things and I'm doing something that marks that this is what I did on this birthday instead of doing nothing. I think rituals around birthdays and aging are amazing to symbolize like the privilege of getting older and just again, make your birthday feel special so that time feels marked by these moments. Same for the start of a new year, same for the start of a new season, new cities, new life, like that sort of thing. It marks things in time. It says that that everything in life, every experience is still important and during transitional times, it also stops us from keeping things like open-ended that can kind of, I don't know,

• 33:56Jemma Sbeg?

  kind of cast a shadow over us. Okay, we're gonna take one final short break with this episode before I dive into my final two tips for romanticizing our twenties and when we maybe shouldn't romanticize hard things and we should just let ourselves feel a little bit crap.

• 34:18Speaker 04

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• 34:46Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 35:24Jemma Sbeg?

  I've been really trying to prioritize my health in a realistic way this year. And something that has kept me really motivated is my Whoop. I am such a data person, which is why I love Whoop. Because I can genuinely see why my body feels differently depending on the day. Why I'm running differently, why I'm maybe less focused. Whoop effortlessly tracks my sleep, it tracks my strain, my recovery, my stress. And most importantly, my overall health. And it just gives me all that data and all those patterns. So I can make better decisions, which includes knowing when to go easy and knowing when to go hard. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join.whoop.com/psychology for your free month of Whoop.

• 36:08Jemma Sbeg?

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• 36:51Jemma Sbeg?

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• 37:12Jemma Sbeg?

  I did this episode on whimsy like a month or two ago now. And it kind of blew up. You guys loved it. It like strangely went viral on Instagram, which side note, the comments are honestly quite funny. I had no idea whimsy could be so controversial. Like people were up in arms. Like people were angry in those comments, but that's besides the point. Something I spoke about. In that episode, if you haven't listened to it, it's amazing. Please go listen to it, which not to toot my own horn, but it's a great episode. Um. Something I spoke about is the importance of collecting and representing your memories through trinkets, small souvenirs, through junk. During your twenties, we are constantly shedding the skin of the person we used to be and shedding

• 37:56Jemma Sbeg?

  the life of the people we used to be. And sometimes we look back on a year and we wonder like, where the heck did all the time go? I have nothing to remember this time by. And we struggle to actually think and and appreciate what we've done. By collecting trinkets, by collecting postcards, notes, whatever it is, these act as cues for our memories. It's one way to kind of prevent that evaporation of time that a lot of us experience. Twenty twenty one study in Australia found that possessions like souvenirs, like photographs, really any object that is meaningfully attached to a time or moment can actually preserve that experience for us and make the moment feel more vibrant,

• 38:40Jemma Sbeg?

  feel more important in hindsight, and of course, feel more romantic with a capital R, feel more deep. Think about when you were a child. I know I used to collect shells from the beach. And when I was a kid, which apparently you're not meant to do anymore. So I'm very sorry, but I was a kid back then. Nobody knew anything. I used to collect Beanie Babies. I used to, I don't know, collect little figurines and I still have so many of them. And it physically is very grounding and it physically feels like I'm I'm carrying moments of my life with me. I'm carrying memories with me that maybe don't have a physical representation, but I'm like in my mind, but I'm making that physical representation for myself.

• 39:24Jemma Sbeg?

  Things and ways to do this is like junk journaling, but try doing a junk box this year. Cinema tickets, receipts from a date, a note from somebody, a concert wristband, a postcard, a menu, a chocolate wrapper. Like, it doesn't have to be neat. You're not, nobody's gonna put this in a museum. Maybe they will. I don't think they will. It's a time capsule for yourself. Or do like one scrapbook page per month, just one. One photo, one sentence, that's it. Something like, March was hot, I did X, Y, Z. Here was a photo that I took on my iPhone, but you know, I spent some really nice time in nature. And now I have that and I remember that and I can come back to that. On this note, my final tip.

• 40:06Jemma Sbeg?

  Half of romanticizing your twenties is providing ways, again, for you to really experience hindsight. And for you to really reflect on the past and how far you've come. And how meaningful past experiences were to the story that you are creating. So with that in mind, I think the biggest thing you can do for your twenties and romanticizing them is to make vlogs. For yourself and yourself only. Let me explain this. When I, um. When I broke up with like my first proper boyfriend when I was at university. I remember feeling like so deeply sad and so unhappy. And so what I started doing was. Vlogging myself crying. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but I would.

• 40:49Jemma Sbeg?

  Talk to myself on the camera and be like, I just am having such a hard time. I miss this about him. I miss that about him. And I would keep doing that until I felt like I didn't need to do it anymore. And only recently did I find those videos again. I found like twenty of them. And I was like, wow. I feel so happy that I documented that. Like, I feel so happy I now have the privilege of getting to sit back. With hindsight and be like, we really did get better and everything really turned out the way it was meant to be. And we didn't want to end up with him anyways. That is such a privilege. I genuinely feel so lucky that I had that opportunity. And again, it's this hindsight, it's this part of you that only gets to find experiences like romantic.

