Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee Prasek: And I am Aimee Prasek. So today we are talking about resilience. That's our Element of Joy for this month. And we're digging into another habit, I think you can call it that, uh, but a habit that can deplete us, that can pull us away from our natural state of resilience. And that habit is busyness. Everybody's like, oh, getting tight busyness.
Aimee Prasek: It's sort of [00:01:00] the state of our society. And we, we talked about busyness in our Element of Joy, Equanimity last month. Henry, you called it do-too-much-ism I think,
Henry: Did
Aimee Prasek: I
Henry: I.
Aimee Prasek: So we're actually gonna go deeper, I think more of this mindset of busyness and even more specifically, something that researchers sometimes call time poverty.
Aimee Prasek: So time poverty is the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. Probably sounds familiar for a lot of us. So quickly, busyness is really interesting I think. There's a lot of research to say that staying busy is really good for our cognitive health and for our mental health, especially in our elder years. And then there's all this research on how busyness is wrecking our mental health.
Aimee Prasek: So there's something more subtle here that we need to kind of get a handle [00:02:00] on. And I think it has less to do with really how many activities we have on our calendar, in some capacity. And more to do with why we think there's so much to do, why we feel, feel so strapped for time, and why we might struggle to do less if there are in fact too many things in our calendar, and also what we actually consider to be time well spent.
Aimee Prasek: So I wanna dive into all that today. Let's talk about thoughts and feelings first. Dive right in. So I think it's really important to start off by considering our perception and our stress state rather than how many activities or tasks or responsibilities we might actually have. So we can put those aside even for now.
Aimee Prasek: And that's because when we are in a chronic state of stress, then we will always be short on time. It is a story of our nervous [00:03:00] system with too much stress and without release, we kind of get amped up and burned out at the same time. It's like the worst combination with that chronic state of stress. There's just no way to think that you have a leisurely amount of time to finish anything to accomplish what you want.
Aimee Prasek: Your brain just can't go there. Um, Henry, you talk about adrenal fatigue in a really interesting way, and I think it relates here to how our sense of time can get hijacked, if that makes sense. Do you wanna get into that a bit?
Henry: Sure, sure. But let me come back to that in a, in a minute or two. 'cause, um, something that you said, just brought up a memory of a quote that I recently heard again, I've heard it before, and I think a lot of folks are familiar with this quote from Annie Dillard, a writer Annie Dillard. So I think it fits [00:04:00] with what you're talking about, Aimee.
Henry: So here's, here's the quote as, as best I remember it, how we spend our days is of course, how we spend our lives, what we do with this hour, and that one is what we are doing. So it kind of sounds, sounds obvious at one level. Right? But I
Henry: think there's something pretty profound in this. And after that, seeing that those first two lines, I think she goes on to talk about schedules and how we use them to sort of, as in her words, to create some sort of a scaffolding on which we can break our work into smaller chunks and that,
Henry: and we're sort of building our days out of that scaffolding, if you will. But what strikes me about this quote is, number one, it just feels true to me, and I bet it does to a lot of
Henry: people.
Henry: How we spend our days is of course, how we spend our lives, and maybe it's that, that [00:05:00] resonance of truth that makes it such a well known quote. It also feels important to me, not just true but important. And so when I just recently heard it, somebody read it aloud at a contemplative service, I was at my ears just perked up and I thought, okay, listen up. This is important.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: And to me it says that our lives are built brick by brick, board by board. So the stuff I fill my days with is not just random, meaningless busyness.
Henry: It might seem that way at times, but it actually becomes my life. So if I go through my days overly busy and stressed, my life becomes overly busy and stressed. I know, it just sounds so logical, so common sense. But I know for me, when I get overly busy and stressed, I am not thinking about it [00:06:00] this clearly,
Henry: Probably because in that moment I am not very conscious.
Henry: I'm basically on autopilot. So I think that might give us a clue how to break out of this pattern, you know, to, to raise our awareness. And I think, we'll, we'll get back to that later. So let me now pivot back to adrenal fatigue.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: The adrenal fatigue is a term I think you'll find mostly in the holistic health or wellness community.
