7 Underrated Habits for a Better Life (and 7 Overrated Ones Too)

I just heard about the “bed rotting” trend on social media and I think I need a minute. Because if the kids think staying in bed all day eating pizza and doom scrolling is a form of rejuvenation then I’m calling bullshit on self-care. Today’s episode is a fun one. Drew and I have a long list of common self-improvement practices and I’m scoring them as overrated or underrated or, “it depends.” CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Overrated vs. Underrated Game 00:01:46 Goals: Why You Should Quit More Often 00:03:40 Self-Care: The Bed Rotting Problem 00:06:46 Romance Is Overrated and Why Love Isn't Enough 00:09:55 Friendship: As Important as Smoking 15 Cigarettes a Day 00:11:26 Therapy: Finding the Right Fit Matters More Than Credentials 00:17:03 Purpose: When Everything Doesn't Need to Be Meaningful 00:19:46 Dancing and Music: The Underrated Mood Intervention 00:22:43 Politics: The Reality TV Drug Ruining Your Life 00:26:24 Journaling: Properly Rated but Not All Journals Are Equal 00:30:34 Saunas Are Underrated, Cold Plunges Are Overrated 00:35:11 Psychedelics: The Clinical vs. Optimization Divide 00:41:58 God and Religion: The Atheist's Case for Church 00:47:13 Gratitude: It Depends on Who You Are ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  I'm really excited for today's episode, Drew. I think this is gonna be a ton of fun. As you know, we get hundreds, thousands of questions, millions of questions all the time from readers and listeners, asking, what do you think about X? What do you think about morning routines? What do you think about saunas? What do you think about meditation, affirmation, manifestation? Enter whatever you want under X. And so, we're gonna play a game today, overrated, underrated. And we're gonna go through things that you see influencers and authors and scientists always recommending to people to be happier and more productive. I'm gonna give my opinion on whether it's overrated or underrated, and I've got some really cool printouts here. So, we've got the Nicolas Cage underrated.

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  Because, I mean, what is Nicolas Cage if he's not underrated? If you don't believe Nick Cage is underrated, go watch Leaving Las Vegas. We've got the Will Ferrell overrated, and he's very upset in this picture. And then finally, we've got the, it depends.

• 1:02Mark Manson?

  This is gonna be a fun one. Hopefully, I don't upset too many snowflakes in the audience when I shit all over their favorite personal development habit or practice.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  100% chance that's gonna happen.

• 1:13Mark Manson?

  Do you have your biohazard suit on, Drew? Are you ready for this? The pure toxicity is about to begin.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  The podcast that's saving the world, one fewer fuck at a time. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm, I'm ready for it. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how this goes. But yeah, I got a stack of cards here. They're random. I don't know. I don't know what the order is. We're just gonna machine gun right through them.

• 1:41Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Are you ready?

• 1:43Mark Manson?

  Let's do it.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Goals.

• 1:46Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 1:48Mark Manson?

  Overrated. That's not gonna surprise you. We have a very popular article on the website called, Goals Are Overrated. That's not to say that they're not valuable. Goals are definitely valuable, but I think people mistake what the value of the goal is. The value of the goal is that it gets you motivated to go do something and it gets you pointed in a particular direction. The goal itself isn't what's valuable. You know, if I decide I want to lose 20 pounds this year or whatever, the 20 pounds doesn't really matter. What matters is, am I exercising? Am I eating better? Am I drinking water? You know, am I taking care of myself? And if I lose 16 pounds instead of 20, that's still great.

• 2:32Mark Manson?

  Or let's say I lose 10 and then I realize like, well, 20 is probably unrealistic. It turns out actually I need to add muscle mass. So I'm going to up my gym workouts and I'm going to drop that goal and I'm going to set a new goal. Now that I have new information based on pursuing the first goal. I think people get too attached to the goal. They're like, well, I can't quit now because I got halfway there. It's like, no, you can quit anytime you want. You quit the second the goal stops being the optimal thing for you to do. That's when you quit and you set a new goal. So I actually think you shouldn't be achieving all of your goals. You should be quitting a significant percentage of your goals. But you should also be setting a good amount of goals regularly. Completely understanding that at least half of them, you're not going to hit or nor should you hit.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you said it best with Derek Zibbers. You said your goals should serve you, not the other way around. That's kind of just sums up what you just said. And that for me, I was like, yes, that's, that's what we all need to think about when we set and work towards goals is let them serve you.

• 3:34Mark Manson?

  And this is why I didn't run the marathon on my birthday. I instead ate a marathon of tacos and no regrets.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  You gotta do a follow-up episode on that, Mark. I'm interested to hear more about that and your decision around that, but.

• 3:46Mark Manson?

  We'll get to that. We're going to do, we'll do the six month goal episode.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Okay, here's a good one, self-care.

• 3:51Mark Manson?

  Okay. It depends. Philosophically, I think the concept of self-care is good. You need to carve out space in your life to take care of yourself. You need to know how to set boundaries and give yourself a break. That is very, very true. What bugs me is what passes for self-care is usually just self-indulgence. It's like spa weekends every other month or spending your savings on a three-month trip to Europe because it's hashtag self-care. You know, it's just the way it gets portrayed online, it really does not look good. It looks like really narcissistic self-indulgence. So the concept is good.

• 4:35Mark Manson?

  There are important lessons around it, but the way it's practiced and promoted online, it just makes me want to puke sometimes.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  The one I saw recently was bed rotting. Have you seen that one?

