October 31, 2024 • 37 mins
The idea of a 'soft life' originated from a group of Nigerian influencers who chose the term to describe a way of living that was comfortable, joyful, minimised stress whilst prioritised self care and simple beauty, in comparison to hustle culture, burnout and urgency. In today's episode we are going to go through 5 practical tips to make this gentle life your reality, including:
- The 'Picture This' exercise
- The new way to approach your To Do list
- How to organically regulate your nervous system
- Creation over consumption
- Rethinking our ideas for success
I also have a special announcement at the beginning of the episode! Thank you again for all the support.
Preorder my book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/755841/person-in-progress-by-jemma-sbeg/
Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg
Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast
For business: psychologyofyour20s@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here,
back for another episode, as we, of course break down
the psychology of your twenties. Before we get into today's episode,
I have a really special announcement, and if you're listening
(00:23):
to the episode in the week that it is coming out,
you might be some of the first people to know.
I wrote a book, and come twenty twenty five, it
will be yours. It is called Person in Progress, and
much like this podcast, it's a psychological roadmap basically to
your twenties, with even more studies, even more guided exercises,
(00:47):
even more personal stories, and it is for you, guys,
to have and to hold. I cannot even believe that
those words are coming out of my mouth. I wrote
a book. Before I tell you any more details, I
want to just firstly say thank you and to just
express my very deep gratitude for every single listener of
the podcast. There is not a moment that I don't
(01:10):
pinch myself and feel so grateful to have you all,
because it would have never been possible without your continued support,
without all of you who tune in week after week.
You know I may have written the book, but you
are the reason I have the opportunity. So before I
say anything else, I just want to say thank you
and that I think you'll love this book as much,
(01:33):
if not more than the podcast and the episodes that
I put out each week. So Person and Progress, let
me tell you a little bit more about it. I've
been in the process of writing this book for the
last two years. I think I've given some hints here
and there that it would be coming, so it's great
to finally have it out in the open. Person and
Progress is made up of four sections. They are Welcome
(01:54):
to your callal Life, Crisis, Love on the Brain, Work
in Progress, and Everybody is Healing from Something. It covers
so many of the complicated experiences of your twenties. It's
over three hundred pages. We talk about how to figure
out exactly what you should be doing in your life,
exactly who your authentic self is, how to make friends
(02:15):
as an adult, how to stop repeating history in relationships,
how to use psychology to fall in love, to heal guilt, shame, embarrassment, loneliness,
and so much more. I could literally keep going. It
is also available for pre order right now, like at
this very moment, it's just such a pinchby moment to
like even be saying that. But if you do feel
(02:37):
cool to do so, grab a preorder copy now so
that you get the book the day it comes out.
Another benefit, it really helps get the book into local
bookstores and into local shops, local bookshops because preorder numbers
help people determine the quantities that they're going to order
come release. So if you are excited to get your
(03:00):
hands on it as am I, please consider pre ordering
through the link in the description. Again, thank you, thank you,
thank you for giving me this opportunity and for giving
me this platform. There will be so many more details
to come in the following months, and if you want
to see the cover, head to my Instagram and you
(03:20):
can see so many more details and exactly what is
going to be in your hands come twenty twenty five.
Without further ado, let's get into the episode. Today. We
are going to be talking about how to create a
self life in your twenties, and what I mean by
that is, how do we create a life of simple
(03:44):
pleasures of joy, one that is gentle, happy, successful without
feeling heavy and frustrating, as everything so often feels these days.
It is a daily reality for a lot of us
in this day decade. We are so focused on progress
(04:04):
and success. It's been drilled into our brains. We are
focused on not falling behind on this like predetermined racecourse
that we all are traveling on, and it means that
our lives firstly no longer seen like ours and at
times they don't even feel enjoyable. All of our attention
and our energy is like focused on work. It's focused
(04:26):
on school, it's focused on achievement, and it's dictated by
like this urgency culture to be doing it all and
to have it all together right now, to be rushing
from one milestone to the next, from one place to
the next. I think it's time that we sow down.
It's my belief that when we really buy into this
during our twenties, this like overatching perspective and attitude towards life,
(04:50):
and we don't have the occasional reminder that life is
short and we actually need to enjoy it. We end
up being overwhelmed by unnecessary stress. We prioritize productivity rather
than being kind to ourselves, being gentle to ourselves, experiencing
the world, shaking off that philosophy as well. It becomes
(05:12):
harder that the older we get. So it's a very
formative period where we can rewrite the script that we
have been taught on how to enjoy our lives. That
is what we want. We do not want to be
operating at this really high stress frequency for you know,
the next thirty forty years and never slowing down. I
think it also comes down to this very important thing
(05:35):
to remember, which is that in a culture of hustling
and in the culture of success, you don't need to
burn out to prove that you deserve good things. You
don't need to deny yourself simple pleasures to prove you're
a good person. We want to take a more it
would say, positive psychology approach. We want to take our
(05:56):
mental health and our emotional health seriously by liberately choosing
and pursuing a soft life. The soft life is about
slowing down. It's about adopting a lifestyle of enjoyment. Comfort
is simple pleasure. And it came from the Nigerian wellness
(06:19):
community and from black female creators who were sharing this
new approach in the last two to three years. That
really combines agency, ambition, freedom without the need to sacrifice
what you enjoyed. Always put others above you put yourself
under this intense stress, you go easier on yourself. You
(06:39):
appreciate the details of life rather than rushing through them.
If you want to read about the exact history of
this term, there is an amazing article by Andscape which
is like an online journal titled the Soft Life Isn't
as Easy as It looks Online and they interview some
of the originators of this term. It's incredibly fascinating for
(07:02):
you know where their desire to embrace the soft life
and promote the soft life really came from. I like
to think of it as well as really living similarly
to how our ancestors would have lived long ago. They
would have woken with the sun. They would have felt
their feet on the earth. They would have watched the
trees move, watch the sunset, enjoyed like the sweetness of
(07:25):
the berries really saved it. They would have done just
what they needed to survive and then rest easy at
night with their clan. They didn't have to do lists,
they didn't have teams meetings, they didn't have Microsoft work,
they didn't have keynote presentations that needed to be done
for their boss, and the soft life is about appreciating that. Obviously,
circumstances have changed, so we need jobs, we have these responsibilities.
(07:49):
This is an element of who we are, but choosing
to return to a life before productivity defined us in
the time that we have. We want comfort, we want
low stress. So let us jump into five ways you
can really create that life for yourself at this pivotal point.
(08:09):
How you can reprogram, resocialize, retrain your brain to see
this as the version of success you should be pursuing,
and talk about the psychology behind it, talk about the
mental impact, all of that and more. After this shortbreak,
there are, of course a few straightforward ways to embrace
(08:31):
the self life that we hear about quite frequently. You know.
Prioritize self care, especially self care that isn't just about
self improvement, but a genuine generosity to yourself. Setting boundaries
with people or situations which are emotionally taxing another important one.
