September 29, 2022 • 31 mins
How can we build resilience against life's challenges? And how can embracing our most difficult emotions actually help us do just that? This week, Eva is joined by Physician, Counselor, and co-founder of Mettle Health, Dr. BJ Miller, to talk about connecting to all of our emotions—especially during difficult times.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Connections. I'm Eva Longoria. Today
we are going to talk about connecting to our emotions,
but specifically the difficult ones, and we're going to explore
the idea of emotional resilience and the connection with your
negative emotions has a lot to do with that resilience
and that stamina, if you will, of getting knocked down
(00:24):
in life. But you know, we've done an episode on
happiness with Dr Laurie Santo's But what about the other
side of that, anxiety, fear, sadness, and so I think
sometimes these emotions can be really difficult and can feel
counterintuitive to try to connect with them, But I think
when we're faced with challenges, being in touch with these
emotions can really build our resilience to get through these
(00:45):
tough times. So I'm really excited to introduce Dr b J.
Miller to the show. He's one of the founders of
Metal Health. It's an online pailative care service that focuses
on caring for the whole person, especially they're emotions and
inner resilience. He's also given a beautiful ted talk which
I have seen about facing the end of life and
(01:07):
his own near death experience, so I couldn't think of
a better person to talk about this with. So welcome
to the show, b J. Thank you, Eva, that's so
nice to be here. Thank you very much. Now tell
me what. I don't know what came first, the chicken
or the egg because I saw your ted Talk. Did
that come once you were already deep into this online
care service or did you do the ted talk and
(01:29):
then it blew up into this like need for people
to really learn some coping skills. Well, the ted Talk
was recorded in and at that time I was the
director of the Zen Hospice Project, very much an analog
a place, not a digital thing, a real fleshy place
that you come and get care. And so digital health
(01:51):
per se, this whole online thing was happening, but it
wasn't part of my world. But after ted talk took off,
then I started doing a lot more sort of publican
agement for a number of reasons. But then it was
the pandemic that really lit up the online work. And
that's when Sonja, my business partner, I decided to respond
to the pandemic with mental health and make this kind
(02:12):
of care as accessible as we could possibly make it.
And um, can you explain because I don't even know
if I'm quite sure what paliative care means. Oh, thank
you Eva, and I even saying it right, I feel
like I'm I mean, some people will say you might
hear some people say palliative more ab or a but
paliative paliative. You're on it. You got okay, And thank
(02:35):
you so much for asking about that. Powder of care
is poorly understood. A lot of people may have heard
of it. But anyway, so I'm really glad you asked
that question. Bottom line is paliative care is essentially is
it's a relatively new medical subspecialty. Since two thousand six,
it's been called hospice and palliative medicine, and we grew
(02:56):
out of hospice, which came to these shores in the
seventies and eighties. Um. But this kind of care where
you're not trying to fix someone, You're trying to accompany them.
You're trying to attend to their emotional lives, their spiritual life.
You're trying to be with them, witness them, reflect with them.
That's what hospice has been about, that kind of loving
(03:17):
support at the end of life, in the final months
of life, but a lot of people who did this
early hospice work in the eighties said, you know, why
are we waiting until people are dying? What? Why? Why?
Why wait till you're dying to actually speak openly and
honestly about your fears, around telling people you love them,
around feeling as well as you can possibly feel about,
(03:40):
questioning meaning in your life? You know all that? Why
do we wait till the very end to do these
very rich things? So in the nineties that work we
try to kind of move upstream from just end of
life stuff, and this field of palliative care was born.
Hospice now is a subset of out of care, this
sort of interdisciplinary quality of life kind of work. But
(04:00):
palliative care a large you don't have to be dying
to get it. A lot of the people I tend
to I've been seeing for many years, a dozen years,
What is your typical patient? Like, how would I know
if I need your services? Well, if you're dealing with
some sort of serious illness, you know, and serious illness
that could be just about anything, but some life altering illness.
In other words, you wouldn't call a paliative care team
(04:21):
if you broke your arm if you got a diagnosis
that was going to be really hard to cure or
was never going to be cured, like more and more
of us live with chronic illness. Can't cure it, but
you can learn to live with it. So within the
context of serious illness, you would reach out for palliative
care if you're suffering more than you need to. Basically,
you know, I tend to people suffering, like my other
(04:44):
medical colleagues tend to people's diseases. That's a really important difference.
My job is to help people realize their highest quality
of life, not necessarily maximize the number of minutes on
their planet. It's more about how do you enjoy your life,
how do you dig into your life, how do you
feel it? How do you make me with your life?
That's the work of power of care. So you might
reach out if you had pain or not. Is there
(05:05):
anything related to physical symptoms you might benefit from powd
of care? The medical piece we do tend to symptoms,
But otherwise, if you're struggling, like who am I now?
Like I was even before and now I have this
diagnosis and I feel different, I'm changed? How do I
roll with this? These kinds of existential questions. These are
the things that people reach out to us for, or
family members are burning out trying to be a caregiver
(05:26):
at home. A lot of people, like maybe sixty of
our clients are actually the caregivers reach out. Oh really,
that's a majority. Well yeah, yeah, yeah, and very often
we love that work. So it will start with the caregiver,
and then very often they'll bring their person into a
visit with us too, and we start tending to the
whole crew, the whole family. How much do you think
(05:47):
or is there a scientific data behind how much their
emotions affect their physical pain suffering mightily hugely? You know,
I can't, I couldn't quote data research per se. But
everything in my twenty years of practicing whatever it is
tells me and in my own life tells me that, Boy,
(06:10):
our emotions of course follow the experience, but are also
our emotions lead the experience too, And so one way
and another, we are emotional beings. And as messy as
that is, it's also fascinating is where so much the
action is. You can try to avoid those things, but
in some ways you'd be avoiding life, right right, So
(06:31):
I want to back up in case people don't know
your story. How old were you when you had this
near death experience? I was nineteen college right, yeah, yes,
sophomore year, so you're young, young kid. Did this is
a dumb question? Did that dictate you going into this field?
Did you discover this because you needed it? Or did
(06:53):
you go oh wow? This is like? Um, I mean,
I guess a near experience reveals a lot. So why
don't you tell our audio it's about that experience and
what happened after. Yeah, well, I had never even heard
a palliative care did exist. So this was the year
when I got injured. So a palliative hair did exist
(07:13):
in some corner of the world. I hadn't heard of it.
So for your listeners, so yeah, I was a sophomore
in college. I had screwed around on a commuter train
and came into contact with the electrical current and got
electrical burns that brought me close to death but ultimately survived.
Just lost a couple of legs below the knee and
my left arm below the elbow. So that was my
(07:34):
sort of introduction to death. That was like whoa, Okay, there,
I am not in control. Here was my phrase for
it is the cosmic spanking. It was my cosmic spanking moment.
