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Music: https://www.purple-planet.com
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Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:
You can find Alexis Rockley at her website, and on Twitter @AlexisRockley, and on Instagram @AlexisRockley.
And the original thread that went viral:
Let me be clear (a thread):
Those "all over the place" feelings you've been having? They are symptoms of stress, NOT personal failures of yours.
Do you feel FLAKEY + INCONSISTENT? That's b/c your brain doesn't know what news to brace for next, or what next month will hold.
— Alexis Rockley (@alexisrockley) April 14, 2020
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Transcript
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[music]
Sarah Wendell: Hello there! Thank you for inviting me to keep you company. I’m Sarah Wendell; this is Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, episode number 411. My guest today is Alexis Rockley. Alexis is a business coach and the author of the book Find Your F*ckyeah. She recently went viral with a tweet about the cognitive exhaustion of the quarantimes, and in the course of making an argument against the constant push towards increased work and productivity and leveling up, she talks with me about working with your brain to find a happier space for yourself, and she offers practical tips to help you and your tired brain slow down and breathe and soothe yourself a little bit. I will have a link to the original thread and plus her website and other places where you can find her work, but I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope that you do as well.
I have a compliment, and I love to start off episodes with compliments. Makes me really happy!
To Stephanie W.: You are the person who most people want to sit next to in any meeting, gathering – from a respectful distance – or even on the bus, because you radiate warmth and good humor, and you usually share your snacks.
If you would like a compliment of your very own, have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. The Patreon community keeps the show going every week and makes sure every episode receives a transcript, which makes every episode accessible to everyone! So thank you to our Patreon community for being awesome. I’m also telling the Patreon community a lot about upcoming guests and interviews, so if you’d like to suggest questions for some of the interviews I have coming up, have a look at our Patreon and join the fun!
I also have a game to tell you about. If you are looking for a fun way to pass time while engaging your brain – this is all about brains this week – and enjoying a fun and adorable story, your answer is Best Fiends. Best Fiends is a casual game that anyone can play, but it is made for adults. Each level is part of a larger story world. It involves a puzzle, so you solve and then you advance to the next one. Leveling up is a lot of fun, and I can attest it’s really difficult to stop once you start playing. Each puzzle solved gives you that really satisfying feeling, because each level includes new characters and a new portion of the story, which I really liked because they worked with me; these characters work with you to solve the next puzzle. It’s like assembling a team of really friendly, adorable creatures who help you beat the next level! It’s really fun. You can engage your brain with fun puzzles and collect tons of cute characters. With over a hundred million downloads, this five-star-rated mobile puzzle game is a must-play. Download Best Fiends free on the Apple App Store or Google Play. That’s Friends without the R: Best Fiends.
This episode is also brought to you by Ritual, which is a daily multivitamin that was obsessively researched for women! It is vegan-friendly, sugar-free, non-GMO, gluten-free, and allergen-free, and all of the sources for the nine nutrients inside are provided for you to read and research on your own. Ritual is designed to be an easy way to build a daily – wait for it – ritual! Get it? A subscription box of vitamins arrives on your doorstep; the next bottle arrives just as you finish the last one. It’s only a dollar a day to have your daily multivitamin delivered to you, which is pretty nifty. I really like the delivery, because that way I don’t have to remember, especially since we go to the store once a week, and I don’t know about you, but I will forget the thing that I need that is in the bathroom when I’m doing the grocery list in the kitchen. It’s a spatial memory thing, but this is automatic! I don’t have to remember. And I like the fact that I know exactly what’s in each capsule and why it’s there. Ritual is offering you ten percent off your first three months. Fill in the gaps with Essential for Women by visiting ritual.com/SARAH – S-A-R-A-H – to start your ritual today. That’s ten percent off your first three months at ritual.com/SARAH.
A quick note that Alexis was having some roofing work done during this interview, so you might hear some banging in the background. That’s all that is. Do not be alarmed; it’s not you.
In the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast, I will have links to all of the books we talk about and also some breathing techniques and links to options to help you calm and self-soothe your-, self-soothe yourself. Self-soothe? Yeah, soothe yourself soothfully. Basically, we’re going to talk about being stressed and how to care for your tired brain.
So let’s do this thing. On with the podcast with Alexis Rockley.
[music]
Alexis Rockley: Oh boy. It’s always fun to try to summarize yourself into a tiny paragraph or blurb, but –
Sarah: Right? You need a short –
[Crosstalk]
Alexis: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Alexis: The punchiest version I can give you of who I am and what I do right now is that I am Alexis Rockley. I am the author of the book Find Your F*ckyeah, and I am a positive psychology certified business coach, so I help creatives and entrepreneurs essentially launch or build or pivot their businesses or careers using the tools of positive psychology? And I’m also, like, a, a digital creator. I’m starting to like the word “edutainer”?
[Laughter]
Alexis: I mean, like, I make videos and podcast episodes and different bits of information to help people understand their brain so that they can like being alive, because that’s the biggest theme that I have taken from my recent studies into psychology: when you understand your brain, you can like your life, and that seems to be what everyone wants, so – [laughs] – that’s what I do.
Sarah: One of the things I really like about a lot of your public-facing information – your website, your Twitter feed, your Instagram – is that you advocate very much working with the things that your brain does. Like, your brain is trying to help you, and we are so conditioned to work against what our brains are trying to do.
Alexis: [Laughs] Yes! Very much so. Very much so. I think we – I think the thing that a lot of people have responded really vocally to that I’ve been sharing the last couple months is around productivity and this feeling –
Sarah: Yes!
Alexis: – that we have to constantly be doing something that is productive or making us money or doing something for society, and if not, there’s this new version of productivity that is improving yourself, and I’m hyperaware of it because I’m in a self-help space. I’m in the “health and wellness industry,” and it’s a little weird realizing that we’re essentially commodifying our existence in various formats. It’s not, it’s not really a, a default human way of being? It’s a very capitalist focus, and it’s exhausting, so I like talking about what really smart people and scientists and researchers have found about the brain and why we get tired, why we don’t want to be productive all the time, why we feel the way we do under stress, and helping people see that that’s not only human, it’s not a personal failure of theirs, because we’re, we just have brains: they’re not perfect, they’re not machines, you know?