Practicing gratitude, incorporating rest, treating yourself every now and again,
(08:54):
all very important, all pretty well known for a good reason.
But with that in mind, I really want to focus
on five more specific things that are a little bit
different and that you can do daily, weekly, monthly, that
have an evidence base behind them. The most significant one,
in my mind, in my opinion, comes down to gratitude,
(09:15):
and that is number one. Go searching for joy, Go
searching for things to savor and embrace the kind of
little things that are presented to you every day. Savor
you know, the crunchiness of the apple that you had
for breakfast. Savor the fact that you found that perfect
shower temperature, your cup of coffee, the little kid like
giggling on your bus, the joy of your daily walk.
(09:39):
You know, wake up without an alarm once a week,
Choose a slower pace for your meals, Reconnect. Joy as
an emotion is so overlooked and so often confused with
happiness as well. But it's a lot deeper, it's a
lot more profound. Joy is elation, It's delight. It's like
this whole body experience of synchronicity. Almost Like the best
(10:03):
way I can explain it is the sense that in
that moment, you exist right now just to experience this.
This is the reason you were put on this world.
This is such a human experience to feel joy, This
is what we're here for. Here is the thing. The
more you go searching for joy, the more it tends
(10:23):
to find you, even when you don't want it to.
Because once our brains start searching for a certain kind
of stimulus moment thing like a joyful thing, it becomes
naturally more attuned to the presence of such things in
our environment. So noticing joy makes joy more evident in
your every day. It's kind of like when you notice
(10:45):
a yellow car and you can't stop noticing them, Like
there is a screen car near my house. It's like
a lime green car. And now anytime I am in
a new city, a new suburb, sometimes even in a
new country, I see that car everywhere. I always notice
th it being around. Having that search for joy, that
personal search for joy, is really really helpful for your
(11:10):
health and your life satisfaction. So there was a study
published by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and
it found that when we regularly experience joy day to day,
something we take for granted, something we don't tend to
focus on in health literature, it triggers a number of
psychological but also physical changes. Better blood flow, better focus,
(11:34):
a better mood, all things that make for a softer life. Now,
that was one study, but there is another one from
twenty nineteen that was a research paper that is the
perfect example of how embracing joy makes you more holistically well. So,
(11:54):
this paper measured the impact of an intervention called picture this.
I love this intervention. It's very similar to the exercise
that I'm going to talk about in just a second.
But in the picture of this study, the researchers asked
two hundred of their participants in the experimental condition to
use their smartphones to take at least two photographs of
(12:16):
an event, moment, place that made them feel joyful. And
they have to do this each day for three weeks,
and then they uploaded those photographs to a server for
the staff to kind of look at. So the researchers
gave them some examples of like things to take photosoft.
You know, you could take a photo of the sky
(12:37):
at sunset. You could take a photo of a good friend,
of getting a really good grade on a paper, or
a test that you worked hard for. They were also
instructed this is the second part. They're instructed to focus
on the physical sensations and the cognitive and emotional response
that they had in that moment that they decided to
(12:57):
take a photograph. This is actually called sense reperceptual sharpening,
noticing how your senses respond to something that you're perceiving. Basically,
what they were doing in this not so sly way
was forcing their participants to take note and take notice
of joy, then capture a photo of the source. Over
(13:19):
that period, all these two hundred people their mood improved,
They became more grateful, more motivated, They expressed that they
enjoyed their life more. For some people, it was actually
quite a profound experience. They were like, I just didn't
realize how much beauty my life had. It really seems
to show that daily experiences of all curiosity, gratitude, love,
(13:43):
that can put the average person on a trajectory of
growth success. And we know that a soft life is
about being present and immersed in experiencing whatever you get
the privilege to enjoy and whatever you get the experience
to you know, to feel. Taking inspiration from that study,
and I love this study. I've talked about this on
(14:05):
the podcast before and I've talked about it on Instagram.
But I have my own version of picture this and
it's called the Smile file. Some people also have a
Tada list. These are your only instructions, very similar to
that exercise. Once a day, all you have to do
is take a photo of screenshot or take a note
of something that has brought you joy or something that
(14:26):
has seemed so magical to you, almost like someone has
placed this thing in your life and gone like, Toda,
look at it, enjoy it. I made this for you.
Savor that moment. Find one moment every single day, focus
on the sensations. I think life becomes so much easier
to enjoy and it's so much more gentle when you
(14:47):
have this outside armor of gratitude, when that is the
first thing that any experience that comes at you will
have to penetrate, an armor of gratitude. So moving on
from that, our second step for adopting a soft way
of living and a soft way of flourishing in our twenties.
(15:09):
Every single day, I want you to remove two things
from your to do list that you cannot do. Let
me tell you there is a lot we can do
in a day. There is twenty four hours. That's a
lot of time, but there is a lot more that
we actually don't need to do. We actually never need
to do. We just convince ourselves that we're lazy if
we don't do it. If you grew up in an
(15:31):
environment where you were called lazy for relaxing, or your
own overachiever, every single piece of your worth was tied
to what you can do in a day, your grades,
how impressive you looked. You know, these days, you may
feel quite an intense internal conflict or guilt when you
(15:52):
aren't busy, and so you feel like you have to
earn your rest by creating more tasks, more challenges for
your self day in and day out. But the idea
of being quote unquote lazy, it has no place in
our soft era because reducing your stress by reducing how
much you have to do, it's actually not laziness. It's deliberate.
(16:16):
It's actually quite hard to do, and it is about
providing yourself with space to be human rather than just
being a product of how much output you can produce.
Another version of that, so you can remove two things
from your list today. This is a version of that
that I swear by. And what I do is I
have my to do list, that is the things I
(16:38):
really need to do, couldn't do them any other day.
Essential for my job, essential for living, essential for being
a good friend, being a good partner, paying taxes, you
know those kinds of things. That's my to do list.
Then I have my I would like to do list.
This is the things that I would really kind of
like to get done, I really like to get around to.
(16:58):
It's not gonna be the end of the world I
don't do it. And then I have my extras list.
This are the things that I would do if I
have like a shit ton of time. But none of
those things are essential. Anything on my I would like
to or my extras list doesn't need to be done
today or tomorrow. Eventually, they might even fall off the
(17:19):
list all together, and nothing's gonna go wrong. So you
have your must list, your I would like list, and
your extra list. Why is this important? Well, too often,
and I'm guilty of this as well, but too often
we put every single small thing on our to do list,
from our small tasks to our large ambitions, and it's
(17:42):
just not helpful. I do think that we tend to
do this as a way of organizing or structuring our
thoughts and a way of visualizing and finding a space
for remembering what needs to get done. But It has
the ripple and effect of making us insanely overwhelmed because
we have no vetting pro We have no vetting process
as to what actually deserves to be on our daily agenda.
