Send us a text

Episode 37: Lana Manikowski (a certified life coach, infertility advocate, and the author of So Now What?) shares her personal journey navigating infertility, how it shaped her life, and practical strategies for reconnecting with one's body and finding purpose beyond motherhood. She highlights the importance of creating a new narrative regardless of societal expectations.

Lana Manikowski is a certified life coach, author, and infertility advocate who helps women thrive after infertility. After a seven-year fertility journey that ended without children, she created the support she yearned for but was never offered. She went on to write the bestselling book So Now What?, founded The Other’s Day Brunch, an annual event honoring women without children, and hosts The "So Now What?" Podcast. Through her coaching and community, Lana guides women to release shame, heal their relationship with their bodies, strengthen their marriages or partnerships, and reconnect in meaningful relationships with friends and family who have children. She helps childless women create purposeful, joyful lives beyond motherhood. She holds advanced certifications in grief and post-traumatic growth and is a proud member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and an active volunteer with the National Infertility Association, RESOLVE

To learn more about Lana visit her website: https://lanamanikowski.com

In this episode, (in order) we talked about: 

• Longing as a guiding beacon 
• How infertility can lead to feelings of failure & why self-compassion is essential
• How reconnecting with the body involves appreciation beyond reproduction
• Why purpose can be found in how we show up in the world (not just through motherhood)
• How friendships may evolve during one's journey of fertility
• Practical strategies to help in healing and self-acceptance
• How to better show up for ourselves on a daily basis
• Why she didn't want her book cover to look like a sympathy card
• The top 27 things people say when you're childless and how to respond 

Quotes

"Here I was (an) unexplained and failed patient. That really got into my psyche. Like, did I do something wrong? Did I not pay attention enough? Did I not take my medications at the right time? Did I do something in my past that I am being punished for?"

"I had an animosity towards my body that it didn't show up for me. So, I sort of gave up on my body and felt like it was broken and failed anyway. And I started working with a weight loss coach, and turns out she was a life coach, and that was what exposed me to the principles of life coaching."

"I think it's really important to allow ourselves to show up for ourselves first, and we're not often given that opportunity by society."

"There are so many things that our body does and so many new challenges that we can offer our body if we can let go of parenthood or motherhood or caring a child or conceiving as being the only thing that we see our body useful for."

"Why are we, as childless women, looking at ourselves without purpose? What if I'm not the person that needs to declare my purpose, but people take the beautiful pieces of me and, through that, my purpose is created. What if we just show up in our life and feel connected to who we are? Your purpose is super easy because you are impacting the people around you and giving them gifts because of who you are."

"There are moments where I see a mother baby interaction, and I still get sad. But getting sad doesn't mean that I'm still not growing."

Send us a text

Episode 36 Columbia University Professor of Music Walter Frisch explores how longing is expressed in 19th and 20th-century music, particularly in the works of composers like Schumann, Wagner, and Arlen. Frisch also shares the lesser-known historic details on the development of the iconic song of longing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

Walter Frisch is the H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1982. He has lectured on music throughout the United States, and in England, France, Spain, Germany, and China.  Frisch is a specialist in the music of composers from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in American popular song.  His books include German Modernism: Music and the Arts (2005), Music in the Nineteenth Century (2012), Arlen and Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” (2017), and Harold Arlen and His Songs (2024). He is currently working on a book about the classic French film musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Frisch has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. Learn more about Frisch at: https://music.columbia.edu/bios/walter-frisch

 In this episode, (in order) we talked about: 

*How Robert Schumann’s infatuation for pianist Clara Wieck inspired his music composition

*The unresolved harmony in Richard Wagner’s Opera Tristan and Isolde 

*How Henri Berlioz’s object of longing, Irish actress Harriet Smithson, inspired his piece Symphonie Fantastique 

*Terms of longing used in music composition like “vague de passion"

*Why “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” almost got cut from the movie The Wizard of Oz

*How Harold Arlen composed the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”

*Why MGM hoped “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” would outshine Disney’s “Someday My Prince Will Come”—both known as an “I want” song in musical parlance

*How “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” made it out of MGM and was recorded and released (1938) before The Wizard of Oz (1939) by big band singer Bea Wain

*What the song meant to Judy Garland throughout her life

*The introduction to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that is often not sung

Quotes

“Sometimes we call it dissonance and consonance, or things that are unstable and stable, and very often, that pattern can sort of be linked to, or feel like it's connected to longing, a state of tension that longs for resolution."