So it really shook me in all sorts of ways
and definitely led me into medicine. I had not been
interested in healthcare medicine before I became a patient, so
(07:57):
it definitely turned me on to medice in in the
healthcare world, but not palliative care specifically. It wasn't until
deep into my training that I even heard of palliative care,
let alone decided to pursue it, So that came at later.
Isn't that interesting though, because I was talking to my
cairopactor about medical care and how you know the spine
(08:17):
and the spine is important, but they don't really like
when the Medical Association was formed, they actually kept chiropractors
out because they were like, what you're doing is cookie. Yeah,
it feels like this would fall under kokie, like you
know what I mean, Like, oh, you're gonna take care
of their emotions. Come on, let's get medicine, let's get prescriptions.
You're right about that. Paliative care is something it's sort
(08:38):
of an awkward cousin within healthcare. And again, it was
only two thousand and six that it became an official subspecialty.
Hospice had been around this mode of care, because honestly,
it wasn't only in the twentieth century where we really
started thinking that we could cure so much. You know,
the idea of people living with things that they couldn't fix,
(08:58):
they couldn't cure, that's a real satively modern phenomenon. Medicine
has done a really good job of helping people like
myself survive things that would have killed us earlier. But
we're not fixed. In other words, they can't help me
grow my legs back, but I can keep living with
this situation, and same with a lot of chronic illnesses.
Now medicines advanced, you can survive all sorts of things
and live with multiple diagnoses that used to kill you.
(09:21):
But now we've created this whole population of people like
myself who are somewhere between living and dying, you know,
and we've got a lot more living to do, we
got tears to do. We can't just sort of sit
around and wait to die. So it's opened up. This
segment of the population has a different kind of relationship
to illness and death and therefore medicine, and it's sort
(09:42):
of reductive way. You can't get away with just trying
to attend to the body. The emotions are going to
keep coming into play. Even if I, like a lot
of my colleagues and palliative care really do focus on
symptom management. We love our prescription pad too. We write
prescriptions for pain meds all, so we do do the
hard science stuff too in palliative care. But in some
(10:03):
ways we do that quote unquote hard science prescription pad
stuff to turn down the noise of pain, or turn
down the noise of nausea or breathlessness, so that we
can get to the juicy stuff that once you're out
of acute crisis, once you can breathe again, once you
can feel anything but pain, well, then our work really
begins because then we can dig into the emotions, the meaning,
(10:24):
the psychology. We can plumb the depths together and work
with this thing, this diagnosis, and help you accommodate it
and live with it, even triumph with it. That's where
the real action is. And you're right, that kind of
work has really kind of been left out of the
medical purview. Hence this is why this field had to
come into existence. I mean, if medicine we're always tending
(10:45):
to our emotional lives or psychology our mental wellness as well,
then we wouldn't need this little subspecialty called palliative care.
But the truth is medicine chose to be really much
more physical in nature, and it's created opportunities for my
field to come along and tend to the rest. The
(11:11):
goal of your care is to build emotional resilience, right,
how do you define emotional resilience, I guess is the
first question. That's a good question. I mean, so our
resilience our ability to You might say bounce back from
an illness or a trauma or something that pulled you
what feels like off course, you know, something comes along
(11:33):
and changes the way you see life, or changes the
way you fit into life, changes the way you are
in the world. Something comes along and like I said
that cosmics, banking knocks you down, changes your worldview in
an instant. So resiliency, emotional resiliency would be finding a
way to roll with those changes, accommodate those changes, make
them part of your life. And so I would say
(11:55):
bounce back, But bounce back is a little bit of
a misnomer and may not even be back like bounce forward,
a new bounce, find someone, this idea of going rehab.
I never liked these sort of kind of return to
normal things. Most of us know when some ship goes down,
you ain't going back. No, it's no, I mean no, no,
(12:17):
You've got to learn to live with this new piece
of reality. That's your work, not to pretend it didn't happen.
And so resiliency is not bouncing back, I'd say, but
it is bouncing. It's coming to life something along those lines,
thriving by something that otherwise might take you down, finding
a way to thrive nonetheless. Yeah, well that's the whole
reason I wanted to do this podcast was coming out
(12:39):
of COVID. Everybody kept saying I just want things to
go back to normal, and I was like, oh my god,
I don't. I learned so many lessons during COVID, And
so it's interesting that you say that because I was.
That's one of the questions was like, want to bounce back?
But do we really want to bounce back? Like do
we want to go back to the way it was?
It feels like you're going to give people tools to
navigate their life even better than before. Right, A man
(13:01):
the way humans are wired. I mean, we're sort of
relative at beasts. We know joy because we know sorrow
and some level, you know, And it's funny. I kind
of end up feeling sorry for folks who had nothing
ever go wrong in their lives, nothing to make you
challenge the way you're looking at things, and to kind
of revisit and be curious about things you don't understand.
(13:22):
You know. In some ways, some of the most fascinating people,
but also the happiest people are folks who have really
been through some stuff. Those things seem related. It's not like, well,
they found happiness despite all that hardship. No, I think
actually that happiness in some ways is related to that hardship.
Good news is we don't have to invent hardship for
ourselves if we're paying attention. It's all over the place.
(13:43):
There's all sorts of ways our lives might be not
quite what we'd want if we could command them. There's
all sorts of proof that we're not in control all
the time. But you've got to kind of pay attention,
or have some excuse to pay attention, whether that's a
pandemic or some amputations or whatever it is. But back
to your point. I'm so grateful to you. This is
exactly the point here is no, no, no, we ain't
(14:03):
going back here. Our lives, whether by force or by
choice something. Just pride our eyes open, pride our ears open.
Let's work with that. Let's work with this new, bigger thing,
this bigger idea of reality, this idea of reality that
includes sorrow and grief and all sorts of hard stuff.
It's way more interesting too. Yeah. You know, I have
(14:25):
a son. I have a little boy's four, and we
ask each other as moms, which you because fear And
sometimes they go, oh, my fears he's going to have
his heartbroken. But I go that, well, that means he
fell in love, do you know? Like I was like,
oh my god, I hope he gets his heartbroken ten times.
Like I hope he gives his heart so that it
can be broke. You know what I mean? Right? I
mean one of my goals in life is sort of
(14:45):
I feel like a tangent real quick, but walk with
me for a second. Here. Is like, I am very
good at appreciating something that I've just lost, you know,
or I'm about to lose. When I realized I could
lose it. That's when I really appreciate it. So in
some ways, my my goal in life, for myself and professionally,
why kind of remind each other of our mortality, why
(15:06):
remind each other of things of the sort of preciousness
of time, is so that we can appreciate it while
we have it. I've been around so many folks on
their deathbeds, who that's the moment they go, Holy sh it,
life is amazing. I just didn't lift my head up
and look at it or whatever it is, you know.