Sarah: And your brain operates on level that, on levels that you yourself may not be conscious of, right?
Alexis: Absolutely. Yeah, that, I think that was probably the most shocking bit of information that I absorbed from going back to school for my certification in positive psychology: realizing that you have more than one brain? They, of course, are completely interlinked and working together constantly, but to understand that the subconscious brain is not this, like, sub-basement of your, your existence with, like, deep repressed desires, kind of the way that Freud depicted it for us in the past, that your subconscious brain is this massive, constantly changing network of connected neurons in your brain that are actively running your life by default, and you don’t have to be conscious of them to continue to function, and it’s obvious when you think about, like, the way that you can drive a car, right? Like, if you are doing a million things at one time seamlessly because you have this subconscious brain – in my book, I refer to it as autopilot, ‘cause it helps me distinguish –
Sarah: Yes!
Alexis: – the patterns?
Sarah: Yes.
Alexis: But you’re constantly operating on autopilot, on default mode, because you evolved that way.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: And what’s interesting is that when you, when you realize you have also evolved a conscious brain that can do significantly less but still have an impact and you bring certain subconscious behaviors or thoughts to the surface, you can actually change them, and that’s one of the beautiful things of having a human brain. [Laughs] So realizing you have more than one brain is basically the very first mindboggling bit of information I like to give people.
Sarah: I think a lot about my autopilot because I notice myself that when I lose my autopilot, I go straight to Super Irritability Land.
Alexis: Mm.
Sarah: Your autopilot is very comforting, and one of the things that’s happening right now in what I’ve been calling the quarantimes is that we have all lost most if not all of our autopilots. Everything is different, and we have to be conscious of everything, and there’s no –
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: – there’s no autopilot! When you, when you tweeted back in, in mid-April and you went rather viral, did you, did you expect that to happen?
Alexis: [Laughs] I absolutely did not. No.
[Laughter]
Alexis: I’ve, I’ve –
Sarah: Surprise!
Alexis: – I’ve joked with a friend of mine that I truly would have been satisfied creating really meaningful content and information for, like, the couple hundred people who had been listening to me or following me up until that point. Like, I would have just kept doing that forever and it was perfectly fine, but you know what? A lot of people resonated with something, so cool! [Laughs]
Sarah: Yes. And it was also a comforting message –
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: – which is, I think, very important, because there, there was a lot of, of, you can do this, and you can improve yourself, and you can level up every area of your life while you’re in the quarantines!
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Um, uh, no!
Alexis: [Laughs]
Sarah: No! For goodness’ sakes! Now, you called it a slow burn stress in your, in your thread, and –
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: – the idea that you, we are slowly low-grade burning out very much resonated with me, and also with, with trying to help my, my children change to online learning and –
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: – figuring out how to redefine what they do to self-soothe when we’re, when our options are so much more limited ‘cause we’re all in a house together? And –
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – in your thread, you wrote about what our brains are doing to try to help us with this stress and how it seemed sort of obvious when you lined it all up, but I, I really didn’t think of it that way. What are some of the things that our brains are doing to try to help us with this ongoing multiple months of, of slow burn?
Alexis: Well, it’s all very surprising, that’s for sure. I, I think the –
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: – first thing I have to mention before I sort of list some of the things that our brains are doing is to clarify that the word stress itself is a loaded term that means a lot of different things in English –
Sarah: Yes.
Alexis: – and stress itself, when we talk about being stressed or experiencing stress or when scientists use the term stressors, it’s all gotten tangled up in this idea that this is like there’s a bunch of bad things that happen to people in bodies, and then they feel bad or they suffer, and it’s the concept of stress, but that’s not really what scientists mean when they’re talking about stress. And stress, the more research that’s done on the brain, the more they understand that stress is actually very subjective and a way, it’s essentially the way you, your brain and your body receive information in the world, and it doesn’t –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – necessarily mean it’s negative. So external circumstances that are outside your control are not always going to have a negative impact, but if you perceive them that way or they have a physical harm to your body, then, yes, it becomes a stressor. So I have to say all that science-y stuff to clarify that, like, the stress isn’t happening to us necessarily? It’s not default, or it’s not guaranteed that this has to be a difficult time for everyone, because each person experiences very, very different things, different lives, but –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – you know, just needed to mention that. So anyway –
Sarah: Absolutely.
Alexis: – generally speaking, the way that our brain, people will probably recognize our brain is helping us cope with stress is by narrowing our focus significantly. So during – the easiest way to describe this is, like, classic fight or flight – so when you’re experiencing fight or flight response, you’re scared of something, you’re afraid, you’re angry, you experience physiological symptoms: your heart starts racing, your breath gets more shallow –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – all of these things are in your body.
Also, you can hear the roof work that’s happening and the bus outside. [Laughs] Like, I’m sure you’re enjoying all these sounds.
Sarah: Yeah, ambient, ambient visit! It’s great!
Alexis: Yeah! So – right, so stress. So we experience these physiological symptoms, and what’s going on is that our brain is essentially perceiving that we need to respond to something happening, and it’s giving us the energy to do so. So it’s giving us a surge of cortisol to increase our heart rate so that it’s easier for us to pump more oxygen to our brain so, and to our muscles, so we can, you know, flee the scene or fight, and that stress, the stress response can happen in much slower, less intense ways and still have an effect on our brain, and one of those things is a narrowed focus. When your brain is preparing you to fight or to flee, you have to only pay attention to the danger in front of you or to the circumstances in front of you, and so –
Sarah: Right.