• 4:47Mark Manson?

  No, what is that?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  I guess you just stay in bed all day and you like order Uber Eats, like the worst food imaginable and just sit in your bed and pig out. And that's a form of self-care.

• 4:56Mark Manson?

  How is that self-care? Like, there's nothing caring about that. I mean, at least a massage is arguably good for you. Don't even get me started on this. I went, so I went on, I went on the Drew Barrymore Show. They did an episode on self-care. I went on and my whole thing was like, this is all bullshit. Real self-care is paying your credit card bills. Real self-care is waking up on time. Real self-care is going to the gym when you don't want to go. Like, self-care is doing things for yourself that are good for yourself. That is what self-care is. And most things that are good for yourself are not necessarily pleasant. It's not, it's not enjoyment. It's not indulgence. It's not eating pizza at a four-star resort.

• 5:39Mark Manson?

  You know, it's, it's like taking care of yourself. And I think what people don't realize is that the burnout that they feel like they need to escape to self-care for, that burnout wouldn't exist if they just took care of themselves a little bit each day.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. So one thing around exercise that I've found is I treat it more as like, that's my self-care. Like, and sometimes I don't want to do it.

• 6:00Mark Manson?

  A hundred percent.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  But I see it.

• 6:02Mark Manson?

  A hundred percent.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  This is self-care. I know it's going to make me feel better and. Make me happier in the long run, even if I don't want to do it right now.

• 6:09Mark Manson?

  A message that needs to get shared more is self-discipline is self-love. The way you love yourself is almost parenting yourself. It's like forcing yourself to do the things that you don't feel like doing, but are good for you, that are in your best interest, that are gonna set you up for long-term success. That is the way you love yourself, is by being disciplined, is by doing the things that you don't necessarily feel like doing. Laying in bed and eating pizza all day, like that's, that is not self-love. That is self-indulgence. That is being a child. Sorry, not sorry.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  For real. Oh, good one. Romance.

• 6:43Mark Manson?

  Romance. That's easy. Overrated. So much relationship advice, particularly women's relationship advice revolves around maximizing romance or optimizing for romance. Romance, don't get me wrong, it's nice. Uh, and especially in like a long-term committed relationship, once you've been together for seven or eight years, it's nice to be able to turn on the romance every now and then, you know, go on like a nice little, uh, getaway, yeah, get the honeymoon suite in Vegas for a weekend. But overall, I think romance derails more relationships than it rails. No pun intended.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 7:27Mark Manson?

  I think, uh, a lot of people have a tendency to mistake romance for love itself. They mistake romance for things like respect or trust. They mistake romance for a healthy, thriving relationship, when actually, some of the things that maximize romance are completely unhealthy and toxic. You can have a very dramatic and toxic relationship that has a lot of romance in it, because you're riding the emotional ups and downs. So romance for me is an easy, overrated, there's an article on the website called Love Is Not Enough. I advise everybody who may be triggered by this answer to go check those out.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  What do you think about like certain situations, though? Like maybe romance needs to be? Injected back into some areas like, I don't know, especially with the whole, you know, online dating thing and the apps and everything. It's like you meet somebody up for a drink or coffee or whatever. And that's it's like, go to a fancy dinner, get dressed up, go for it.

• 8:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I mean, look, there should be some romance. It's just that romance is the supplement. It's not the, it's not the main thing. There should be, especially in the first year, there should be a lot of romance. There should be like, a lot of juices flowing, no pun intended. I've been with my wife for 12 years. It is, romance is definitely a practice that you have to, I mean, we've reached a stage in our relationship where it's like, we kind of have to plan romance. Otherwise, it doesn't happen organically past a certain point. And it's, it's nice to plan it. It's like, I think it's important. It's nice to have those moments. But again, it's the icing on the cake. It's the cherry on, on the cupcake. It's not, it's not the cake itself.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do a lot of stupid things for romance. We sacrifice a lot of ourselves. Sacrifice some of our values just for romance. I would agree with this one.

• 9:11Mark Manson?

  Totally. Yeah. Uh, there's actually an old article on the website called, romance is like alcohol. And it's, the whole piece is basically just a bunch of sentences that if you replace the word romance with alcohol, it still makes sense. Basically, all of your worst decisions were made while on romance.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  What? So you quit alcohol? And it sounds like you've quit romance too, Mark.

• 9:32Mark Manson?

  No, no, no, no. I'm just, I'm a, I'm an old romantic, Drew. How did you not know that?

• 9:41Mark Manson?

  Sparkling water, the cold moonlight. Nothing gets better.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Sparkling water? Okay.

• 9:47Mark Manson?

  I was gonna say sparkling wine, but you know, I don't drink anymore. So, next one.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  You next one. Okay. Oh, friendship.

• 9:53Mark Manson?

  Oh, underrated.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Underrated.

• 9:57Mark Manson?

  This is another easy one. We actually just did an entire podcast on friendship, particularly adult friendship. And I think we ended that podcast discussing.

• 10:06Mark Manson?

  Actually, just this thing that we just talked about, how people tend to overestimate their romantic relationships and underestimate their friendships. I think just the most stark example of this is that if you look at mental health data and happiness data of people who are single, they're generally happy and healthy as a cohort. If you look at people who don't have any friends, they're horribly unhealthy as a cohort. In fact, there's a statistic that gets passed around a lot that says that, uh, social isolation is just as adverse for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which is shocking. You wouldn't assume that, that being alone and not seeing people is, is as bad for you as smoking almost a pack a day, but statistically it is.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you can also feel very alone in a romantic relationship if, when it, you know, gets sour. I think it's hard to feel alone if you have even halfway decent friends around you, so.

