Ep. 167: Podcasts I Love – Bonus Mini-episode

Rachael took a flight and listened to three podcast that may change the whole way she lives (and she loves that!). She shares them here. 

Food, We Need to Talk, all episodes

Ten Percent Happier, episode #221

The Happiness Lab, Mistakenly Seeking Solitude

Transcript

Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 Patreons. If you’d like me to be your mini coach for less than a large mocha Frappuccino, you can join too at www.patreon.com/rachael

Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode 167. This is a bonus episode and I’m fearing off the rails today. I am not going to answer a question, but if you’ve submitted one, they’re all still in the queue. I will get to them. You can ask me any questions if you’re a Patreon at the $5 level or above. 

But today, I really wanted to talk about some podcasts that I heard the other day. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see that I’m in a hotel room. I’m in Austin. I was at these stories shop summit conference. It was lovely. And getting here, I spent some time on the plane, not reading, not working, but plowing my way through a few of the podcasts that I listened to. And I had one of those wonderful couple or three hours in the air. Austin is far from California, I found out. Listening to some shows that kind of blew my mind and I kind of wanted to share them with you because they gave me a lot of new stuff to think about. They are not about writing; they are just about kind of living in general. I will go ahead and list these over http://rachaelherron.com/blog  I’ll list the links because my podcast’ place is broken. It won’t take comments or leave comments and I’m really irritated about it. So you can just go to http://rachaelherron.com/blog when you listen to this, and I will put the links in there. The first one I listened to is something that, my girl friend Nicole Peeler told me about, and it’s called Food, We Need to Talk. And it is from WBUR, NPR, the people who bring you Radio lab. So it’s that kind of production and it is a conversation between two scientists about food and how we think about it. 

[00:02:13] I have been recently inspired by the rather annoying book called Intuitive Eating, which I didn’t want to read, and I’m still irked by. Because it flies in the face of the things that I have believed that, you know, I should cut out all sugar forever and I should be eating low carb because that’s what my body likes. This book argues something a little bit differently and this is kind of what they’re exploring on this podcast, is the idea – challenge the idea that there’s good food and bad food. I’m very good at falling into the idea that, you know, kale is good, morally and cake is bad morally. When I eat kale, I’m a good person. When I eat sugar, I’m a bad person. It’s really internalized in my system and it is for a lot of people especially in America, in the United States. So I’m really enjoying the podcast. It’s only, it’s short. It’s like, you know, 20-minute hit. And it talks about, some mindfulness about when we’re eating, the podcast and the book. Talk about that they are not linked in any way, but intuitive ideas; intuitive eating is kind of the idea behind it. And I was talking to my friend Jay Thorne on the Writers Well recently about how I was reading this book. And then I went to my silent meditation where they fed us three times a day. They fed us delicious vegetarian food, even though I’m not a vegetarian, and we were being mindful about it and I would take a bite. We’re encouraged to put down the fork, think about the bite. All the things that we don’t do in real life.

[00:04:00] We just don’t have time where, you know, you shoving a taco bell burrito in our mouth as we’re driving to the next appointment or to pick up the kids or whatever, and being mindful really did something to my brain and that I could feel my body filling up. I could feel my hunger getting faded and it was a lovely feeling. I want to point out that, I am an overeater in a lot of different kinds of ways, and I’m not going to ascribe good or bad to that. I, but I am going to say that that overfull feeling is something that I feel a lot and I don’t like it. It gives me heartburn and, and, it’s not a comfortable feeling. I went to the movies last night and I ate my face off with smothered fries. And afterwards I was like, Oh my God, could I have stopped? I don’t know. Should I have? I don’t know. But these are things that I am exploring. Sugar is something I do try to keep out of my diet because it can trigger migraines and generally makes me feel like crap, but there’s a time for sugar. There really is. It’s a celebratory thing. I really feel like for me it’s an addiction and it is a place to numb myself. I can sit down with a pint of ice cream and really affect my mood system. My, my emotional weather in my body I can affect that by eating sugar. But the whole point in my life right now, well, not the whole point, but a point of my life right now is to affect my life in a positive way by doing things that are good for me. And, or staying in the moment, including with the feelings that don’t feel good. If I don’t feel good for very many years before I quit drinking and using whatever drugs I was using, I always had a way to affect my emotional system and that is my default go to. If I don’t feel good, I reached for something that makes me feel better. And I’m trying to learn better ways to do that, that are more sustainable. I would like this body to continue to live healthily and strongly for a long time. That is a goal. So these are things I’m thinking about. I’m not fixing anything. I’m not changing much. But I am thinking, and I thought that you might like the podcast. I do apologize for any noise on the echo-y sound that is in here. I don’t have my normal podcasting microphone ‘cause I forgot it. So, and the maid is vacuuming in the room next door. So that is what is happening. 