Alexis: – negative emotions and fight or flight narrow your focus to look at that one thing, which is, how do I get out of here? And that’s really useful in survival mode, but in a slow burn fight or flight, as I call it, you continue to have a narrowed focus because you’re continuing to perceive danger. Your brain is continuing to perceive danger, and so it’s trying to always pay attention to help you get out of that danger, but that means that you don’t see as many possibilities as you might have seen in a more relaxed state. And there’s lots of research on how positive emotions show that they create a space for people to be more creative, to solve problems better, to think more clearly, to make better decisions, and negative emotions have the opposite effect. So our brains are trying to help us by narrowing our focus, but it means that we might feel foggy or fatigued. It means we might feel distracted easily; we might feel sort of suddenly numb or apathetic to previous goals that we cared deeply about, and this is all –
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Alexis: – a shorter – it’s sort of like your brain making you more shortsighted to help you cope with the danger, and one of the easiest ways that I describe this is, your brain is trying to make you flexible, but you are –
Sarah: Yes.
Alexis: – perceiving it in a culture of, that glorifies productivity as being lazy or being all over the place or being up and down or flaky or irrational. And that’s not to give people, like, a Get Out of Jail Free card on, you know, shirking obligations or hurting other people; that’s not the case here? It’s just that your brain wants you to be flexible because it doesn’t know what’s coming next under circumstances of stress, and so that means that you will be up and down, you will care about certain things and then not care about certain things, you will feel focused one day and foggy the next, and the best thing you can do is help your brain and body regain stability with a couple different techniques around self-soothing or self-care.
Sarah: Now, you, you mentioned the idea that you would have a, a, like a, a really good day and then you have a bad day, and I definitely notice that’s the case for me. There are some days where my brain’s like, let’s do the things! And then the next day my brain is like, you know, let’s not do anything, ‘cause it’s –
Alexis: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah.
Sarah: – it’s a lot. And I also know, from having gone through the experience of grief, that grief is exhausting.
Alexis: Hmm, yes.
Sarah: Like, constantly managing big emotions generally makes me tired!
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: And there’s a lot of big emotions, as well as this low, this, this sort of low-grade, constant set of stressors that are making us focus on the short term. There’s also really big, scary emotions all the time that make you tired –
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: – and you wrote in your thread that your brain is burning energy ten times faster than usual, and is that just processing all of the things that we’re dealing with?
Alexis: Yes, and I should also clarify there that the, I do not have a scientific paper to back up the number ten times?
Sarah: Right.
Alexis: So, because I am really hyperspecific about the data I provide, so I need to mention that now, that that was an expression I was using to say, like, your brain is burning energy extremely fast. That is proven, but I don’t have data for the number ten times. Just, just so your listeners know.
Sarah: I appreciate the scientific sourcing!
[Laughter]
Alexis: I just, I’m really, I’m really particular about it, so I wanted to make sure it’s mentioned, but –
Sarah: Totally get it.
Alexis: Yeah, so I think one of the best ways to describe this is to use some phrasing that the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett uses in her book How Emotions Are Made, which is a book I’ve been reading recently, and I highly recommend it; it’s excellent. It’s on the cutting edge of neuroscience and emotions right now. But the reason that our brains are burning energy faster and why emotions are so exhausting, both physically and mentally, is because our bodies and brains are completely interlinked at all times, and –
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: – we have what she calls a body budget, a, a body-balancing budget, and so your brain is constantly assessing external circumstances; potential dangers, both perceived mentally or physically; and then just your general energy level – the state of your heart rate; your, the glucose you’re burning – all these things all at once; and determines how much resting you’re going to need to do, how much recharging you’ll need to do, how much food you’ll need to eat to get your body budget back to normal, and when you’re grieving or when you’re stressed or when you’re experiencing really deep, heavy, complicated emotions, that is physically and mentally draining in a very literal way, and so it, it can be taxing because your body is forever trying to balance the budget, and that is an evolved process that normally is really, really helpful. It’s always helpful, but it’s draining. It’s a draining thing to experience.
Sarah: Yes, it is very draining! You, you also wrote in your thread that your brain, one of the things when you talked about narrowing focus, you mentioned specifically the prefrontal cortex, which you described as the part that juggles complex tasks and planning.
Alexis: Mm.
Sarah: And we don’t have a lot of complex tasks and planning ability when our focus is exactly on what’s in front of us and we’re living hour to hour or day to day, or trying to fill hour to hour to day to day and we can’t do all the things that we normally do. That particular part of your brain is not something I know a lot about, so what is, what does the prefrontal cortex do?
Alexis: So, you know, it’s kind of funny, because for almost hundreds of years now, scientists have been trying to, like, pin down exactly one task to one location in the brain, because that’s kind of how humans are: we like categorizing things and being like, this is this thing’s job.
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: And that’s part of why, for the longest time, we’ve though that, like, the amygdala is related to fear or creates fear, or, you know, it’s like the, the stereotype we all kind of heard growing up that, like, the left brain is logical and the right brain is creative! Right, it’s like a super simplification –
Sarah: Yes!
Alexis: – of an area. So recent neuroscience, because especially of developments of the fMRI machine – so functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, where you can take pictures of a, of a person thinking in real time without harming them; you can see what’s going on in their brain – that technology has highlighted to us that it’s not as simple as just a single location in the brain with a single task. So even saying, like, my mentioning the prefrontal cortex sort of having functionality pause during, during stress is accurate, but a massive reduction – [laughs] – of information?
Sarah: Right, well, it is, it is Twitter. I mean, you kind of have to –
Alexis: Right! Yeah.
Sarah: – distill –
[Crosstalk]
Sarah: Exactly!
[Laughter]
Alexis: But, but to explain, like, a, a loose idea of what the prefrontal cortex, we know it does – we don’t know, it’s not the only thing it does, but we know that it is very involved in future-focused planning. So the, my way of describing this is mental time travel. So, like, your ability as a human to experience a remembered past or an imagined future, your ability to draw up experiences from the past and picture them really vividly in your mind’s eye and to plan ahead, to see your calendar and go, oh, well, that’s, in three weeks, this is what’s happening, and to actually have a visualization of that and to understand time in this broader perspective. The prefrontal cortex does a lot of stuff related to “higher thinking,” and that’s in air quotes? [Laughs]
Sarah: Right.