• 11:00Mark Manson?

  True. I mean, it's, it's almost like the definition of friendship is not feeling alone with somebody.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:07Mark Manson?

  Quote that shit. Put that shit on Instagram. Let's go.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  That's what we're going for. We're going for quotable shit today here. Share, Mike.

• 11:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, we're, we're going for Instagram virality. That's what we're optimizing on today's podcast.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  All right, next one, therapy.

• 11:21Mark Manson?

  Ooh, the mother of all interventions. This one depends in aggregate over a large population. It has one of the highest hit rates for the most people, but it doesn't work for everybody. And even the people it works for, it doesn't work forever. But what's difficult about therapy is that so much of it really seems to depend on the quality of the therapist and your personal relationship with the therapist. One of the most maddening things about therapy is that there are dozens and dozens of modalities and philosophies around therapy. And if you look around enough, you'll, you'll hear all sorts of arguments of why is CBT's the best, or DBT, or psychodynamic, or psychoanalysis, like it's.

• 12:07Mark Manson?

  Really, when you look at the data behind everything, none of that shit matters. What it really comes down to is, is the therapist good and empathetic? Do they listen well? Do they respond well? Do they ask pointed and useful questions in a non-judgmental way? Do they not insert their own values and beliefs aggressively? And do they have, are their incentives straight? You know, like, I didn't dig into this research, but I saw somebody post recently on a Substack. They said that in a meta-analysis, they found that the best therapists are, produce 10 times the outcomes of the average therapist. So, the very best therapists are responsible for like 90% of the results.

• 12:50Mark Manson?

  And the worst therapists actually make people worse on average. There is a small minority of people who get worse in therapy. But A, it never gets talked about or acknowledged because it's, I think it's just, therapy is under-attended in, in society. And so, people don't want to talk about how it doesn't work for all the time, or it can actually make things worse occasionally. But two, I think the complicated thing with therapy is that when it makes things worse, you aren't aware it's making you worse. It's unclear that you're getting worse. In fact, in a lot of cases, you feel like you're getting better, but you're actually getting worse. So, therapy is a complicated one. I think it's really, really important.

• 13:31Mark Manson?

  Like, I get, people in my personal life come to me all the time saying, "I'm looking to get therapy, what advice do you have?" The advice I always give them is this: completely disregard the background credentials and school of thought. Just fuck it. Think really hard about what type of therapist is going, like, think about the problems that you're facing, and then think about the type of therapist that you think will understand what you're going through. And, and you'll actually see this, like, there are therapists that, like, there's LGBTQ therapists who specialize in LGBTQ people. There are couples therapists, therapists that specialize in relationship problems. There are therapists who particularly specialize in anxiety problems.

• 14:13Mark Manson?

  So, look more towards like the subject matter that they tend to specialize in, but also just look at who they are as a person. You know, like, if you are a 22-year-old guy with like a lot of sexual insecurities, I don't know, maybe think about finding a male therapist who can relate to your sexual insecurities. Or, go the other way and find like a 70-year-old woman who... Has no idea what your sexual insecurities are like and is going to give you a completely objective opinion. So just think hard about that. And then the second thing I tell people is I say, don't just jump in with the first therapist you talk to. Like, most therapists

• 14:53Mark Manson?

  will give you a free or discounted consultation, like a first session. Try out two or three or four and see how you vibe with them. See if you feel like you're being heard and understood and empathized with and that you're not just, you know, signing up for the first person who comes along. I think that's very important.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  They have a whole bunch of therapist friends and they will back this up. They're like, it's all about fit. They don't want to take on people who don't fit well either. That's a big thing too. They're not just in it for the money. Like, I know a lot of people think that's what it is, but they don't want anybody who's a bad fit. They don't want anybody they can't help. They're not hurting for work either. So, you know, it's one of those things.

• 15:37Mark Manson?

  I think the other thing too is that people need to, again, about setting expectations. You will get as much out of therapy as you put into it.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  That was the other thing I was gonna say, yeah, for sure.

• 15:46Mark Manson?

  These people are not superhuman. They can't just like magically mind read and pull insights out of your brain. You have to go in there willing to dig deep and share and think hard about your life. Think about uncomfortable things. Ask questions about yourself. And ideally, carry those questions into your life. Like, I remember my therapist, we would have like a very deep conversation and he would ask me a lot of difficult things that confused me on the spot. But then, over the course of the week, I would continue to think about them and I would slowly develop insights over a number of days. And then I'd come back into the next session and I'd be like, so I really thought about that question

• 16:28Mark Manson?

  and I had a few ideas. And then we would pick up from there. And so it's like, the work continues outside of the office. And then you bring it back with you. And the best therapist will tell you when you're done. That's the last thing, is the best therapist will be like, seems like you don't have a whole lot to talk about. Maybe we just end this now.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  One too, the one I really liked, she told me, she's like, look, we don't have to resolve every little thing here. And I was like, fuck, yes. That's true. Like, yeah, thank you for saying that. You know, you realize that, right? I'm like, yes, okay. Oh, purpose. I believe like finding purpose in your life.

• 17:05Mark Manson?