(18:05):
It's like everything from do the dishes, to find my
birth certificate, to get a new job, to insert huge
tasks here. Because of this, we never actually finish the
to do list. Every day, a new task is kind
of carried over. You've added on more items but you
can't do anyways. Then you don't do them. You feel
like a failure, even when you already did all the
(18:26):
things that you already needed to do. So why is
it important to have a realistic list rather than an
ambitious list. It's because of how our brains prioritize and
think about unfinished tasks. They become rather intrusive. There is
a natural spotlight on everything that we haven't done, rather
than on what we have done. So this is due
(18:47):
to a psychological phenomena known as the zygonic effect, which
basically says that we tend to fixate on interrupted tasks
or incomplete tasks more than others. When we feel like
we have I hate you in this word, but failed
to do something, something that we needed to do. This
creates this underlying cognitive tension, and it means that our
(19:08):
brain keeps coming back to it, keep saying, Hey, we
haven't finished that yet, we haven't finished that yet, even
as you're trying to switch off, even as you're trying
to fall asleep, even when you are totally exhausted, even
when actually there's no need to do that thing today.
In some ways this is sometimes helpful. You know, when
you're really under the pump, you don't want to forget things,
(19:29):
you don't want things to slip off the list. But
you are not meant to feel that way all the time,
because then everything becomes about what you didn't do with
your time, rather than prioritizing what you chose to do
with your time in order to be more present in
your life. So this is my new rule for myself. Yes,
(19:50):
I have my must like and like my extras list,
but I also say, if any sentence starts with I
could such as I could do this. I could add
more things to my to do list. I could sign
up for new projects. I could, you know, add this
extra element that's going to take a lot of time.
(20:11):
I could find time in my day, I have to
shut it down. Any sentence at this time in my life,
when everything is so busy that starts with I could
is I can't. I only have space for things that
are urgent, for things that are important, for things that
I want to do. Because I was doing all this
stuff before that just really drained me enormously, and it
(20:32):
actually didn't even matter, like it had no impact on
my life. It wouldn't have made my life better. It
wasn't really doing anything, it wasn't important. It wouldn't have
mattered whether it was done or not. And it made
my life heavy. And you know, it was things I
didn't even care about, and the things that I did
care about I wasn't able to prioritize because I was
(20:53):
carrying the stress of these tasks that were unnecessary. You know,
someone said to me recently, I think this really does
summarize it. If you don't have to struggle, don't don't
force yourself to struggle just because you think it means
you deserve more, just because you think that people are
going to think you're lazy if you don't. So Tip
(21:15):
number two, cut down that to do list, please and
thank you. We're going to take a short break, but
when we return, I want to discuss my remaining three
steps or pieces of advice for creating that soft, tender,
gentle life that you deserve in your twenties. Stay with us.
(21:40):
One of the other crucial elements of creating a routine
and a lifestyle that lets you go slowly and at
your own pace is developing a better relationship with stress.
Now that probably sounds unrealistic, undoable for many of us.
Stress is of course, it's a necessary part of life.
You know, like it or not ever going to eliminate
(22:01):
it entirely, nor actually should you want to, because you'd
miss out on so much important information. But we can
get better at regulating our nervous system so that it's
not being triggered by unnecessary stresses, things that are minor stresses,
things that really don't deserve that much attention and energy,
(22:24):
you know, the daily hassles. Stress has an impact we
want to be selective with when it is activated, because
when our fight or flight response is you know, consistently
set off, it changes our immune system response, It suppresses digestion,
It reduces our body's ability to heal itself. There are
so many cognitive impacts. It actually does put your body
(22:47):
under a lot of tension. It's like a vigorous workout
for your body. And you know workouts are great workouts
keep you healthy. You don't want to be doing like
four or five of them a day. It's gonna put
a strain. It also just like doesn't feel nice. That's
like a pretty simple way to say it. I've noticed though,
that so few of us realize how often we are
(23:08):
actually being pushed into that stressed state, how often our
environment is triggering a response that was meant for survival.
But this is not a matter of survival. You know,
a workplace deadline, missing a train, having an argument with
a friend is not a matter of survival. But we
cannot help but feel like this insane stress response and
(23:30):
this fight or flight response is being triggered because we
have been trained by our environment to be more on edge.
So this is a long way of saying number three.
If you want a soft life, we have to improve
how we regulate our nervous system in organic ways, in
ways that we are evolutionarily and our ancestors would have
(23:52):
regulated their emotional response and their stress response. A regulated
nervous system like that term it has been getting a
lot of buzz online recently. I've noticed this. What it
basically means is that your body and your mind can
effectively respond to stress. So it is not the complete
(24:14):
removal the complete absence of stress. It's actually important to
note that it is about having this important two way
street relationship with stress, where stress is welcomed but it
is not allowed to dominate. You are able to return
to a balanced, calm state after it has passed, and
(24:34):
that state, that balance, is called homeostasis. It's crucial because
it means that your nervous system isn't overreactive, it's not stuck.
It allows you to be flexible. It allows you to
adapt to various situations. You're not a tense creature. Here
are some ways that we can get to that regulated state.
You need to have a process for grounding yourself and
(24:56):
for remaining present when everything in you is calling to panic.
I always repeat to myself, just be where your feet are.
Just be where your feet are, and that means taking
off my socks. I don't know if that's gross to
some people, but whatever, I take off my socks, I
take off my shoes. I just place my feet on
the floor, and I say, the only thing that I'm
(25:19):
going to concern myself with is whatever is ten centimeters
from where I'm standing. This is my zone, this is
my present, This is what I can control. Not the future,
not others, not the past. I'm going to take a
moment in the stress state to be where my feet are.
This is even better when you combine it with like
(25:40):
a natural environmental setting. So this kind of grounding it's
called earthing. When we combine that centering technique with nature.
Earthing really focuses on realigning your electrical, your neural energy
with the earth. You know, those were words they might
(26:01):
not sound scientific, but the research behind this type of grounding,
it really is the best study that I've come across
this ever. It talks about how our lost connection with
nature and the earth has basically caused our nervous system
to no longer have a stable environment in which to
(26:23):
calm itself. You know, we no longer sleep on the ground.
We rarely walk barefoot outdoors. We live and we work inside.
We spend so much of our time disconnected, like up
far above the ground in high rises, not out in nature.
Some of us wouldn't spend more than an hour outside
a day, everything is loud, busy, or of a stimulating
(26:45):
urgent that never ends, and all that external information means
we need to be constantly on So our threshold for
stress has been lowered. But when we practice earthing, we
return our body and our mind to the place it
evolved from, to where it belongs, to where it can
recalibrate itself and feel calm, And a grounded body is
(27:10):
a healthier and stable body. The most fascinating part of
the study though, and you would you kind of have
to see it to believe it, because I read this
and I was like, I need some more evidence of this,
I need something, I need a graph, I need a picture.
They had them. Basically in the study they looked at
thermal imaging of a person's body before and after earthing.
(27:31):
So thermal imaging basically looks at body temperature, and lower
body temperature would typically mean less inflammation, perhaps even less pain.