Alexis: However, it’s not all centralized in that one area. It’s more like we have these massive teams of neural connections, like networks of neurons that are lighting up and passing information at different times, and these networks overlap in different areas, and the prefrontal cortex happens to be the area of your brain that’s the big squiggly bit right at the, at your forehead between your eyebrows, if that’s helpful.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: [Laughs] So that’s that part –
Sarah: Right.
Alexis: – of your brain, but it’s responsible for a whole lot of stuff, and it is affected by stress in that, like I mentioned, narrowed focus. It isn’t nearly as important to the other networks in your brain when you’re experiencing emotional distress or a narrowed focus. It, it just kind of presses Pause, and there’s lots of research showing how the stress response has an effect where your sympathetic nervous system, when it’s activated in fight or flight, will temporarily pause digestion, it’ll pause reproductive functionality. It pauses a whole bunch of stuff and is like, listen, let’s put all those on the back burner; let’s focus on survival mode.
Sarah: Right.
Alexis: And that –
Sarah: Right.
Alexis: – also happens with your prefrontal cortex and planning and thinking.
Sarah: And we’re, we’re not – are we, am I, am I correct in saying that we are not necessarily designed to be in this state for a really long time? We’re supposed to move in and out of this state, right?
Alexis: Yes. And I would add to that that, like, it’s different for each person, as I mentioned previously –
Sarah: Of course.
Alexis: – and also, it isn’t a default. It isn’t a guarantee that, that new, novel, confusing, routine-disrupting experiences do not necessarily have to cause chronic stress. It has to do with many factors, including whether we’re equipped with tools for resilience, whether we know how to help manage our complicated emotions, whether we have resources to handle complicated circumstances, and then on top of that, you know, the bigger systemic issues of, like, are we in physical survival mode on a daily basis? Can we afford to pay our bills? Like, how much trauma have we been through? So it’s not a guarantee that being in this, in these kind of circumstances would cause harm or stress, but –
Sarah: Right.
Alexis: – since so many of us are struggling right now, I can tell you that, like, data does definitively show that chronic stress is very, very bad for the brain and body, and managing it and learning how to deal with it is really important for our, our wellbeing.
Sarah: I know for me personally, there’s a, a noticeable relationship between stress and inflammation –
Alexis: Yes.
Sarah: – and for me, that’s particularly a problem, because I’m allergic anti-inflammatory pain killers, so I can’t take them.
Alexis: Hmm, yeah.
Sarah: So I have to watch my own inflammation response, and I know that when I have a certain amount of things that are really weighing on me, I notice it in completely different physical areas of my body, mostly related –
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: – to inflammation, and it strikes me that it’s even more enraging for me to see all of this sort of constant fear and stress and, affecting people at different levels, and yet we’re, we get this message, as you, as you mentioned earlier, from a, a very capitalist-driven society: nonono! Just keep going; you’re fine.
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: Keep going! This is fine! Is that, is that frustrating for you too?
Alexis: Oh yeah. Absolutely frustrating, and I think, like, you know, there’s always well-intentioned messages of, like, it’s okay! Here’s all the things you could be doing! Here’s a positive way of looking at this, right? Like –
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: – there’s lots of ways, different voices saying a similar message, and depending on the voice you receive, the, you know, the social media account you read, the news article you read, you either can feel attacked or chastised or encouraged. It just depends on the place, you know, the mental state you’re in? But I find it exhausting –
Sarah: Mm-hmm!
Alexis: – because, because honestly, just being a person is exhausting?
Sarah: Yeah!
Alexis: It’s, it’s already exhausting, and change can be really tiring. We didn’t volunteer for the change; we get very irritated about it.
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: Humans hate change unless they instigated it, and in order to instigate change, they usually had to decide they hated the thing that they’re currently dealing with, and that’s why they want to change something? [Laughs] We like –
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: – stability and normalcy, so having all of our routines disrupted, being concerned about paying the bills, being concerned about the health of the people we love is not something we signed up for and therefor is very exasperating, and that’s why we’re so, so many of us are angry to hear, like, do more! Do, do lots more things! Because we were already tired before this started.
Sarah: Yeah. The big question then would be, what can we do to help our tired, stressed brains? Like I said earlier, we’re not, we’re not really taught to work with our brains and recognize the ways in which our brains work on an individual level and how to cope and, and manage the things that make our brains unique. Like each of us is different, and the way we –
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: – respond to things is, is unique, and I noticed that just raising two very different human beings.
Alexis: [Laughs]
Sarah: They respond to things very differently, and I adapt accordingly with my, you know, my parenting style. But I, I’m much less adaptable with myself because, you know, we receive so many messages to be harder and harder on ourselves.
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: What can we do to work with our brains? What are some things that might, you know, help us get along better with our, with our mental copilots?
Alexis: Well, I would say one of the first big things is to understand that your brain is, is a body. It’s part of a body, and just like you would seek out medical attention if you were unable to manage new symptoms of a cold or something going on, you can also seek out medical attention for your brain and realize that it’s normal to pursue counseling or therapy or mental healthcare if you have access to it.
Sarah: Yes.