  Depends. I think it depends. 10 years ago, I would have said underrated. I think today, it depends. You should have some sense of purpose in your life, but not everything in your life is gonna feel purposeful all the time. You're still gonna have to do a lot of shit that feels unimportant and it's not fun to do. And I think at some point in the last five or 10 years, that that got lost a little bit. You know, I wrote an article, I think back in 2015, 2016 called Screw Finding Your Passion, which is basically this argument that you don't have to love every minute of your job or every minute of everything you do. And in fact, trying to optimize that is is probably actually making making yourself miserable. There's a lot of bullshit in life.

• 17:48Mark Manson?

  There's a lot of bureaucratic nonsense, headaches, you know, you gotta like do the dishes and take out the trash and file your taxes. We all have to do this shit. And it's not going to feel purposeful or meaningful most of the time. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. So I would say it depends. I would say if you are underweighted in purpose in your life, if you feel you have no purpose in your life, then it's crucially important. But if you do feel like you have a sense of purpose in your life, but you're trying to make everything seem meaningful and purposeful, then you're probably overdoing it.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think when you're overdoing it too, you tend to like if everything revolves around your purpose and everything in your life is going towards that, you miss out on a lot of just like simple pleasures in life or not even pleasures. Just like, I don't know, I'll find myself in standing in line, being super bored and then just be like, oh, my God, it's like I'm alive, right? Like just something like that. And there's no purpose to it. There's no deeper meaning that has to be there. It's just.

• 18:44Mark Manson?

  It's almost like the inane things are actually in a way more profound for that reason. I might be a little bit sensitive to this as well, because this is one of my gripes about LA. Is that, you know, you'll go to a dinner here on the West Side and you'll be having a perfectly fine, normal conversation with a group of people. And then somebody will like interrupt everything and they're like, let's go around and state our intentions for the evening. Let's all say something that we're grateful for this week. And I'm like, can we just eat food and fucking talk like normal people?

• 19:17Mark Manson?

  Like, does everything have to be optimized all the time?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  You're gonna piss off the Californians again.

• 19:23Mark Manson?

  I did not get canceled for that episode. So I'm gonna keep working on it.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, we'll get you there.

• 19:32Mark Manson?

  We'll get you there.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  One of these is gonna happen. Ooh, maybe this one will, maybe this one. Dancing slash music.

• 19:40Mark Manson?

  Underrated.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Okay, alright.

• 19:42Mark Manson?

  I'm biased on this one. So really interesting meta-analysis came out like a month ago and I posted about it on social media. I don't think we've talked about it. The meta-analysis looked at physical activity as it relates to depression and mental wellbeing. And what it found was that over a large population, over a long period of time, simple physical activity is just as effective as pharmaceutical intervention. Now, that's not to say that it's just as good for everybody as a pharmaceutical intervention, but it's fascinating that such a simple, free,

• 20:20Mark Manson?

  available 24/7 intervention as something as simple as walking around the block can have as much of an impact as like pharmaceutical shit that we've spent tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars on. But what was interesting about that meta-analysis is that it broke it down by physical activity. And you know what was at the top of that list? Fucking dancing, which is kind of not surprising. It's impossible to dance and be unhappy. And I don't know why that is completely, but I've never seen an unhappy person dance. I mean, I haven't seen you dance, Drew.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say, you should see me dance. I'm usually crying by the end of it. It's, yeah.

• 21:00Mark Manson?

  I hate that. Seriously, like if you imagine somebody who's like dancing and like really into dancing, it is impossible to not elevate your mood while dancing. So I think that's really interesting. And I also think there is a lot of under-discussed data around music and the positive mental and emotional benefits that music brings. It helps a lot of people with focus. It helps a lot of people with happiness. It helps a lot of people with ADHD symptoms. Music really enriches people's lives quite a bit. I mean, it's one of those things like people kind of know intuitively, but like you'll see a YouTube video or a book like drone on for 20 pages about,

• 21:42Mark Manson?

  you know, the importance of gratitude and writing in your journal, which we'll get to those in a minute. Nobody's like, just put on a really good song and go outside and dance in your backyard. Like, that's probably gonna accomplish something, you know? It sounds silly and stupid, but.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  It sounds a little new agey, Mark. I don't know.

• 21:59Mark Manson?

  It's the California in me. It's happening.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Now, I did recently see there's been some pushback against that study. People have have kind of taken it to task a little bit, and I think some of the results might have been overblown. I don't know. I haven't dug into it very much, so I won't get too far into it, but.

• 22:16Mark Manson?

  A psych study, overblown? No.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Getting up and moving and dancing is not gonna hurt. I will tell you that right now, like, obviously. I'm just not sure if like it's as impactful as they said it was, but we'll see.

• 22:29Mark Manson?

  It probably is not, but it's free and easy and you can do it anytime, so.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  I still think it's underrated. Yes. Yeah.

• 22:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  All right. Politics.

• 22:40Mark Manson?

  Oof.

• 22:43Mark Manson?

  Overrated. I completely matched the expression on his face when I, as soon as this topic comes up. We're like, what, 20 episodes into this show? Something like that? I think one of the most poignant things that was said on this show was when we had David Brooks on, when he said that our culture is in a crisis of connection and a large percentage of people have tried to fill that void with politics. And it's not working. I think the thing that is damaging about politics is that it creates unrealistic expectations of what should be the case in the world and what could be the case in the world. I used to be very much wrapped up in politics when I was younger, and I think as I've gotten older, I've backed off quite a bit.

• 23:28Mark Manson?