“There's a melody [on top of this Tristan chord] that creeps upward in very small intervals, and it seems to be going somewhere, but not quite getting there…So that becomes part of this musical language of longing.”

“Wagner's view of longing and passion was influenced by the philosopher Schopenhauer, who, in turn, was influenced by Buddhism. There is this sense (that) you can never really overcome the suffering within this world. It's only in another world or in another sphere that you can find satisfaction.”

“In the middle section of the song, called a bridge, where Dorothy sings, “That's where you'll find me,” and before she goes back to the opening melody, on “find” that chord is the most dissonant, most kind of unresolved chord in the song, at the moment of greatest tension, so sort of like Schumann or Wagner.”

“The two composers that I've written the most about are Brahms from the 19th century and Harold Arlen from the 20th century. They never knew each other. They were totally different kinds of people. But in both their music, there is a sense of longing and yearning, even melancholy….it really speaks to me.”

Send us a text

Episode 35 Feminist journalist and author of The Sex Myth, Rachel Hills discusses what she’s learned about sex as a source of power, the sex myths many of us believe, and how the sexual revolution didn’t really liberate us. Hills also highlights the social pressures she personally felt not having sex until her mid-20s. 

Rachel Hills is a feminist journalist and non-fiction writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She began her career contributing features and opinion pieces to the Sydney Morning Herald in her native Australia in her early 20s, going on to write for publications across six continents, including The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Fusion, The Guardian, The New Inquiry, The New Republic, New York Magazine, New York Times, TIME, Vogue, Washington Post, and more. Rachel’s first book The Sex Myth is about the invisible rules and assumptions that shape the way we think about sex. Her second book, The Whole Mother, looks at how we can liberate motherhood so that women don’t feel like they need to choose between having a child and existing in the world as their full selves. 

Follow Rachel on her Heart Talk Substack: https://rachelhills.substack.com/

In this episode, (in order) we talked about: 

*The impetus for writing The Sex Myth

*The most common myth she discovered doing research for the book

*How labels both serve and harm us

*Why trust and kindness could be the key to true liberation

*Ways in which we are encouraged to avoid emotional vulnerability in society

*The optimistic and realistic view of motherhood her new book The Whole Mother  

Quotes

“The core of the sex myth, similar to the beauty myth, is this idea that the way that we engage with sex reflects who we are and reflects our value in the world.”

“The fact that I was not having sex was kind of my greatest source of shame... I felt like it was this big secret that I was carrying at the time that I could not share with anybody because if I did, I felt like that would change the way that they thought about me, from what I hoped they perceived as being an attractive, fun, well-liked person and progressive feminist to…a loser, unattractive, and secretly conservative.”

“When I was working on the book and talking to people...they would often say to me in a kind of confession-esque way, ‘Oh, you wouldn't believe…my sex life is really unusual.’ And then sometimes they would say to me the thing that seemed the most usual thing ever.”

“If I'd lived in a different sexual culture—not just in terms of the ideals, but in terms of how people treated each other—perhaps I would have felt more able to have had sex outside of a loving relationship—not for my first time, perhaps, but later on. If I knew that I could have sex with somebody in a casual sense, and they would treat me with respect and kindness the next day, then that would be amazing. And frankly, it would be hugely liberating.”

“One of the myths within The Sex Myth is that older millennials, like myself, had been sold this idea that we were now liberated. But in fact, what we had been sold as liberation was a new set of standards, and in some ways, a new form of oppression, or at least regulation.