So my hope for myself in the world is that
we learned to appreciate what we have while we still
(15:27):
have it. I think that's really the key here. So
how do we do that well? I mean, I think
if we're paying attention to our own lives, it's filled
with little losses. It doesn't have to be dramatic. I
like to think of Sunday's like I feel a little
grief on Sundays. It's like, oh, the weekends, Like Sunday morning,
I can already know it's Sunday, Mondays tomorrow. I start
(15:48):
talking myself, I start girding myself, and I start mourning
the loss of the weekend. A little bit. I mean,
and this is this teamy little example, but I'm just
saying these are ways we can practice it. Things that
we wish were otherwise that aren't. They're all over the place,
So you can kind of pay attention to life that way.
Or you can walk down the street and see leaves
falling from a tree and realize those are dead, dying leaves.
You know what, with autumn coming, this death all over
(16:10):
the place, or bugs on your windshield, or the loss
of an idea or a loss of a relationship, these
are little deaths. These are little things that if you
let them, you can pay attention to them. They can
teach you, they can trim your sales just as effectively
as you know electrical current and amputations can just a
little more subtly. So that's one way is to pay
attention to our lives in a different way. And then
(16:32):
the last thing I would say on this eve would
be through empathy. You know, I am relatively a very
fortunate person by many definitions of that word. But thanks
to empathy, I can be in touch with the feelings
of others. I can put myself in people's shoes to
some degree. I'll still need to defer to them for
their experiences. I would never project my own into theirs,
(16:55):
but I can get a little closer by paying attention
to their feelings, not just my own all the time.
M that's probably the number one problem in the world, empathy,
putting yourself in somebody else's choose. Why is there such
empathy lacking in the world. You know this is probably
complex answer that question. I mean, one is we have
(17:19):
ceased to apparently value it. We need to honor it,
we need to celebrate it where we see it. In
my experience, at least with a lot of the med
students or nursing students I get to teach over the
years one thing, and just watching young people in general.
My sense, you tell me what you think is that
empathy is something that most of us have. If you
(17:41):
happen to be born sociopathic and you don't have the
mental hardware to feel the feelings of another person, and
they can't empathize, but most of us can. And so
my point here is that it's something to protect and
honor in children, not necessarily something we have to teach
so much. It's something that gets kicked out of us.
I see it in med students all the time. If
(18:01):
like the difference between the first year med students and
someone at the end who's awash and hundred our work weeks,
and you know, the empathy starts becoming a hazard. Look,
I have to see forty patients a day, and if
I'm going to be feeling all their feelings, I'm never
gonna get through the day. And you watch how people
start closing down, closing up, scarring down. So my point
here is, maybe we don't necessarily need to teach empathy
(18:24):
so much as protected as we're growing and going through life.
I mean, what do you think of that? Do you
do you agree? Do you think they're looking it? You
four year old? Do you feel? Yeah? I mean he's
already getting it. He already gets it. Yeah. We're playing
with some toys and he said should I share these?
And he set some aside. He didn't know for who,
but you know, like I should probably set these aside
for somebody. So hopefully he gets that message. But here's
(18:47):
the other thing about the way our society is shaped.
I think, which the world is built to be so busy,
like I don't have time to worry about recycling my
water bottle. I am trying to keep a float, and
so I think the same thing, like when you talk
about pain, it's like we just got a quiet the
pain so that we can get into the juicy stuff.
I feel the same thing, like, how can we take
(19:08):
care of our fellow humanity so that we can get
to the good stuff of emotions and empathy and compassion
and what humanity should be about, which is ultimately love. Right.
So I don't know that's a big problem. It is
because I think our society is designed to be so noisy,
just like the pain in your body that you cannot
(19:30):
possibly deal with. It's true enough, it's true enough, and
it's a real issue that I think, and I think
one way forward is to not separate ourselves. I think
I'll speak for myself. I know that I can get
burned out. I think I'm a kind of a softy.
I think I've always been a little softly pretty, relatively
compassionate kind of guy. I always happen, but I reached
my limits. I have dealt with burnout and compassion, fatigue,
(19:54):
numbness absolutely. So at one point here is for us
to not accidentally sort of set up a false vibe.
Those jerks over there, it can't be empathetic. I think
I think we can all get there if we're overwhelmed.
And overwhelm is probably a word of our time right now.
Even just the simplicity of the signals coming at us
(20:15):
through our computers, it's amazing. I can be in touch
with someone across the planet. I can be aware of
what's happening to billions of people. That's amazing. What's harder
as our emotional lives and our moral lives, those evolve
more slowly than our technology. And how do I handle
being able to be in touch with thousands and millions
(20:37):
of people and their feelings? And how do I square
that volume that load with me just being one little guy?
How do I feel all my empathy for all those people?
So there's a modern scourge. There's an overlay here that
we have a volume of stories we can be in
touch with, provoking emotions that we don't have the time
or the capacity to handle. So it's no wonder we're
(20:58):
scarring down. There's no wonder we're retreating to our camps
and getting divided because it seems much more controllable. I
can care about my family or my neighborhood or my people.
You want me to care about everybody. I don't know
how to do that. And so we're setting up these
false lines where half the populations outside and always like
excluding something, excluding somebody, I think in part to kind
(21:20):
of tamp down the load of emotions I've got to handle,
I've got to deal with. Does that make sense to
my speaking? Yeah, So it's a modern thing, and I
think I don't know that we know yet how to
handle that volume. I'm pretty sure we don't. One of
(21:45):
the things like I never take things personal is one
of the four agreements, And Don Miguel Reice talks about
this detachment, like you have to be detached from ego,
but sometimes I think people detached from their emotions. What
do you think about detaching or disconnect from your emotions
and what tools can I go, Okay, I cannot pay
attention to this noise, but I am going to recognize
(22:06):
the feeling. I mean, how does that work? So I
think this is really really important, and I've seen it,
whether it's sort of zen contemplative communities or medical students,
I've seen one way in another how sort of trying
to pursue really thoughtfully dealing with life's fullness um, whether
it's through a spiritual or medical lens. Sometimes the message
(22:29):
sounds like what you're saying is to detached from the feeling,
not have the feeling, therefore you won't be you know,
abended by it, which I think is a really important,
powerful mistake. Like I think the point here is to
feel your feelings. I think the detachment that Don Miguel
(22:49):
is talking about, the attachment that I would ever view
is really more The word is sort of investment. I'm
not invested in whether I get to feel sorrow or
feel joy. In other words, I don't have a dog
in the race for any one particular outcome or any
one particular emotion, So I'm detached from outcome or detached
(23:11):
from something specific. I think what we're talking about here
is to have a love of life so big and
an awareness of reality being so broad that you don't
follow any one emotion whipping you around. You have the emotion,
but you pause and you reflect on how you want
to respond to that emotion, not whether you want to
(23:33):
have the emotion. That's really really important because otherwise we're
signing up to go numb. These are huge distinctions, and
I see people make the sort of cross those wires
a lot in the name of self care, something really good,
not taking things personally. They're basically signed up to not
have feelings right, and then it goes the other way.
