April 21, 2025 • 45 mins
There are many benefits to being an optimist - particularly when things go wrong in our lives. But we aren't all naturally optimistic, so can we learn to adopt the best and most positive behaviours of born optimists?
Through treating New Yorkers caught up in the 9/11 attacks, psychiatrist Dr Sue Varma developed a concept she calls "practical optimism". She shares her tips on how we can all be more optimistic in the face of life's challenges.
Read more in Sue's book Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being
Dr Laurie spoke to Sue Varma MD at the 2025 World Happiness Summit.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, There's no way around it. Sometimes life is tough, awful.
Even bad things happen all the time, whether it's an
unanticipated health problem, a new relationship woe, or dire news
on the job. Sometimes these nasty circumstances result from our
(00:37):
own behaviors and choices, and sometimes they have nothing to
do with us whatsoever. Every Day people become the victims
of random accidents, natural disasters, or even unprovoked attacks. In
the aftermath of awful events like these, it's easy to
feel upset and broken, and when things are really bad,
you can even start wondering whether you'll be able to
pick up the pieces of your life again. It is
(00:59):
so fabulous to be back in Miami and this beautiful
zity and this beautiful weather with you beautiful This spring,
I was invited to host a discussion at the World
Happiness Summit in my and that gave me the chance
to interview someone who's dedicated her career to helping people
whose lives have been impacted in awful ways. I made
this amazing audience.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I was so excited to see. I am so excited
to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is psychiatrist doctor Sue Varma. Sue was the first
medical director at the World Trade Center Mental Health Program
at NYU, where she treated people caught up in the
attacks of nine to eleven. Sue has now gathered her
insights from decades of this kind of work into a
new book called Practical Optimism, The Art, Science, and Practice
of Exceptional well Being. In the book, Sue explores strategies
(01:45):
we can use to deal with the difficult chapters in life,
and her biggest recommendation is to adopt a particular form
of optimism, what she calls practical optimism.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
To me, optimism has head to toe benefits, but at
the end of the day, what optimism is is a mindset.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
The world happiness of it, or WHASU as we call it,
is an amazing event. If you like this podcast, you
would have an Apse sloop Blast at OHASU. But with
so many speakers scheduled, I only had time to chat
with Sue about a tiny part of her work, so
I asked her to record a fuller interview just for you.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Nice to see you, my pleasure looking forward to it.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
So I got her back to join me on Zoom.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, I'm fine with whatever worked for you. I don't
mind doing like a full episode yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
And began at the beginning with her story of the
morning of September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
So, you know, on nine eleven, I was a medical
student and I was working in a New York City hospital,
and I remember getting the call to say, you know,
discharge as many healthy ish people as you can, because
we need to make beds for people who are going
to be coming in who are injured. And we did that,
and we waited and waited and waited, and we just
simply didn't see the kind of numbers that we were
(02:55):
thinking because a death toll was so high.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Do you remember where you were when you first heard
about the towers, Like, were you already like at work
and saw it on TV or something?
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yes, I remember like we would come in at five am,
so I had already been there for like three plus
hours when we were hearing the news and seeing it
live as the towers were coming down as a plane crash,
So you know, it was freakish. And I remember, like,
you know, my sister in law was working downtown in
nine to eleven, so many friends and family members were
somehow down and around there, and we couldn't get through
(03:25):
to anybody like nobody was answering the phone, and we
did lose loved ones, friends. I mean, there were so
many stories of people getting caught in the dust cloud,
seeing people jump out of the buildings, getting trampled on,
and in the days after, myself and my colleagues we
volunteered in a variety of ways with first responders, with cleanup, rescue,
recovery at the Morgue, getting trauma training, you know, being
(03:47):
a New Yorker my whole life, like, this is a
place I identified with. But I think no matter where
you were in the country or in the world, I
think a lot of people felt somehow connected and traumatized rightfully,
So it was devastating. You know, when I think of trauma,
like you're never left the same. There's a you before
it and then there's a U after it. When I
think of mass disasters and terrorism, it's intended to chip
(04:10):
away at your morale and your sense of self and
your source of confidence and trust in the world. And
so what I saw in you know, this whole concept
of you know, New York strong, It really to me
came from this idea that great tragedy, not always, but
sometimes can bring out a sense of grit and toughness
and community. And it wouldn't be until years later, after
(04:30):
I'd finished my residency training at NYU and psychiatry to
be recruited for this role that I really didn't feel
prepared for, but felt so honored to be considered and
thought of for it. And you know, it was a
massive effort. It was a new program, and so when
I came on, you know, I remember the early days,
They're like, there's several hundred patients who are on our list.
You're going to be treating first responders and civilians. And
(04:51):
I was like, great, how many psychiatrists do we have?
Like six seven? They're like, no, it's just you. I joked.
I'm like, these are big shoes to fill and they're like, no, no, no,
you're bringing your own shoes because their own a shoes.
Like this is the first program of its kind, so
incredibly daunting, challenging, but eventually extremely meaningful and rewarding.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
But you had, if I understand, I kind of someone
to look up to who kind of dealt with difficult
situations with optimism. I'm thinking about someone in your family
that you talked about in your book. Tell me the
story of the inspiration that your dad was giving you.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
So you know, my dad still is an inspiration. Like
he's going to be close to ninety soon. And he
literally looks and acts and thinks twenty years younger, if
not more, and one of the kindest, sharpest and healthiest
people that I do. There's such resilience. You know. He
came from very little in India, and you know he's
born in late nineteen thirties and has seen so many
(05:40):
decades of trauma and tragedy and the things that I
take away from him, you know, he would always say
simple living and high thinking and this was a big
saying in my family that I always make fun of him.
I was like, but Dad, why are you always laughing?
Why are you always smiling? Like what is there to
be like, especially now, Like what is there to be
so grateful for? He's like, I mean you can laugh
or you can cry. I mean, you make the choice.
He's always sometimes like laughing at his own jokes in
(06:02):
his own head, telling himself stories, not in a delusional way,
just like laughing. And I was like, the Dad, you
didn't have electricity, didn't have running water. He's like, are
you talking about we had like dance parties and slumber
parties on the rooftop and camel rides and you know,
hurricane lamps. I'm like, that's because you had no electricity.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Dad.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
He's like, life was great. Life was great. He's like,
how do you want to look at it? But like,
how do you want to tell your story? And so
you know, I just saw him this morning and he's
like standing there and he's like cutting fruit. That's how
like immigrant dads show love in the house. He's like,
what do you want to like, you know, candle up,
I'm cutting this, I'm cutting that. And I was like, wow,
you spend three hours cutting fruits for the whole thing.
Like yeah, he's retired now, he's like, you know, we've
got to spend our time some way. So I was
(06:38):
just thinking about him, and I'm like, you know that
saying like you don't want to just add years to
your life, you want to add life to your years.
And he is like the perfect example of that of
just always enjoying himself no matter where he is. He's
always reading new books, always coming back and listening to
podcasts and interviews and sharing things, so keeps himself intellectually stimulated.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
So it seems like part of his story is that
even though he came from circumstances that might feel kind
of negative or feel sort of harsh to other folks
when they're listening to it, he seems like he's really
happy and optimistic, resilient. And this sort of seems to
fit with the question that you face when you saw
your patients. I mean, talk about the puzzle you sort
of experienced as you saw different patients reactions to the
(07:18):
trauma of nine to eleven.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yes, so you know, first thing I want to say
is I never want anyone to feel less than if
they do end up experiencing mental health disorders, whether it's
related to an event or an incident or not. Most
people twenty thirty forty percent of folks in their life
will experience a mental health disorder, and seventy to eighty
percent of people will experience a life threatening event at
(07:39):
some point or another. Right, Well, what's interesting that when
it comes to post traumatic stress disorder that while eighty
percent of people will experience a life threatening event, only
about eight to ten percent of people will actually meet
criteria for post traumatic stress disorders. So what that says
to me is, Wow, right, like at least ninety percent
of people will have really bad things happen to them
(08:00):
in their life, big bad, life changing things, and yet
they will move on. We had a lot of patients
who were in the medical monitoring program but never met
criteria for anxiety depression PTSD. So our brain has a
great ability to bounce back, right, But to me, bouncing
back from adversity, that's only part of the equation. It's
(08:20):
important part, but it's only one part. I wanted to
help people thrive in the face of adversity, because which
one of us will escape this world, you know, without
anything bad ever happened to us, none of us. That
is where practical optimism came to me, is because I
would see these folks who a lot of these patients
who never became anxious or depressed, that they would still
come to our program and helping other folks. They bring
(08:43):
them to their appointments. In the aftermath of nine to eleven,
A lot of patients would have agoraphobia or avoidance of people, places, things,
reminders is a feature of PTSD, so with hypervigilance, insomnia
on nightmares, irritability, so they don't want to leave their house,
and we would have these other patients who are like,
I'm fine, I'll bring you, I'll take the subway with you,
(09:03):
because they were so afraid of there being another attack
in the days after, or just having triggers and reminders.
So these folks who never made it into my program,
I would see them in the hallways and I literally
would be like, what is your secret? And I've started
to see common threads of specific things that they did.
But resilience, in my mind, was always something you either
(09:23):
had or you didn't, and one feature of it was optimism,
but there were other features like altruism, social support, moral compass,
cognitive flexibility, but optimism was again one of these things
that you had or you didn't, and so was resilience.
But what about the rest of us? And it wouldn't
be until years later that there was a paper done
with researchers from UCLA and they said, you know, there
(09:45):
is a genetic linked toptimism. So that was my first question.
Is it genetic? Is it something you're born with? And
I love it when I find science to back up
things that I'm already thinking. And it said, yes, there is,
and it's this oxytocin receptor gene and if there's some
variation in it, you know, you may not be as optimistic.
And what did that mean? Well, if you're pessimistic or
have pessimistic tendencies and you're more likely to get depressed.
(10:07):
And then they looked at this gene and they said, so,
what is it actually code for? Right, It's a mindset, yes,
But in addition to being a mindset, it's also the
ability to regulate your emotions, to be able to ask
for help. And I was thinking about so many of
these things that in my therapy with patients. What is
it that I'm helping them with? And can I teach
people optimism? Can I teach them the things that optimists do?
(10:29):
How do we codify this? What does this look like
behaviorally in the world? And I found data in every
field of medicine talking about it. People who are optimistic
and do a brief optimistic intervention recover faster from colds
or have less colds or infections, or looking at exceptional longevity.