That was very clearly documented in these images. People were
talking about how even spending thirty minutes earthing themselves, so
(27:52):
just basically grounding using nature, they felt more calm their
pain from certain chrod health problems or certain joint pains,
things like that was relieved. They felt less stressed, less
like almost even hot, less jittery. All of these coming
down to nature's innate capacity, its innate role as our
(28:17):
friend and as our collaborator in handling our motions. So
there's some other things that you can do to help
with that regulation. Cold showers in the morning, that's a
big one at the moment. Personally, don't like it, No,
it works not for me, but just to put it
on the table. You can also do progressive muscle relaxation,
which is beautiful. You can get guided versions of this online,
(28:40):
which I really recommend. This one was something that I
thought of for us, like, huh, this would really work,
And I tried it the other day and it was
actually very very interesting. Unplugging from your phone or your
headphones when you go for a walk. So we often,
you know, you and me both we are listening to podcasts,
we are listening to music, we are calling our friends.
(29:01):
We've got our noise canceling headphones on, we've got earbuds
in instead. Next time you go for a walk, take
your headphones off, just pay attention to your environment, and
it means that we don't experience this disconnection between what
we're listening to our senses and what we're seeing, so
our eyes and our ears are not processing different information.
(29:23):
I just think that all those options are free, like
you can literally do them tomorrow. But it really just
like reconnects your mind and your body to your environment
in a way that our current situation and our current
work life travel existence doesn't really promote. This really brings
(29:46):
me to my next big tip. Look at this amazing
segue I'm about to perform, because my next piece of
advice is really really related to that, and it's related
to how we treat self care as a consumerist act
when we should be folksocusing more on creation. Self care
is really really important, but it's so often associated with
(30:07):
spending money and having more skincare, more candles, more luxuries,
buying yourself little things. This is all really really nice, right,
I do it all the time. It's a joy getting
a new little trinket. It's a joy getting something that
you've really worked hard for. But it can also make
self care unattainable, and after a while, I would make
(30:28):
the argument that it makes self care quite shallow. If
you can just like buy yourself a better mood, it's
of course going to give you the dopamine hit that
you want, because it is an act of consumerism, and
companies are great at leveraging that to get you to
think that self care really just means buying more things,
really just means consuming more things thinking it's going to
(30:51):
make you happier. There was a really great Vox article
written about this in I think June or July this year.
It's called How the Self Care Industry Made Us So Lonely,
and it talks about how self care used to be
a term that meant nurturing yourself by filling your cup
(31:13):
with community and creation and rest expression. All of these
are so psychologically nourishing. But nowadays those things are harder
to come by and they're harder to prioritize because we
are so disconnected. Those spaces aren't as available, those communities
aren't as available, and so we replace them with what
(31:34):
we can buy or what is most convenient and available,
which can actually make our lives quite heavy. We talked
about this in last week's episodes. If you're up to date,
last week we talked about hobbies. I don't know if
it was last week or on Tuesday. Now, our most
recent episode, we talked about hobbies, and I talked about
how we are so exhausted from how busy society keeps
(31:57):
us that often we just want to do what's easiest.
We want to have the quickest meal, We want the
most convenient way to switch off our brain by scrolling
by watching TV, all of which have their place, but
continuously choosing that is your place to relax. Choosing that
as your source of kind of decompressing, it's going to
(32:19):
detract from your life. It's going to make it a
lot less tasty. If you want that delicate, soft, cozy life,
you need to make more space for creating things and
more space for expression, and dedicate less time, less money,
less room to just consuming. So two to three days
(32:42):
a week, I want you to invest in creation as
a way to feel more connected to what you're doing.
So your food, your items, your space, your hobbies. Take
the extra thirty minutes, the extra hour to really pour
some care and love into your dinner or your breakfast,
and to feel proud of what you're making yourself, how
(33:03):
you're nourishing yourself. Take an afternoon off, Take it an
afternoon off on your weekend to pursue a creative project,
get a herb garden, volunteer, take care of someone else,
be generous to someone else, put something back into the world.
That is a real, true act of softness, being open
(33:26):
enough to want to give and not just receive. Finally,
rethink what you believe success should look like. This is
a big aspect of shifting from a productive, heavy life
to a slower, softer, gentler life. Typically, you know, and
historically our biggest indicators of success they are material and
(33:47):
they are social. You make more money, you receive more praise,
do you have more respect, you have a nicer house.
But what does any of that actually mean if you
are always in a rush anyway, and if you never
have this space to enjoy it, what makes that a
more desirable life than the soft life? You know, because
(34:08):
quite frankly, you can have all those things, and a
lot of people have experienced all of those things and
still said, I am quite miserable. So let's consider the alternative,
a balanced lifestyle, a day filled of variety, time to
just exist, enjoy your experiences, time to socialize, to build connection,
(34:30):
room to slow down. Maturing to me at least is
realizing that is very appealing. That is the outcome we
should want. A few weeks ago, I did an episode
I think it's called How to Be Truly Successful in
Your Twenties, Episode two hundred and twenty one, Episode two
hundred and twenty one. Yes, and I really wanted to
(34:52):
wreck you to listen to that, because when we talk
about redefining success, that's like the best place to turn
so in depth, and it could be a wake up
call that you might need to hear that we're putting
so much weight on the traditional notions of success, no
fault of our own. That's how we've been socialized, that's
how we've been conditioned, how we've been raised. But at
(35:16):
their center, they are about self sacrifice. They are about discipline, productivity, image.
The alternative is about giving, enjoying, resting, slowing down, caring,
and you know, I just think that's more valuable. Doesn't
mean you can't still be successful in traditional ways, but
(35:39):
it's about kind of opting out of the rat race
at some point and being like, huh this, I can't
win in this system. I can't win if I have
to just keep being productive for the rest of my
life to obtain all these sweet, beautiful joys that they're
telling me I'm obtaining because of this work, but never
actually being able to enjoy them. Like you kind of
(36:00):
start to really see how that's not a healthy cycle.
So choose the gentler life. It's the simple things. It's
the minimalistic things, not the flashy things. It's joy, nature, community, creation,
a regulated nervous system. That is true wealth to me,
and the tips that we've shared today will hopefully bring
(36:20):
you closer to having more of that in your life. So,
in wrapping up this episode, I'm hoping that this left
an impression on you, or it just made you think
that's really what's important. I hope you please do just
one of these things, just see if it. If it helps,
you could even literally just not set an alarm every
now and again. Slow down, cook a nice meal, see
(36:42):
what happens. See if life feels more fulfilling, and more rich.
If you have listened this far, thank you so much.
Just a reminder that if you want to pre order
my book, you can do that right now, at this
very minute that you are listening. If you just want
to check out the cover, if you just want to
see what the blurb looks like, I don't know, whatever
flow to your boat. I'll leave a link in the description.