• 41:34Jemma Sbeg?

  In the future. And if you don't give yourself the opportunity to fully like resubmerge in those moments. Obviously you can do it in other ways, but like, sometimes you miss that. You miss how heartbreak, rejection, pain. Terrible things, job, losing your job, going broke, like. You forget that it's all gonna be okay and that it's all taking you somewhere else. And so starting that practice now of genuinely filming yourself when you feel the need to talk, when you feel like this is a moment or a memory that you are going to wanna return to. It's a fantastic way to romanticise what you're going through. It's a fantastic way to just, yeah, I feel like I'm, I've said it enough times. It's a fantastic way to create the story and to have parts of the story that you can reflect back on.

• 42:20Jemma Sbeg?

  And then project forward with to see that things are gonna get better in the future. Now, to drill one final point home before we conclude this episode. Contrary to all the nice sentimental tips I've given so far to like vlog yourself crying, keep junk in a box, whatever. Sometimes the most romantic, loving thing you can do for yourself is just let yourself fall apart.

• 42:48Jemma Sbeg?

  To just let yourself feel like crap about a situation. Our twenties are a hard decade. This is hard. You're a baby adult. You are in your infancy of adulthood. And as you mature, um, there is so much to learn. And part of that learning is, is through pain, which really sucks, but I think we all learn that the older we get. Practice emotional acceptance. Basically, allow negative emotions to pass through you rather than fighting them. Lean back into them. This has been found to actually predict better psychological outcomes. Fewer depressive symptoms, less anxiety over time compared to constantly trying to put a positive spin on, on absolutely everything.

• 43:32Jemma Sbeg?

  I know that sounds contradictory, but you are allowed to be messy and you're allowed to be sad. And you're allowed to feel lost and not necessarily know that you're going to feel better, but just hope. Like you're allowed to feel sorry for yourself sometimes. I feel like we need to say that. It's actually a good thing. Um, you don't need to fix it. You don't need to rush through it. Just name the emotion accurately. Care for your body in the most basic sense, movement, food, sleep, water. And when you're ready, you can maybe look for the silver lining. You can maybe add the narrative back in if you want to do that. Sometimes, honestly, the hard feelings are where you feel most alive.

• 44:15Jemma Sbeg?

  Because it like, it hurts so much, it almost feels good. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean by that? Like, the, like, the pain almost feels satisfying and gratifying. Because it reminds you that you're alive and it reminds you that you are here. And as bad as that is, and as much you're like, this is just ripping me to shreds. There is always a parallel happy experience that's gonna balance things out. Well, I, I at least believe that. I really do believe in the balance of the universe. When you experience bad, good, good will return. So to summarize, romanticizing your twenties isn't a trick to make bad things always feel good and magical all the time. That is impossible.

• 44:59Jemma Sbeg?

  You cannot act against the physics of life. It's not a way to stop bad things from happening. It's just a way of stopping bad things from becoming the only narrative you tell yourself about your life. We know this works because psychologically, we have evidence for methods like cognitive reappraisal. We have evidence for uh attention bias theory. We have evidence that our beliefs about a situation do allow us to better control the outcome. And it matters to us. I think this whole process matters to us because in a time this turbulent and ever-changing as our twenties. Um, having that stable coherent story of like, this is all linked. There is an invisible string that runs through this all.

• 45:43Jemma Sbeg?

  Stops us from discarding or just wanting to push through hard things and lets us just feel them. And just be like, cool, I'm here, I'm in the belly of life. If there's, if it's not gonna go well, at least I'm gonna feel it as deeply as I can. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have made it this far and you were listening on Spotify, leave, leave a little comment down below. How are you planning to romanticise your twenties? Is there something that you do that I didn't mention that you think is important? As always, huge thank you to our researcher Libby Colbert for her contributions and her help on this episode. She is truly amazing. Know the drill by now, but until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself.

• 46:27Jemma Sbeg?

  We're gonna talk very, very soon.

• 46:34Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over fourteen years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is. Lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favourite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 47:12Jemma Sbeg?

  I've been really trying to prioritise my health in a realistic way this year. And something that has kept me really motivated is my Whoop. I am such a data person, which is why I love Whoop, because I can genuinely see why my body feels differently depending on the day, why I'm running differently, why I'm maybe less focused. Whoop effortlessly tracks my sleep, it tracks my strain, my recovery, my stress, and most importantly, my overall health. And it just gives me all that data and all those patterns so I can make better decisions, which includes knowing when to go easy and knowing when to go hard. New members can try Whoop with a thirty day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join dot whoop dot com slash psychology for your free month of Whoop.

• 47:56Jemma Sbeg?

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• 49:21Speaker 00

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