In this study in drama that I was a meta
analysis of over two hundred thousand people and said that
(10:50):
people who are optimistic live ten to fifteen percent longer,
and not just longer lives, but healthier lives. So the
concept of health span, because lifespan may be increasing, but
we're spending the last decade of our lives, especially women
with dementia, living in a nursing home or dependent on
other people. So I was like, head to toe optimists
have less anxiety and depression, thirty percent, less likelihood of
getting strokes or dying from heart attacks or really all
(11:13):
cause mortality. They're happier, They're forty percent more likely to
get a raise in the next year. They have more friendships,
stronger and longer bonds from childhood. They are happier in
their romantic relationships. I was like, why is no one
talking about this? This to me is the jackpot, This
is the well spring of health.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
So I wanted to talk a little bit about how
people tend to think about optimism because I think when
we hear the word optimism, we sometimes get it wrong.
So what is optimism?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, so I think a lot of people I know
I did think of it as like this woo woo
thinking and just look on the bright side and everything
will work out. And that is definitely not optimism. That
is toxic positivity, asking someone to just get over something,
or look on the bride side. Optimism simply is the
tendency to have a positive outlook in an uncertain situation,
to kind of expect best possible outcome. But to me,
(11:59):
optimism by itself is only part of the equation because
it's like, i can have all the positive thinking in
the world, but if I'm not doing anything actionable and proactive,
I'm not going to be able to trans those positive
outlooks into positive outcomes. And so in my mind, I
needed something more. I needed skill set and a tool set.
And that is what practical optimism is, and that is
how practical optimism differs from optimism. So if you're in
(12:22):
that twenty five percent bucket that is born naturally with
a positive outlook, excellent, But the reality is that seventy
five percent of us are not skewed that way. You know,
we might be sort of somewhere in the middle or
maybe skeew more pessimistic. So optimism is having a very
favorable outlook, but by itself it's not sufficient.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
So let's walk through this sort of updated version practical optimism.
How is that different?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
So practical optimism helps you translate positive outlooks into positive
outcomes through action and practical optimism is a practice like
having a yoga practice, learning a new language, learning how
to ride a bike, learning a sport. Some days it's
five minutes, some days it's longer, but it does require
effort and work, and more importantly, it's a skill set.
And why that was so freeing to me is like,
(13:04):
we can all learn skills, and we all should learn skills,
and the practical optimism is a practice that requires you
to take chances and to put yourself out there in
the world, and to course correct and to continually learn
from mistakes.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
It's time for a quick break, but we'll dive deeper
into Sue's idea of practical optimism when the Happiness Lab
returns in a moment. In her book Practical Optimism, The Art,
Science and Practice of Exceptional Wellbeing, psychiatrist doctor Sue Varma
explains that a major pillar of becoming more optimistic is
(13:40):
facing up to our emotions and processing them. So why
is that so important?
Speaker 2 (13:45):
When people look at optimists, they want to dismiss their
happiness and say, well, they've never had anything bad happen
to them. Of course they're happy. And what people don't
realize is that optimists and pessimists both experience the same
number of life adversities. The difference is that optimists are
better able to cope with them. And the reason is
is because they are in real time. Processing their emotions
(14:09):
requires more effort and more energy to suppress your emotions.
And when you suppress your emotions, they say that your
body expresses what your mind cannot. And so a lot
of my patients will come to me and they'll say,
I don't know why I'm always sick, or I have
these headaches, or I have these unexplained aches and pains,
or ended up in the emergency room from panic attacks.
(14:29):
So processing your emotions is such a key pillar of
optimism because it says bad things are going to happen
to you. People are going to piss you off, and
what are you going to do about it? And a
lot of times people end up suppressing negative emotions, like
when we talk about any kind of addiction or unhealthy
behavior with substances, with anything, hours of binge watching, doom scrolling,
if it's meant as an avoidance of a procrastination, you
(14:53):
cannot escape negative emotions. They will come to haunt you
and That's why I say manage your emotions before they
manage you, because in some form or another, I see
so much suffering. You know, in my practice, a lot
of these people look to the world as if they
have it all together. In the realities, I know different
because I get an interesting inside perspective of what is
actually going on in their lives, and so in one
(15:14):
form or another, whether it's their relationship suffering, whether it's
their work, something is going to suffer. So we know
that people who deal with their emotions are less likely
to have all sorts of problems of heart disease. You know,
there's something called type deep personality. We've heard of type
A and type B and type DS. Is kind of
like angry, holding onto emotions, not expressing them. It takes
less energy to express it. I think so many people
(15:35):
are afraid of their emotions. They're afraid to be alone,
They're afraid to be alone with their thoughts. I know
people who will put the music on always in the
background because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.
And they're like, what would that mean for me if
I actually had to confront how I feel.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Which I think is so sad, right, because our emotions
are this really useful signal about what's going on in
reality and what we need to do. Differently, I feel
like ignoring them. We do that really at our parallel
right totally.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
And you know what it is an interesting Laurie, is
that I think a lot of times people are afraid
to confront emotions because it means that they will have
to make in their mind what they perceive it's massive
changes in their life and not ready to do that
because like if somebody confronted the fact, wow, I really
can't stand my partner and I've been resentful for so
many years, and if they were to confront it, it
would require something to change, and maybe they're afraid that
(16:21):
it would mean that this would be the end of
this relationship and then who would I be without it?
So I get it, I understand, But I would also
say that Rome wasn't built in a day, Like we
don't have to deconstruct our lives as a result of
figuring out what it means. Like I had a patient
the other day who was sharing with me, like a
lot of things that she was not happy about with
her partner, and I was like, what do you think
(16:42):
would be most helpful for me to say right now.
And she was like, well, I know what I don't
want you to say. I know I don't want you
to tell me to break up with it. She knows
on some level that the way things are not working,
but isn't ready to end the relationship. So that's just
one example. There's so many where somebody's like, I know
what I need to do in terms of changing my
life or changing a job. Like they know that if
they were to allow themselves to be enveloped by the
(17:05):
emotion either that they would be debilitated by it. And
I always say to patients, think of it is like
dresser drawers. I'm not saying let's open all of them
and take everything out and create an entire mass and
pile in the middle of your room. I'm saying, like,
let's just look at one drawer at a time and
I'll help you pack it a little bit neater, right,
But we're not saying everything, take out everything. And because
I think there's a fear of being overwhelmed.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And I think that fear of being overwhelmed can also
involve not just being overwhelmed by the circumstances. You need
to change but this worry that you might be literally
overwhelmed by the emotion itself. Yeah, and that's one of
the reasons I love your book. You share this sort
of handy rhyming catchphrase which I love for how we
can begin processing our emotions. What is this catchphrase?
Speaker 2 (17:44):
So it's name it, flame it, tame it, and reframe it.
And the naming part is just name the antecedent for
the trigger, just being aware of it. And there's so
much evidence that having emotional and granularity, just like understanding,
putting words to what you're feeling and what caused the trigger.
You know, when we look at people who have suicidal thinking,
as weird as this may sound, we feel that patients
(18:06):
who have understanding of what the trigger was probably have
a higher chance of recovery and prognosis because they can
tie it back to a specific event. And if you
can do that, then you're more likely to be able
to address the underlying causes and prevent them from happening again.
So naming your trigger and antecedents and knowing what they
are is really important.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
And so next up is claim it. What does it
mean to claim our emotions? So when I say claim
your emotions where in your body do you feel them.
A lot of times people will say that I have insomnia,
or I have frequent urination or frequent bowel movements, or
I have headaches, or I have a lot of tension
in my neck and my shoulders. So I say that
the body expresses what the mind cannot, and a lot
(18:44):
of times our painful or forbidden emotions shows up physical symptoms.
Another reason you talk about the importance of claiming emotions
is it allows us to think about what we might
call our forbidden emotions. What are forbidden emotions?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
So I think for some people, women, especially anger might
be really forbidden. I have so many patients that I
work with that end up crying when they're angry. It's
scary because either I think that they're afraid of pushing
the other person way, or that it means confronting or
challenging the person. And then what, I think we've all
created stories in our head about if I were to
(19:17):
say something to someone, They're not going to like it,
they're going to leave me, they're going to be mad
at me, and then what And I think it's helpful
to be like okay, yeah, and then what there's a
statistic that says that eighty five percent of the time
the things that we worry about never actually happen, and
the fifteen percent of time that they do, we're better
equipped to handle it than we think. So I think
that's really important to just keep in mind. So that's
(19:39):
claiming our emotions. But next up is that we have
to tame our emotions. And one way that you suggest
doing this is to really try to tame our ruminative loops.
What do you mean by ruminative loops? I think I
know what you mean. I think I've experienced this myself. First, yes,
I definitely have experienced ruminative loops. And it's just like
you're going in circles with the same thought, and what
that does is end up creating powerlessness, and it strips
(20:02):
us away of our agency because you're repeating the same
emotion what if, or you're catastrophizing assuming the worst case scenario,
or you're projecting. But taming your emotions is like short
circuiting and fading a break in that and saying, all right,
I am feeling angry, anxious, helpless, what am I going
to do to self soothe? And so taming is really
about soothing, And what I say is pick an activity
(20:24):
that's not going to create a negative habit on its own.
So somebody may say a glass of wine helps me soothe, Right,
Then what happens when you need two or three or
four to have the same effect, Right, So we don't
want the soothing activity to take on a life of
its own. So I would say, pick something that seems
relatively healthy ish. Can you make a five minute phone
call to a friend. Can you text someone that you
know is going to be supportive and helpful, But you
(20:45):
do a one minute meditation in place wherever you are,
just closing your eyes and taking a deep breath. For me,
walking is one of the most soothing activities. And I
was fascinated by the science of walking that there's something
about when you're walking, your eyes have to track what's
out there in the world, Like so you want to
get hit by a car, and all of that forces
you those eye movements to get out of your own head.
(21:07):
So going for a walk or any kind of exit
size just gets you out of your own head. It
gets you out of routine. So whatever you're capable of doing,
it could be a five minute stretch. So we just
want to keep it simple and lower the bar. But
what's soothing for you? That's the big take home point.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
You also mentioned this other strategy that I'm totally going
to adopt myself, which is this idea of emptying your
emotional spam folder.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah, what is this for me? I do that in journaling,
and I think that there's so much value and there's
so much science behind two ten minute journaling sessions, and
there's no one right way to journal what works for you,
Like sometimes it's literally for me reiterating what happened in
the day, and it's getting it out of your head
and putting it on paper, and you're like, all right,
that's it. I'm done. You know, when I was a
(21:46):
patient and going for my own therapy, I learned a
technique called worry journaling. And somebody may say, well, that
seems counterintuitive. Why would you keep a journal of your worries?