Alexis: And I say if you have access to it because we all know that it is still prohibitively expensive, specifically in the United States and many other parts of the world, to get mental healthcare. But if you can get access to it or you can check out nonprofit resources like, Open Path Collective is one of my favorite ones to recommend for sliding-scale access to therapy, that would be something to throw out there. Like, if you can be proactive and aggressive about taking care of your mental health and you have the bandwidth and resources, please do it, because this is the time.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Alexis: On a smaller, more daily scale of things we can do, it’s not, you’re, you’re not going to like it – [laughs] – but I’ll, but I’ll say it anyway, and I say that because I imagine most, most of us are, feel good about being productive and, and efficient and getting lots done, but the first piece of advice is to lower our expectations. So, specifically, to lower the expectations that, that we hold ourselves to during periods of mental exhaustion and stress. Thinking about, that it’s okay to do less than we normally do because these are –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – temporarily different circumstances. It’s okay to deliver less than we would normally deliver. It’s okay to communicate that we need to lower deliverables and expectations with our family members, our employers, our clients, things like that. And hand in hand with that is to say extending your timelines is really important? So instead of throwing out the goal that you previously cared about before, you know, experiencing intense stress, right now that, that goal feels unimportant. Maybe it feels like it’s stupid, it’s worthless, it’s never going to work out, or there’s, how in the hell are we going to make that happen in the new world we live in? Rather than deciding that it’s irrelevant and throwing it out, put a pin in it and extend your timeline and give yourself permission to revisit that thing at a later date when you are in a different mental state and when you are not focusing so much of your energy on staying calm and –
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: – staying balanced. And then finally, practicing emotional first aid, which psychologists and therapists call self-soothing, as we’ve mentioned previously, so. These are like, I describe this as like emergency self-care? [Laughs]
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: So instead of it just being maintenance, it’s more like practices you can do to calm yourself down? So over the last couple months, because there’s so many, there’s so much of a need for this information, I’ve been making videos around self-soothing techniques that are –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – accessible and easy. So one of my favorites is a breathing technique called 4-7-8 breathing, and it’s essentially inhaling for four seconds, holding that breath for seven seconds, and exhaling for eight seconds, and then repeating that cycle a few times, maybe three times if you can. And the benefits of this are that slow belly breathing, whether it’s that exact number of seconds or not, all slow belly breathing has a manual flipping the switch for our nervous systems. So they found that when you do deep belly breathing, you’re sending a signal, probably from your vagus nerve into your brain, telling it to switch from the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system mode to the parasympathetic, the one that helps you calm down, the rest and digest? And so just by doing this breathing, you are interrupting a fight-or-flight response and asking your brain to slow down, to comfort you, to restore balance, and this can be done just on a daily basis when you’re not panicked? You know, it can happen just taking a moment, taking a deep breath, but it can also happen when you’re very anxious or worried or stressed out to help switch from fight or flight over to a calmer state of being. So I love that one, 4-7-8 breathing.
And then I’ve two more that I love recommending. So the other technique for self-soothing is called grounding, and really what it is is just dragging your body back into the present moment, because it’s, sort of gets carried away by mental time travel. So you feel sensory experiences of worry or future, potential pain or potential danger, you feel it in real time, and so to help your body come back to the present moment and calm down, you can do the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique, which is moving through each of your senses and listing things that you can see. So five things you can see; four things you can hear; three things you can feel, like your touch –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – two things you can smell; and one thing you can taste. And it’s an, it’s an activity that essentially, just like the first one, interrupts the automatic process of fight or flight or slow-burn stress and brings you back to the present moment. And it won’t instantly make you happy, but it will kind of get you to neutral for a second, and it’s very useful to interrupt a stream of negative thought, I find.
And I have to also mention, though, that technique is very ableist, because not everyone has access to all those sense?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: So I have found that you can, you can still practice this technique by substituting gratitude in for the sense that your body doesn’t have access to? So if you were hearing impaired, for example, then you could list five things you can see and then list four things you’re grateful for, three things –
Sarah: Right.
Alexis: – you can feel, etc. So there’s still a way to utilize this, since gratitude has such a profound impact on your body. I love recommending that one as well.
Sarah: That makes a lot of sense, especially the idea that we, we, like, right now specifically in the, in the quarantimes, are receiving so much information, and everything is, everything is a projection graph. Have you noticed this?
Alexis: [Laughs] Yes, oh my God.
Sarah: Everything is a line graph now.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Like, everything is either a line graph or a bar or some kind of arc. Like, everything has, everything has a parabola in the future –
Alexis: [Laughs]
Sarah: – and we’re, and we’re being asked to constantly assess and, and take in all of this information –
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – and make decisions, and it, it is really easy to be both hyperfocused on right now, and everything is just going to be like this forever, and to just project into the future the way –
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: – we’re feeling right now.
Alexis: Absolutely.
Sarah: And it’s, and it’s gone on for so long, it’s very hard not to think, okay, it’s going to be like this forever, isn’t it?
Alexis: Yeah. I mean, that’s also just a human default to project present experience into the future. That’s part of mental time travel; it’s not, it’s not a –
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: – failure of ours, it’s how we’ve evolved, but it can really, you know, bite you in the ass when – [laughs] – when you’re, like, in the middle of feeling really worried and you are imagining, like, how could I possibly live like this for another –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – year or six months? Where you’re –
Sarah: Right. It, it’s, it’s, it’s incredibly, just grindingly demoralizing –
Alexis: Yeah!
Sarah: – to do that to yourself, but yet I do it all the time. [Laughs]
Alexis: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm!
[music]
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[music]
Sarah: One of the things that I have been doing to self-soothe, which – okay, so I don’t know if everyone had one of these, but when I was very little I had a doll, and I used to rub her dress under my nose, and that was like, you know, you, you see kids like a blanket, and they rub it on their faces. For me –
Alexis: Oh yeah.
Sarah: – it was rubbing my, my, the dress of this doll under my nose, so whenever I think of self-soothing I’m like, where’s dolly? I need, that’s what I need right now!
[Laughter]
Sarah: I need that dress!
Alexis: Yes, you need something comforting.
Sarah: Exactly! One of the things that I’ve been doing every day to sort of say, okay, today is, is very similar to yesterday and very similar to the day before, but today we’re going to, we’re going to make something different. What are we making today? So either I give myself a manicure or I make bread with one of my children or I do something and I create something, even if it’s very, very small.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And I’ve tried very hard to be mindful of the idea, okay, you don’t have to create something; you aren’t creating something just because you have to. It’s a way of being! You know, it’s a way of –
Alexis: Right, right.
Sarah: – engaging with a part of my brain and my body that makes me feel a little better. There’s a lot of things that make it easy to, to advocate, yes! Create something! Absolutely! But I never want to say to somebody – [deep, serious voice] – you must always be creating! Because that’s not fun at all! Is that –
Alexis: Right.
Sarah: Do you have any advice for balancing creation without, I guess compulsion would be the right word?
Alexis: Yeah! I mean, I think that’s a very self-aware perspective, which I appreciate because there are lots of people sharing their experiences – [clears throat] – excuse me – but aren’t being self-aware?