(37:04):
It truly is an honor to get to announce this
to you guys, my wonderful listeners today. As for this episode,
as for the podcast, make sure you have left us
a five star review. Make sure you are following along
on Apple or Spotify so you get alerted when new
episodes come out. It's almost December, which you know means
the twelve days of guests. I can't wait to announce
(37:24):
who is coming on. You can follow us on Instagram
if you want a sneak peek of that as well
at that Psychology podcast. And until next time, stay safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself, embrace the soft life,
and we will talk very very soon.
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here,
back for another episode, as we, of course break down
the psychology of your twenties. Before we get into today's episode,
I have a really special announcement, and if you're listening
(00:23):
to the episode in the week that it is coming out,
you might be some of the first people to know.
I wrote a book, and come twenty twenty five, it
will be yours. It is called Person in Progress, and
much like this podcast, it's a psychological roadmap basically to
your twenties, with even more studies, even more guided exercises,
(00:47):
even more personal stories, and it is for you, guys,
to have and to hold. I cannot even believe that
those words are coming out of my mouth. I wrote
a book. Before I tell you any more details, I
want to just firstly say thank you and to just
express my very deep gratitude for every single listener of
the podcast. There is not a moment that I don't
(01:10):
pinch myself and feel so grateful to have you all,
because it would have never been possible without your continued support,
without all of you who tune in week after week.
You know I may have written the book, but you
are the reason I have the opportunity. So before I
say anything else, I just want to say thank you
and that I think you'll love this book as much,
(01:33):
if not more than the podcast and the episodes that
I put out each week. So Person and Progress, let
me tell you a little bit more about it. I've
been in the process of writing this book for the
last two years. I think I've given some hints here
and there that it would be coming, so it's great
to finally have it out in the open. Person and
Progress is made up of four sections. They are Welcome
(01:54):
to your callal Life, Crisis, Love on the Brain, Work
in Progress, and Everybody is Healing from Something. It covers
so many of the complicated experiences of your twenties. It's
over three hundred pages. We talk about how to figure
out exactly what you should be doing in your life,
exactly who your authentic self is, how to make friends
(02:15):
as an adult, how to stop repeating history in relationships,
how to use psychology to fall in love, to heal guilt, shame, embarrassment, loneliness,
and so much more. I could literally keep going. It
is also available for pre order right now, like at
this very moment, it's just such a pinchby moment to
like even be saying that. But if you do feel
(02:37):
cool to do so, grab a preorder copy now so
that you get the book the day it comes out.
Another benefit, it really helps get the book into local
bookstores and into local shops, local bookshops because preorder numbers
help people determine the quantities that they're going to order
come release. So if you are excited to get your
(03:00):
hands on it as am I, please consider pre ordering
through the link in the description. Again, thank you, thank you,
thank you for giving me this opportunity and for giving
me this platform. There will be so many more details
to come in the following months, and if you want
to see the cover, head to my Instagram and you
(03:20):
can see so many more details and exactly what is
going to be in your hands come twenty twenty five.
Without further ado, let's get into the episode. Today. We
are going to be talking about how to create a
self life in your twenties, and what I mean by
that is, how do we create a life of simple
(03:44):
pleasures of joy, one that is gentle, happy, successful without
feeling heavy and frustrating, as everything so often feels these days.
It is a daily reality for a lot of us
in this day decade. We are so focused on progress
(04:04):
and success. It's been drilled into our brains. We are
focused on not falling behind on this like predetermined racecourse
that we all are traveling on, and it means that
our lives firstly no longer seen like ours and at
times they don't even feel enjoyable. All of our attention
and our energy is like focused on work. It's focused
(04:26):
on school, it's focused on achievement, and it's dictated by
like this urgency culture to be doing it all and
to have it all together right now, to be rushing
from one milestone to the next, from one place to
the next. I think it's time that we sow down.
It's my belief that when we really buy into this
during our twenties, this like overatching perspective and attitude towards life,
(04:50):
and we don't have the occasional reminder that life is
short and we actually need to enjoy it. We end
up being overwhelmed by unnecessary stress. We prioritize productivity rather
than being kind to ourselves, being gentle to ourselves, experiencing
the world, shaking off that philosophy as well. It becomes
(05:12):
harder that the older we get. So it's a very
formative period where we can rewrite the script that we
have been taught on how to enjoy our lives. That
is what we want. We do not want to be
operating at this really high stress frequency for you know,
the next thirty forty years and never slowing down. I
think it also comes down to this very important thing
(05:35):
to remember, which is that in a culture of hustling
and in the culture of success, you don't need to
burn out to prove that you deserve good things. You
don't need to deny yourself simple pleasures to prove you're
a good person. We want to take a more it
would say, positive psychology approach. We want to take our
(05:56):
mental health and our emotional health seriously by liberately choosing
and pursuing a soft life. The soft life is about
slowing down. It's about adopting a lifestyle of enjoyment. Comfort
is simple pleasure. And it came from the Nigerian wellness
(06:19):
community and from black female creators who were sharing this
new approach in the last two to three years. That
really combines agency, ambition, freedom without the need to sacrifice
what you enjoyed. Always put others above you put yourself
under this intense stress, you go easier on yourself. You
(06:39):
appreciate the details of life rather than rushing through them.
If you want to read about the exact history of
this term, there is an amazing article by Andscape which
is like an online journal titled the Soft Life Isn't
as Easy as It looks Online and they interview some
of the originators of this term. It's incredibly fascinating for
(07:02):
you know where their desire to embrace the soft life
and promote the soft life really came from. I like
to think of it as well as really living similarly
to how our ancestors would have lived long ago. They
would have woken with the sun. They would have felt
their feet on the earth. They would have watched the
trees move, watch the sunset, enjoyed like the sweetness of
(07:25):
the berries really saved it. They would have done just
what they needed to survive and then rest easy at
night with their clan. They didn't have to do lists,
they didn't have teams meetings, they didn't have Microsoft work,
they didn't have keynote presentations that needed to be done
for their boss, and the soft life is about appreciating that. Obviously,
circumstances have changed, so we need jobs, we have these responsibilities.
(07:49):
This is an element of who we are, but choosing
to return to a life before productivity defined us in
the time that we have. We want comfort, we want
low stress. So let us jump into five ways you
can really create that life for yourself at this pivotal point.
(08:09):
How you can reprogram, resocialize, retrain your brain to see
this as the version of success you should be pursuing,
and talk about the psychology behind it, talk about the
mental impact, all of that and more. After this shortbreak,
there are, of course a few straightforward ways to embrace
(08:31):
the self life that we hear about quite frequently. You know.
Prioritize self care, especially self care that isn't just about
self improvement, but a genuine generosity to yourself. Setting boundaries
with people or situations which are emotionally taxing another important one.
Practicing gratitude, incorporating rest, treating yourself every now and again,
(08:54):
all very important, all pretty well known for a good reason.