And what I learned is that when you write the
same thing over and over again, you start to see
that there's a trend in your worries. There's a common theme.
You're worried about the same types of things, and that
the things that you're worried about are not actually happening.
(22:06):
And if you're willing to write down how you handled it,
that creates a sense of mastery as well. So putting
it on paper is one way to unload your worry
spam folder.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
And so that's a nice transition to the last of
our four tips for kind processing our emotions, We need
to reframe them. What is reframing our emotions? Why can
it be so important?
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So reframing is one of the best techniques to try
to put a different spin on a negative situation that happened.
And I just want to say that there are some
negative things that happen to you that there will be
no positive spin. They will be no silver lining, And
I one hundred percent get that. But other than the
sort of big tragedies, ask yourself, and sometimes it may
not be until you've created some distance between you and
(22:47):
this bad thing that happened. But reframing allows us to
take back some control and says, you know what, I'm
not going to allow myself to be debilitated by this.
And one way might say, is there another way for
me to look at the situation? Could I look at
it from another person's point of view? Could I understand
it in the context of the larger plan for my life.
So sometimes it might be a rejection, and there's this
(23:08):
catchy thing rejection is really just redirection. There were so
many things that I wanted to do at certain times
in my life, and I am glad in retrospect that
they didn't happen at that time, because for any number
of reasons, I might have thought I was ready, or
maybe I gained more experience later on, or I was
better equipped to handle the challenge. And you could say, well,
that's just you trying to be an optimist, and I'd say, sure,
But the point is I couldn't control it. I couldn't
(23:29):
change it, so why not reframe it in a way
that puts me at ease. So reframing and really just
is taking back control and it's saying I don't have
to choose to allow myself to be a victim of
this situation. Reframing is one of the most powerful techniques
used in trauma processing therapy. But I recognized, you know,
I had nine to eleven survivor patients and friends and
(23:50):
they would say, you know, when we would talk about reframing,
and they're like, you know, I don't see there's no
silver lining, and I'd say absolutely, And it would be
later on that I would recognize that there are some
things that there'll be no positive way to put a
spin on it. And then I realized from my Eastern upbringing,
something my parents would say to me is that is
this a problem to be solved or a truth to
(24:10):
be accepted? And sometimes you cannot reframe something, and then
it just becomes about acceptance. And I think, you know,
my Western upbringing would have me believe that acceptance was resignation, surrender, passive,
meek and weak. Eastern upbringing says, no, acceptance is a
very strong place to be when you don't have a choice.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
We need to take another quick break. But when we return,
Sue will explain how she's been inspired by the Japanese
art form of kin sugi, taking broken pottery pieces and
reconstructing them to be even more beautiful than an undamaged face.
The Happiness Lab will be right back. Treating people caught
(24:51):
up in the destruction of the World Trade Center had
a huge impact on doctor Sue Varmer's career. Of course,
doctor patient confidentiality prevents Sue from talking in detail about
the specific cases she treated. But she wrote about one
inspiring person who escaped the collapsing towers, a woman that
Sue calls Shelley.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
So, you know, one of the first patients I worked with,
and I had imposter syndrome. I was like, this is
like a big job, and like, how am I qualified
to be here? And I was scared, and I was like,
how am I going to help Shelley? Because Shelley in
some ways represented a lot of the themes that I
was seeing, which was these amazing people, many of them
were high achievers, many of them leaders in their community.
(25:29):
You know, Shelley's a mom and just like a very honest, hardworking,
strong human being. And you know, she was someone who
considered herself an optimist. Go get her. She's like, I'm
the one always doing the five k races and throwing
the company get togethers, and so I never saw that
something could break my spirit. And that was literally what
she said. She was like, you know, on nine to eleven,
(25:50):
here I am. I'm getting trampled, I'm getting caught in
the dust clouds. I'm wearing heels that day. I love
to look cute when I come to work, and the
heel broke and then I'm walking barefoot and I'm asking
for help. The next thing, you know, like the dust cloud,
like just like there's no ways to even put words
on what happened that day. You go to work thinking
this is just a regular day, and then you're seeing
(26:11):
people die in front of you everywhere. And she was like,
I couldn't get home that day and my husband couldn't
reach me. Like she wasn't able to go back to
work in that office, and eventually when she did, she
never took a day off and never asked for help.
And it was really like only through the program that
a lot of people were told that they're going there
for physical reasons for checking up like asthma, GI problems,
(26:32):
and then they got mental health screenings. She wasn't even
thinking that, like I need to get help. And in
her story, as she's unfolding it, she's just start crying
and she like, I don't cry in front of people,
and I don't think I've ever cried about this in
front of anyone before. And you know, at the end,
she said, I feel broken. You know, that was one
of the hardest things to hear because I was like,
what role do I possibly even play in helping you
(26:55):
because everything you're saying to me is one thousand percent legitimate.
There's no silver lining. How do I get you to reframe?
There's no positive spin. So the theme was the brokenness
that Shelley was sharing, and it made me think of
this art of broken ceramics kinsugi in Japanese culture, which
is preparing something to beyond its original form. It's restoring it,
(27:18):
but bringing upon a level of beauty that is like
the two point zero version in kinsugi, like you're putting
these broken ceramic pieces together with the golden glue, a
golden lacquer, and it ends up being even more majestic
and expensive and valuable. And so when she said that,
it reminded me because I remember what I was in
therapy and I saw this art form in my therapist's office.
It's the thing that my dad had from one of
(27:40):
his trips many years ago in Japan. I thought to myself,
is this an opportunity? Could tragedy ever be an opportunity
for us to come back stronger? And so then became
the journey. I think it was a parallel journey of
me becoming a therapist. I think learning so much from
my patients and just going home and saying, you know what,
like I'm on this ride with them, for better or
or worse, and we're going to get through this together.
(28:02):
I don't have all the answers, and I don't have
them right now. We're going to co create and co
construct a new reality that hopefully will be just as good.
It's never going to be the same. I get it
that Shelley who wore the heels is the Shelley that
now wear sneakers or if she wears kitten heels, and
she brings like a book bag duffel bag and had
a change of clothes, always anticipating in a way, like
what if this were to ever happen again. So in
(28:22):
some ways she was right, she was never going to
be that person. But after the treatment ended, you know,
I sat with her and her husband and he's like,
I used to be the warrior in the relationship, and
like I finally have my wife back, and she's able
to function and she was able to ask for help.
But it's returning back to a person that sense of
self that they lost, of like that ability of I
(28:43):
can do this.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
It seems like going through trauma, so many people that
you've worked with went through this idea of the sense
of inner brokenness, and you talked about this as the
effect that trauma has had on people's self efficacy. What
is self efficacy and why is it so important for
mental health?
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Self efficacy is your confidence in your own abilities. And
I think it's so interesting because it's not really saying
anything about your actual abilities. And you know that saying
like faked till you make it. I think there is
some truth to it, but not the realities. Nobody is
saying completely faked. Like you need to do the work,
whatever that work is, if it's training to become a musician,
like you need to train, but you also have to
(29:18):
have faith and confidence in your ability to achieve the
thing that you're working towards. So there's two aspects of it.
One is continuing to push yourself to develop that ability,
but then eventually believing that it is going to come
to fruition. And we see there's so much work. Like
Albert Bandura had done a lot of study on self efficacy,
and he says that this sense of confidence comes from
(29:40):
your own personal experience, from vicarious learning, looking at role models,
getting feedback from trusted people, and then also just a
sense of how does it make you feel your own
physiological feedback.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
It also seems like self efficacy involves some specific expectations,
both expectations about ourselves and outside ourselves. Explain what the
research shows about that. Yes, there's two features to it.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
One is just the belief that you yourself have the
capacity to achieve this and then the fact that this
outcome is achievable. Period. So I'm just going to use
weight loss as an example. Somebody may say I'm doing
all the things I know, like I know what I
need to do, and that could be anything like if
somebody said I'm trying to put on more muscle, I
need to eat more protein. I know what I need
to do if I need to wake up like better
(30:22):
sleep hygiene. So intellectually knowing what the steps are, that's
a part of it. Number two, you carrying it out.
But number three, will my work in the end be impactful?
Will I see results? Because there'll be people who say
I'm still not seeing the result. Sometimes the results are
not in your hand. You may say I'm working really
hard at work for promotion. I know what I need
(30:44):
to do, but I'm dealing in a very stressful work
environment that feels unfair, that feels biased, that feels like
I'm walking an uphill battle. So I think that there
are two parts that you need to feel efficacious, because
your environment lends itself to making you feel that way.
And the environment needs to be supportive because you can
do all you want. But if the system feels rigged
(31:04):
against you, and again, it could be a matter of
perception or it could be reality. So we have to
entertain both. Always try to ask my patients. I said, listen,
I just want to get a better sense of your work.
Tell me a little bit about your boss's personality, give
me a sense of the interactions. How do you feel?
How do your colleagues feel about this? So I never
want to deny that reality if somebody says I'm trying,
I am doing my best and things are still not
(31:25):
working for me.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
But both of those expectations seem to contribute to the
benefits of experiencing self efficacy. What happens when it feels
like we're not able to do what we really want
to do. What happens when we're not feeling so effective?
Speaker 2 (31:36):
So I think we end up feeling demoralized disenchanted, disenfranchised,
and we give up. And it's natural to think that
you're going to fail, but what you really need to
be reminded of is that you can rise up again.
And so to me, proficiency is about reminding people at
their very core of their capability. And like they did
experiments with athletes and they're told, you're not going to
(31:57):
win against this person. There's so much better than you.
What they didn't know was they were actually matched with
an athlete who was at the same level as them.
But when you're told in advance you're not going to
be able to do this, it can't. And when they
were told the opposite, all this person sucks compared to you,
You're so much better, you're going to win. So a
lot of times our expectation really predicts outcomes. And like
there's an experiment where they tell students going into a
(32:19):
classroom the people that are very friendly or they're not,
and the success of this student going into the classroom
being able to make friends really had to do with
what their expectations of what was to come. So I
do believe in this concept of self fulfilling prophecy, and
I don't think that optimism is at all magical thinking.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
So, how can we fight some of these barriers that
lead to a lack of self efficacy? What can do
we do to become more proficient? One of the barriers
you talked about a lot sort of fighting helplessness. How
can we fight our inner sense of helplessness?