Henry: A lot of more, you know, Western medical doctors don't believe in it. And I think it's because they're looking at it in a very strict way that, if they measure the adrenal hormones, you know, like, cortisol or adrenaline even. They're almost always normal. There's some rare conditions that, that they are too low and they has, that's a true medical illness that needs to be treated. But, but they don't, if they don't see that in the lab test, then they kind of toss out the whole concept. [00:07:00] But I find the concept useful and here's why. This is how I think of adrenal fatigue. I think that we are designed for stress, really well designed to handle stress, the stress response has gotta be one of the strongest, most universal aspects of our physiology. But our our bodies are made to respond well to short term stress, not long term. And I think over the long term, this finely tuned system starts to break down. It gets frayed around the edges. No matter how resilient you are to begin with, there is a limit, I think, to how long you can endure these high levels of stress hormones without something going wrong, something in your body going wrong.
Henry: 'Cause eventually the body can get depleted and that's, to me, that's what [00:08:00] adrenal fatigue is. It's a state of depletion so that even if something comes along that you really should feel stressed about. You cannot mount that response. It's just, you just don't have it in you to do it anymore. And I think that that one of the most challenging parts of this state of being is fatigue.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: If you get that depleted, you get, you can get really fatigued and sometimes it can be severe and your motivation can just tank. So it might look a lot like depression to some folks and maybe it, it could even turn into depression. And, but this is a state that is very much to be avoided, if at all possible.
Henry: Because once we get into that state of depletion, although we can come back from it, it's, it can take a while and a lot of effort to do. So, back to the quote. That's why I was so struck with it, because I think it's [00:09:00] worth paying attention to how we spend our days now, because it's going to become our lives down the road.
Aimee Prasek: I, I hadn't heard that quote before actually.It makes me think too that so often we spend our days thinking that, or not thinking, not aware, but in such a way that we're hoping a different outcome for our life. We're, we're engaged in these activities that we believe will, fundamentally change our life later.
Aimee Prasek: And I love this to think about, no, those, those bricks you're laying are your life. Obviously, we are laying that foundation. You can't separate those two things. So we have to wake up for it. I love this. That's something we do a lot here at Joy Lab,in the podcast, in the program. How can we actually wake up to our life, actually tap into what is [00:10:00] good as well right now ?
Aimee Prasek: So let's, let's keep doing just that. I wanna bring back this busyness word to talk about how we might resist giving ourselves more time to do things that give us joy, things that we enjoy. Why we might stick ourselves in this cycle of sort of feeling so busy all the time. And there are two reasons I wanna highlight.
Aimee Prasek: The first is a cultural shift, and the second has to do with fears around our thoughts and emotions that might rise up when we stop moving around so much. So the cultural shift, I wanna hit on that first. I'll quote the sociologist, Jonathan Gershuny, who recently said, "Work not leisure, is now the signifier of dominant social status."
Aimee Prasek: I think the fact that he says work is [00:11:00] really key here. He doesn't say productivity even. He doesn't say mastery, just work, just quantifiable, punched in hours.
Henry: Yeah, he doesn't say meaning.
Aimee Prasek: No, no,
Henry: He says, work.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, that, that the quantity of work is a signifier of dominant social status.And I'm just thinking about these pictures or stories of founders sleeping at the office, working so many hours that they can't eat a meal or carve out enough time to sleep outside of the office, let alone build any real friendships or treat the people around them very well.
Aimee Prasek: As long as they're working around the clock, then it must be good. So we've glorified the grind, really the exhaustion, not the outcomes, not the impact, um, let alone the wellbeing of anyone involved. And there's a phenomenon here that I think is helpful to understand. It's known as effort justification.[00:12:00]
Aimee Prasek: It's something we all do really. Essentially, we tend to think that harder work or more work must be more meaningful work. That it'll have a bigger payoff, that it must be worth it. It's a fallacy. I mean, it's a great survival strategy for us to be willing and motivated to work. plant and gather up the food before the winter hits, build a shelter quickly before the rainy season.