You know, you become so numb to like I'm detached
(23:54):
from that negative feeling. Positives fall under that as well. Yes,
I think ideas to pull the engineer out of your emotions.
You're not trying to create an emotional experience. Emotions are
powerful because they're a little bit beyond our control. I
can't be blamed from my emotional response. I can be
blamed for what I do with those emotions, how I
(24:15):
act them into the world. But we're innocent before our emotions.
So therefore let's be curious. I shouldn't be ashamed to
have X, Y or Z emotion. No, no, no, that's shame.
That's a force for shutting ourselves down, shutting ourselves up,
shutting ourselves off to ourselves. There's a great way to
pursue the opposite of resilience. Parts yourself to sleep, cut
(24:36):
yourself off from your emotions. These are things that poach
your resilience, not protect your resilience. M So here's Another
emotion that I feel is like the buzzword of our generation,
which is anxiety, anxiety and anxious. He's anxious, there's anxiety.
I have anxiety. I feel like this word is like
really at the forefront of any emotions that we have
(24:58):
been experiencing, Like do you think this is probably the
biggest emotion that more than I'm sad or I have fear,
and it's anxious, I'm anxious, I have anxiety. What is this?
I think anxiety is this sort of nervous system spasticity
almost it's your nervous system just responding. Not being able
to sort of tolerate uncertainty, for example, is a big
(25:20):
trigger for anxiety. I think, as you've described the pandemic,
we've just been to an existential crisis on mass What
is an existential crisis? It's sort of a threat to
our existence. But what that really means is how that
boils down to in the way psychology plays out, is
it's sort of it's a crisis of meaning. And so
when we as human beings, when the things that used
(25:40):
to give us meaning are being shaken, whether it's our
institutions or its religion, or something is proving to not
be what we thought it was, and it undermines the
stability it used to give us. You know, if we
used to think that any one institution were rock steady,
or that the Catholic Church can do no wrong or whatever.
Is when something happens, when something is wrong with those
(26:01):
institutional building blocks of our sense of self, of our
sense of life, it rocks our access to meaning. What
we thought was meaningful maybe isn't. And that is the
source of anxiety, one way or another for a lot
of people. So the anxiety that you're describing is everywhere.
And of course it's everywhere because there's mismatch between our
(26:21):
daily lives and our spiritual lives. There's a mismatch between
our inner and outer selves. There's all these sort of mismatches,
and in that mismatch, in that gap comes anxiety. So
it is everywhere. It is common and growing more and
more common, and it's probably related to fear, it is
probably related to depression. These aren't probably distinct centers in
(26:43):
our brain. They're all kind of kind of collapse into
something called anxiety. And so how do we deal with it? Well,
I mean, I think of anxiety. So it's a little
bit like suffering. It's like it's like the gap between
the world you want in the world you have. You know,
so you can close that app by changing your reality,
or you can close that gap by stop wishing for
(27:05):
a reality that you can't have. Those are sort of
the things that you can kind of do with your
mind and revisit how you're seeing yourself in the world,
so how you think. But that's making anxiety out to
sound like something that we can simply come and deer
with a little frame shift in our minds. Sometimes anxiety
has its life of its own, and there's a time
and a place for medication. There's a time and a
(27:25):
place for meditation. Prayer can help us. Learning to sit
with things that we can't change, learning to sit with
suffering that we can't affect is a really important skill
I think for adulthood. And in a sense that's saying
learning how to sit with anxiety. So maybe like we're
talking about not so much this detachment, but this disinvestment
from the thing that's making us anxious. I with enough practice,
(27:50):
I can be anxious in other things. I can be
anxious and happy. I can be anxious and interested. I
can be anxious another thing. It doesn't have to whip
us around. So, like all these difficult emotions, that trick
is having them but keeping them in their place, having
them but not being just anxious. So if you can
learn to lift your gates and see the world beyond
your anxiety, then you can begin to accompany your anxiety
(28:11):
not be whipped around by it. Again, I want to
be clear for our listeners. There are generalized anxiety disorders,
panic attacks, PTSD, depression. All these are corollaries for anxiety.
And sometimes that anxiety is way bigger than any one
thing that you or I could do. Sometimes we just
need help. Yeah, I mean it's easy to say just
(28:33):
be happy. Yeah, yeah, I didn't think of that. Yeah, okay,
good idea. Thanks. Yeah, not helpful. So what's a resource
that people can use? Well, come see us. Not to
sound too pluggy here, but this is what we do
at Mental Health m E T T l E. Metal
(28:54):
like your Inner strength or in a reserve mental health
So metal health dot com. You can come visit us there.
We do these one hour sessions at a time with folks.
We also have free webinars and things like that. There
are all sorts of other resources around resiliency. My friends
at UCS at the University California, San Francisco, the Mary
Center M E. R I. If you google UCSF from
(29:17):
the Merry Center, they have some really beautiful public facing
programs around resiliency, poetry, all sorts of beautiful things that
go along with living with illness. So those are two
resources for you. I also love Frank Ostaeseski's book, which
kind of touches a little bit on sort of existential anxiety.
That's five invitations, but there are plenty other books out there. Well,
(29:38):
this is the last question I always ask if I guess,
is what is a book you recommend? It doesn't even
have to be in your field. It could be a novel.
I mean, for me, I'm I go to music, you know,
So that's where I that's my angiolytic That's how I
deal with all sorts of things. That's how I learned.
Daily life is really much my teacher, and music is
the thing that helps me metabolize it. So lately I've
(30:01):
been listening to music of Brian Eno, this sort of
ambient electronic music that I find very relaxing and very
loving and soothing and beautiful. I've been listening to the
music of jazz pianists Ahmad Jamal, but I think is
just wonderful. But a book my friend Claire Bidwell Smith
has written a bunch of books. One is Anxiety as
the sixth stage of grief, I think is the title.
(30:22):
Claire Bidwell Smith writes nicely about grief as well as anxiety.
I would go there and then totally tangent, but it
kind of relates in terms of like living fully and
living well and feeling alive is so much the antidote
for some of life's hardships, including anxiety. So a book
called Art as Experienced by John Dewey. It's an older book,
(30:44):
but Art as Experienced as a treatise on aesthetics and
how we can kind of feel alive, which, like I say,
is a pretty good antidote to all sorts of things. Yeah. Well,
thank you so much Dr Miller for being with us
and sharing all of your thoughts. I really appreciate it.
I have been such a fan of your work and
I'm just honored that I got to speak with you.
Thank you, Eva, I really appreciate being with you. Such
(31:06):
a joy talking with you, and again, thanks for doing this.
You're gonna help a lot of people with this show.