Speaker 2 (32:46):
So I think the first thing is just understanding and
recognizing it as that, and allowing yourself time to rest
and to sometimes hit pause, maybe not stop. Validation is
a key part of that is just to say I
had a really hard time, Like if you're lucky enough
to have someone really like loving and caring and has
your best interests at heart, to say I get it,
I see you, I see how hard you're working, and
(33:07):
this was not your fault or could you learn something
from this if you did have a role in it,
and what can you do differently? So I think pausing, resting, recovering,
because I think so many of us just go from
one project to another to another, and it's this like
sort of destination addiction where you're like, I need to
get to the next place without really thinking through why
do I continue to strive? You know, and sometimes to
(33:29):
look at the helplessness and say, is this an opportunity
for me to change course? You know, am I meant
really for this? Do I really want this? Or is
there another way for me to achieve this?
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And that really nicely gets to a second barrier. You've
talked about this idea of stuckness, where it's like I
just I'm never going to find a path forward. I'm
just always going to be stuck. How do we fight
this barrier to proficiency? Fighting stuckness is about finding flexibility.
And I talk about in the book about patients who
are like, oh, I must go to I don't know,
fill in the blank, like business school or medical school
or whatever it is. And he was actually a patient
(33:59):
who you know, she was like I have to be
a PhD In psychology, Like this is the only thing
she wanted since she was a kid. And her parents
were like, no, you're not really meant for that very
long course, and we don't have the money for like
and I remember talking to this patient saying, is there
anything else that you can think of? And one thing
led to another, and next thing, you know, she's the
head of a wellness company and years later, you know,
she sent me a clipping of some award that she
(34:20):
got and it said she had written thank you and
this was something you should with me in therapy, write
your purpose and pen but your path in pencil. And
that was so poignant to me because I was like,
number one, don't remember saying that, but thank you.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
I'll take it. And then number two, Wow, you know
it was something that probably I needed to hear at
that time. And you know, just this idea that we
don't have to be fixated on one specific path because
there's so many roads to feeling satisfied, to feeling needed,
to feeling impactful, and often it's not the road that
we thought that we would be and that's totally fine.
So flexibility is a big part of proficiency. Like you
(34:53):
have to be nimble, you have to be quick, you
have to say I have tried and it is okay.
Giving up isn't always a sense of failure. I think
a lot of times in this culture of go go
go and work warrior make it happen, too much emphasis
on the final product, on the success rather than the process,
which is about making this and learning and fun and
creativity and getting lost. When my husband and I travel
(35:14):
and sometimes we make plans and sometimes we don't, you know,
we don't like to have fixed, structured itineraries. We like
to drive and go to small villages and meet people
and see where things take us, you know. And I
get that that's not always reality, and it's not always
productive or efficient, especially if you're traveling with young kids.
But I think as much as possible, I love the
idea of getting lost and just think about what feels
(35:34):
safe and what parameters and guardrails. How do you want
to intentionally and safely allow yourself to get lost.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
It's such a nice way to sort of reframe your perceptions,
which I think is like such an important part of flexibility.
And so so those are ways we can sort of
fixed stuckness. But the third barrier is also one that
I relate to a lot. It's this kind of just fatigue,
this idea that like I'm too tired to be proficient,
Like I just can't do this. What are some ways
we can break through that barrier to proficiency?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Laurie, I love that you share that, because when I
think of so many like really successful and high achieving people,
I feel like we are at risk of burnout because
we hold ourselves to really high standards and I feel
like in this culture, we're often taught that rest has
to be earned, or that rest is wasteful, unproductive, and
it's like frowned upon. And I just think that rest
and leisure need to be incorporated as part of the
(36:24):
work plan and schedule with the same type of intention
and urgency in a way. So when fatigue sets in,
I think that whatever fills your cop play, I think
for me is always a way to do that. So
give yourself grace and be gentle and recognize that do
you want to get to the peak or the summit
of this mountain completely out of breath, weathered and worn down, demoralized?
(36:47):
You got to the peak? But at what costs?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
It also sounds like it's just really recognizing our natural limitations,
whether those are just kind of mental natural limitations, like
we just need some rest, we need to take a break,
but also physical natural limitations. I think this is sometimes
why we feel so fatigued, is that we're not taking
care of our physical bodies too.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yes, yes, And I say, like, for me, like something
I'm really working on right now, and it's something I've
been thinking about for a long time is like sleep hygiene,
you know, I think that I've always just taken my
physical health for granted, and sometimes there's consequences to that,
and I've just assumed, oh, I'm a machine, it'll work
itself out. And I remember a friend several years ahead
of me telling me that, so there's going to come
(37:25):
a point in your life when you're going to make
your schedule around sleep. And I was like, I don't
believe you, Like I make my schedule around everything else,
but that that just fits itself in. She's like, no,
I'm very careful about it. And now I'm thinking backwards
where I'm like, if I want to protect this time,
whatever it is, seven eight, nine hours, then I'm going
to work backwards, and the things that I'm saying yes
to and no too are going to be centered around
(37:46):
the sleep schedule. You know, it's about making deposits into
this rest account. And so sleep is one way, fifteen
minute naps is another way, one minute meditations is another way,
exercise is another way. Anything that's going to refill your
cup and replenish your energy.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
And so all these strategies that you're talking about for
replenishing your energy, fighting helplessness, feeling less stuck, these were
exactly the kind of things you talk about with Shelley.
What was the outcome there? Was she able to use
these strategies to kind of heal that inner sense of brokenness.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Yes, And it's funny because she would joke. She's like,
I didn't often know where you were going with certain things,
like when I'm telling you how I'm scared about another
terrorist attack happening, or I feel like my sense of
safety or calmness or hope has been changed or demoralized.
You would say to me, talk to your boss about
trying to get time off or sleep. She's like, I
didn't understand where we were going necessarily, but you know,
I figured I'm here, so I might as well show
(38:37):
up and go with you. And so I think a
lot of times when people come in to work with me,
they'll come in with one specific problem in mind, and
they're hoping to get an answer for that problem. And
then I often say, let's back up and sort of
take a three sixty to approach your wellness even though
you're talking to me about, let's say, problems at work.
You know, she wanted to get a raise, she wanted
to get a promotion, but she was just so afraid.
(38:58):
She thought if I asked for days off, if I
ask for rest, even if it was like blocking off
an hour for therapy, that all of these things would
get in the way of promotion because she would be
seen as, you're not really serious about this job. And
what was interesting was by taking care of her mental
health by resting more. Her boss was like, I had
no idea that you were going through all of this.
I am more than happy to give you PTO. No,
(39:18):
I'm not going to doctor pay like a lease. Consider
it as part of the sickly that you have, which
you have tons of. You have never taken a sick
day in your life. And she finally felt her mission
to rest, permission to take care of her mental health,
and she ended up getting the promotion. I mean, her
life changed, like a lot of it is because embracing
the fact that your life is not the same, you know.
And I think that's the hardest part because so many people,
(39:38):
very quickly after trauma or any any kind of setback,
want to get back to who they were. I mean,
it's not possible because this event has transformed you and
your understanding and framework of the world. But also for
a lot of people going back to baseline also doesn't
make sense because your baseline might have gotten you to
where you are right now and why you're in my
(40:00):
office to begin with. So really think about when someone
said I just want to be who I was? Is
it realistic? Is it possible? And is it healthy?
Speaker 1 (40:07):
Because sometimes optimism really seems like it's about kind of
accepting where we are and giving ourselves the grace to
be in that spot.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Yes, exactly. So it's interesting because when you think about optimism,
it's just you think it only means one thing, which
is to look on the bright side, not recognizing that
it includes a practice of gratitude, of leisure, of rest
of self, compassion, of proactivity, of challenging the way that
you're thinking. So there's so much more to it, and
optimists do it naturally not to mention having healthier habits
(40:36):
and what's involved with that.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Thanks to doctor Sue Varmah and the folks at the
World Happiness Summit who introduced me to Sue's work. If
you want to learn more about the summit or sign
up for their twenty twenty six event, you can visit
World Happiness Summit dot com. That's World Happiness summit dot com.
But my discussion with Suet Wahasu was so insightful and
I can't help but leave you with one more of
the highlights. This was when Sue agreed to lead me
(41:01):
in the audience in a name It, Claim It, Team it,
and reframem it exercise.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Okay, so first of all, just if you want to
close your eyes, feel free. If you want to keep
them open, you know, whatever worked best for you, name
the antecedent. Think of a problem, right, Think of anything
that might have happened today or in the last week
that could have triggered you to feeling upset, right, And
the more granular you get, the more likely you are
to be able to put your finger on it and
change the problem. And we see this even as far
(41:27):
an extreme as suicide, where somebody can put their finger
on These were the events that led to me feeling
like my life didn't have value anymore. I didn't want
to live anymore. Right, So that is a dark scenario.
But just in think of an everyday problem, name the antecedent. Right.
Then I want you to feel in your body, right,
so maybe you want to close your eyes for this,
(41:47):
Where in your body are you feeling the tension, right?
Are you feeling it in your jaw? Are you feeling
it in your shoulders? Are you feeling it in your legs?
Where do you tend to hold the problem and the
stress in your body? Right? So, now you've named the antecedent,
You've claimed where it is in your body. Because often
the body will express what the mind can be right
(42:10):
and it will take place in the form of medical problems, headaches,
things like that. And then I want you this is
the taming part, and everybody has a different form of
self soothing. Some people may say that I want to
take one minute meditation. I call these oasis moments where
you are shutting the world out and finding your grounded
sense of peace internally. Right, it could be one minute
(42:31):
meditation or something that I've worked on that is based
off of a best possible scenario. It's an optimism intervention.
It's ten minutes, but this is a one minute version
of it. So if you want to do this with me,
let's go. I'd like to just close your eyes, settle in,
let your shoulders drop, and I want to take you
on a little journey with me. So now that I've
(42:53):
asked you to envision a problem. Right so you've clearly
defined the problem in your mind. I want you to
imagine a road, a path leading to the solution to
that problem. I want you to get very specific. What
does that solution look like? And what does the road
(43:15):
to the solution look like? Is that road straight? Does
it wind? Does it twister? Turn? And now I want
to imagine that we are walking together towards that solution.
We're getting closer. You're getting closer, and this solution is
(43:37):
the best possible outcome that you could have envisioned. And
you're starting to feel the anticipation of excitement, of delight,
of success, of satisfaction, of personal gratification. You're getting closer,
(43:58):
and now you have arrived at the best possible outcome
of your solution. And I want you to feel all
the feelings that come with success, with mastery, with resolution, peace, happiness,
(44:19):
and success are enveloping you. Right now. I want you
to take a deep breath to the count of five,
inhaling gently through your nose and exhaling slowly through your mouth.