  For two reasons. One is just I'm old enough to see how wrong everybody is about everything constantly. Like, I'm old enough to like, reserve judgment and be like, you know, like, maybe let's wait a year before we decide who's on the right side of this issue and who's on the wrong side. But also, I think I've I've just intuitively understood like how big and messy society is and human systems are and how imperfect they're gonna be no matter what. And so if you kind of naively bang your head against the wall expecting. You know, this one solution is going to solve everything. You're just setting yourself up for disappointment. A, because that solution is probably never going to pass into law.

• 24:12Mark Manson?

  And B, even if it does, it's not going to work. So you're going to be incredibly disappointed at that, too. I think politics is, it's become almost kind of a drug. It's become like reality TV for the masses. And I don't think that's a healthy way to govern a society. I don't think it's a healthy way for people to find purpose and meaning in their lives, to bring back the purpose piece. I think you need to find something more localized and something more in your control to feel meaning and purpose. And I think people just need to revise their expectations drastically, both in terms of what is possible and also what is plausible. It's like, take any issue, I don't, I'm not going to pick a single one, any issue.

• 24:55Mark Manson?

  You can name any issue across the board and it is so much more complicated and nuanced than 99% of the discourse you see about it. And it just feels like people don't want to dig into that, that nuance. They, they just want to get angry and yell at each other. Again, to bring it back to like psych data, mental health, wellbeing, the data around news consumption is, is absolutely horrifying. I mean, if you want to depress yourself as soon as possible, maybe the most effective way is to like, start a drug habit and watch news 24/7. Like, those are probably the two most effective ways to ruin your life and ruin your happiness. One thing that I started doing during the pandemic, which in hindsight is like one of the best decisions I ever made.

• 25:39Mark Manson?

  I stopped watching news and instead I replaced that information consumption with history. So instead of like, watching and reading news every day about like, what the new thing was happening in Europe or the UK or whatever. I went and bought books about previous pandemics and plagues. I went and bought books about previous constitutional crises in the United States. I went and bought books about, you know, the cholera plague in 1793 and what George Washington did to handle it and why nobody believed him and nobody wanted to stay home either. And you start to realize that none of these problems that we have in society are new or particularly novel or unique. And none of them caused the end of the world to happen. So, you know, take a chill pill.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I think we all, I mean, most people, if they know any history at all, it's all from like World War II forward and that's it, right? That's all they know.

• 26:34Mark Manson?

  If that at this point.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Moving along, journaling.

• 26:37Mark Manson?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna do depends, but I'm gonna do it because I, I think it's probably properly rated. I think people value journaling quite a bit and I think it is genuinely helpful. There are a lot of interventions or practices that have very real downsides. There's like potential for abuse or misuse. I think journaling is probably one of the safest things that you can do that is probably going to be net positive 99% of the time. It's not always going to be super useful. Like there, there have definitely been times in my life that I've journaled and I'm like, I don't really feel like I'm getting a whole lot out of it. But there are other times in my life that I've journaled that I'm like, God, this is so helpful. Just like getting your thoughts on the paper, getting clarity around the stuff that you're thinking and feeling,

• 27:20Mark Manson?

  being able to go back and look at stuff that you wrote like four or five years ago, seeing the stuff you were concerned about at the time, seeing how far you've come. I think it's all really, really useful. So thumbs up on journaling and, and I think I would say it's properly rated because people understand the benefits of it, but you don't see this hype and like hysteria around journaling that you do around some other things that I'm sure we're gonna get to.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. For one, I think it's harder. So people don't hype it up. You know, it's like, oh psychedelics, all you gotta do is take a drug and you're, you know, gonna be all of a sudden changed, but you're not. Is there a certain kind of journaling though, that you think is more useful than, than others?

• 27:59Mark Manson?

  That's a great question. So I, I have seen, there are a lot of journals on the market that, for lack of a better term, they just seem a little bit self-indulgent to me. You know, when we were putting together the subtle art journal, I bought maybe 10 or 20 journals on the market and kind of looked through them. And I was a little bit appalled by how many of them, particularly the ones marketed to women, I have to say, how many of them were like, what are your three favorite foods? What is your favorite vacation? Who's your best friend? You know, it's like, it's stuff you ask like a six-year-old. And I think the best journals are the ones that, that force you to ask difficult questions of yourself and confront.

• 28:41Mark Manson?

  Uncomfortable situations in your life. So I would simply look at journals that that do that, that probe more into your feelings, that ask questions like, you know, what is something that you are unsure of at the moment? And why do you think you're unsure of it? Or what is some something you have said recently that you kind of regret? Is there something you can do about that? You know, like, stuff that's a little bit more personal and emotional and serious and not just like, you know, write down 10 awesome things about yourself today.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:17Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:18Mark Manson?

  It's, that's probably not helping a whole lot.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  I heard a musician one time talk about how he would journal, and he's been journaling since he was a teenager. And he would go back, he's like, if I want to, he's in his 30s, I think now, he's like, if I want to write a song that's about being a pissed off 21 year old or something like that, I go back to those journals and I see what that pissed off 21 year old was thinking. I was like, oh, that's good. That's, that's a good.

• 29:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  That's a good sales pitch for journaling.

• 29:43Mark Manson?

  I will say, the older I get, the more I wish I had journaled when I was younger. Because I've journaled in sporadic periods, you know, so there were a couple of years when I was a teenager, there were a couple of years when I was in my 20s, and I've done it on and off throughout my 30s. Every time I go back and look at stuff that I wrote, you know, 10, 20 years ago, I'm like, fuck, like, I could just read this all day. It's so fascinating.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  It's no, it's great. It's great when you come across something too that you wrote, and you're like, god damn, that was good. That was actually good.