“As I look at what happened in the history of the sexual revolution and its consequences over the last 60 years, the problem is…it made the ideal to be to say, ‘yes,’ but it didn't necessarily make it physically safe to say yes, emotionally safe to say yes, pleasurable to say yes. It didn't always allow you to say yes and keep your inner sense of humanity intact.” 

“We're told that if we want to be mothers and have a life outside of motherhood, that is an unrealistic [and] selfish desire, that it's not inherent to what motherhood is. But

Send us a text

Episode 34 Dylan Thomas Doyle (PhD) discusses the use of AI in creating "griefbots," which simulate deceased loved ones. Doyle-Burke emphasizes the ethical considerations, potential harms, and psychological impacts of grief-related technology. He highlights the need for careful design and regulation. Doyle-Burke also mentions ongoing research and the cultural nuances of grief across different societies.

Dr. Dylan Thomas Doyle is a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the intersection of grief and technology. His research focuses on the ethics of designing AI griefbots – chatbots that are being made to look and sound like our loved ones who have passed away. Dylan is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, a hospital chaplain, and the host of popular AI Ethics Podcast, The Radical AI Podcast, and the AI-tocracy podcast. Connect with him at [email protected]

In this episode, (in order) we talked about: 

*How griefbots are created from data and what kind of data is used

*Griefbot lingo like fidelity and hallucinations

*Questions and concerns he has for griefbot developers

*The problems that arise with monetizing grief

*Different types of griefbot users and what they want in a griefbot

*Differences between greifbots and prayer as tools to deal with grief 

*Why griefbots can psychologically short-circuit” grief

*Narrative therapy practices using griefbots

*The future of griefbots for the death of a romantic relationship (i.e. divorce)

*How cultural perspectives influence our view of griefbots

Quotes

“Griefbots are one way that people can plug into that longing and really try to understand who we are and what the world means to us and what we mean to the world.”

“People talk about elegant code. What does an elegant code look like for a griefbot, a technology that is about death and loss.”

“I never have have done that [made griefbots] yet for myself. It makes me feel weird, so I don't do it. And I think that feeling of weirdness is one of the reasons why I like to study it. Because, at the same time, I have talked to people who use these grief bots, and they really do help them heal.”

“The reason why people get into the death industry in general is because they've lost someone, or they've had a really bad experience of not getting the support or comfort that they've needed when they've had a loved one die, and so they say to themselves, I can do this better.”

“For the people who are using these grief bots, I think what they're longing for is comfort in the face of the unknown.”

“There's a concern and danger that we're just going to have instant gratification for grief, which is kind of kind of scary because grief generally needs time to process.”

“Everyone really does have their own cultural, familial, personal, religious relationship with this word that we call death. I don't think that the solution for bringing comfort is to just build a faster course, to just build a better chatbot that will help us overcome death—which is what some of these companies claim. I think the real solution is to figure out how to use this technology in the same way that we have other tools to help us work through death and work through grief.”

Send us a text

Episode 33 Dr. Ravin Alaei explores the relationship between music lyrics and attachment styles. In a study of 500 participants, lyrics of ~4,700 songs were analyzed to quantify avoidance, security, and anxiety. Results showed that people with avoidant attachment styles preferred songs with more avoidant lyrics, while those with secure attachment styles preferred more secure lyrics. Another study analyzed Billboard charts from 1949 to 2015, finding modern songs are more avoidant and less secure than older ones. The conversation also touches on the potential therapeutic value of music and songwriting, and the influence of music on attachment styles, particularly during formative years.

Dr. Ravin Alaei is family physician at Western University in Ontario, Canada. He received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Toronto. He was also the lead author on a study published in the Journal of Personal Relationships in September 2022 titled, “Individuals’ favorite songs’ lyrics reflect their attachment style.” 