Your feeling relaxed, hopeful, successful, and just know that this
(44:46):
feeling is always at your fingertips. Success is accessible within
you through a positive mindset that you have chosen, and
take a deep breath and open your eyes.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Pretty good, right, that's pretty good. Thank you,
Pushkin, There's no way around it. Sometimes life is tough, awful.
Even bad things happen all the time, whether it's an
unanticipated health problem, a new relationship woe, or dire news
on the job. Sometimes these nasty circumstances result from our
(00:37):
own behaviors and choices, and sometimes they have nothing to
do with us whatsoever. Every Day people become the victims
of random accidents, natural disasters, or even unprovoked attacks. In
the aftermath of awful events like these, it's easy to
feel upset and broken, and when things are really bad,
you can even start wondering whether you'll be able to
pick up the pieces of your life again. It is
(00:59):
so fabulous to be back in Miami and this beautiful
zity and this beautiful weather with you beautiful This spring,
I was invited to host a discussion at the World
Happiness Summit in my and that gave me the chance
to interview someone who's dedicated her career to helping people
whose lives have been impacted in awful ways. I made
this amazing audience.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I was so excited to see. I am so excited
to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is psychiatrist doctor Sue Varma. Sue was the first
medical director at the World Trade Center Mental Health Program
at NYU, where she treated people caught up in the
attacks of nine to eleven. Sue has now gathered her
insights from decades of this kind of work into a
new book called Practical Optimism, The Art, Science, and Practice
of Exceptional well Being. In the book, Sue explores strategies
(01:45):
we can use to deal with the difficult chapters in life,
and her biggest recommendation is to adopt a particular form
of optimism, what she calls practical optimism.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
To me, optimism has head to toe benefits, but at
the end of the day, what optimism is is a mindset.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
The world happiness of it, or WHASU as we call it,
is an amazing event. If you like this podcast, you
would have an Apse sloop Blast at OHASU. But with
so many speakers scheduled, I only had time to chat
with Sue about a tiny part of her work, so
I asked her to record a fuller interview just for you.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Nice to see you, my pleasure looking forward to it.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
So I got her back to join me on Zoom.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, I'm fine with whatever worked for you. I don't
mind doing like a full episode yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
And began at the beginning with her story of the
morning of September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
So, you know, on nine eleven, I was a medical
student and I was working in a New York City hospital,
and I remember getting the call to say, you know,
discharge as many healthy ish people as you can, because
we need to make beds for people who are going
to be coming in who are injured. And we did that,
and we waited and waited and waited, and we just
simply didn't see the kind of numbers that we were
(02:55):
thinking because a death toll was so high.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Do you remember where you were when you first heard
about the towers, Like, were you already like at work
and saw it on TV or something?
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yes, I remember like we would come in at five am,
so I had already been there for like three plus
hours when we were hearing the news and seeing it
live as the towers were coming down as a plane crash,
So you know, it was freakish. And I remember, like,
you know, my sister in law was working downtown in
nine to eleven, so many friends and family members were
somehow down and around there, and we couldn't get through
(03:25):
to anybody like nobody was answering the phone, and we
did lose loved ones, friends. I mean, there were so
many stories of people getting caught in the dust cloud,
seeing people jump out of the buildings, getting trampled on,
and in the days after, myself and my colleagues we
volunteered in a variety of ways with first responders, with cleanup, rescue,
recovery at the Morgue, getting trauma training, you know, being
(03:47):
a New Yorker my whole life, like, this is a
place I identified with. But I think no matter where
you were in the country or in the world, I
think a lot of people felt somehow connected and traumatized rightfully,
So it was devastating. You know, when I think of trauma,
like you're never left the same. There's a you before
it and then there's a U after it. When I
think of mass disasters and terrorism, it's intended to chip
(04:10):
away at your morale and your sense of self and
your source of confidence and trust in the world. And
so what I saw in you know, this whole concept
of you know, New York strong, It really to me
came from this idea that great tragedy, not always, but
sometimes can bring out a sense of grit and toughness
and community. And it wouldn't be until years later, after
(04:30):
I'd finished my residency training at NYU and psychiatry to
be recruited for this role that I really didn't feel
prepared for, but felt so honored to be considered and
thought of for it. And you know, it was a
massive effort. It was a new program, and so when
I came on, you know, I remember the early days,
They're like, there's several hundred patients who are on our list.
You're going to be treating first responders and civilians. And
(04:51):
I was like, great, how many psychiatrists do we have?
Like six seven? They're like, no, it's just you. I joked.
I'm like, these are big shoes to fill and they're like, no, no, no,
you're bringing your own shoes because their own a shoes.
Like this is the first program of its kind, so
incredibly daunting, challenging, but eventually extremely meaningful and rewarding.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
But you had, if I understand, I kind of someone
to look up to who kind of dealt with difficult
situations with optimism. I'm thinking about someone in your family
that you talked about in your book. Tell me the
story of the inspiration that your dad was giving you.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
So you know, my dad still is an inspiration. Like
he's going to be close to ninety soon. And he
literally looks and acts and thinks twenty years younger, if
not more, and one of the kindest, sharpest and healthiest
people that I do. There's such resilience. You know. He
came from very little in India, and you know he's
born in late nineteen thirties and has seen so many
(05:40):
decades of trauma and tragedy and the things that I
take away from him, you know, he would always say
simple living and high thinking and this was a big
saying in my family that I always make fun of him.
I was like, but Dad, why are you always laughing?
Why are you always smiling? Like what is there to
be like, especially now, Like what is there to be
so grateful for? He's like, I mean you can laugh
or you can cry. I mean, you make the choice.
He's always sometimes like laughing at his own jokes in
(06:02):
his own head, telling himself stories, not in a delusional way,
just like laughing. And I was like, the Dad, you
didn't have electricity, didn't have running water. He's like, are
you talking about we had like dance parties and slumber
parties on the rooftop and camel rides and you know,
hurricane lamps. I'm like, that's because you had no electricity.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Dad.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
He's like, life was great. Life was great. He's like,
how do you want to look at it? But like,
how do you want to tell your story? And so
you know, I just saw him this morning and he's
like standing there and he's like cutting fruit. That's how
like immigrant dads show love in the house. He's like,
what do you want to like, you know, candle up,
I'm cutting this, I'm cutting that. And I was like, wow,
you spend three hours cutting fruits for the whole thing.
Like yeah, he's retired now, he's like, you know, we've
got to spend our time some way. So I was
(06:38):
just thinking about him, and I'm like, you know that
saying like you don't want to just add years to
your life, you want to add life to your years.
And he is like the perfect example of that of
just always enjoying himself no matter where he is. He's
always reading new books, always coming back and listening to
podcasts and interviews and sharing things, so keeps himself intellectually stimulated.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
So it seems like part of his story is that
even though he came from circumstances that might feel kind
of negative or feel sort of harsh to other folks
when they're listening to it, he seems like he's really
happy and optimistic, resilient. And this sort of seems to
fit with the question that you face when you saw
your patients. I mean, talk about the puzzle you sort
of experienced as you saw different patients reactions to the
(07:18):
trauma of nine to eleven.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yes, so you know, first thing I want to say
is I never want anyone to feel less than if
they do end up experiencing mental health disorders, whether it's
related to an event or an incident or not. Most
people twenty thirty forty percent of folks in their life
will experience a mental health disorder, and seventy to eighty
percent of people will experience a life threatening event at
(07:39):
some point or another. Right, Well, what's interesting that when
it comes to post traumatic stress disorder that while eighty
percent of people will experience a life threatening event, only
about eight to ten percent of people will actually meet
criteria for post traumatic stress disorders. So what that says
to me is, Wow, right, like at least ninety percent
of people will have really bad things happen to them
(08:00):
in their life, big bad, life changing things, and yet
they will move on. We had a lot of patients
who were in the medical monitoring program but never met
criteria for anxiety depression PTSD. So our brain has a
great ability to bounce back, right, But to me, bouncing
back from adversity, that's only part of the equation. It's
(08:20):
important part, but it's only one part. I wanted to
help people thrive in the face of adversity, because which
one of us will escape this world, you know, without
anything bad ever happened to us, none of us. That
is where practical optimism came to me, is because I
would see these folks who a lot of these patients
who never became anxious or depressed, that they would still
come to our program and helping other folks. They bring
(08:43):
them to their appointments. In the aftermath of nine to eleven,
A lot of patients would have agoraphobia or avoidance of people, places, things,
reminders is a feature of PTSD, so with hypervigilance, insomnia
on nightmares, irritability, so they don't want to leave their house,
and we would have these other patients who are like,
I'm fine, I'll bring you, I'll take the subway with you,
(09:03):
because they were so afraid of there being another attack
in the days after, or just having triggers and reminders.
So these folks who never made it into my program,
I would see them in the hallways and I literally
would be like, what is your secret? And I've started
to see common threads of specific things that they did.
But resilience, in my mind, was always something you either
(09:23):
had or you didn't, and one feature of it was optimism,
but there were other features like altruism, social support, moral compass,
cognitive flexibility, but optimism was again one of these things
that you had or you didn't, and so was resilience.
But what about the rest of us? And it wouldn't
be until years later that there was a paper done
with researchers from UCLA and they said, you know, there
(09:45):
is a genetic linked toptimism. So that was my first question.
Is it genetic? Is it something you're born with? And
I love it when I find science to back up
things that I'm already thinking. And it said, yes, there is,
and it's this oxytocin receptor gene and if there's some
variation in it, you know, you may not be as optimistic.
And what did that mean? Well, if you're pessimistic or
have pessimistic tendencies and you're more likely to get depressed.
(10:07):
And then they looked at this gene and they said, so,
what is it actually code for? Right, It's a mindset, yes,
But in addition to being a mindset, it's also the
ability to regulate your emotions, to be able to ask
for help. And I was thinking about so many of
these things that in my therapy with patients. What is
it that I'm helping them with? And can I teach
people optimism? Can I teach them the things that optimists do?
(10:29):
How do we codify this? What does this look like
behaviorally in the world? And I found data in every
field of medicine talking about it. People who are optimistic
and do a brief optimistic intervention recover faster from colds
or have less colds or infections, or looking at exceptional longevity.