Thank you. I hope. So that's the point. We're not
going back to normal, We're going forward. A man's sister,
thank you, Thank you so much for listening. I'm happy
to be connected with you. Connections with Eva Lagoria is
a production of unbelievable entertainment in partnership with I Hearts
(31:30):
Michael Pura podcast Network. For more podcasts from my Heart,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Connections. I'm Eva Longoria. Today
we are going to talk about connecting to our emotions,
but specifically the difficult ones, and we're going to explore
the idea of emotional resilience and the connection with your
negative emotions has a lot to do with that resilience
and that stamina, if you will, of getting knocked down
(00:24):
in life. But you know, we've done an episode on
happiness with Dr Laurie Santo's But what about the other
side of that, anxiety, fear, sadness, and so I think
sometimes these emotions can be really difficult and can feel
counterintuitive to try to connect with them, But I think
when we're faced with challenges, being in touch with these
emotions can really build our resilience to get through these
(00:45):
tough times. So I'm really excited to introduce Dr b J.
Miller to the show. He's one of the founders of
Metal Health. It's an online pailative care service that focuses
on caring for the whole person, especially they're emotions and
inner resilience. He's also given a beautiful ted talk which
I have seen about facing the end of life and
(01:07):
his own near death experience, so I couldn't think of
a better person to talk about this with. So welcome
to the show, b J. Thank you, Eva, that's so
nice to be here. Thank you very much. Now tell
me what. I don't know what came first, the chicken
or the egg because I saw your ted Talk. Did
that come once you were already deep into this online
care service or did you do the ted talk and
(01:29):
then it blew up into this like need for people
to really learn some coping skills. Well, the ted Talk
was recorded in and at that time I was the
director of the Zen Hospice Project, very much an analog
a place, not a digital thing, a real fleshy place
that you come and get care. And so digital health
(01:51):
per se, this whole online thing was happening, but it
wasn't part of my world. But after ted talk took off,
then I started doing a lot more sort of publican
agement for a number of reasons. But then it was
the pandemic that really lit up the online work. And
that's when Sonja, my business partner, I decided to respond
to the pandemic with mental health and make this kind
(02:12):
of care as accessible as we could possibly make it.
And um, can you explain because I don't even know
if I'm quite sure what paliative care means. Oh, thank
you Eva, and I even saying it right, I feel
like I'm I mean, some people will say you might
hear some people say palliative more ab or a but
paliative paliative. You're on it. You got okay, And thank
(02:35):
you so much for asking about that. Powder of care
is poorly understood. A lot of people may have heard
of it. But anyway, so I'm really glad you asked
that question. Bottom line is paliative care is essentially is
it's a relatively new medical subspecialty. Since two thousand six,
it's been called hospice and palliative medicine, and we grew
(02:56):
out of hospice, which came to these shores in the
seventies and eighties. Um. But this kind of care where
you're not trying to fix someone, You're trying to accompany them.
You're trying to attend to their emotional lives, their spiritual life.
You're trying to be with them, witness them, reflect with them.
That's what hospice has been about, that kind of loving
(03:17):
support at the end of life, in the final months
of life, but a lot of people who did this
early hospice work in the eighties said, you know, why
are we waiting until people are dying? What? Why? Why?
Why wait till you're dying to actually speak openly and
honestly about your fears, around telling people you love them,
around feeling as well as you can possibly feel about,
(03:40):
questioning meaning in your life? You know all that? Why
do we wait till the very end to do these
very rich things? So in the nineties that work we
try to kind of move upstream from just end of
life stuff, and this field of palliative care was born.
Hospice now is a subset of out of care, this
sort of interdisciplinary quality of life kind of work. But
(04:00):
palliative care a large you don't have to be dying
to get it. A lot of the people I tend
to I've been seeing for many years, a dozen years,
What is your typical patient? Like, how would I know
if I need your services? Well, if you're dealing with
some sort of serious illness, you know, and serious illness
that could be just about anything, but some life altering illness.
In other words, you wouldn't call a paliative care team
(04:21):
if you broke your arm if you got a diagnosis
that was going to be really hard to cure or
was never going to be cured, like more and more
of us live with chronic illness. Can't cure it, but
you can learn to live with it. So within the
context of serious illness, you would reach out for palliative
care if you're suffering more than you need to. Basically,
you know, I tend to people suffering, like my other
(04:44):
medical colleagues tend to people's diseases. That's a really important difference.
My job is to help people realize their highest quality
of life, not necessarily maximize the number of minutes on
their planet. It's more about how do you enjoy your life,
how do you dig into your life, how do you
feel it? How do you make me with your life?
That's the work of power of care. So you might
reach out if you had pain or not. Is there
(05:05):
anything related to physical symptoms you might benefit from powd
of care? The medical piece we do tend to symptoms,
But otherwise, if you're struggling, like who am I now?
Like I was even before and now I have this
diagnosis and I feel different, I'm changed? How do I
roll with this? These kinds of existential questions. These are
the things that people reach out to us for, or
family members are burning out trying to be a caregiver
(05:26):
at home. A lot of people, like maybe sixty of
our clients are actually the caregivers reach out. Oh really,
that's a majority. Well yeah, yeah, yeah, and very often
we love that work. So it will start with the caregiver,
and then very often they'll bring their person into a
visit with us too, and we start tending to the
whole crew, the whole family. How much do you think
(05:47):
or is there a scientific data behind how much their
emotions affect their physical pain suffering mightily hugely? You know,
I can't, I couldn't quote data research per se. But
everything in my twenty years of practicing whatever it is
tells me and in my own life tells me that, Boy,
(06:10):
our emotions of course follow the experience, but are also
our emotions lead the experience too, And so one way
and another, we are emotional beings. And as messy as
that is, it's also fascinating is where so much the
action is. You can try to avoid those things, but
in some ways you'd be avoiding life, right right, So
(06:31):
I want to back up in case people don't know
your story. How old were you when you had this
near death experience? I was nineteen college right, yeah, yes,
sophomore year, so you're young, young kid. Did this is
a dumb question? Did that dictate you going into this field?
Did you discover this because you needed it? Or did
(06:53):
you go oh wow? This is like? Um, I mean,
I guess a near experience reveals a lot. So why
don't you tell our audio it's about that experience and
what happened after. Yeah, well, I had never even heard
a palliative care did exist. So this was the year
when I got injured. So a palliative hair did exist
(07:13):
in some corner of the world. I hadn't heard of it.
So for your listeners, so yeah, I was a sophomore
in college. I had screwed around on a commuter train
and came into contact with the electrical current and got
electrical burns that brought me close to death but ultimately survived.
Just lost a couple of legs below the knee and
my left arm below the elbow. So that was my
(07:34):
sort of introduction to death. That was like whoa, Okay, there,
I am not in control. Here was my phrase for
it is the cosmic spanking. It was my cosmic spanking moment.
So it really shook me in all sorts of ways
and definitely led me into medicine. I had not been
interested in healthcare medicine before I became a patient, so
(07:57):
it definitely turned me on to medice in in the
healthcare world, but not palliative care specifically. It wasn't until
deep into my training that I even heard of palliative care,
let alone decided to pursue it, So that came at later.