Sarah: Not everything that I do applies unilaterally to everyone else.
Alexis: Right, right. So I think, one of the things that I have been thinking about a lot lately, and this might help with the whole, like, how do you give advice about being creative or doing, doing anything when –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – you don’t know whether people have the bandwidth or, or resources or ability to do something, and will it even help them? I’ve been thinking a lot about boredom, and I actually posted something about this yesterday specifically. So we think of boredom or – we think of boredom culturally as, like, this thing that you only experience if you’re lazy or entitled or –
Sarah: [Laughs] Yes!
Alexis: – like, the worst? Like, if you’re, like, you only get bored if you’re not trying very hard, right? And –
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: – but when you’re in boredom, it’s very easy to feel guilt, to feel shame because you’re like, well, I’m ungrateful. Like, I have such an easy life; how could I possibly be overwhelmed at all my options on a Saturday morning? Or –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – how could I possibly be bored when there are people dying from a pandemic? Or how could I possibly not know what to do with my two hours of free time, because how dare I? And what I have been trying to remind people of, and it’s been helping me a bit, is that there are different kinds of boredom, and boredom isn’t a personal failure necessarily. [Laughs] Boredom is actually more like when your brain doesn’t know what to focus on anymore, and you also are simultaneously experiencing low body energy. So like I said, you have this really connected brain and body network, and when you have low energy in your body but high mental activity and can’t decide on what to focus on, you can feel bored. And one of the suggestions that I’ve been making that’s helping me is to ask yourself whether you feel pressure to create, to do something interesting, to learn something to improve yourself, because that’s the culture you live in and so you need to rush to do, fill your time, or if you, if your brain is actually just notifying you that you need a challenge. Because it could be either-or.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: So if I find myself feeling really, really high energy, I’m like – in my brain – I’m looping through, I’ve got to choose something, I’ve got to do something, I need – I don’t know what to focus on; I don’t know what I should do. I should figure something out; I should, maybe I should work on this project or bake bread or whatever, like the things we were just discussing. But I feel low energy, and I feel disinterested in all of those things and dismissive –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – of those things; then I know it’s a sign that my brain actually needs rest, and so I take it as a sign as mandatory rest time. I have to sit with that boredom and just find a way to do less and be, because I’m, I’m exhausted. I’ve exhausted my attention span. I have more than enough time to get the things done I need to get done, but I’ve clearly exhausted my attention.
Now, if I feel really low mental energy, kind of irritable, pissed off, but my body is restless, I feel physically restless, I want to do something or get out or I want to, like, make a list or something like that, then I usually know that that’s a sign that I need mandatory play. My brain is bored, it wants a challenge, and if I don’t give it a challenge it will invent drama for me to have to deal with.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Alexis: This is what I do.
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: I will drop a grenade in my life, and I will do some dumb thing because I’m looking for a problem to solve, so – all that to say, there’s no right or wrong time to be creative or to rest, but the more we learn to ask ourselves follow-up questions when we’re feeling shitty, the better we can, you know, help our brains out and serve our needs. So there might be a time where, a state of being where creativity, working on a project with your hands, doing something, baking bread with your kids, writing a piece, painting your nails, like those things you mentioned, that might be exactly the kind of creative challenge your brain needs because it’s healthy distraction, and there might be other times where you are telling yourself you need to go do those things, but you have no energy, and it’s okay to mandatory rest and just chill and practice not being productive all the time and give yourself permission to not be productive all the time because you need to recharge that body budget, that body-balancing budget you have. So could be either-or.
Sarah: That makes a lot of sense. So going back to something you mentioned earlier, in the event that someone who’s listening doesn’t quite know about this field, what is positive psychology?
Alexis: Oh yeah, I love that question, ‘cause I always thought it was a scam?
[Laughter]
Alexis: I, I really didn’t know.
Sarah: Call now for some Positive Psychology!
Alexis: Yeah! Like, it feels really self-help-y, and I’m also, like, admittedly very cynical and eye-roll-y about a lot of things? So –
Sarah: Yes. I know all the words to that song.
Alexis: Yeah, I, I, I think that I leaned really hard into data and science before –
[Loud scraping noises]
Alexis: Oh my goodness. [Laughs] Can you hear that?
Sarah: You still have a roof?!
Alexis: Jesus, can you –
Sarah: Did your roof just get taken off the house? [Laughs]
Alexis: I – apparently they’re laying something down up there, so we’ll see how much, how many more words get to come out of my mouth at this point in time. Wow.
So, positive psychology: so positive psychology is a branch of the study of psychology. It is, in fact, a real branch of psychology, and the reason it’s called positive psychology is because, by default, for at least a century, especially in the United States, psychology was the study of mental illness. It was the study of being able to name, define, and treat disorders of the brain. And in the early ‘90s, Martin Seligman, who had recently become president of the American Psychological Association, made this really, like, epic speech for his inauguration as president, basically saying, like, what are we doing? We have, like, nine hundred pages in this DSM manual of diseases, but none of us are studying what makes healthy people healthy and how to give people tools to stay healthy? And everyone was very uncomfortable, and then he continued to make his speech, and ultimately he got a standing ovation because they were like, oh, oh, right. We should definitely research that.
So positive psychology became a branch of study on the science of happiness, essentially. The science of what healthy brains look like, how people can improve their mental health, how people can actually nurture their mental health, and I like, I love positive psychology because it is really, in fact, the study of health, and I think a lot of the times when we’re talking about mental health on social media, we’re actually talking about mental illness? Which is really refreshing and freeing, because it’s time that we destigmatize the experiences of so many human beings. It’s just, mental illness is so prevalent and so normal, we need to talk about it?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: But it’s also important that there are tools out there for boosting your health, your mental health, your happiness. So positive psychology is the study of happiness, and when I found out about it through my, like, obsessive deep dive into psychology and neuroscience a couple years ago, I discovered that branch of psychology, found out that there was a program at University of Pennsylvania led by Martin Seligman and the team that were researching positive psychology there, and that’s when I was like, oh, well, that’s what I want to do. [Laughs] So I joined that remote program and continued to study it.