In this episode, (in order) we talked about:

*The different attachment styles

*The study he did that looked if individuals select songs based on their attachment styles

*The study that examined if recent Western popular music reflects the increasing individualism/avoidance Western culture has been experiencing  

*How his research assistants coded song lyrics to be anxious, avoidant, or secure

*How both attachment styles and music preferences are developed in teen years

*Whether our attachment styles influence the songs we are drawn to or vice versa

*Certain music artists who have lyrics that are anxious, avoidant, or secure 

*The impact of self-made breakup albums

*The tipping point between music being cathartic and being detrimental

Quotes

“What we found was that modern day songs are far more avoidant than older songs. They're far less secure than older songs, whereas anxiety has actually remained pretty steady across the years in terms of the West's most popular songs.”

“Instead of it being about the survey respondent, we just said, ‘How much do you think the protagonist in this song is expressing the need for self-reliance versus the need for the partner or longing for the partner or receiving the partner’s attention. So, it was the exact same scale you would use to find out an individual's attachment style.”

“So many songs from the past 20-30 years often will have some sort of insecure elements in them even if it is expressing security, at some points. It's tough to find a purely secure song from modern day music.”

“I would love to see the impacts that listening to songs from of a certain attachment style have on your ‘in the moment’ emotions and thoughts and expectations of relationships.”

“There is some research that songwriting is therapeutic. So, if there's a listener right now who is longing, consider songwriting or writing, writing it down into lyrics, seeing if you can express it in that way, because lyrics provide that space for you to do that and then that might be therapeutic for you. The second thing is to take a step back and really analyze the music that you're listening to and the message it's sending to you. See if you think that's helping you or being detrimental.”

Send us a text

Episode 32 Psychologist Nirit Soffer-Dudek explains maladaptive daydreaming, a clinical phenomenon where fantasy becomes a highly disabling and distressing addiction. She discusses fuels, triggers, treatments and why/how it’s often misdiagnosed.

Nirit Soffer-Dudek, PhD is an associate professor at the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her research focuses on the clinical and personality correlates of consciousness states including dissociative states, nocturnal dreaming, and daydreaming. Prof. Soffer-Dudek is also a past president of the International Society for Maladaptive Daydreaming (ISMD) and the scientific director of the International Consortium for Maladaptive Daydreaming Research (ICMDR).

In this episode, (in order) we talked about:

*What is maladaptive daydreaming and how it’s similar to an addiction (3:45)

*Why clinical psychologist and professor Eli Somer coined the term maladaptive daydreaming (MDD) to describe what many researchers had previously described as the personality trait of “fantasy proneness” (11:00)

*How MDD impacts a person’s ability to function in daily life (13:45)

*Literature and movies where MDD was illustrated before it was formerly coined (15:00)

*Fuel and triggers for MDD (22:00)

*Disorders people with MDD have usually been diagnosed as having have (also or instead) (26:30)

*Why, for people experiencing MDD, daydreaming is an itch you have to scratch (30:00)

*The difference between limerence and MDD (32:00)

*How MDD is different from PTSD that involves flashbacks (38:00)

*Common themes in MDD daydreams: idealized self, a sense of being wanted and taken care of, and elaborate sexual narratives (40:30)

*Therapeutic techniques that help: Self-monitoring, practicing mindfulness, and investing in one’s real life (42:00)

Quotes

“So, just imagine that you had this ability to watch TV all the time. You had Netflix in your head. It would be very difficult not to use it if you're not really interested in what's going on around you, or what's going on around you is causing you some anxiety. You have this internal button that you can press. Some people do press it actively, and some people say that it just comes to them without even actively trying to do it.”

“They feel shame, they feel guilt, they feel they can't achieve their goals. They feel so attached to their characters. It embarrasses them. They feel like they can't necessarily develop other meaningful relationships because they're too attached to these characters.”

“One of our studies showed that 70% of the people we interviewed who have maladaptive daydreaming also met criteria for ADHD, most of them the inattention only type.”

“It's not just a distraction. It’s not just imagining how you'll talk to your boss tomorrow about giving you too many shifts. It's something which is very creative. It's really deep in terms of the storylines. It's very intricate and fanciful, and people can really get into it for hours and hours.”