In this study in drama that I was a meta
analysis of over two hundred thousand people and said that
(10:50):
people who are optimistic live ten to fifteen percent longer,
and not just longer lives, but healthier lives. So the
concept of health span, because lifespan may be increasing, but
we're spending the last decade of our lives, especially women
with dementia, living in a nursing home or dependent on
other people. So I was like, head to toe optimists
have less anxiety and depression, thirty percent, less likelihood of
getting strokes or dying from heart attacks or really all
(11:13):
cause mortality. They're happier, They're forty percent more likely to
get a raise in the next year. They have more friendships,
stronger and longer bonds from childhood. They are happier in
their romantic relationships. I was like, why is no one
talking about this? This to me is the jackpot, This
is the well spring of health.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
So I wanted to talk a little bit about how
people tend to think about optimism because I think when
we hear the word optimism, we sometimes get it wrong.
So what is optimism?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, so I think a lot of people I know
I did think of it as like this woo woo
thinking and just look on the bright side and everything
will work out. And that is definitely not optimism. That
is toxic positivity, asking someone to just get over something,
or look on the bride side. Optimism simply is the
tendency to have a positive outlook in an uncertain situation,
to kind of expect best possible outcome. But to me,
(11:59):
optimism by itself is only part of the equation because
it's like, i can have all the positive thinking in
the world, but if I'm not doing anything actionable and proactive,
I'm not going to be able to trans those positive
outlooks into positive outcomes. And so in my mind, I
needed something more. I needed skill set and a tool set.
And that is what practical optimism is, and that is
how practical optimism differs from optimism. So if you're in
(12:22):
that twenty five percent bucket that is born naturally with
a positive outlook, excellent, But the reality is that seventy
five percent of us are not skewed that way. You know,
we might be sort of somewhere in the middle or
maybe skeew more pessimistic. So optimism is having a very
favorable outlook, but by itself it's not sufficient.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
So let's walk through this sort of updated version practical optimism.
How is that different?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
So practical optimism helps you translate positive outlooks into positive
outcomes through action and practical optimism is a practice like
having a yoga practice, learning a new language, learning how
to ride a bike, learning a sport. Some days it's
five minutes, some days it's longer, but it does require
effort and work, and more importantly, it's a skill set.
And why that was so freeing to me is like,
(13:04):
we can all learn skills, and we all should learn skills,
and the practical optimism is a practice that requires you
to take chances and to put yourself out there in
the world, and to course correct and to continually learn
from mistakes.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
It's time for a quick break, but we'll dive deeper
into Sue's idea of practical optimism when the Happiness Lab
returns in a moment. In her book Practical Optimism, The Art,
Science and Practice of Exceptional Wellbeing, psychiatrist doctor Sue Varma
explains that a major pillar of becoming more optimistic is
(13:40):
facing up to our emotions and processing them. So why
is that so important?
Speaker 2 (13:45):
When people look at optimists, they want to dismiss their
happiness and say, well, they've never had anything bad happen
to them. Of course they're happy. And what people don't
realize is that optimists and pessimists both experience the same
number of life adversities. The difference is that optimists are
better able to cope with them. And the reason is
is because they are in real time. Processing their emotions
(14:09):
requires more effort and more energy to suppress your emotions.
And when you suppress your emotions, they say that your
body expresses what your mind cannot. And so a lot
of my patients will come to me and they'll say,
I don't know why I'm always sick, or I have
these headaches, or I have these unexplained aches and pains,
or ended up in the emergency room from panic attacks.
(14:29):
So processing your emotions is such a key pillar of
optimism because it says bad things are going to happen
to you. People are going to piss you off, and
what are you going to do about it? And a
lot of times people end up suppressing negative emotions, like
when we talk about any kind of addiction or unhealthy
behavior with substances, with anything, hours of binge watching, doom scrolling,
if it's meant as an avoidance of a procrastination, you
(14:53):
cannot escape negative emotions. They will come to haunt you
and That's why I say manage your emotions before they
manage you, because in some form or another, I see
so much suffering. You know, in my practice, a lot
of these people look to the world as if they
have it all together. In the realities, I know different
because I get an interesting inside perspective of what is
actually going on in their lives, and so in one
(15:14):
form or another, whether it's their relationship suffering, whether it's
their work, something is going to suffer. So we know
that people who deal with their emotions are less likely
to have all sorts of problems of heart disease. You know,
there's something called type deep personality. We've heard of type
A and type B and type DS. Is kind of
like angry, holding onto emotions, not expressing them. It takes
less energy to express it. I think so many people
(15:35):
are afraid of their emotions. They're afraid to be alone,
They're afraid to be alone with their thoughts. I know
people who will put the music on always in the
background because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.
And they're like, what would that mean for me if
I actually had to confront how I feel.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Which I think is so sad, right, because our emotions
are this really useful signal about what's going on in
reality and what we need to do. Differently, I feel
like ignoring them. We do that really at our parallel
right totally.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
And you know what it is an interesting Laurie, is
that I think a lot of times people are afraid
to confront emotions because it means that they will have
to make in their mind what they perceive it's massive
changes in their life and not ready to do that
because like if somebody confronted the fact, wow, I really
can't stand my partner and I've been resentful for so
many years, and if they were to confront it, it
would require something to change, and maybe they're afraid that
(16:21):
it would mean that this would be the end of
this relationship and then who would I be without it?
So I get it, I understand, But I would also
say that Rome wasn't built in a day, Like we
don't have to deconstruct our lives as a result of
figuring out what it means. Like I had a patient
the other day who was sharing with me, like a
lot of things that she was not happy about with
her partner, and I was like, what do you think
(16:42):
would be most helpful for me to say right now.
And she was like, well, I know what I don't
want you to say. I know I don't want you
to tell me to break up with it. She knows
on some level that the way things are not working,
but isn't ready to end the relationship. So that's just
one example. There's so many where somebody's like, I know
what I need to do in terms of changing my
life or changing a job. Like they know that if
they were to allow themselves to be enveloped by the
(17:05):
emotion either that they would be debilitated by it. And
I always say to patients, think of it is like
dresser drawers. I'm not saying let's open all of them
and take everything out and create an entire mass and
pile in the middle of your room. I'm saying, like,
let's just look at one drawer at a time and
I'll help you pack it a little bit neater, right,
But we're not saying everything, take out everything. And because
I think there's a fear of being overwhelmed.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And I think that fear of being overwhelmed can also
involve not just being overwhelmed by the circumstances. You need
to change but this worry that you might be literally
overwhelmed by the emotion itself. Yeah, and that's one of
the reasons I love your book. You share this sort
of handy rhyming catchphrase which I love for how we
can begin processing our emotions. What is this catchphrase?
Speaker 2 (17:44):
So it's name it, flame it, tame it, and reframe it.
And the naming part is just name the antecedent for
the trigger, just being aware of it. And there's so
much evidence that having emotional and granularity, just like understanding,
putting words to what you're feeling and what caused the trigger.
You know, when we look at people who have suicidal thinking,
as weird as this may sound, we feel that patients
(18:06):
who have understanding of what the trigger was probably have
a higher chance of recovery and prognosis because they can
tie it back to a specific event. And if you
can do that, then you're more likely to be able
to address the underlying causes and prevent them from happening again.
So naming your trigger and antecedents and knowing what they
are is really important.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
And so next up is claim it. What does it
mean to claim our emotions? So when I say claim
your emotions where in your body do you feel them.
A lot of times people will say that I have insomnia,
or I have frequent urination or frequent bowel movements, or
I have headaches, or I have a lot of tension
in my neck and my shoulders. So I say that
the body expresses what the mind cannot, and a lot
(18:44):
of times our painful or forbidden emotions shows up physical symptoms.
Another reason you talk about the importance of claiming emotions
is it allows us to think about what we might
call our forbidden emotions. What are forbidden emotions?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
So I think for some people, women, especially anger might
be really forbidden. I have so many patients that I
work with that end up crying when they're angry. It's
scary because either I think that they're afraid of pushing
the other person way, or that it means confronting or
challenging the person. And then what, I think we've all
created stories in our head about if I were to
(19:17):
say something to someone, They're not going to like it,
they're going to leave me, they're going to be mad
at me, and then what And I think it's helpful
to be like okay, yeah, and then what there's a
statistic that says that eighty five percent of the time
the things that we worry about never actually happen, and
the fifteen percent of time that they do, we're better
equipped to handle it than we think. So I think
that's really important to just keep in mind. So that's
(19:39):
claiming our emotions. But next up is that we have
to tame our emotions. And one way that you suggest
doing this is to really try to tame our ruminative loops.
What do you mean by ruminative loops? I think I
know what you mean. I think I've experienced this myself. First, yes,
I definitely have experienced ruminative loops. And it's just like
you're going in circles with the same thought, and what
that does is end up creating powerlessness, and it strips
(20:02):
us away of our agency because you're repeating the same
emotion what if, or you're catastrophizing assuming the worst case scenario,
or you're projecting. But taming your emotions is like short
circuiting and fading a break in that and saying, all right,
I am feeling angry, anxious, helpless, what am I going
to do to self soothe? And so taming is really
about soothing, And what I say is pick an activity
(20:24):
that's not going to create a negative habit on its own.
So somebody may say a glass of wine helps me soothe, Right,
Then what happens when you need two or three or
four to have the same effect, Right, So we don't
want the soothing activity to take on a life of
its own. So I would say, pick something that seems
relatively healthy ish. Can you make a five minute phone
call to a friend. Can you text someone that you
know is going to be supportive and helpful, But you
(20:45):
do a one minute meditation in place wherever you are,
just closing your eyes and taking a deep breath. For me,
walking is one of the most soothing activities. And I
was fascinated by the science of walking that there's something
about when you're walking, your eyes have to track what's
out there in the world, Like so you want to
get hit by a car, and all of that forces
you those eye movements to get out of your own head.
(21:07):
So going for a walk or any kind of exit
size just gets you out of your own head. It
gets you out of routine. So whatever you're capable of doing,
it could be a five minute stretch. So we just
want to keep it simple and lower the bar. But
what's soothing for you? That's the big take home point.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
You also mentioned this other strategy that I'm totally going
to adopt myself, which is this idea of emptying your
emotional spam folder.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah, what is this for me? I do that in journaling,
and I think that there's so much value and there's
so much science behind two ten minute journaling sessions, and
there's no one right way to journal what works for you,
Like sometimes it's literally for me reiterating what happened in
the day, and it's getting it out of your head
and putting it on paper, and you're like, all right,
that's it. I'm done. You know, when I was a
(21:46):
patient and going for my own therapy, I learned a
technique called worry journaling. And somebody may say, well, that
seems counterintuitive. Why would you keep a journal of your worries?
And what I learned is that when you write the
same thing over and over again, you start to see
that there's a trend in your worries. There's a common theme.
You're worried about the same types of things, and that
the things that you're worried about are not actually happening.