Isn't that interesting though, because I was talking to my
cairopactor about medical care and how you know the spine
(08:17):
and the spine is important, but they don't really like
when the Medical Association was formed, they actually kept chiropractors
out because they were like, what you're doing is cookie. Yeah,
it feels like this would fall under kokie, like you
know what I mean, Like, oh, you're gonna take care
of their emotions. Come on, let's get medicine, let's get prescriptions.
You're right about that. Paliative care is something it's sort
(08:38):
of an awkward cousin within healthcare. And again, it was
only two thousand and six that it became an official subspecialty.
Hospice had been around this mode of care, because honestly,
it wasn't only in the twentieth century where we really
started thinking that we could cure so much. You know,
the idea of people living with things that they couldn't fix,
(08:58):
they couldn't cure, that's a real satively modern phenomenon. Medicine
has done a really good job of helping people like
myself survive things that would have killed us earlier. But
we're not fixed. In other words, they can't help me
grow my legs back, but I can keep living with
this situation, and same with a lot of chronic illnesses.
Now medicines advanced, you can survive all sorts of things
and live with multiple diagnoses that used to kill you.
(09:21):
But now we've created this whole population of people like
myself who are somewhere between living and dying, you know,
and we've got a lot more living to do, we
got tears to do. We can't just sort of sit
around and wait to die. So it's opened up. This
segment of the population has a different kind of relationship
to illness and death and therefore medicine, and it's sort
(09:42):
of reductive way. You can't get away with just trying
to attend to the body. The emotions are going to
keep coming into play. Even if I, like a lot
of my colleagues and palliative care really do focus on
symptom management. We love our prescription pad too. We write
prescriptions for pain meds all, so we do do the
hard science stuff too in palliative care. But in some
(10:03):
ways we do that quote unquote hard science prescription pad
stuff to turn down the noise of pain, or turn
down the noise of nausea or breathlessness, so that we
can get to the juicy stuff that once you're out
of acute crisis, once you can breathe again, once you
can feel anything but pain, well, then our work really
begins because then we can dig into the emotions, the meaning,
(10:24):
the psychology. We can plumb the depths together and work
with this thing, this diagnosis, and help you accommodate it
and live with it, even triumph with it. That's where
the real action is. And you're right, that kind of
work has really kind of been left out of the
medical purview. Hence this is why this field had to
come into existence. I mean, if medicine we're always tending
(10:45):
to our emotional lives or psychology our mental wellness as well,
then we wouldn't need this little subspecialty called palliative care.
But the truth is medicine chose to be really much
more physical in nature, and it's created opportunities for my
field to come along and tend to the rest. The
(11:11):
goal of your care is to build emotional resilience, right,
how do you define emotional resilience, I guess is the
first question. That's a good question. I mean, so our
resilience our ability to You might say bounce back from
an illness or a trauma or something that pulled you
what feels like off course, you know, something comes along
(11:33):
and changes the way you see life, or changes the
way you fit into life, changes the way you are
in the world. Something comes along and like I said
that cosmics, banking knocks you down, changes your worldview in
an instant. So resiliency, emotional resiliency would be finding a
way to roll with those changes, accommodate those changes, make
them part of your life. And so I would say
(11:55):
bounce back, But bounce back is a little bit of
a misnomer and may not even be back like bounce forward,
a new bounce, find someone, this idea of going rehab.
I never liked these sort of kind of return to
normal things. Most of us know when some ship goes down,
you ain't going back. No, it's no, I mean no, no,
(12:17):
You've got to learn to live with this new piece
of reality. That's your work, not to pretend it didn't happen.
And so resiliency is not bouncing back, I'd say, but
it is bouncing. It's coming to life something along those lines,
thriving by something that otherwise might take you down, finding
a way to thrive nonetheless. Yeah, well that's the whole
reason I wanted to do this podcast was coming out
(12:39):
of COVID. Everybody kept saying I just want things to
go back to normal, and I was like, oh my god,
I don't. I learned so many lessons during COVID, And
so it's interesting that you say that because I was.
That's one of the questions was like, want to bounce back?
But do we really want to bounce back? Like do
we want to go back to the way it was?
It feels like you're going to give people tools to
navigate their life even better than before. Right, A man
(13:01):
the way humans are wired. I mean, we're sort of
relative at beasts. We know joy because we know sorrow
and some level, you know, And it's funny. I kind
of end up feeling sorry for folks who had nothing
ever go wrong in their lives, nothing to make you
challenge the way you're looking at things, and to kind
of revisit and be curious about things you don't understand.
(13:22):
You know. In some ways, some of the most fascinating people,
but also the happiest people are folks who have really
been through some stuff. Those things seem related. It's not like, well,
they found happiness despite all that hardship. No, I think
actually that happiness in some ways is related to that hardship.
Good news is we don't have to invent hardship for
ourselves if we're paying attention. It's all over the place.
(13:43):
There's all sorts of ways our lives might be not
quite what we'd want if we could command them. There's
all sorts of proof that we're not in control all
the time. But you've got to kind of pay attention,
or have some excuse to pay attention, whether that's a
pandemic or some amputations or whatever it is. But back
to your point. I'm so grateful to you. This is
exactly the point here is no, no, no, we ain't
(14:03):
going back here. Our lives, whether by force or by
choice something. Just pride our eyes open, pride our ears open.
Let's work with that. Let's work with this new, bigger thing,
this bigger idea of reality, this idea of reality that
includes sorrow and grief and all sorts of hard stuff.
It's way more interesting too. Yeah. You know, I have
(14:25):
a son. I have a little boy's four, and we
ask each other as moms, which you because fear And
sometimes they go, oh, my fears he's going to have
his heartbroken. But I go that, well, that means he
fell in love, do you know? Like I was like,
oh my god, I hope he gets his heartbroken ten times.
Like I hope he gives his heart so that it
can be broke. You know what I mean? Right? I
mean one of my goals in life is sort of
(14:45):
I feel like a tangent real quick, but walk with
me for a second. Here. Is like, I am very
good at appreciating something that I've just lost, you know,
or I'm about to lose. When I realized I could
lose it. That's when I really appreciate it. So in
some ways, my my goal in life, for myself and professionally,
why kind of remind each other of our mortality, why
(15:06):
remind each other of things of the sort of preciousness
of time, is so that we can appreciate it while
we have it. I've been around so many folks on
their deathbeds, who that's the moment they go, Holy sh it,
life is amazing. I just didn't lift my head up
and look at it or whatever it is, you know.