Aimee Prasek: This drive to persevere has always been a survival strategy, of course. It's why we need our motivation.So hard work is not a bad thing. Like think of those days where you work really hard, like on a project with your team, physical or cognitive work, I think, and you get it done or you're practicing something and you see your progress and then your head hits the pillow and you're like, yes, we did that.
Aimee Prasek: I did that. So productive hard work when we have the resources to give it, um, and, and can see its impact-- that's [00:13:00] particularly helpful-- can be so rewarding. The problem is when we conflate more work with better outcomes, it's just not the case. There is a really nice bell curve here. We've talked about bell curves a lot lately.
Aimee Prasek: Perfect for equanimity and resilience. They, they sit on the bell curve quite well, so there is this bell curve where enough work, which includes work that is hard or challenges us that is optimizing. We actually need that to live a joyful life. I truly believe that we need to be challenged. When we have too little work, not enough challenge,
Aimee Prasek: we have negative health, health outcomes and the other side of that curve at the bottom, what I'm noting now, too hard work, or in our modern case, really just too much work equates to negative health outcomes. So why do we do this? Henry, do you wanna talk about the fears that we may [00:14:00] have around not being busy, challenging the social signifier?
Henry: Sure. But I also really wanna reinforce what you said, Aimee, about the, the bell curve
Henry: of busyness. 'Cause I, I think it's that there is a window of busyness and there's also a window of stress that is the sweet spot. You know, it's, it's the right place to be and if we're below it or above it, we just don't feel as good.
Henry: So, as an example, I'm thinking about the many patients I've seen over the years who have had to take time off of work simply because they're not functioning well enough at that moment to, to keep doing what they're doing.
Henry: And when that, when it comes to that point, I often caution them ahead of time that even though they'll be relieved for a while of the, the excess stress of work that they, [00:15:00] it's really important to sustain some kind of structure and some degree of activity because going from way too much to way too little in one short period of time is not good for people's mood. So they, they've gotta find enough things that feel meaningful and that get them up and kind of organize their day around so that they don't sink even further into depression.
Henry: So I think that might be one of the fears that, that can lead to chronic busyness that if, if I stop moving as fast as I am used to,
Henry: I
Henry: might just sink into this state of torpor or you know, losing all motivation and
Henry: just not being able to get going again. And I think there's some legitimacy to that concern, but not as much as we usually give it.[00:16:00]
Aimee Prasek: Sure.
Henry: To me, it's, it's surprising how little it takes to provide sufficient structure. Literally, it can be just one or two things planned in a day that don't have to even take up that much time. That can be enough.
Henry: But I think the more common pattern is just to stay busy. Because if we stop, then another fear we have is that we will be overwhelmed by our emotions that we are running so fast to avoid.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: And I will admit, there have been times in my life where I have done that. I've stayed super busy in order to avoid what I've, what I'm feeling. And it does seem to work actually after a fashion. That's why I think we keep doing it. It seems like it's working. And it's surprising to me how long you can keep doing
Aimee Prasek: this
Aimee Prasek: Oh yeah.
Henry: just to keep your emotions at arm's length. [00:17:00] But you can't do it forever. That's kind of the key, is you are just kicking the can down the road, You're not solving a thing by doing that. And I, I think if we just stop to think about it just for a moment, we would know that.
Henry: But therein lies the problem. We don't stop to think, we don't become conscious of what we're doing. We just keep doing it with a really, really low level of awareness. Now, I will also admit that there are times that I do this consciously, on purpose, which I think is probably a little bit better
Henry: than than the unconscious, but you know, honestly, it's still not a great long-term strategy. So the way out of this, I think, is to learn how to turn toward our emotions
Henry: rather than avoiding them. And that's, that's a bigger topic. Maybe something will take up in another episode, [00:18:00] but it is absolutely worth it to learn that skill no matter where one is in their lives.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah. Some folks asked me, you know, I did my high school in Minnesota and I did my undergrad, mainly in California. And they asked me, why did you go to California? And my answer is, 'cause I was running away from my problems. I mean, wasn't to go to this great school or something. I literally spun a globe and landed on the central coast of California.
