Doctors go to the doctor, yoga teachers take yoga classes, and yes, therapists go to therapy. In this Taboo Tuesday, best-selling author of the book “Maybe you Should Talk To Someone” and psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb joins Dr. Emily to discuss all things therapy, from why people often wait too long to start, why the stigma around therapy is tough to break, even for therapists, and why our friends don’t necessarily make the best substitutes for help and support from a professional. Listen now to find out how to avoid having your own emotional heart attack.

Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health, and surprising, funny, and shocking conversations on Taboo Tuesdays - because the things we’re most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Follow Lori Gottlieb on Instagram and Twitter 

Read Lori’s book: Maybe you Should Talk To Someone 

Watch Lori’s TED Talk: How changing your story can change your life

Listen to Lori’s podcast Dear Therapist

Read Lori’s column for The Atlantic: Dear Therapist

Thank you for listening! Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(01:31) - Mental health is as important as physical health - “They feel like you have to be in crisis or have a diagnosable condition before you step in a therapist's office, and so they don't do anything about it, and then they land in my office when they're having the equivalent of an emotional heart attack.”

(04:49) - Idiot compassion vs. wise compassion - “A therapist will hold up a mirror to you and help you to see something about yourself that you haven't been willing or able to see.”

(07:36) - On growing as a therapist - “You go and you get trained and you learn the scales and the technique and the form and all of the rules. And then when you get really good at that you start to improvise, and the more you improvise, the more you see who you are going to become as a therapist.”

(11:23) - Stigma and therapy -  “People need support andI think it would be a lot easier if we just acknowledged that human beings are ridiculous, and I mean that in the most compassionate way.”

(18:22) - Embracing our feelings - “Feelings don't go away. They just get stuffed down, but they're still there. And in fact feelings need air, so they just get bigger. So I think the danger is that you feel like you've numbed out your feeling, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings. Numbness is a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings.”

(25:41) The connection between therapist and patient - “The person's training, the kind of modality that they're using, the years of experience, all of those things definitely matter. So I'm not saying they don't because they do, but what matters most of those factors is the relationship that a person has with their therapist.”

Why is it that we often forget what someone said but not how that person made us feel? In this Emotional Push-Up, Siri Srinivas, investor at Draper Associates, joins Dr. Emily to explore how we can tap into our emotional memories and control our moods and mindsets for the better. Tune in to learn how to better flex this emotional muscle!

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Dr. Emily is back solo in this Emotional Push-Up to share some of the best advice she’s ever received: in order to handle life’s uncertainties you have to trust that your future self can handle future problems. Listen now to hear just how powerful this advice can be and how you can use it to alleviate some present anxiety. 

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Have you ever finished a book you didn’t like because you had already put time into it? Or stayed at a job that wasn’t right for you because it was hard to imagine starting over? In today’s Emotional Push-Up, Neil Devani, founder and managing partner of Necessary Ventures, joins Dr. Emily to talk about the decisions and situations we hold onto, even if they’re not right for us, because of the time, money, or resources we’ve invested into them. Listen in to practice approaching these situations a little differently.

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Death is the most guaranteed part of life, yet it’s a topic most people avoid thinking and talking about. In this Taboo Tuesday discussion, Shoshana Berger, co-author of the book “A Beginner's Guide to the End,” joins Dr. Emily to talk about how her father’s prolonged death changed her perspective on death and dying. After seeing firsthand how difficult and overwhelming the process was, Shoshana set out to explore various aspects of end-of-life care, from navigating the healthcare system and hospice to green burials and the various and strange ways grief works. Listen now to hear why you should be thinking and talking to your own loved ones about death. 

Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health, and surprising, funny, and shocking conversations on Taboo Tuesdays - because the things we’re most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Follow Shoshana Berger on Twitter and Instagram 

Check out Soshana’s book A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death

Learn more about green burials and Better Place Forests

Read a 1996 LA Times article Rest in Space : Company Plans to Become First to Launch Cremated Remains Into Orbit

Read The Washington Post’s A public park for ashes? As cremations soar, demand for scatter gardens grows.

Thank you for listening! Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(01:16) - How Shoshana first got interested in the topic of death - “If you think of death as an experience like every other experience we have in life, giving birth; falling in love; getting married; maybe getting divorced; raising our children; all of these huge life cycle events, death is one of them and it is a transformational event. It was kind of stunning to me how unprepared I was for it.”

(05:24) - Investigating our biases about end-of-life care - “You do not have to be dying to take advantage of palliative care. It's about making you more comfortable, and so you can be far from death. The one criteria you have to have to engage with palliative care is that you are suffering.”

(07:20) -Why Shoshana wanted to start researching and sharing about death - “In the midst of that chaos, my instinct is always, ‘Man, how is it possible that someone with a graduate degree can be so clueless about something so elemental in life?’ It's like you're book smart and completely life clueless. And I thought to myself, ‘If I'm having this much trouble, there's probably a lot of other people who are having trouble with this experience.’”