So my hope for myself in the world is that
we learned to appreciate what we have while we still
(15:27):
have it. I think that's really the key here. So
how do we do that well? I mean, I think
if we're paying attention to our own lives, it's filled
with little losses. It doesn't have to be dramatic. I
like to think of Sunday's like I feel a little
grief on Sundays. It's like, oh, the weekends, Like Sunday morning,
I can already know it's Sunday, Mondays tomorrow. I start
(15:48):
talking myself, I start girding myself, and I start mourning
the loss of the weekend. A little bit. I mean,
and this is this teamy little example, but I'm just
saying these are ways we can practice it. Things that
we wish were otherwise that aren't. They're all over the place,
So you can kind of pay attention to life that way.
Or you can walk down the street and see leaves
falling from a tree and realize those are dead, dying leaves.
You know what, with autumn coming, this death all over
(16:10):
the place, or bugs on your windshield, or the loss
of an idea or a loss of a relationship, these
are little deaths. These are little things that if you
let them, you can pay attention to them. They can
teach you, they can trim your sales just as effectively
as you know electrical current and amputations can just a
little more subtly. So that's one way is to pay
attention to our lives in a different way. And then
(16:32):
the last thing I would say on this eve would
be through empathy. You know, I am relatively a very
fortunate person by many definitions of that word. But thanks
to empathy, I can be in touch with the feelings
of others. I can put myself in people's shoes to
some degree. I'll still need to defer to them for
their experiences. I would never project my own into theirs,
(16:55):
but I can get a little closer by paying attention
to their feelings, not just my own all the time.
M that's probably the number one problem in the world, empathy,
putting yourself in somebody else's choose. Why is there such
empathy lacking in the world. You know this is probably
complex answer that question. I mean, one is we have
(17:19):
ceased to apparently value it. We need to honor it,
we need to celebrate it where we see it. In
my experience, at least with a lot of the med
students or nursing students I get to teach over the
years one thing, and just watching young people in general.
My sense, you tell me what you think is that
empathy is something that most of us have. If you
(17:41):
happen to be born sociopathic and you don't have the
mental hardware to feel the feelings of another person, and
they can't empathize, but most of us can. And so
my point here is that it's something to protect and
honor in children, not necessarily something we have to teach
so much. It's something that gets kicked out of us.
I see it in med students all the time. If
(18:01):
like the difference between the first year med students and
someone at the end who's awash and hundred our work weeks,
and you know, the empathy starts becoming a hazard. Look,
I have to see forty patients a day, and if
I'm going to be feeling all their feelings, I'm never
gonna get through the day. And you watch how people
start closing down, closing up, scarring down. So my point
here is, maybe we don't necessarily need to teach empathy
(18:24):
so much as protected as we're growing and going through life.
I mean, what do you think of that? Do you
do you agree? Do you think they're looking it? You
four year old? Do you feel? Yeah? I mean he's
already getting it. He already gets it. Yeah. We're playing
with some toys and he said should I share these?
And he set some aside. He didn't know for who,
but you know, like I should probably set these aside
for somebody. So hopefully he gets that message. But here's
(18:47):
the other thing about the way our society is shaped.
I think, which the world is built to be so busy,
like I don't have time to worry about recycling my
water bottle. I am trying to keep a float, and
so I think the same thing, like when you talk
about pain, it's like we just got a quiet the
pain so that we can get into the juicy stuff.
I feel the same thing, like, how can we take
(19:08):
care of our fellow humanity so that we can get
to the good stuff of emotions and empathy and compassion
and what humanity should be about, which is ultimately love. Right.
So I don't know that's a big problem. It is
because I think our society is designed to be so noisy,
just like the pain in your body that you cannot
(19:30):
possibly deal with. It's true enough, it's true enough, and
it's a real issue that I think, and I think
one way forward is to not separate ourselves. I think
I'll speak for myself. I know that I can get
burned out. I think I'm a kind of a softy.
I think I've always been a little softly pretty, relatively
compassionate kind of guy. I always happen, but I reached
my limits. I have dealt with burnout and compassion, fatigue,
(19:54):
numbness absolutely. So at one point here is for us
to not accidentally sort of set up a false vibe.
Those jerks over there, it can't be empathetic. I think
I think we can all get there if we're overwhelmed.
And overwhelm is probably a word of our time right now.
Even just the simplicity of the signals coming at us
(20:15):
through our computers, it's amazing. I can be in touch
with someone across the planet. I can be aware of
what's happening to billions of people. That's amazing. What's harder
as our emotional lives and our moral lives, those evolve
more slowly than our technology. And how do I handle
being able to be in touch with thousands and millions
(20:37):
of people and their feelings? And how do I square
that volume that load with me just being one little guy?
How do I feel all my empathy for all those people?
So there's a modern scourge. There's an overlay here that
we have a volume of stories we can be in
touch with, provoking emotions that we don't have the time
or the capacity to handle. So it's no wonder we're
(20:58):
scarring down. There's no wonder we're retreating to our camps
and getting divided because it seems much more controllable. I
can care about my family or my neighborhood or my people.
You want me to care about everybody. I don't know
how to do that. And so we're setting up these
false lines where half the populations outside and always like
excluding something, excluding somebody, I think in part to kind
(21:20):
of tamp down the load of emotions I've got to handle,
I've got to deal with. Does that make sense to
my speaking? Yeah, So it's a modern thing, and I
think I don't know that we know yet how to
handle that volume. I'm pretty sure we don't. One of
(21:45):
the things like I never take things personal is one
of the four agreements, And Don Miguel Reice talks about
this detachment, like you have to be detached from ego,
but sometimes I think people detached from their emotions. What
do you think about detaching or disconnect from your emotions
and what tools can I go, Okay, I cannot pay
attention to this noise, but I am going to recognize
(22:06):
the feeling. I mean, how does that work? So I
think this is really really important, and I've seen it,
whether it's sort of zen contemplative communities or medical students,
I've seen one way in another how sort of trying
to pursue really thoughtfully dealing with life's fullness um, whether
it's through a spiritual or medical lens. Sometimes the message
(22:29):
sounds like what you're saying is to detached from the feeling,
not have the feeling, therefore you won't be you know,
abended by it, which I think is a really important,
powerful mistake. Like I think the point here is to
feel your feelings. I think the detachment that Don Miguel
(22:49):
is talking about, the attachment that I would ever view
is really more The word is sort of investment. I'm
not invested in whether I get to feel sorrow or
feel joy. In other words, I don't have a dog
in the race for any one particular outcome or any
one particular emotion, So I'm detached from outcome or detached
(23:11):
from something specific. I think what we're talking about here
is to have a love of life so big and
an awareness of reality being so broad that you don't
follow any one emotion whipping you around. You have the emotion,
but you pause and you reflect on how you want
to respond to that emotion, not whether you want to
(23:33):
have the emotion. That's really really important because otherwise we're
signing up to go numb. These are huge distinctions, and
I see people make the sort of cross those wires
a lot in the name of self care, something really good,
not taking things personally. They're basically signed up to not
have feelings right, and then it goes the other way.