Henry: Well, was this as far as you could go and still be in
Aimee Prasek: I know I didn't need a passport.and you know what though? Well, who came with me on that trip? All those bad feelings. All those feelings that I was trying to run from, they are, they're just as quick. Um, yeah, we should talk about this on another day. But I think what we're getting at [00:19:00] here is the awareness.
Aimee Prasek: Waking up to our life and to our resilience, not just those, tough feelings we might need to move through.and releasing this, this grip on busyness as an unconscious habit that we may have, we may have adopted. And when we let go of that and see what we are doing, see what is, then we can choose, we can tap into our resilience and choose.
Aimee Prasek: Joy Lab Program folks, that's our "see what is, accept what is, choose wisely" formula that Henry walks us through in a few of our Experiments. So it's coming in here as well. The last bit we wanna get into has to do with what we consider to to be time well spent. And then I think this can be a missing link in a lot of cases.
Aimee Prasek: And this matters because when we include things in our day that we [00:20:00] enjoy, then we will feel less time poverty. And likely have better mental health and physical health outcomes.
Aimee Prasek: It's kind of that simple. But the challenge can be determining what time well spent means to you. How do you wanna spend your time? What do you wanna learn or experience in this life? Who are the people or creatures you wanna connect with? Because that connection is uplifting and builds you up. And I think it is really common to actually not know those answers.
Aimee Prasek: But only we can answer those questions for ourselves. Only we know what is time well spent for us. So one way to inform those questions is to actually log how we spend our minutes throughout the day and how we feel during those activities, which can take some work. But I think it can be helpful.
Aimee Prasek: You can use pencil paper, a time management app however you want but, maybe do it for [00:21:00] a, a full week or at least three days and note what you're doing and how you're feeling when you do it. I think what many of us will find surprisingly is that we have more time during the day than we thought we had, where we are choosing how to spend our time and we're choosing things that we don't enjoy.
Aimee Prasek: And I think when that slaps you in the face, there's a, a gut answer that can come up to tell you, ah, here's what I wanna do instead. I'll give an example. Actually, I downloaded this stupid solitaire game on my phone thinking it would be relaxing, fun little game. 'cause my, my grandma, you guys know where I'm going with this.
Aimee Prasek: My grandma had taught me solitaire. I would play a two person version with my dad. It has like all these great memories. So I was, I was in the space of I can, it's like an evolved gaming [00:22:00] opportunity for me. But that flipping game, it was so extravagant and extra gamified, like pinging my dopamine all the time.
Aimee Prasek: Like you had to check in every two hours to get extra points and stuff.
Henry: gosh.
Aimee Prasek: left. A meeting once to get my points. And then one night I played for three hours and I came out of this fog like, where am I? What just happened? And I realized at that moment, this does not feel good. But I had, you know, it, it took a while to get there, probably five weeks of stress with this game.
Aimee Prasek: it just surprised me. I, and I knew that moderating my time was not an option. I couldn't do it. I did not have the self-control. So I deleted it and I told my husband, if you see me playing this, take my phone [00:23:00] away legitimately. And I didn't wanna delete it but I knew it. I had this unhealthy relationship with it.
Aimee Prasek: It was definitely not serving me. So maybe you have something that obvious in your day and, and it's not even that obvious. It, it, for five weeks I was stressed with this stupid game. The fact that it stressed me out was surprising. but unconsciously it was having negative impacts on me for quite a while.
Aimee Prasek: So.
Henry: Aimee, I have a friend who, who got tendonitis in her thumb from playing solitaire
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, I think it's called like trigger finger. Yeah.
Henry: and that's what, that's what, finally got her to delete it.