• 30:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, you're like, that was pretty, that was pretty smart. Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:17Mark Manson?

  And then you turn the page, you're like, oh, my god.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  But the cringe is good, too. As we discussed that before, the cringe is good, too.

• 30:24Mark Manson?

  Cringe is underrated.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Cold plunges and saunas.

• 30:28Mark Manson?

  Ooh, okay, I'm excited about this one. I'm gonna go.

• 30:33Mark Manson?

  Both underrated on saunas, overrated on cold plunges. These two get combined a lot because people like to do them together. Give you an idea of how funny LA is and why it's so easy to be healthy in LA. So in New York, people's idea of like hanging out is going and drinking somewhere. And in LA, people's idea of hanging out is doing saunas and cold plunges together. So I can't tell you how many times I've like texted somebody and be like, you want to hang out? And they're like, yeah, you want to do sauna cold plunge? Like, yeah, sure. So both of these kind of became popular around the same time, a few years ago with Huberman and Rhonda Patrick and a few other people.

• 31:13Mark Manson?

  What's interesting is like, I think as more data has come in, the data on saunas and heat exposure is very good and continues to be very, very good. It's great for longevity. It's great for heart health. It's great for immune response. It's great for all of these things. The data on cold plunges is not great. The studies that I've seen at least, the sample size is very small and it's very homogeneous. You know, it tends to be like, you know, 13 athletes did cold plunges for a week and this is what happened. The data around cold plunges is a little bit more suspect, but part of my rating on these two is because I own both of these. I have a sauna, I have a cold plunge.

• 31:58Mark Manson?

  The sauna is amazing. You turn it on, you can turn it on from your phone. Like I can be like sitting here in the studio and turn it on now and like go hop in the sauna after the, the show and it's like, get a great sweat in. I can be in there, I can get some email done, listen to a podcast, do whatever. It's very relaxing. It's a, it's a really nice, it's a good way to decompress. So you can do a little meditation in there. Big ups on the sauna. The cold plunge is such a pain in the ass. Like you don't think about this, but you're dealing with water, water that sits in the same spot for days and days and days. So you have to constantly clean it or you have to leave it running like 24/7. Refrigerator on it is loud as fuck.

• 32:41Mark Manson?

  So like you've either got this loud motor running in your backyard 24/7. Like I, I, I can honestly say I've spent more time cleaning my cold plunge than I've spent in it. And

• 32:55Mark Manson?

  Cause you get in for like two to three minutes and then you're done. But then every week you have to spend like 30 minutes fucking cleaning the thing, replacing the water, adding like alkali, balancing the pH. It is such a pain in the ass. It's not fun to do. You feel great after you've done it, but honestly, if I could go back, I wouldn't buy one. So overrated on the cold plunge.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  I, I feel horrible for you, Mark. That sounds awful. Your life is.

• 33:22Mark Manson?

  I know, man. Come at me, Huberman bros. So I'm waiting for the Huberman bros to come in and be like, you just stopped doing it, right? You don't understand. You gotta, see, the way you gotta do it is blah.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Well, you're right. You do feel amazing after one of those. It does, it feels great. If that's what you're going for, go for it. Yeah.

• 33:39Mark Manson?

  You do, but it's, I think a lot of that is that it just, it releases a lot of adrenaline and adrenaline fucking hypes you up like a motherfucker. Releases endorphins too, which makes you feel good, but like, there's a lot of things that release endorphins that aren't necessarily good for you. And so it's, I'm skeptical, there's not really a whole lot of good long-term data on it. And like I said, a lot of the, the studies that people reference are like not great studies. With the heat exposure stuff, like Scandinavian's been doing it for like a hundred years. So like, you can actually go look and see like, this guy does a sauna every day and this guy does a sauna once a week and this guy never does a sauna. And you just see how, when they die and what they die of.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Right. Now I'm a big proponent of the heat exposure stuff because I've been doing hot yoga for a few months now and my God, yeah, it's awesome. And it's one of those things too, I just, I really look forward to it. So it's super sustainable for me anyway. So on my off days, when I'm not working out, I'll go do hot yoga and it's, I'm just like, yes. I don't know, there's a lot of the claims around that too. It's like you sweat out toxins and stuff. I'm like, I don't know about that.

• 34:42Mark Manson?

  Ah, yeah. Yeah. Toxins.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Just, it feels great. I mean, activating your sweat glands too, I think is just a good thing.

• 34:50Mark Manson?

  It's good to get your heart rate up. That's, that's really what most of this boils down to is that it's, it's good to get your heart rate up and create a, a stress response, like a modest stress response in the body periodically. It's just good for you. So anyway.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Similar theme here, psychedelics.

• 35:08Mark Manson?

  Depends.

• 35:10Mark Manson?