[00:06:43] Another thing that I listened to on the way here was the Ten Percent Happier episode #221, which was called, “All Your Sleep Questions, Answered. Ten Percent Happier episode #221 is pretty recent, “All Your Sleep Questions, Answered.” Dr. Matthew Walker wrote the book, Why We Sleep, and it has been one of those that I have been waiting from the library to read for forever. I think I’m 4000th on the list. I could just buy it. Maybe I should, but I listened to this podcast and it was wonderful and it made me challenge a lot of things. In fact, I am going to buy the book and maybe read it on plane home. Maybe challenge some things that I should do. We all know how we should be sleeping. We have heard the stats, we know what they look like, but he provided some insane statistics about how we affect our health and mentality and happiness and, all the systems, everything is a system and all the systems connect. And when our sleep is affected, even by an hour a day, it really screws us up. And he was arguing in a very polite and kind though terrifying way that we really do start going to bed every night at the same time, getting up at the same time. I have never been able to do that, especially when I was working for 17 years on a graveyard shift or a 24 or 48-hour shift. I slept when I could get it. Many of those 17 years, I was on a 12 on, 12 off. I would set my body clock to be up all night for the days I was working, and then I would be up like normal people and sleeping at night for my days off. So I was jet lagging myself 12 hours a week, every week. It was one of the most, that was one of the –

the worst things you can do to your body. It’s classified actually as carcinogenic. So I am glad that I’m not doing that anymore, but I do feel like I have a lot to make up for and damaged my body for a long time that way, and I’d like to try to work on fixing it. So I’m saying this to you now, my best days are when I get up at 5:30 and I either do my movement, my yoga, or swimming or whatever it is, and meditate, or I go to my early morning 6:00 AM recovery meeting and follow that with meditation and or movement. Those are my best days. That’s when I get my most words written. I am done writing by 10 you know, I’ve gotten everything that I really need to do and then the rest of the day can be for business or for screwing around or whatever it is. 

[00:09:31] Those are my best days. I am going to –  here I’m saying it, I’ll get back to you in a couple of weeks, as to how it’s going. I’m going to start getting up at 5:30 every day because on Tuesdays, I get up at 4:30 AM so I can run the 5:00 AM to 7:00 AM Tuesday Write-in, which, if you’re interested in joining go to www.rachaelherron.com/Tuesdays. Or Tuesday? one of the other –  one of those (www.rachaelherron.com/Tuesday) and it is the most fun thing ever writing with people that early in the morning or wherever you are in your time zone. So one morning weekend you need to get up at 4:30 that’s fine. All the other mornings a week, I need to get up at 5:30. Because on the weekends I’m often sleeping until 9:30 or 10:30, there is a five-hour jet lag, a five-hour difference, and in the podcast it goes really into detail about how doing that on the weekends can really screw with the internal workings of our bodies and our brains. Not in a good way, so I’m going to try it and see how I feel. I am excited about this. It requires a couple of changes. It means that I’m going to have to eat dinner earlier than my wife who doesn’t know this yet, because I’m still in Austin. Because she often gets home at 7:30, and if I’m going to be going to bed at 8 or 9 to get up at 5:30 and try to get that optimal 7 to 9 hours of sleep, including time falling asleep. I need to go to bed early and I do not like to eat dinner right before I go to bed. That isn’t, Ooh, it doesn’t make me feel good. The other thing I’m going to miss is snuggling.