But with that in mind, I really want to focus
on five more specific things that are a little bit
different and that you can do daily, weekly, monthly, that
have an evidence base behind them. The most significant one,
in my mind, in my opinion, comes down to gratitude,
(09:15):
and that is number one. Go searching for joy, Go
searching for things to savor and embrace the kind of
little things that are presented to you every day. Savor
you know, the crunchiness of the apple that you had
for breakfast. Savor the fact that you found that perfect
shower temperature, your cup of coffee, the little kid like
giggling on your bus, the joy of your daily walk.
(09:39):
You know, wake up without an alarm once a week,
Choose a slower pace for your meals, Reconnect. Joy as
an emotion is so overlooked and so often confused with
happiness as well. But it's a lot deeper, it's a
lot more profound. Joy is elation, It's delight. It's like
this whole body experience of synchronicity. Almost Like the best
(10:03):
way I can explain it is the sense that in
that moment, you exist right now just to experience this.
This is the reason you were put on this world.
This is such a human experience to feel joy, This
is what we're here for. Here is the thing. The
more you go searching for joy, the more it tends
(10:23):
to find you, even when you don't want it to.
Because once our brains start searching for a certain kind
of stimulus moment thing like a joyful thing, it becomes
naturally more attuned to the presence of such things in
our environment. So noticing joy makes joy more evident in
your every day. It's kind of like when you notice
(10:45):
a yellow car and you can't stop noticing them, Like
there is a screen car near my house. It's like
a lime green car. And now anytime I am in
a new city, a new suburb, sometimes even in a
new country, I see that car everywhere. I always notice
th it being around. Having that search for joy, that
personal search for joy, is really really helpful for your
(11:10):
health and your life satisfaction. So there was a study
published by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and
it found that when we regularly experience joy day to day,
something we take for granted, something we don't tend to
focus on in health literature, it triggers a number of
psychological but also physical changes. Better blood flow, better focus,
(11:34):
a better mood, all things that make for a softer life. Now,
that was one study, but there is another one from
twenty nineteen that was a research paper that is the
perfect example of how embracing joy makes you more holistically well. So,
(11:54):
this paper measured the impact of an intervention called picture this.
I love this intervention. It's very similar to the exercise
that I'm going to talk about in just a second.
But in the picture of this study, the researchers asked
two hundred of their participants in the experimental condition to
use their smartphones to take at least two photographs of
(12:16):
an event, moment, place that made them feel joyful. And
they have to do this each day for three weeks,
and then they uploaded those photographs to a server for
the staff to kind of look at. So the researchers
gave them some examples of like things to take photosoft.
You know, you could take a photo of the sky
(12:37):
at sunset. You could take a photo of a good friend,
of getting a really good grade on a paper, or
a test that you worked hard for. They were also
instructed this is the second part. They're instructed to focus
on the physical sensations and the cognitive and emotional response
that they had in that moment that they decided to
(12:57):
take a photograph. This is actually called sense reperceptual sharpening,
noticing how your senses respond to something that you're perceiving. Basically,
what they were doing in this not so sly way
was forcing their participants to take note and take notice
of joy, then capture a photo of the source. Over
(13:19):
that period, all these two hundred people their mood improved,
They became more grateful, more motivated, They expressed that they
enjoyed their life more. For some people, it was actually
quite a profound experience. They were like, I just didn't
realize how much beauty my life had. It really seems
to show that daily experiences of all curiosity, gratitude, love,
(13:43):
that can put the average person on a trajectory of
growth success. And we know that a soft life is
about being present and immersed in experiencing whatever you get
the privilege to enjoy and whatever you get the experience
to you know, to feel. Taking inspiration from that study,
and I love this study. I've talked about this on
(14:05):
the podcast before and I've talked about it on Instagram.
But I have my own version of picture this and
it's called the Smile file. Some people also have a
Tada list. These are your only instructions, very similar to
that exercise. Once a day, all you have to do
is take a photo of screenshot or take a note
of something that has brought you joy or something that
(14:26):
has seemed so magical to you, almost like someone has
placed this thing in your life and gone like, Toda,
look at it, enjoy it. I made this for you.
Savor that moment. Find one moment every single day, focus
on the sensations. I think life becomes so much easier
to enjoy and it's so much more gentle when you
(14:47):
have this outside armor of gratitude, when that is the
first thing that any experience that comes at you will
have to penetrate, an armor of gratitude. So moving on
from that, our second step for adopting a soft way
of living and a soft way of flourishing in our twenties.
(15:09):
Every single day, I want you to remove two things
from your to do list that you cannot do. Let
me tell you there is a lot we can do
in a day. There is twenty four hours. That's a
lot of time, but there is a lot more that
we actually don't need to do. We actually never need
to do. We just convince ourselves that we're lazy if
we don't do it. If you grew up in an
(15:31):
environment where you were called lazy for relaxing, or your
own overachiever, every single piece of your worth was tied
to what you can do in a day, your grades,
how impressive you looked. You know, these days, you may
feel quite an intense internal conflict or guilt when you
(15:52):
aren't busy, and so you feel like you have to
earn your rest by creating more tasks, more challenges for
your self day in and day out. But the idea
of being quote unquote lazy, it has no place in
our soft era because reducing your stress by reducing how
much you have to do, it's actually not laziness. It's deliberate.
(16:16):
It's actually quite hard to do, and it is about
providing yourself with space to be human rather than just
being a product of how much output you can produce.
Another version of that, so you can remove two things
from your list today. This is a version of that
that I swear by. And what I do is I
have my to do list, that is the things I
(16:38):
really need to do, couldn't do them any other day.
Essential for my job, essential for living, essential for being
a good friend, being a good partner, paying taxes, you
know those kinds of things. That's my to do list.
Then I have my I would like to do list.
This is the things that I would really kind of
like to get done, I really like to get around to.
(16:58):
It's not gonna be the end of the world I
don't do it. And then I have my extras list.
This are the things that I would do if I
have like a shit ton of time. But none of
those things are essential. Anything on my I would like
to or my extras list doesn't need to be done
today or tomorrow. Eventually, they might even fall off the
(17:19):
list all together, and nothing's gonna go wrong. So you
have your must list, your I would like list, and
your extra list. Why is this important? Well, too often,
and I'm guilty of this as well, but too often
we put every single small thing on our to do list,
from our small tasks to our large ambitions, and it's
(17:42):
just not helpful. I do think that we tend to
do this as a way of organizing or structuring our
thoughts and a way of visualizing and finding a space
for remembering what needs to get done. But It has
the ripple and effect of making us insanely overwhelmed because
we have no vetting pro We have no vetting process
as to what actually deserves to be on our daily agenda.