“Limerence doesn't have to be all about daydreaming. And maladaptive daydreaming doesn't have to be about an infatuation.”

“Among people who are trauma survivors that have maladaptive daydreaming, sometimes their daydreams are about trauma, but not necessarily the trauma that they had. And they're not necessarily in the same role or position that they were. For example, they could be perpetrators, they could be rescued.”

“It’s a normal phenomenon that has to be, not eradicated completely, but kind of mitigated back to its normal size, instead of being blown up and replacing your actual lif

Send us a text

Episode 31 Journalist Anna Goldfarb discusses the complexities of modern friendships, emphasizing the impact of social media on longing and the grief in losing friends who played specific roles in our lives. During a time when it appears we have hundreds of connections, she encourages readers/listeners to become wholehearted friends with fewer.

Journalist Anna Goldfarb is known as “the New York Times’ friendship correspondent." Anna’s reporting on friendships has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. Her book, Modern Friendship, explores the nuances of navigating adult friendships. She also publishes Friendship Explained, a Substack newsletter that explains the mechanics of friendship through a pop culture lens. Find her online @AnnaGoldfarb.

 In this episode, (in order) we talked about: 

*How social media compounds our longing for friends

*The longing we have to know our friends’ children

*Why it’s easier than ever to shed friendships with less social glue

*How her father’s reluctance to connect with a childhood friend just before he died inspired her to write this book

*The parallel between learning music and learning how to do friendship better 

*Why we grieve the role our friendships played at a specific time in our lives

*Why we live in unprecedented times where we have more bonds we’re expected to maintain 

*How the pandemic disrupting our routines changed how we do friendship

*How to change your invitation to friends be more about them and less about you

*The 14-Day Friendship Cleanse to becoming a whole-hearted (dedicated, committed and enthusiastic) friend

*How you figure out who belongs on your list

Quotes

“I've naturally taken a step back from social media because it's not helpful. It's not reality. Our we're not supposed to know this much about people in our outer rings of our social life.”

"It's just harder to find people, to have more enduring friendships, when your identity is so complicated."

“My dad didn't come to me very often with these kinds of personal problems, and I wanted to be his hero. I wanted to solve it. I wanted to reconnect them...He was so terrified of rejection, silence, if his friend would be mad at him…there was so much uncertainty, and uncertainty creates anxiety, so he never connected." 

“When you learn how music works, when you learn the notes, when you learn how to create music, I mean, it's a whole different way to interact with the art form, and that's what I wanted to do with this book. Here is how the music of friendship works. Here are the notes. Here's how it's arranged. Here's why things sound good or don't sound good. This is the human equivalent of sheet music.”

"Studies show we lose half our friends every seven years."
 
"I think where a lot of people they go wrong with longing for a friendship is they think, ‘What's in it for me?’ I think the miscalculation is, ‘What's in it for them? Why would they want to connect with you?’ And when you think of it that way, it's like ...'I really want to see them succeed. I really want to be a witness to their triumphs and see them overcome challenges.'...That's a different invitation then, ‘Let's meet for drinks, because I'm bored.’”

“Wholehearted friendship is my way to close the gap between the friend you want to be perceived as and the friend that you are in reality. I wanted to close that gap. The cleanse is is my strategy to get closer to those kinds of friendships.”

Send us a text

Episode 30 Centenarian and University of Colorado Super Fan Peggy Coppom shares wisdom about love, friendship, and prayer through stories she shares about her twin sister, Coach Prime, and her faith in God. 

Since her family moved from the high plains of eastern Colorado to Boulder to escape the Dust Bowl in 1939, CU football mega fan Peggy Coppom has only missed three CU home football games. She and her late twin sister Betty attended over an estimated 2,500 CU sporting events in person in nine sports: football, men's and women's basketball, baseball, soccer, volleyball, track and field, lacrosse and women's tennis. Now Peggy is the one making history. This past fall Miss Peggy became the first FAN to receive an NIL deal. NIL, or name image likeness, allows athletes to accept money from businesses in exchange for using them in products or advertisements. CU Buffs Coach Prime (Deion Sanders) has become one of Peggy's biggest fans.