[00:11:09] I’m a big snuggler. I love to sleep in, in the mornings. The reason I sleep-in in the mornings is because my wife and I are such good spooners and we’re so cuddly and it’s just one of my favorite things to do is just snuggle in bed and drift in and out of sleep, and I have solved problems. I have solved both of these problems when my wife eats dinner, I will have a nice cup of tea or a sparkling soda or sparkling water with her and sit at the – dinner time for us is really important. We sit and we talk about the day every day, so I’m still going to do that. I’m just not going to eat with her. And the other thing can be solved with a text. She often sleeps in on the weekend even later than I do. And she can text me when she gets up and I’ll go into the bedroom and cuddle. And in the meantime, I’m getting maybe a bunch of work done or maybe some reading done on the weekends in this beautiful window of time that I’m generally sleeping through. I’m going to try it. I ordered myself a sleep tracker, which I have never used. I didn’t want to find out, kind of how my sleep changes, what it looks like if I’m getting enough. So I don’t know. It’s pretty exciting. I’m also going to commit more fully to meditating every day. I’m pretty good at meditating often, but if you do it every day, studies show that the average meditator falls asleep 40 minutes faster. And for me, a person who usually takes an hour to 90 minutes in order to get to sleep, 40 minutes faster sounds really good to me. The other thing that he says that I’m really struggling with on this podcast is that the bed should be just for sleeping, you know, and all sex. But, just for sleeping. And I love reading in bed. You’ve heard me say it before. I love reading in bed. If I can spend a whole day in bed reading, I’m in heaven and I always read in bed for an hour or two before I go to sleep. So I’m going to try also to move reading into the living room or into my office some places cozy that I can curl up and try using bed just for sleep. It said to work better. I don’t know. I would love your comments over at www.rachaelherron.com/blog on whether any of these things have worked for you or if you’ve given them a real try or if you listen to the podcast, Ten Percent Happier episode #221, tell me what you think about that. And if you’re gonna change anything. These are going to be experiments for me. You know, I love experimenting on myself, so I’m excited about this.

[00:13:45] The last one that I’m going to mention is the happiness lab, which is a podcast you should be listening to. And I was listening to; Mistakenly Seeking Solitude and put really quickly, this podcast shows that almost to a person, we all think we do not want to connect with the person next to us on the bus or in the line or at school or in places where we would talk to kind of strangers and this says that we all feel that way and we are all wrong. The Happiness Lab as a podcast its really about the way we think we’ll be happy, and proving that human beings as a whole do not understand what will make us happy. We think it is one thing, it is reliably something else that they document and I listened to Mistakenly Seeking Solitude and to me, talking to a stranger on a bus or on a plane is my idea of hell. Oh my gosh. I tried to avoid Lyft and Uber rides as much as possible because I don’t want to connect. But I landed in Austin after listening to the podcast with this episode still really fresh in my mind, and it changed everything for me about this conference. I wasn’t hiding, I wasn’t allowing myself the introv-  introversion that I prefer. I made myself talk to Lyft drivers and two people in the lobby and two conference attendees that I normally would have kind of tried to skirt by and avoid because I am truly, a secret introvert. And instead I went up to them and said, “I don’t, I don’t know anybody here. I don’t know many people here. Tell me about yourself.” And I had the best conversations. I had the best time. I ended up in places I did not expect to be in conversation and actually physically, because of these, cause I’m putting myself out there like that and it gave me happiness. It gave me these really sweet burst of dopamine.

[00:15:39] So I would recommend listening to that. Also, the Happiness Lab Mistakenly Seeking Solitude. And I think if you’re listening to a podcast, you are like the rest of us podcast junkies. Not only are you a writer, that’s why you listen to this one, but you are also trying to improve your life and podcast listeners have that over some people who go through the same day, groundhog day every day without thinking new thoughts, without trying new actions, without getting under the hood of our bodies and our brains and our spirits. So I recommend these podcasts. Go check them out. Feel free to come over to www.rachaelherron.com/blog and tell me what you have been listening to and loving lately. And thanks for listening to this bonus episode.

 I wish you happy writing. And we will talk soon my friends.

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.