Sarah: And you use that in your coaching business to help fig-, people figure out what, what they want to do or go, where they want to go next.
Alexis: Yeah! I essentially, because I am so wary of terms like coach or life coach or just –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – you know, like I said, the, the eye-roller in me is very cynical about terminology used in the health and wellness space, I describe it as, I do not pretend to have all the answers, but I am really good at asking the right questions, and so I work with my clients to help, I ask them questions to figure out how to build businesses that will not burn them out, businesses that will support the kind of life that they want to live. I help them change careers; I help them figure out what they really want, essentially by using the tools of positive psychology, by using the resources that have been developed by people much smarter than me who’ve been researching for much, much, much longer than me – [laughs] – and it’s very fun.
Sarah: That is very cool!
Alexis: Yeah.
Sarah: So what are you working on or developing right now? Which is a total jerkwad question, considering that we were just talking about not doing so much to give ourselves a break. [Laughs]
Alexis: That’s okay! I’ve been, I mean, most recently I’ve been putting a lot of effort into creating a, a video series about self-soothing and about, you know, these little techniques, these things that are free or accessible to help people cope with stress, and so –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – I encourage people to join my email crew by signing up on my website – [laughs] – I can hear people walking on my roof right now – by signing up on my website so that they can –
Sarah: The people on the roof are actually going to sign up for your newsletter right now.
Alexis: That’s where they’re marching to. Yeah, exactly, they’re –
Sarah: Exactly! [Laughs]
Alexis: So this is, so I’m building these, these free video resources, which has been fun to create, and I’m learning a lot in the process about video creation. I’m actually editing them myself, which is a fun project, ‘cause I’ve wanted to learn how to do that for a while.
Bigger scale, I have been working with one-on-one clients and doing some consultations for, for people around pivoting careers or building their businesses, especially like creatives, freelancers, and entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs?
And I’m also working behind the scenes on building something that will help people, help people determine how to use their voice in a way that isn’t gross to show up online as an online business owner and earn, earn a living that way. So it’s sort of like the opposite of self-branding? It’s like using the concept of, concepts of positive psychology to help people build a business and share a message that is genuine and authentic, and I’m, I’m building that out with a friend of mine right now, so it’s a little, a little ways off, that we’ll have this community for others, but we’re really excited about it ‘cause I have a lot of issues with self-branding and, and social media influencer culture and stuff like that, so I’m excited to offer an alternative.
Sarah: ‘Cause it is hard to – especially ‘cause a lot of the people who listen to my show are authors – it is hard to promote yourself and promote your work and develop a consistent set of habits to do that in a way that isn’t, doesn’t feel, like, icky or gross.
Alexis: Yeah! It’s really hard to separate – like, it’s really hard for your brain to distinguish the separation between your, your self as an artist and your “brand,” and we’re being –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – so encouraged to develop, like, self brands in a digital age that it’s –
Sarah: Yeah.
Alexis: – it can be really, really dangerous to walk that line. Like, it can be the way that you earn money, but it can also be problematic for a sort of subconscious self-censorship and altering your, the presentation of yourself and the, your work to appease other people, or sort of becoming your own audience member is, is a really weird side effect of living in this time and place as a creative, so. I’m excited to work with Stephanie Gilbert to, like, build out a resource for creatives and entrepreneurs that helps them avoid doing that, to be able to live in this society where you have to have a key way of marketing yourself, a brand, but you, you don’t want to become a brand, you know? Somewhere in the middle.
Sarah: Right. Being in your own audience is a really good way to put that, too. Yeah.
[Crosstalk]
Alexis: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s like, I think Bo Burnham, the comedian, had a great line of, like, what more do you want at the end of the day than to, like, be your own audience member and scroll through imagery of your life? Like, you just, there’s something about social media and being a personality who sells any kind of work online, a writer, an artist. Like, it’s just surreal, and it’s not necessarily healthy – [laughs] – for, for all of us, so finding a way to earn a living in this, in capitalism, digital capitalism, and not sabotage our, our identities or who we really are is, is complicated.
Sarah: Yeah, it really is. It really, really is!
Alexis: Yeah, and I think probably the only other big thing I’m thrilled about right now that I’m working on is that my, the paperback edition of Find Your F*ckyeah is coming out in the fall, so I’m –
[Crosstalk]
Sarah: Oh, hey, congrats! That’s awesome!
Alexis: Yeah, thanks! I’m really excited that that book will reach more people at a more accessible price point and hopefully be available in more places worldwide as well, so I’m thrilled about that.
Sarah: So I always ask this question to all of my guests: what books are you reading right now that you would want to tell people about?
Alexis: Mm. Well, I think I already mentioned one. So –
Sarah: Yes.
Alexis: – How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. It came out a couple years ago. It is a science-heavy book, but it’s definitely readable. I’ve read a lot of science-heavy books that are not, so I would –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – I would recommend this one. It’s interesting because of her approach to explaining the classical view, the old school science view of emotion and all the ways that we’ve discovered it’s wrong and sort of helping everyday human beings like you and me understand why functionality in our brain is not located to one particular region, one, one spot, one organ, one squiggle in your brain, you know? And –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Alexis: – specifically, helping you understand the power you have as a person to help manage that body budget, that body-balancing budget that I mentioned, and, and why self-care practices actually help you deal with stress. So it’s, it’s a really scientific book, but it’s excellent.
And then recently, I also read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. I think, let me see, the subtitle is Resisting the Attention Economy?
Sarah: Mm-hmm?
Alexis: I kind of thought that it was going to be a self-help book about not, you know, scrolling for too long? [Laughs] But it was much more interestingly pulled together than that. It was a, a thoughtful read; it had me thinking about the way that I approach my free time, the way that I deal with boredom, the way that I deal with social media and the internet and consuming information, and it’s a, just a really great quick read, and it’s not nearly as cliché as I think you might assume based on its title.
Sarah: I have that audiobook in my queue to listen to, so I’m very curious about that one.