  Which I think a lot of people are going to interpret this as me being a hater, but it's not at all. As someone who's done a lot of psychedelics when he was much younger, had a whale of a good time. I like, I can't hate on psychedelics. I think they're awesome. I think they should be legal. And I do think, you know, the research around the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics is really, really exciting. It's pretty, especially like the stuff around PTSD is like, it's incredible. But what people don't understand is that these are controlled clinical trials with

• 35:48Mark Manson?

  patients who have deep-seated mental health issues, very intransigent depression issues, very severe PTSD issues. What worries me is when I go somewhere, either here in LA, Bay Area, New York, Austin, and people are just like microdosing every other day to optimize their health, right? This, this comes back to, to my old like, there's bad to okay interventions and there's okay to great interventions. You know, the okay to great is like the optimizers. Those are the cold plunge people. Those are the people

• 36:28Mark Manson?

  who are like, I want the 1% edge so I can, you know, start my side hustle or make my business more profitable. That's a completely different category than the bad to okay intervention. But those two things get lumped into the same categories. They, they all get lumped into mental health, personal development, self-help, et cetera. So, all of the research on the incredible profound effects of psychedelics and, and the effects that it can have on mental health, all of it is in the bad to okay category. All of it is with people who are in a very dark and bad place and getting them to a place that is okay. It's also done with

• 37:09Mark Manson?

  trained professionals, clinicians, people who have spent their entire career working with this stuff. That's not to say that psychedelics can't help take you from okay to great. That is possible. The research around that is much spottier. It's much more inconsistent. There's not, there's much less of it being done. And the research around stuff like microdosing is, it's just like nonexistent. It's basically a placebo. So I would say if you are somebody who struggles with a very serious mental health issue, psychedelics are something to be very curious and potentially excited about. If you are already a high functioning individual, who is simply looking for that next thing to give you a 1% edge

• 37:52Mark Manson?

  and hope you fucking crush your morning routine or whatever. I don't necessarily think it's appropriate to look in this area. Or if you do, just like understand that what you're doing is like mostly just for fun. It's mostly a hobby. And if you get some like profound insight or side benefits from it, great. Awesome. You know, like I said, I did a bunch of them. I had a couple of trips that were very profound and meaningful for me. But I definitely don't necessarily think it was like, you know, it didn't like 180 my life or anything like that. Last thing I was going to say, and this is super important for the depends. This never gets talked about.

• 38:32Mark Manson?

  There is a small minority of people who have very, very intense negative reactions to psychedelics. And it rarely gets discussed. It rarely gets talked about, but it happens and it exists. It tends to be people who are predisposed to a certain category of mental illness. But it happens. And if you search online and you look for blogs and articles, like you will find people who, who did a bunch of psychedelics and it like completely fucked up their life. And it took them years to recover and some of them still haven't recovered. So I'm not saying that I'm not trying to be like finger waggy and scare people away from it. It's just, you can't just talk about the positive part of an intervention without talking about the negative.

• 39:17Mark Manson?

  So there is a very small minority of people who do have negative reactions to it. I think it's important to be aware of those and understand the types of people that have those negative reactions and just be informed before you like. Run off the Burning Man and fucking, I don't know, do whatever they do with Burning Man.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  No, for sure. I, I think too, one of the, um, you, you talk about the going from bad to okay, okay to great. I, I get a little concerned when I see some of the data coming out of these studies. The results are very similar to like the, um, antidepressants and anti-anxiety medicines that came out in the eighties. We're seeing like 70, 80% success rate in those early trials. I think it was because they were using these trials on people who were, you know, majorly depressed or had real serious problems and these interventions helped them a lot. And then it started, we started, you know, prescribing these medicines to people who weren't quite as bad. And so they're not quite as effective then.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  I see a similar parallel to that right now. I don't know if there's anything to it, but it just, it kind of concerns me a little bit that they're part of the hype around that is maybe getting generalized a little too much.

• 40:25Mark Manson?

  This actually raises two really good side points. One is selection bias, which is selection bias happens when you experiment on a non-random group of people, right? So it's like right now, all the trials being done on psychedelics are being done on people with very intense mental illnesses. That, those people are not representative of the general population, so we can't generalize the results to the general population. The second one, which is also, doesn't get talked about a whole lot. Every psychiatric medication or intervention that I, at least I think every, has lost efficacy over time. And I think some of that is what you just described, is that

• 41:06Mark Manson?

  it starts with the worst cases and slowly moves to the milder cases. And then at some point just starts getting over prescribed and

• 41:13Mark Manson?

  starts having no effect. But what's interesting is there also might be a little bit of a, you know, there's this concept of the expectation effect of like, when something is rare and new and special, people tend to have higher expectations for it because it hasn't been tried before. And when something is very commonplace and has very mixed results across a large population, people's expectations lower. And your expectations when going into any psychological intervention affects the results of that intervention. Because the human mind's just fucking crazy like that. So that's the other thing to keep in mind.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Good one. Good one. Oh, Mark. God.

• 41:55Mark Manson?

  God.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  For the record, Mark came up with these.

• 42:03Mark Manson?

  I don't know what you're talking about, Drew. No idea what we're doing. I will preface this by saying I am atheist and not religious. I'm going to say underrated on God. And keep in mind that I am saying this as a practice or habit or intervention for

• 42:23Mark Manson?

  mental health or personal development purposes. When you look at religious populations or highly religious people, they tend to live longer, they tend to have better relationships. They tend to commit fewer crimes. They tend to get divorced less often. And what's interesting too, is I believe the more religious the group, the higher they index on most of those things. That's absolutely fascinating. The rub here is to bring back the selection bias, right? Is there's, there's two ways to look at that. Either A, religion causes people to become happier, have better relationships, live longer, et cetera.

• 43:04Mark Manson?