In this episode, (in order) we talked about:

*Her relationship with her identical twin sister and their decision to dress alike 

*How Coach Prime has helped her deal with the grief of losing her twin

*What it felt like to be sung “Happy Birthday to You!” by the entire college stadium

*Her “secret” to longevity: moderation

*How she bounced back from breaking her hip and Covid this summer

*What she misses about Boulder from the past

*The importance of prayer and the prayers of your ancestors

*How her Irish-Catholic upbringing developed her love for football 

*Her relationship with Coach Prime & her Alamo Bowl plans

*What she’s still longing for

*Why FOMO kept her from moving to Florida to marry a beau

*How you know you’re in love 

Quotes

“She was still warm. She had just died. So, I whispered in her ear, and I said, ‘Betty,’ I shouldn't say this because it makes me cry, ‘We were together when we came into this world, and I'm here with you now.’”

“I felt so humble and so little and so amazed and blessed…To think that that many people were singing Happy Birthday, it makes me cry now. Undeserving, maybe is a good word for it.”

“Betty and I always said, ‘Pray and play.’ I think in one word I would say moderation…You can overdo anything. Even sleep, you can sleep too much. You can exercise too much. I have not set out to do that, but that's the way I've lived.”

“I miss going down Pearl Street and having home-owned stores of people you know, and businessmen that you know…The stores all were [owned by] people who lived here.”

"I don't think it. I believe it." (in reference to her faith in God)

“We were Irish Catholics, so naturally we cheered for Notre Dame…we knew when fall came and Saturdays came, it was football on the radio.”

“I don't feel like a lucky charm. I feel lucky.”

“I've had interviews ask me what one word I would use to describe him (Coach Prime), and [what] immediately came up to me [was] honorable.

“What I'm longing is for is for my kids to all be healthy and safe. And I pray for them mainly to get to heaven, at the age I am.”

“I never heard my mom and dad say a cross word for each other ever. And Betty and I both have said that was not a normal life for us to not ever hear our parents argue or anything. Because the first time my husband lost it, and it wasn't over anything I did,…I found out that somebody can lose their temper, and they're not going to get a divorce.”

Send us a text

Episode 29 Steph Hauser shares the miraculous birth story of her son Zev, born at 23 weeks (halfway through Steph’s pregnancy) with a 1% survival rate, and the difficult choices they faced. She explains how her "Tell me what's good" strategy helped them find hope and the organizations they began to support NICU families.

Steph Hauser is a writer, podcaster, ultrarunner, and the founder and Executive Director of 4those, a nonprofit dedicated to providing hope, healing and possibility for former micropreemies and their families. This year, she ran 14.7 miles for 147 days (in a row!) to raise money for and bring awareness to the journey many families endure in the NICU. Her story has been featured in Runner’s World Magazine, local and international news outlets, and on a variety of podcasts and stages. Steph is also the host of The Zev Project, a podcast that shares her own journey around extreme prematurity, including the “Tell Me What’s Good” strategy that carried her through their 147 days in the NICU. Steph co-owns FOX•DOG COFFEE with her husband Ben and lives in Louisville, CO, with Ben, their dog, and their four boys. Learn more at 4those.org

In this episode, (in order) we talked about:

*Why longing as an anchor to your past 

*How this pregnancy was different than her first (even before delivery)

*Chorioamnionitis, the intraamniotic infection she had

*How do you define viability

*How “Tell me what’s good” approach helped create a fuller narrative 

*Miracle guilt

*The important role surrender played in their situation

*How Zev’s micro-prematurity miracle has shaped their family dynamics

*How their organization 4those.org serves families in the NICU

*Why she ran 14.7 miles for 147 consecutive days 

Quotes

“Longing for me in that season with ZEV created a great foil for us to sort of look at what we were tying ourselves to past, present, future. What we saw, what we wanted, what we were hoping for…[Longing] joined and partnered with surrender.