(12:29) - The benefits of being prepared for death - “We die every night that we close our eyes and we trust that that's okay. We're going to close our eyes and we're going to kind of go into oblivion, and there's something beautiful about learning from that too, that we've been practicing this our whole life.”

(22:13) - How Shoshana's perspective on death has changed - “The fear part is tricky because you have to kind of dig into what you're really afraid of. Are you afraid of oblivion? Are you afraid of just going into the darkness and what's there? Are you afraid in a much more kind of religious way of, like the fiery ovens of hell? Like a lot of people are really afraid of judgment on what that's gonna look like.”

(29:18) - Shoshana’s message for thinking about death - “One beautiful way of getting engaged with it is just really paying attention to how the world works. So, there is a natural life and death cycle to every day, every moment, every season. We are shedding thousands of cells every day. Parts of us are dying every day. Leaves falling from the trees, insects and animals dying in our midst. Death is all around us all the time, and so is renewal. So is rebirth.”

For Dr. Emily, a difficult realization of adulthood was that every decision we make means having to grieve the loss of every decision we can no longer make as a result. In this Emotional Push-Up, Shoshana Berger, global editorial director at the design firm IDEO, joins Dr. Emily to talk about how growth and grief are intertwined and how learning to grieve is an important skill for ongoing emotional health.

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Have you ever made an assumption about what someone else is feeling or thinking and then found out you were way off? All too often, our assumptions about others reveal more about us than they do about them. In this Emotional Push-Up, Dr. Emily is joined by brand marketing lead at Heard and founder of Fulwiler Media Michael Fulwiler to explore the meaning we assign to other people's words, intentions, and actions in order to better understand ourselves.

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Nothing lasts forever—the good or the bad—so learning to be present in the moment is a core skill of emotional fitness. In this Emotional Push-Up, Dr. Emily is joined by Karan Singh, COO at Headspace and Co-Founder of Ginger, to highlight the importance of mindfulness to weather all that life brings our way: fully soaking in the joy while we have it and trusting that the tough moments won’t last forever.

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

It can be hard owning up to mistakes, but President and COO of Athletic Greens Kat Cole says that the more comfortable we can get with things not going perfectly, the better we’ll be at taking risks and trying new things. In this Taboo Tuesday episode, Kat and Dr. Emily discuss mistakes, loss, and grief and how to balance all of the above while also carving out a successful career. From asking for help to enduring a miscarriage, Kat doesn’t shy away from talking about her own experiences, including what she says was the worst mistake she ever made in her career and how she worked to turn the situation around. Tune in now for this thoughtful discussion on how to be honest, open and resilient in work and life. 

Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health, as well as surprising, funny, and shocking conversations on Taboo Tuesdays - because the things we’re most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Follow Kat Cole on Instagram and Twitter.

Thank you for listening! Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(02:45) - Kat on mistakes, loss, and grief - “I have learned to appreciate that there is a spectrum which has allowed me to feel whatever I feel in the moment, but understand that it could be worse or it could be better and have a sense of perspective."

(6:15) - A framework for managing emotions - “I'm still a leader. I still have responsibilities for this team. And I have to decide if I'm going to show up, how do I modify? Because my words and my body language and my tone and everything that could be altered by something that's taking my energy, will definitely be misread if I do not otherwise explain it.”

(11:34) - Asking for help - “It is realizing that if I don't bring that help forward, there is a high likelihood for the receiver, for the audience, for the employee, that it will be a suboptimal outcome. And I should not be so complacent as to believe that a worse version of me alone is better than a little less of me and more of someone else.”

(16:18) - What care looks like for Kat - “I am responsible for my care, like full stop. At the same time, I think like most people, I don't know what I need. I just know I feel lost or sad or something in a moment. And maybe the answer is a hug. Maybe the answer is a text of, ‘It will be okay.’ Maybe the answer is my husband just saying, ‘What can I do?’” 

(20:15) - On making mistakes - “The more people get comfortable with things not going perfect or great, the less fearful they will be to make mistakes, and the more likely they will be to lean into something new or unfamiliar or non-traditional.”

(26:23) - The worst moment in Kat’s career - “They automatically leaped to, ‘You lied. You're just like every other corporate hack. You want to make money off of our backs. You can talk to our lawyers.’ And it was a long fall emotionally. And essentially, outside of losing life and losing love, I believe there's nothing worse than losing trust.”

Any relationship or experience that has taught us something about ourself is a relationship or experience that was worth having or doing. In this Emotional Push-Up, President and COO of Athletic Greens, Kat Cole, joins Dr. Emily to talk about the beauty in impermanence and how to make peace with things coming to an end.

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Tuesday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!