(18:05):
It's like everything from do the dishes, to find my
birth certificate, to get a new job, to insert huge
tasks here. Because of this, we never actually finish the
to do list. Every day, a new task is kind
of carried over. You've added on more items but you
can't do anyways. Then you don't do them. You feel
like a failure, even when you already did all the
(18:26):
things that you already needed to do. So why is
it important to have a realistic list rather than an
ambitious list. It's because of how our brains prioritize and
think about unfinished tasks. They become rather intrusive. There is
a natural spotlight on everything that we haven't done, rather
than on what we have done. So this is due
(18:47):
to a psychological phenomena known as the zygonic effect, which
basically says that we tend to fixate on interrupted tasks
or incomplete tasks more than others. When we feel like
we have I hate you in this word, but failed
to do something, something that we needed to do. This
creates this underlying cognitive tension, and it means that our
(19:08):
brain keeps coming back to it, keep saying, Hey, we
haven't finished that yet, we haven't finished that yet, even
as you're trying to switch off, even as you're trying
to fall asleep, even when you are totally exhausted, even
when actually there's no need to do that thing today.
In some ways this is sometimes helpful. You know, when
you're really under the pump, you don't want to forget things,
(19:29):
you don't want things to slip off the list. But
you are not meant to feel that way all the time,
because then everything becomes about what you didn't do with
your time, rather than prioritizing what you chose to do
with your time in order to be more present in
your life. So this is my new rule for myself. Yes,
(19:50):
I have my must like and like my extras list,
but I also say, if any sentence starts with I
could such as I could do this. I could add
more things to my to do list. I could sign
up for new projects. I could, you know, add this
extra element that's going to take a lot of time.
(20:11):
I could find time in my day, I have to
shut it down. Any sentence at this time in my life,
when everything is so busy that starts with I could
is I can't. I only have space for things that
are urgent, for things that are important, for things that
I want to do. Because I was doing all this
stuff before that just really drained me enormously, and it
(20:32):
actually didn't even matter, like it had no impact on
my life. It wouldn't have made my life better. It
wasn't really doing anything, it wasn't important. It wouldn't have
mattered whether it was done or not. And it made
my life heavy. And you know, it was things I
didn't even care about, and the things that I did
care about I wasn't able to prioritize because I was
(20:53):
carrying the stress of these tasks that were unnecessary. You know,
someone said to me recently, I think this really does
summarize it. If you don't have to struggle, don't don't
force yourself to struggle just because you think it means
you deserve more, just because you think that people are
going to think you're lazy if you don't. So Tip
(21:15):
number two, cut down that to do list, please and
thank you. We're going to take a short break, but
when we return, I want to discuss my remaining three
steps or pieces of advice for creating that soft, tender,
gentle life that you deserve in your twenties. Stay with us.
(21:40):
One of the other crucial elements of creating a routine
and a lifestyle that lets you go slowly and at
your own pace is developing a better relationship with stress.
Now that probably sounds unrealistic, undoable for many of us.
Stress is of course, it's a necessary part of life.
You know, like it or not ever going to eliminate
(22:01):
it entirely, nor actually should you want to, because you'd
miss out on so much important information. But we can
get better at regulating our nervous system so that it's
not being triggered by unnecessary stresses, things that are minor stresses,
things that really don't deserve that much attention and energy,
(22:24):
you know, the daily hassles. Stress has an impact we
want to be selective with when it is activated, because
when our fight or flight response is you know, consistently
set off, it changes our immune system response, It suppresses digestion,
It reduces our body's ability to heal itself. There are
so many cognitive impacts. It actually does put your body
(22:47):
under a lot of tension. It's like a vigorous workout
for your body. And you know workouts are great workouts
keep you healthy. You don't want to be doing like
four or five of them a day. It's gonna put
a strain. It also just like doesn't feel nice. That's
like a pretty simple way to say it. I've noticed though,
that so few of us realize how often we are
(23:08):
actually being pushed into that stressed state, how often our
environment is triggering a response that was meant for survival.
But this is not a matter of survival. You know,
a workplace deadline, missing a train, having an argument with
a friend is not a matter of survival. But we
cannot help but feel like this insane stress response and
(23:30):
this fight or flight response is being triggered because we
have been trained by our environment to be more on edge.
So this is a long way of saying number three.
If you want a soft life, we have to improve
how we regulate our nervous system in organic ways, in
ways that we are evolutionarily and our ancestors would have
(23:52):
regulated their emotional response and their stress response. A regulated
nervous system like that term it has been getting a
lot of buzz online recently. I've noticed this. What it
basically means is that your body and your mind can
effectively respond to stress. So it is not the complete
(24:14):
removal the complete absence of stress. It's actually important to
note that it is about having this important two way
street relationship with stress, where stress is welcomed but it
is not allowed to dominate. You are able to return
to a balanced, calm state after it has passed, and
(24:34):
that state, that balance, is called homeostasis. It's crucial because
it means that your nervous system isn't overreactive, it's not stuck.
It allows you to be flexible. It allows you to
adapt to various situations. You're not a tense creature. Here
are some ways that we can get to that regulated state.
You need to have a process for grounding yourself and
(24:56):
for remaining present when everything in you is calling to panic.
I always repeat to myself, just be where your feet are.
Just be where your feet are, and that means taking
off my socks. I don't know if that's gross to
some people, but whatever, I take off my socks, I
take off my shoes. I just place my feet on
the floor, and I say, the only thing that I'm
(25:19):
going to concern myself with is whatever is ten centimeters
from where I'm standing. This is my zone, this is
my present, This is what I can control. Not the future,
not others, not the past. I'm going to take a
moment in the stress state to be where my feet are.
This is even better when you combine it with like
(25:40):
a natural environmental setting. So this kind of grounding it's
called earthing. When we combine that centering technique with nature.
Earthing really focuses on realigning your electrical, your neural energy
with the earth. You know, those were words they might
(26:01):
not sound scientific, but the research behind this type of grounding,
it really is the best study that I've come across
this ever. It talks about how our lost connection with
nature and the earth has basically caused our nervous system
to no longer have a stable environment in which to
(26:23):
calm itself. You know, we no longer sleep on the ground.
We rarely walk barefoot outdoors. We live and we work inside.
We spend so much of our time disconnected, like up
far above the ground in high rises, not out in nature.
Some of us wouldn't spend more than an hour outside
a day, everything is loud, busy, or of a stimulating
(26:45):
urgent that never ends, and all that external information means
we need to be constantly on So our threshold for
stress has been lowered. But when we practice earthing, we
return our body and our mind to the place it
evolved from, to where it belongs, to where it can
recalibrate itself and feel calm, And a grounded body is
(27:10):
a healthier and stable body. The most fascinating part of
the study though, and you would you kind of have
to see it to believe it, because I read this
and I was like, I need some more evidence of this,
I need something, I need a graph, I need a picture.
They had them. Basically in the study they looked at
thermal imaging of a person's body before and after earthing.
(27:31):
So thermal imaging basically looks at body temperature, and lower
body temperature would typically mean less inflammation, perhaps even less pain.