(22:06):
And if you're willing to write down how you handled it,
that creates a sense of mastery as well. So putting
it on paper is one way to unload your worry
spam folder.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
And so that's a nice transition to the last of
our four tips for kind processing our emotions, We need
to reframe them. What is reframing our emotions? Why can
it be so important?
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So reframing is one of the best techniques to try
to put a different spin on a negative situation that happened.
And I just want to say that there are some
negative things that happen to you that there will be
no positive spin. They will be no silver lining, And
I one hundred percent get that. But other than the
sort of big tragedies, ask yourself, and sometimes it may
not be until you've created some distance between you and
(22:47):
this bad thing that happened. But reframing allows us to
take back some control and says, you know what, I'm
not going to allow myself to be debilitated by this.
And one way might say, is there another way for
me to look at the situation? Could I look at
it from another person's point of view? Could I understand
it in the context of the larger plan for my life.
So sometimes it might be a rejection, and there's this
(23:08):
catchy thing rejection is really just redirection. There were so
many things that I wanted to do at certain times
in my life, and I am glad in retrospect that
they didn't happen at that time, because for any number
of reasons, I might have thought I was ready, or
maybe I gained more experience later on, or I was
better equipped to handle the challenge. And you could say, well,
that's just you trying to be an optimist, and I'd say, sure,
But the point is I couldn't control it. I couldn't
(23:29):
change it, so why not reframe it in a way
that puts me at ease. So reframing and really just
is taking back control and it's saying I don't have
to choose to allow myself to be a victim of
this situation. Reframing is one of the most powerful techniques
used in trauma processing therapy. But I recognized, you know,
I had nine to eleven survivor patients and friends and
(23:50):
they would say, you know, when we would talk about reframing,
and they're like, you know, I don't see there's no
silver lining, and I'd say absolutely, And it would be
later on that I would recognize that there are some
things that there'll be no positive way to put a
spin on it. And then I realized from my Eastern upbringing,
something my parents would say to me is that is
this a problem to be solved or a truth to
(24:10):
be accepted? And sometimes you cannot reframe something, and then
it just becomes about acceptance. And I think, you know,
my Western upbringing would have me believe that acceptance was resignation, surrender, passive,
meek and weak. Eastern upbringing says, no, acceptance is a
very strong place to be when you don't have a choice.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
We need to take another quick break. But when we return,
Sue will explain how she's been inspired by the Japanese
art form of kin sugi, taking broken pottery pieces and
reconstructing them to be even more beautiful than an undamaged face.
The Happiness Lab will be right back. Treating people caught
(24:51):
up in the destruction of the World Trade Center had
a huge impact on doctor Sue Varmer's career. Of course,
doctor patient confidentiality prevents Sue from talking in detail about
the specific cases she treated. But she wrote about one
inspiring person who escaped the collapsing towers, a woman that
Sue calls Shelley.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
So, you know, one of the first patients I worked with,
and I had imposter syndrome. I was like, this is
like a big job, and like, how am I qualified
to be here? And I was scared, and I was like,
how am I going to help Shelley? Because Shelley in
some ways represented a lot of the themes that I
was seeing, which was these amazing people, many of them
were high achievers, many of them leaders in their community.
(25:29):
You know, Shelley's a mom and just like a very honest, hardworking,
strong human being. And you know, she was someone who
considered herself an optimist. Go get her. She's like, I'm
the one always doing the five k races and throwing
the company get togethers, and so I never saw that
something could break my spirit. And that was literally what
she said. She was like, you know, on nine to eleven,
(25:50):
here I am. I'm getting trampled, I'm getting caught in
the dust clouds. I'm wearing heels that day. I love
to look cute when I come to work, and the
heel broke and then I'm walking barefoot and I'm asking
for help. The next thing, you know, like the dust cloud,
like just like there's no ways to even put words
on what happened that day. You go to work thinking
this is just a regular day, and then you're seeing
(26:11):
people die in front of you everywhere. And she was like,
I couldn't get home that day and my husband couldn't
reach me. Like she wasn't able to go back to
work in that office, and eventually when she did, she
never took a day off and never asked for help.
And it was really like only through the program that
a lot of people were told that they're going there
for physical reasons for checking up like asthma, GI problems,
(26:32):
and then they got mental health screenings. She wasn't even
thinking that, like I need to get help. And in
her story, as she's unfolding it, she's just start crying
and she like, I don't cry in front of people,
and I don't think I've ever cried about this in
front of anyone before. And you know, at the end,
she said, I feel broken. You know, that was one
of the hardest things to hear because I was like,
what role do I possibly even play in helping you
(26:55):
because everything you're saying to me is one thousand percent legitimate.
There's no silver lining. How do I get you to reframe?
There's no positive spin. So the theme was the brokenness
that Shelley was sharing, and it made me think of
this art of broken ceramics kinsugi in Japanese culture, which
is preparing something to beyond its original form. It's restoring it,
(27:18):
but bringing upon a level of beauty that is like
the two point zero version in kinsugi, like you're putting
these broken ceramic pieces together with the golden glue, a
golden lacquer, and it ends up being even more majestic
and expensive and valuable. And so when she said that,
it reminded me because I remember what I was in
therapy and I saw this art form in my therapist's office.
It's the thing that my dad had from one of
(27:40):
his trips many years ago in Japan. I thought to myself,
is this an opportunity? Could tragedy ever be an opportunity
for us to come back stronger? And so then became
the journey. I think it was a parallel journey of
me becoming a therapist. I think learning so much from
my patients and just going home and saying, you know what,
like I'm on this ride with them, for better or
or worse, and we're going to get through this together.
(28:02):
I don't have all the answers, and I don't have
them right now. We're going to co create and co
construct a new reality that hopefully will be just as good.
It's never going to be the same. I get it
that Shelley who wore the heels is the Shelley that
now wear sneakers or if she wears kitten heels, and
she brings like a book bag duffel bag and had
a change of clothes, always anticipating in a way, like
what if this were to ever happen again. So in
(28:22):
some ways she was right, she was never going to
be that person. But after the treatment ended, you know,
I sat with her and her husband and he's like,
I used to be the warrior in the relationship, and
like I finally have my wife back, and she's able
to function and she was able to ask for help.
But it's returning back to a person that sense of
self that they lost, of like that ability of I
(28:43):
can do this.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
It seems like going through trauma, so many people that
you've worked with went through this idea of the sense
of inner brokenness, and you talked about this as the
effect that trauma has had on people's self efficacy. What
is self efficacy and why is it so important for
mental health?
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Self efficacy is your confidence in your own abilities. And
I think it's so interesting because it's not really saying
anything about your actual abilities. And you know that saying
like faked till you make it. I think there is
some truth to it, but not the realities. Nobody is
saying completely faked. Like you need to do the work,
whatever that work is, if it's training to become a musician,
like you need to train, but you also have to
(29:18):
have faith and confidence in your ability to achieve the
thing that you're working towards. So there's two aspects of it.
One is continuing to push yourself to develop that ability,
but then eventually believing that it is going to come
to fruition. And we see there's so much work. Like
Albert Bandura had done a lot of study on self efficacy,
and he says that this sense of confidence comes from
(29:40):
your own personal experience, from vicarious learning, looking at role models,
getting feedback from trusted people, and then also just a
sense of how does it make you feel your own
physiological feedback.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
It also seems like self efficacy involves some specific expectations,
both expectations about ourselves and outside ourselves. Explain what the
research shows about that. Yes, there's two features to it.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
One is just the belief that you yourself have the
capacity to achieve this and then the fact that this
outcome is achievable. Period. So I'm just going to use
weight loss as an example. Somebody may say I'm doing
all the things I know, like I know what I
need to do, and that could be anything like if
somebody said I'm trying to put on more muscle, I
need to eat more protein. I know what I need
to do if I need to wake up like better
(30:22):
sleep hygiene. So intellectually knowing what the steps are, that's
a part of it. Number two, you carrying it out.
But number three, will my work in the end be impactful?
Will I see results? Because there'll be people who say
I'm still not seeing the result. Sometimes the results are
not in your hand. You may say I'm working really
hard at work for promotion. I know what I need
(30:44):
to do, but I'm dealing in a very stressful work
environment that feels unfair, that feels biased, that feels like
I'm walking an uphill battle. So I think that there
are two parts that you need to feel efficacious, because
your environment lends itself to making you feel that way.
And the environment needs to be supportive because you can
do all you want. But if the system feels rigged
(31:04):
against you, and again, it could be a matter of
perception or it could be reality. So we have to
entertain both. Always try to ask my patients. I said, listen,
I just want to get a better sense of your work.
Tell me a little bit about your boss's personality, give
me a sense of the interactions. How do you feel?
How do your colleagues feel about this? So I never
want to deny that reality if somebody says I'm trying,
I am doing my best and things are still not
(31:25):
working for me.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
But both of those expectations seem to contribute to the
benefits of experiencing self efficacy. What happens when it feels
like we're not able to do what we really want
to do. What happens when we're not feeling so effective?
Speaker 2 (31:36):
So I think we end up feeling demoralized disenchanted, disenfranchised,
and we give up. And it's natural to think that
you're going to fail, but what you really need to
be reminded of is that you can rise up again.
And so to me, proficiency is about reminding people at
their very core of their capability. And like they did
experiments with athletes and they're told, you're not going to
(31:57):
win against this person. There's so much better than you.
What they didn't know was they were actually matched with
an athlete who was at the same level as them.
But when you're told in advance you're not going to
be able to do this, it can't. And when they
were told the opposite, all this person sucks compared to you,
You're so much better, you're going to win. So a
lot of times our expectation really predicts outcomes. And like
there's an experiment where they tell students going into a
(32:19):
classroom the people that are very friendly or they're not,
and the success of this student going into the classroom
being able to make friends really had to do with
what their expectations of what was to come. So I
do believe in this concept of self fulfilling prophecy, and
I don't think that optimism is at all magical thinking.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
So, how can we fight some of these barriers that
lead to a lack of self efficacy? What can do
we do to become more proficient? One of the barriers
you talked about a lot sort of fighting helplessness. How
can we fight our inner sense of helplessness?
Speaker 2 (32:46):
So I think the first thing is just understanding and
recognizing it as that, and allowing yourself time to rest
and to sometimes hit pause, maybe not stop. Validation is
a key part of that is just to say I
had a really hard time, Like if you're lucky enough
to have someone really like loving and caring and has
your best interests at heart, to say I get it,
I see you, I see how hard you're working, and
(33:07):
this was not your fault or could you learn something
from this if you did have a role in it,
and what can you do differently? So I think pausing, resting, recovering,
because I think so many of us just go from
one project to another to another, and it's this like
sort of destination addiction where you're like, I need to
get to the next place without really thinking through why
do I continue to strive? You know, and sometimes to
(33:29):
look at the helplessness and say, is this an opportunity
for me to change course? You know, am I meant
really for this? Do I really want this? Or is
there another way for me to achieve this?