You know, you become so numb to like I'm detached
(23:54):
from that negative feeling. Positives fall under that as well. Yes,
I think ideas to pull the engineer out of your emotions.
You're not trying to create an emotional experience. Emotions are
powerful because they're a little bit beyond our control. I
can't be blamed from my emotional response. I can be
blamed for what I do with those emotions, how I
(24:15):
act them into the world. But we're innocent before our emotions.
So therefore let's be curious. I shouldn't be ashamed to
have X, Y or Z emotion. No, no, no, that's shame.
That's a force for shutting ourselves down, shutting ourselves up,
shutting ourselves off to ourselves. There's a great way to
pursue the opposite of resilience. Parts yourself to sleep, cut
(24:36):
yourself off from your emotions. These are things that poach
your resilience, not protect your resilience. M So here's Another
emotion that I feel is like the buzzword of our generation,
which is anxiety, anxiety and anxious. He's anxious, there's anxiety.
I have anxiety. I feel like this word is like
really at the forefront of any emotions that we have
(24:58):
been experiencing, Like do you think this is probably the
biggest emotion that more than I'm sad or I have fear,
and it's anxious, I'm anxious, I have anxiety. What is this?
I think anxiety is this sort of nervous system spasticity
almost it's your nervous system just responding. Not being able
to sort of tolerate uncertainty, for example, is a big
(25:20):
trigger for anxiety. I think, as you've described the pandemic,
we've just been to an existential crisis on mass What
is an existential crisis? It's sort of a threat to
our existence. But what that really means is how that
boils down to in the way psychology plays out, is
it's sort of it's a crisis of meaning. And so
when we as human beings, when the things that used
(25:40):
to give us meaning are being shaken, whether it's our
institutions or its religion, or something is proving to not
be what we thought it was, and it undermines the
stability it used to give us. You know, if we
used to think that any one institution were rock steady,
or that the Catholic Church can do no wrong or whatever.
Is when something happens, when something is wrong with those
(26:01):
institutional building blocks of our sense of self, of our
sense of life, it rocks our access to meaning. What
we thought was meaningful maybe isn't. And that is the
source of anxiety, one way or another for a lot
of people. So the anxiety that you're describing is everywhere.
And of course it's everywhere because there's mismatch between our
(26:21):
daily lives and our spiritual lives. There's a mismatch between
our inner and outer selves. There's all these sort of mismatches,
and in that mismatch, in that gap comes anxiety. So
it is everywhere. It is common and growing more and
more common, and it's probably related to fear, it is
probably related to depression. These aren't probably distinct centers in
(26:43):
our brain. They're all kind of kind of collapse into
something called anxiety. And so how do we deal with it? Well,
I mean, I think of anxiety. So it's a little
bit like suffering. It's like it's like the gap between
the world you want in the world you have. You know,
so you can close that app by changing your reality,
or you can close that gap by stop wishing for
(27:05):
a reality that you can't have. Those are sort of
the things that you can kind of do with your
mind and revisit how you're seeing yourself in the world,
so how you think. But that's making anxiety out to
sound like something that we can simply come and deer
with a little frame shift in our minds. Sometimes anxiety
has its life of its own, and there's a time
and a place for medication. There's a time and a
(27:25):
place for meditation. Prayer can help us. Learning to sit
with things that we can't change, learning to sit with
suffering that we can't affect is a really important skill
I think for adulthood. And in a sense that's saying
learning how to sit with anxiety. So maybe like we're
talking about not so much this detachment, but this disinvestment
from the thing that's making us anxious. I with enough practice,
(27:50):
I can be anxious in other things. I can be
anxious and happy. I can be anxious and interested. I
can be anxious another thing. It doesn't have to whip
us around. So, like all these difficult emotions, that trick
is having them but keeping them in their place, having
them but not being just anxious. So if you can
learn to lift your gates and see the world beyond
your anxiety, then you can begin to accompany your anxiety
(28:11):
not be whipped around by it. Again, I want to
be clear for our listeners. There are generalized anxiety disorders,
panic attacks, PTSD, depression. All these are corollaries for anxiety.
And sometimes that anxiety is way bigger than any one
thing that you or I could do. Sometimes we just
need help. Yeah, I mean it's easy to say just
(28:33):
be happy. Yeah, yeah, I didn't think of that. Yeah, okay,
good idea. Thanks. Yeah, not helpful. So what's a resource
that people can use? Well, come see us. Not to
sound too pluggy here, but this is what we do
at Mental Health m E T T l E. Metal
(28:54):
like your Inner strength or in a reserve mental health
So metal health dot com. You can come visit us there.
We do these one hour sessions at a time with folks.
We also have free webinars and things like that. There
are all sorts of other resources around resiliency. My friends
at UCS at the University California, San Francisco, the Mary
Center M E. R I. If you google UCSF from
(29:17):
the Merry Center, they have some really beautiful public facing
programs around resiliency, poetry, all sorts of beautiful things that
go along with living with illness. So those are two
resources for you. I also love Frank Ostaeseski's book, which
kind of touches a little bit on sort of existential anxiety.
That's five invitations, but there are plenty other books out there. Well,
(29:38):
this is the last question I always ask if I guess,
is what is a book you recommend? It doesn't even
have to be in your field. It could be a novel.
I mean, for me, I'm I go to music, you know,
So that's where I that's my angiolytic That's how I
deal with all sorts of things. That's how I learned.
Daily life is really much my teacher, and music is
the thing that helps me metabolize it. So lately I've
(30:01):
been listening to music of Brian Eno, this sort of
ambient electronic music that I find very relaxing and very
loving and soothing and beautiful. I've been listening to the
music of jazz pianists Ahmad Jamal, but I think is
just wonderful. But a book my friend Claire Bidwell Smith
has written a bunch of books. One is Anxiety as
the sixth stage of grief, I think is the title.
(30:22):
Claire Bidwell Smith writes nicely about grief as well as anxiety.
I would go there and then totally tangent, but it
kind of relates in terms of like living fully and
living well and feeling alive is so much the antidote
for some of life's hardships, including anxiety. So a book
called Art as Experienced by John Dewey. It's an older book,
(30:44):
but Art as Experienced as a treatise on aesthetics and
how we can kind of feel alive, which, like I say,
is a pretty good antidote to all sorts of things. Yeah. Well,
thank you so much Dr Miller for being with us
and sharing all of your thoughts. I really appreciate it.
I have been such a fan of your work and
I'm just honored that I got to speak with you.
Thank you, Eva, I really appreciate being with you. Such
(31:06):
a joy talking with you, and again, thanks for doing this.
You're gonna help a lot of people with this show.
Thank you. I hope. So that's the point. We're not
going back to normal, We're going forward. A man's sister,
thank you, Thank you so much for listening. I'm happy
to be connected with you. Connections with Eva Lagoria is
a production of unbelievable entertainment in partnership with I Hearts
(31:30):
Michael Pura podcast Network. For more podcasts from my Heart,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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