That was very clearly documented in these images. People were
talking about how even spending thirty minutes earthing themselves, so
(27:52):
just basically grounding using nature, they felt more calm their
pain from certain chrod health problems or certain joint pains,
things like that was relieved. They felt less stressed, less
like almost even hot, less jittery. All of these coming
down to nature's innate capacity, its innate role as our
(28:17):
friend and as our collaborator in handling our motions. So
there's some other things that you can do to help
with that regulation. Cold showers in the morning, that's a
big one at the moment. Personally, don't like it, No,
it works not for me, but just to put it
on the table. You can also do progressive muscle relaxation,
which is beautiful. You can get guided versions of this online,
(28:40):
which I really recommend. This one was something that I
thought of for us, like, huh, this would really work,
And I tried it the other day and it was
actually very very interesting. Unplugging from your phone or your
headphones when you go for a walk. So we often,
you know, you and me both we are listening to podcasts,
we are listening to music, we are calling our friends.
(29:01):
We've got our noise canceling headphones on, we've got earbuds
in instead. Next time you go for a walk, take
your headphones off, just pay attention to your environment, and
it means that we don't experience this disconnection between what
we're listening to our senses and what we're seeing, so
our eyes and our ears are not processing different information.
(29:23):
I just think that all those options are free, like
you can literally do them tomorrow. But it really just
like reconnects your mind and your body to your environment
in a way that our current situation and our current
work life travel existence doesn't really promote. This really brings
(29:46):
me to my next big tip. Look at this amazing
segue I'm about to perform, because my next piece of
advice is really really related to that, and it's related
to how we treat self care as a consumerist act
when we should be folksocusing more on creation. Self care
is really really important, but it's so often associated with
(30:07):
spending money and having more skincare, more candles, more luxuries,
buying yourself little things. This is all really really nice, right,
I do it all the time. It's a joy getting
a new little trinket. It's a joy getting something that
you've really worked hard for. But it can also make
self care unattainable, and after a while, I would make
(30:28):
the argument that it makes self care quite shallow. If
you can just like buy yourself a better mood, it's
of course going to give you the dopamine hit that
you want, because it is an act of consumerism, and
companies are great at leveraging that to get you to
think that self care really just means buying more things,
really just means consuming more things thinking it's going to
(30:51):
make you happier. There was a really great Vox article
written about this in I think June or July this year.
It's called How the Self Care Industry Made Us So Lonely,
and it talks about how self care used to be
a term that meant nurturing yourself by filling your cup
(31:13):
with community and creation and rest expression. All of these
are so psychologically nourishing. But nowadays those things are harder
to come by and they're harder to prioritize because we
are so disconnected. Those spaces aren't as available, those communities
aren't as available, and so we replace them with what
(31:34):
we can buy or what is most convenient and available,
which can actually make our lives quite heavy. We talked
about this in last week's episodes. If you're up to date,
last week we talked about hobbies. I don't know if
it was last week or on Tuesday. Now, our most
recent episode, we talked about hobbies, and I talked about
how we are so exhausted from how busy society keeps
(31:57):
us that often we just want to do what's easiest.
We want to have the quickest meal, We want the
most convenient way to switch off our brain by scrolling
by watching TV, all of which have their place, but
continuously choosing that is your place to relax. Choosing that
as your source of kind of decompressing, it's going to
(32:19):
detract from your life. It's going to make it a
lot less tasty. If you want that delicate, soft, cozy life,
you need to make more space for creating things and
more space for expression, and dedicate less time, less money,
less room to just consuming. So two to three days
(32:42):
a week, I want you to invest in creation as
a way to feel more connected to what you're doing.
So your food, your items, your space, your hobbies. Take
the extra thirty minutes, the extra hour to really pour
some care and love into your dinner or your breakfast,
and to feel proud of what you're making yourself, how
(33:03):
you're nourishing yourself. Take an afternoon off, Take it an
afternoon off on your weekend to pursue a creative project,
get a herb garden, volunteer, take care of someone else,
be generous to someone else, put something back into the world.
That is a real, true act of softness, being open
(33:26):
enough to want to give and not just receive. Finally,
rethink what you believe success should look like. This is
a big aspect of shifting from a productive, heavy life
to a slower, softer, gentler life. Typically, you know, and
historically our biggest indicators of success they are material and
(33:47):
they are social. You make more money, you receive more praise,
do you have more respect, you have a nicer house.
But what does any of that actually mean if you
are always in a rush anyway, and if you never
have this space to enjoy it, what makes that a
more desirable life than the soft life? You know, because
(34:08):
quite frankly, you can have all those things, and a
lot of people have experienced all of those things and
still said, I am quite miserable. So let's consider the alternative,
a balanced lifestyle, a day filled of variety, time to
just exist, enjoy your experiences, time to socialize, to build connection,
(34:30):
room to slow down. Maturing to me at least is
realizing that is very appealing. That is the outcome we
should want. A few weeks ago, I did an episode
I think it's called How to Be Truly Successful in
Your Twenties, Episode two hundred and twenty one, Episode two
hundred and twenty one. Yes, and I really wanted to
(34:52):
wreck you to listen to that, because when we talk
about redefining success, that's like the best place to turn
so in depth, and it could be a wake up
call that you might need to hear that we're putting
so much weight on the traditional notions of success, no
fault of our own. That's how we've been socialized, that's
how we've been conditioned, how we've been raised. But at
(35:16):
their center, they are about self sacrifice. They are about discipline, productivity, image.
The alternative is about giving, enjoying, resting, slowing down, caring,
and you know, I just think that's more valuable. Doesn't
mean you can't still be successful in traditional ways, but
(35:39):
it's about kind of opting out of the rat race
at some point and being like, huh this, I can't
win in this system. I can't win if I have
to just keep being productive for the rest of my
life to obtain all these sweet, beautiful joys that they're
telling me I'm obtaining because of this work, but never
actually being able to enjoy them. Like you kind of
(36:00):
start to really see how that's not a healthy cycle.
So choose the gentler life. It's the simple things. It's
the minimalistic things, not the flashy things. It's joy, nature, community, creation,
a regulated nervous system. That is true wealth to me,
and the tips that we've shared today will hopefully bring
(36:20):
you closer to having more of that in your life. So,
in wrapping up this episode, I'm hoping that this left
an impression on you, or it just made you think
that's really what's important. I hope you please do just
one of these things, just see if it. If it helps,
you could even literally just not set an alarm every
now and again. Slow down, cook a nice meal, see
(36:42):
what happens. See if life feels more fulfilling, and more rich.
If you have listened this far, thank you so much.
Just a reminder that if you want to pre order
my book, you can do that right now, at this
very minute that you are listening. If you just want
to check out the cover, if you just want to
see what the blurb looks like, I don't know, whatever
flow to your boat. I'll leave a link in the description.
(37:04):
It truly is an honor to get to announce this
to you guys, my wonderful listeners today. As for this episode,
as for the podcast, make sure you have left us
a five star review. Make sure you are following along
on Apple or Spotify so you get alerted when new
episodes come out. It's almost December, which you know means
the twelve days of guests. I can't wait to announce
(37:24):
who is coming on. You can follow us on Instagram
if you want a sneak peek of that as well
at that Psychology podcast. And until next time, stay safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself, embrace the soft life,
and we will talk very very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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