“We went from a 0% chance survival to helicoptering down to a hospital where we were given a less than a 1% chance of survival. So, it's not like we suddenly had all these great odds in our favor. However, there was a spirit at this hospital that just said, ‘Hey, we don't know what's going to come. You've got a less than 1% chance here, but do you want to take it now?’”

“We were given the chance, and so we decided to take it and that baby, at 23 weeks gestation, came out of the womb with no lungs, and the first thing he did was cry. This little human just came out and just proclaimed to the world that, against all odds, he was here, and he was fighting.”

“The doctor turns to us, and she's crying, and says, ‘Your son is dying, but he's in there and he's fighting.’”

“It was believing that whether ZEV lived, died or never, never, never, that whatever happened, love or God, however you identify it, would come through, would walk beside us in whatever road came.”

“There were times in the NICU when [my husband and I] were just floating on separate life rafts in the same ocean, like we were tied together by a string on separate life rafts, experiencing our own things, our own pasts are coming into play.”

“If you asked my husband, he would say that God felt very quiet in that time, that God was not very close in that season. And for me, I felt like it was like a front row seat to watching miracles happen all over the place in there…we watched our child be stitched together into humanness.”

“Instead of running away from the hard thing, it brought all pieces of it to the forefront for me, the good, the bad, the glory, the struggle, the grief, you know, the joy all of it. It was like,

Send us a text

Episode 28  Psychiatrist and mindfulness research leader Dr. Jud Brewer explains the neural mechanisms of longing (i.e. romantic obsession) and the differences between excitement (contraction) and joy (expansion). Brewer discusses how mindfulness training reduces cravings and anxiety to help individuals manage their habits and emotions.

Jud Brewer MD PhD is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health & Medicine at Brown University. Brewer is an internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions. He has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change.  He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback. Brewer is a New York Times best-selling author of Unwinding Anxiety, The Craving Mind, and The Hunger Habit.  Learn more at https://drjud.com/

 
In this episode, (in order) we talked about:

*How longing activates the self-referential default mode network in the brain (especially the posterior cingulate cortex)

*The trigger-behavior-reward pattern (the explore/exploit survival mode), and how it relates to finding a romantic partner

*The difference between contracted excitement and expansive joy

*Intermittent reinforcement that keeps our brains on the hook of uncertainty

*Unconditional love (supportive, solid, connected) compared to infatuation (excitement, anticipatory)

*The link between the deactivation of the default mode network and experienced meditators

*Why curiosity (nonjudgement) is our superpower when it comes to breaking bad habits

*How negative prediction error leads to disenchantment with behavior

*Why worrying gives us a false sense of control 

*How mindfulness improves certain eating disorders

*Hedonic hunger (food associated with emotions)

Quotes

“Longing is a slow want.”

“The more obsessed somebody was with their partner, the more activated a particular region in this [default mode] network was.”

"Dopamine shifts from learning, ‘Oh, this is a good food source,’ to becoming this motivation molecule, which is often how it's described in the addiction field. It drives us to go do something once we've learned that it is something ‘desirable.’”

“A lot of coiling action happens when we're obsessing over somebody, or we're thinking how great the last date was, or we can't wait until the next date. There's that anticipation that coils and coils and coils. And it can be excessively coiled with things like instant messaging and texting, where we don't know when the next text is going to come. We don't know what it's going to say. There's a lot of uncertainty that gets our brain all wound up.”

“I think often people mistake excitement for happiness, because there's that 'I'm alive' quality of experience that comes with it.”

“Curiosity, first off, feels more expanded than contracted…Instead of being identified with [the obsessive thought] or caught up in worry, [people] can get curious and replace that unhelpful habit that leads to contraction with a helpful habit of being curious or even being kind to themselves if their habit was to judge themselves.”

"Just bringing awareness in and seeing that [worrying] is not very rewarding helps us become disenchanted with the behavior.”

“We don’t need to be meditating to be mindful. It’s about being in the present moment and being curious.”