Aimee Prasek: right? Do we have to have like, yes, physical diagnoses? let's get there sooner, you know, before we sort of come out of a comatose state at night under like, just completely confused as to what happened. Like we can do this sooner. So [00:24:00] all that to say, right, we're waking up to this, we're seeing the bricks, we're laying down.
Aimee Prasek: What bricks do we wanna take away? That would be the solitaire game for me. Um, and so maybe documenting those times can help you get there sooner than how long it took me to figure out this was a bad thing that needed to leave. and then you might decide, cool, what could I replace it with? I could play solitaire with a real life human.
Aimee Prasek: You know, so
Henry: Wait, is that still solitaire?
Aimee Prasek: no, there is a two person game,
Henry: Okay.
Aimee Prasek: but my husband and I are like, let's start playing cards or Dominoes is another game. So, you know, or puzzling, like if there's some type of that that you wanna do, then put it in in a way that nourishes you more. So, and I think the funny thing is, is that when we do that, when we have a healthy balance in how we spend our time.
Aimee Prasek: We include activities that we like, we will, we will actually feel like we have more time. [00:25:00] It's that time poverty perspective. And we may not change any hours on the clock, right? Like we may be as busy as we were before with as many activities, but our perception changes. We can do it. If I did it, y'all can do it.
Henry: Oh, geez, I'm still laughing about the, the solitaire
Aimee Prasek: See there's, there's too many of us. Oh yeah. I probably got tendonitis too. I get it.
Henry: So I, I also love the suggestion of, of kind of logging, keeping track, raising our awareness about how the choices we make really impact us.
Henry: So I, I'm going to offer up a shortcut for that.
Henry: Um, 'cause I.
Henry: think that this is something you can do in real time, like moment to moment. And it's, it's, I think it's kind of foolproof if we, if
Henry: we really just get a, a little bit of practice at this.
Henry: and here's an added benefit to doing this. [00:26:00] It, it is a way of practicing mindfulness. It's, it's a way of exercising our mindfulness muscles. So here's, here's my idea. Whatever you're doing, whoever you are with, just turn your attention for a moment, just for a second, uh, to your midsection, your chest or your belly.
Henry: And notice whether in that very moment you feel expanded or contracted. Or you might feel neutral. Okay. It's, but it's one of those three things. This does not take any time. It only requires a subtle momentary shift in your focus. And try to do this without judging the state that you're in.
Henry: Don't say to yourself, "Oh, this is good.
Henry: I'm expansive," or "This is bad, I feel con constricted or flat." No, Just notice it. And then if you'd like. [00:27:00] Start making different choices, choosing to spend your time doing things or being with people with whom you feel more expansive and see then what happens to your life.
Aimee Prasek: I love that we do this work, henry and I talked, we were talking about this before we went on. We don't just talk about this stuff, we live this stuff and also we screw up on this stuff. If I would've done that on day four of my solitaire situation, I would've realized that this is not great. So sometimes these things, it just get like another reminder, I can check back in.
Aimee Prasek: So,if you're surprised by the things that maybe you were doing unconsciously, like Henry said, we don't need to judge it. Ah, okay. I can change this. So I appreciate that wisdom. Another reminder to engage in those, just [00:28:00] those daily practices of mindfulness that can help us to wake up, and see some things that we might be unconscious for.
Aimee Prasek: Brilliant. And you note takers. If you need to document it, you can use my strategy as well.
Henry: Oh, I'm sure there's an app for that.
Henry: There's got to be.
Aimee Prasek: absolutely. So our next episode will actually kind of hit on the other side of this bell curve I think that we brought up today. So, we'll talk more about feeling dull and disconnected, so maybe not frantic and busy, but kind of shut down.
Henry: Mm-hmm.
Aimee Prasek: And like today we'll talk about how we can open up. Wake up to tune into our resilience and be more present for our life. So, to close us today, I wanna share some wisdom from Max Ehrmann, from his poem, Desiderata. These are just a few lines from it. I think it speaks to our, our combo today. And I, I hope you really soak particularly in the last few lines.
Aimee Prasek: Here it [00:29:00] is. " Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here, and whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should."
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