  The other way to look at it is that people who tend to be very happy and have good relationships are very drawn to religious communities. That would be the selection bias argument is that people who tend to be a little bit more disagreeable, skeptical, are on average unhappier and don't live as long. And they also happen to not be attracted to religious communities. So it's not that, I don't think we can say that religion causes people to be happier and healthier and all those things. But there's certainly a lot of evidence suggesting that. I also just think, and maybe this is some of my bias as somebody who grew up in a religious community. As I've gotten older, I really, I look back and I really admire the community aspect,

• 43:49Mark Manson?

  especially in this day and age where it's so hard to build a sense of community in the world. I kind of look back at the church community that I grew up in. And even though I fucking hated church and didn't believe any of it, I kind of envy what my parents had with their, their group of friends at their church. It was a really cool thing to have those people come together like that. So I think in, in, in the world today where the arguably the biggest crisis of all is lack of.

• 44:21Mark Manson?

  Community and connection among people within society. It's hard for me to not say that that religious communities are aren't underrated.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Dude, as a kid, did you ever do church camp, like a summer camp or anything? Those are the best.

• 44:34Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Those are a good time.

• 44:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I, well, I had one when I was a teenager. I loved it when I was a teenager.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:43Mark Manson?

  Jesus camp as a kid was not fun.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. When you got older, like, yeah, you get the teenage, like, then you're doing cool activities and yeah.

• 44:51Mark Manson?

  And people are just nice. I don't know. It's, this was the funny thing is like, as a rule, teenagers are just fucking mean people. And, uh, and I was not a cool kid in high school, so a lot of my peers were mean to me. But then you go to Jesus camp and everybody's so nice. They're so fucking friendly and nice and there's no like, there's not the cool kids and the jocks and the nerds. Like, it's just, everybody's nice to each other. And so it's funny because even though, like I said, I was atheist, I didn't believe in any of it. Even after I stopped going to church, uh, I would still go, go to those camps when I was in high school. Cause I'm like, people are cool. They're like really nice. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna get like judged for my hair or made fun of for my shirt.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Maybe get a like water ski too, or something like that. I don't know. They always have these like really not religious, anything related to, you know, that.

• 45:42Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah, dude. You'd like, you play capture the flag and like builds, build like crazy go karts and it's fun. It's just good wholesome fun.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  So you don't think necessarily that maybe if the causal direction is that people, um, get into religion and then it makes them happier. Is, is religion just the opium of the masses, you know? Is it, uh, is it just a salve for, um, a lot of other problems?

• 46:12Mark Manson?

  I personally think, and I guess this is like where I would differ from Sam Harris, is like, I personally think that religious thinking is simply a part of the human condition and afflicts all of us to a certain degree. Some of us fight very hard against it and develop a little bit of a resistance to it. But religious thinking is an inherent part of human nature. And basically it either gets applied to some sort of traditional religion or it gets applied to a government, politics, which I would argue is worse. Than a religion, or it gets applied to something super fucked up like a cult.

• 46:55Mark Manson?

  Or some like scammy business, multi-level marketing thing.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Oh, here's a good one, gratitude.

• 47:04Mark Manson?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with it depends. Yeah, I personally think this is overrated, but you know, you, we've talked about this on the show before. I think there's a lot of things like gratitude that if you're the type of person who tends to take everything for granted and just tends to be kind of a selfish person. I think gratitude is a really, really good exercise to kind of train your brain out of that. But if you're not, then I think it's kind of superfluous. Like I, I've never really felt, I've tried gratitude journaling and gratitude meditations and all this stuff. And like, I definitely don't feel like I get a whole lot out of it, but I can see why some people do.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Just, I've never been able to connect with it. I've even tried like, okay, sit down, write your three things, really think about them, everything like that. It's just never has like, seemed to generalize to any other part of my life very well. But I think part of that is because I'm just a fairly grateful person to begin with. I can, like I said, I earlier, if I'm standing in line somewhere, sometimes I'm just like, oh, wow, I'm alive. This is awesome. This is great. I'm experiencing a moment right now. This is amazing. I don't need, I don't need to sit down and write the three things out and force myself to be grateful. So I think you're right. It depends on who you are. We got some flack for this one too before. So people were like, this is bullshit. My gratitude journal like saves me. And I'm like, that, I'm sure it does. That's great. It's a tool. Use it. If it works, use it.

• 48:31Mark Manson?

  If there's a simple takeaway from this entire episode, and this is true by the way. The simple takeaway is that nothing works for everybody and.

• 48:42Mark Manson?

  Nothing that works for you is gonna work all the time. Like, it's not a single intervention. You can dig up studies and data on everything, everything. Nothing works all the time. And nothing, and the things that do work, don't work forever. So try things. When you find something that works, write it till it stops working and then try something else. That's, that's the name of the game with this stuff. There's no like, final answer. That's it. Cool. Well, this was fun. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed, um, you know, my Nick Cage and Will Ferrell. Do you really like Nick Cage that much? It's, it's embarrassing. You, you, you are really into Nick Cage?

• 49:25Mark Manson?

  Dude, Raising Arizona and Leaving Las Vegas, like, like The Rock in, uh, Con Air. You know, he kinda started getting a little bit goofy with the action movies, but, so he won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas. It is incredible. It's an absolutely incredible movie, incredible performance. Nick Cage is a legit top actor. He just, I think he just likes money, so he keeps doing stupid movies, movies for a lot of money. Uh, shout out Nick Cage if you ever wanna come on the pod. Happy to have you.

• 49:56Mark Manson?

  That's it, everybody. Be sure to leave a review, subscribe, follow the show. We will be back next week. Say goodbye, Drew. Goodbye, Drew. Till next time, everybody. Peace.