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And that really nicely gets to a second barrier. You've
talked about this idea of stuckness, where it's like I
just I'm never going to find a path forward. I'm
just always going to be stuck. How do we fight
this barrier to proficiency? Fighting stuckness is about finding flexibility.
And I talk about in the book about patients who
are like, oh, I must go to I don't know,
fill in the blank, like business school or medical school
or whatever it is. And he was actually a patient
(33:59):
who you know, she was like I have to be
a PhD In psychology, Like this is the only thing
she wanted since she was a kid. And her parents
were like, no, you're not really meant for that very
long course, and we don't have the money for like
and I remember talking to this patient saying, is there
anything else that you can think of? And one thing
led to another, and next thing, you know, she's the
head of a wellness company and years later, you know,
she sent me a clipping of some award that she
(34:20):
got and it said she had written thank you and
this was something you should with me in therapy, write
your purpose and pen but your path in pencil. And
that was so poignant to me because I was like,
number one, don't remember saying that, but thank you.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
I'll take it. And then number two, Wow, you know
it was something that probably I needed to hear at
that time. And you know, just this idea that we
don't have to be fixated on one specific path because
there's so many roads to feeling satisfied, to feeling needed,
to feeling impactful, and often it's not the road that
we thought that we would be and that's totally fine.
So flexibility is a big part of proficiency. Like you
(34:53):
have to be nimble, you have to be quick, you
have to say I have tried and it is okay.
Giving up isn't always a sense of failure. I think
a lot of times in this culture of go go
go and work warrior make it happen, too much emphasis
on the final product, on the success rather than the process,
which is about making this and learning and fun and
creativity and getting lost. When my husband and I travel
(35:14):
and sometimes we make plans and sometimes we don't, you know,
we don't like to have fixed, structured itineraries. We like
to drive and go to small villages and meet people
and see where things take us, you know. And I
get that that's not always reality, and it's not always
productive or efficient, especially if you're traveling with young kids.
But I think as much as possible, I love the
idea of getting lost and just think about what feels
(35:34):
safe and what parameters and guardrails. How do you want
to intentionally and safely allow yourself to get lost.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
It's such a nice way to sort of reframe your perceptions,
which I think is like such an important part of flexibility.
And so so those are ways we can sort of
fixed stuckness. But the third barrier is also one that
I relate to a lot. It's this kind of just fatigue,
this idea that like I'm too tired to be proficient,
Like I just can't do this. What are some ways
we can break through that barrier to proficiency?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Laurie, I love that you share that, because when I
think of so many like really successful and high achieving people,
I feel like we are at risk of burnout because
we hold ourselves to really high standards and I feel
like in this culture, we're often taught that rest has
to be earned, or that rest is wasteful, unproductive, and
it's like frowned upon. And I just think that rest
and leisure need to be incorporated as part of the
(36:24):
work plan and schedule with the same type of intention
and urgency in a way. So when fatigue sets in,
I think that whatever fills your cop play, I think
for me is always a way to do that. So
give yourself grace and be gentle and recognize that do
you want to get to the peak or the summit
of this mountain completely out of breath, weathered and worn down, demoralized?
(36:47):
You got to the peak? But at what costs?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
It also sounds like it's just really recognizing our natural limitations,
whether those are just kind of mental natural limitations, like
we just need some rest, we need to take a break,
but also physical natural limitations. I think this is sometimes
why we feel so fatigued, is that we're not taking
care of our physical bodies too.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yes, yes, And I say, like, for me, like something
I'm really working on right now, and it's something I've
been thinking about for a long time is like sleep hygiene,
you know, I think that I've always just taken my
physical health for granted, and sometimes there's consequences to that,
and I've just assumed, oh, I'm a machine, it'll work
itself out. And I remember a friend several years ahead
of me telling me that, so there's going to come
(37:25):
a point in your life when you're going to make
your schedule around sleep. And I was like, I don't
believe you, Like I make my schedule around everything else,
but that that just fits itself in. She's like, no,
I'm very careful about it. And now I'm thinking backwards
where I'm like, if I want to protect this time,
whatever it is, seven eight, nine hours, then I'm going
to work backwards, and the things that I'm saying yes
to and no too are going to be centered around
(37:46):
the sleep schedule. You know, it's about making deposits into
this rest account. And so sleep is one way, fifteen
minute naps is another way, one minute meditations is another way,
exercise is another way. Anything that's going to refill your
cup and replenish your energy.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
And so all these strategies that you're talking about for
replenishing your energy, fighting helplessness, feeling less stuck, these were
exactly the kind of things you talk about with Shelley.
What was the outcome there? Was she able to use
these strategies to kind of heal that inner sense of brokenness.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Yes, And it's funny because she would joke. She's like,
I didn't often know where you were going with certain things,
like when I'm telling you how I'm scared about another
terrorist attack happening, or I feel like my sense of
safety or calmness or hope has been changed or demoralized.
You would say to me, talk to your boss about
trying to get time off or sleep. She's like, I
didn't understand where we were going necessarily, but you know,
I figured I'm here, so I might as well show
(38:37):
up and go with you. And so I think a
lot of times when people come in to work with me,
they'll come in with one specific problem in mind, and
they're hoping to get an answer for that problem. And
then I often say, let's back up and sort of
take a three sixty to approach your wellness even though
you're talking to me about, let's say, problems at work.
You know, she wanted to get a raise, she wanted
to get a promotion, but she was just so afraid.
(38:58):
She thought if I asked for days off, if I
ask for rest, even if it was like blocking off
an hour for therapy, that all of these things would
get in the way of promotion because she would be
seen as, you're not really serious about this job. And
what was interesting was by taking care of her mental
health by resting more. Her boss was like, I had
no idea that you were going through all of this.
I am more than happy to give you PTO. No,
(39:18):
I'm not going to doctor pay like a lease. Consider
it as part of the sickly that you have, which
you have tons of. You have never taken a sick
day in your life. And she finally felt her mission
to rest, permission to take care of her mental health,
and she ended up getting the promotion. I mean, her
life changed, like a lot of it is because embracing
the fact that your life is not the same, you know.
And I think that's the hardest part because so many people,
(39:38):
very quickly after trauma or any any kind of setback,
want to get back to who they were. I mean,
it's not possible because this event has transformed you and
your understanding and framework of the world. But also for
a lot of people going back to baseline also doesn't
make sense because your baseline might have gotten you to
where you are right now and why you're in my
(40:00):
office to begin with. So really think about when someone
said I just want to be who I was? Is
it realistic? Is it possible? And is it healthy?
Speaker 1 (40:07):
Because sometimes optimism really seems like it's about kind of
accepting where we are and giving ourselves the grace to
be in that spot.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Yes, exactly. So it's interesting because when you think about optimism,
it's just you think it only means one thing, which
is to look on the bright side, not recognizing that
it includes a practice of gratitude, of leisure, of rest
of self, compassion, of proactivity, of challenging the way that
you're thinking. So there's so much more to it, and
optimists do it naturally not to mention having healthier habits
(40:36):
and what's involved with that.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Thanks to doctor Sue Varmah and the folks at the
World Happiness Summit who introduced me to Sue's work. If
you want to learn more about the summit or sign
up for their twenty twenty six event, you can visit
World Happiness Summit dot com. That's World Happiness summit dot com.
But my discussion with Suet Wahasu was so insightful and
I can't help but leave you with one more of
the highlights. This was when Sue agreed to lead me
(41:01):
in the audience in a name It, Claim It, Team it,
and reframem it exercise.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Okay, so first of all, just if you want to
close your eyes, feel free. If you want to keep
them open, you know, whatever worked best for you, name
the antecedent. Think of a problem, right, Think of anything
that might have happened today or in the last week
that could have triggered you to feeling upset, right, And
the more granular you get, the more likely you are
to be able to put your finger on it and
change the problem. And we see this even as far
(41:27):
an extreme as suicide, where somebody can put their finger
on These were the events that led to me feeling
like my life didn't have value anymore. I didn't want
to live anymore. Right, So that is a dark scenario.
But just in think of an everyday problem, name the antecedent. Right.
Then I want you to feel in your body, right,
so maybe you want to close your eyes for this,
(41:47):
Where in your body are you feeling the tension, right?
Are you feeling it in your jaw? Are you feeling
it in your shoulders? Are you feeling it in your legs?
Where do you tend to hold the problem and the
stress in your body? Right? So, now you've named the antecedent,
You've claimed where it is in your body. Because often
the body will express what the mind can be right
(42:10):
and it will take place in the form of medical problems, headaches,
things like that. And then I want you this is
the taming part, and everybody has a different form of
self soothing. Some people may say that I want to
take one minute meditation. I call these oasis moments where
you are shutting the world out and finding your grounded
sense of peace internally. Right, it could be one minute
(42:31):
meditation or something that I've worked on that is based
off of a best possible scenario. It's an optimism intervention.
It's ten minutes, but this is a one minute version
of it. So if you want to do this with me,
let's go. I'd like to just close your eyes, settle in,
let your shoulders drop, and I want to take you
on a little journey with me. So now that I've
(42:53):
asked you to envision a problem. Right so you've clearly
defined the problem in your mind. I want you to
imagine a road, a path leading to the solution to
that problem. I want you to get very specific. What
does that solution look like? And what does the road
(43:15):
to the solution look like? Is that road straight? Does
it wind? Does it twister? Turn? And now I want
to imagine that we are walking together towards that solution.
We're getting closer. You're getting closer, and this solution is
(43:37):
the best possible outcome that you could have envisioned. And
you're starting to feel the anticipation of excitement, of delight,
of success, of satisfaction, of personal gratification. You're getting closer,
(43:58):
and now you have arrived at the best possible outcome
of your solution. And I want you to feel all
the feelings that come with success, with mastery, with resolution, peace, happiness,
(44:19):
and success are enveloping you. Right now. I want you
to take a deep breath to the count of five,
inhaling gently through your nose and exhaling slowly through your mouth.
Your feeling relaxed, hopeful, successful, and just know that this
(44:46):
feeling is always at your fingertips. Success is accessible within
you through a positive mindset that you have chosen, and
take a deep breath and open your eyes.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Pretty good, right, that's pretty good. Thank you,
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