Alexis: Oh great! I wonder, I wonder if Jenny narrates it. I don’t know. I’m curious: what are you reading right now?
Sarah: I just finished, there is a, a science fiction series. Granted, I’m a, I’m a romance blogger/reviewer, and most of the time the podcast is about romance, but I just finished a science fiction series –
Alexis: Mm.
Sarah: – called The Murderbot Diaries? Which if you’ve like science fiction at all you might really like. It is about a half cloned human, half inorganic technology construct in a very far-future world in space, and Murderbot is genderless and is a SecUnit, which is a, basically a super strong, super high processing individual who has sentience, but is governed by what’s called a governor module which punishes it for any acts of autonomy, and it is sent out with humans as a protection unit to –
Alexis: Oh!
Sarah: – protect humans while they do a thing like a mining operation or a scientific survey. And Murderbot has figured out how to hack its governor module, so it’s essentially a free agent, but it has no idea what to do with itself.
Alexis: [Laughs]
Sarah: It has no idea what to do next, so it continues doing its job while also watching hundreds of thousands of hours of TV serials, books, music. Just, it, it would really like the humans to leave it alone so it can go watch TV.
Alexis: [Laughs] It sounds like one of us.
Sarah: Yeah, exactly! It’s very relatable, very sarcastic, and it’s all first-person narration, so there’s questions of gender and identity and self-actualization and motivation, but also the question of what do I want? I am now free to do whatever I want, as long as I am safe. What can I do? And Murderbot has no answer, so it’s like, well, I’m just going to, you know, do a half-assed version of my job taking care of these humans who are mostly annoying, and it hates emotions? It hates having feelings about people. It would much rather have feelings about soap operas?
[Laughter]
Alexis: That sounds great.
Sarah: It’s just real – it’s so fun to listen to and to read. The, the audiobooks are great as well.
So I just finished that, and I think next on my reading list is a book called You Had Me at Hola by Alexis Daria, who is a romance, it’s a contemporary romance novel based in the world of telenovelas.
Alexis: Oh, that’s exciting too! Those are great; thank you. Thanks for recommending them.
Sarah: Hey, I, I’m an expensive person to know, so if you ever are –
Alexis: [Laughs]
Sarah: – reading recommendations, feel free to email me. That’s my whole job. [Laughs]
Alexis: Got it. Got it, yeah. I have a really long list. I actually just ordered two more books from bookshop.org yesterday. [Laughs]
Sarah: Nice!
Alexis: I’m excited to read Me and White Supremacy and then Pleasure Activism –
Sarah: Oh my gosh, the Layla Saad book Me and White Supremacy is so good!
Alexis: Yeah, I –
Sarah: So good!
Alexis: – thrilled to do it, and I, I am really amazed at how long it took me to order. I think that’s very telling of the fear that we have about doing difficult work, internal work, so I’m excited to read it.
[music]
Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. I want to thank Alexis Rockley and the team of roofers who were providing a rhythmic background. You can find Alexis Rockley at her website, Alexis Rockley – R-O-C-K-L-E-Y – dot com [alexisrockley.com], and I will have links to her Instagram, her Twitter feed, and the original thread that I found that was really resonant with me. I hope this interview was interesting for you as well and that you are doing nice things to take care of your tired brain, ‘cause your brain is very valuable and so are you.
Thank you again to our Patreon community, who make sure that every episode receives a transcript. If you would like to join, have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges start at one whole dollar a month, and every pledge is deeply, deeply appreciated.
Hello again to our Patreon community. Thank you for being so wonderful!
And speaking of wonderful, I have a listener-submitted bad joke because those are the best kind! This joke is from Alex; thank you, Alex! I love this joke. It’s perfect! It’s very relevant to our interests. Are you ready? [Clears throat] Here we go. Serious podcaster voice:
Why does an elephant use his trunk as a bookmark?
Why, why does an elephant use his trunk as a bookmark? Why?
So he nose where he stopped reading!
[Laughs] I love it so much! Thank you, Alex!
If you would like to send me a joke or you have a comment or a question or a suggestion or you just want to email me and say what’s up? You can email me at [email protected] or Sarah, S-A-R-A-H at smartbitchestrashybooks dot com [[email protected]] – ends up in the same place, which is with me, and I love to hear from you.
On behalf of everyone here, including the cat, who is annoyed that I shut the door to record this, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week.
Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find outstanding podcasts to listen to at frolic.media/podcasts.
[sweet music]
This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.
Thank you for this! Haven’t listened yet but just reading the notes and Twitter thread is so validating. (I’ve had to limit social media even more than usual, because stress, so didn’t come across it until now.)
And thank you for being awesome in general. You always talk about enjoying things and taking care of our brains. You introduced me to Burnout by the Nagoski sisters and their podcast. Also Miranda Hart (tv series and books), Alyssa Cole, and so many other wonderful voices.
@Escapeologist: That is so incredibly kind of you to say, thank you. I can’t tell you what this comment means to me, or transcribe the noise I made when I read it. Thank you.
I really enjoyed this and I love the recommendation of the book “How to Do Nothing.” I’ve read it twice (and I never do that). For people who are interested in something similar, but maybe with a little bit more of self help advice I really, really liked “Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving” by Celeste Headlee. Also the Nap Ministry website.
https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/
Wow, you really know how to pick your guests and topics. On top of the quarantimes, my husband passed away from a type of pancreatic cancer at the beginning of April. This explains why I’m so tired, can’t focus and concentrate on work, have high levels of anxiety, etc. I’ve been feeling so inadequate. Thank you for explaining to me what is going on inside my deep brain.
@Francene, my sympathies on the death of your husband. I hope that each day will be a little easier for you.
Headspace (a meditation and sleep story app) is giving away free year long memberships to people laid off or furloughed due to COVID-19. I have been using it for about a month. I really like the morning wakeup- a little mindful moment and some deep breathing that is different each day. I also listen to the sleepcasts – little nighttime stories with white noise int he background. It really helped me get to sleep sooner and sleep better.
Highly recommend!