The Freedom You Find When You Stop Trying to Control Everything | Oliver Burkeman | Be Well Moments

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Do you want to feel more alive without having to earn it by ticking everything off first? I’m exploring how the natural drive to improve is healthy, but using it to reach a standard so you can finally relax keeps you gripping for certainty you can’t get.

This clip explores the relief of seeing that the future can’t be made certain, why “getting everything done” is impossible, and how simple permission slips can loosen that grip. I’m exploring with my guest practical ways to regain perspective during the day: step away, move your body, change your physical context, and then ask, as Jung put it, “What is the next most necessary thing?” We also look at mindfulness as presence of mind in everyday life — repeatedly calling yourself back, noticing when you’ve drifted into control-seeking, and returning without self-criticism. As a nutritionist and health communicator, I connect these ideas to sustainable wellbeing habits that fit busy days: short breathers, physical movement, and realistic self-permission that supports focus and energy.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers
improve their health and well-being.
I think it's amazing that we allwant to be better.
I think that's an amazing thing.And that's fundamentally the the
essence of the quality. I think the essence of all the
work that you write about is that ultimately we want to be

(00:20):
better. We want to be better with our
time. We want to be better friends.
We want to be better parents. We want to be better at our
work. So we want to be healthier.
Like we want all of these things, but we kind of lose
ourselves in that. Yeah, and it's so interesting
that I haven't really thought about those terms, but like the
wanting to be better, that is not antithetical to aliveness.
That is the expression of aliveness.

(00:41):
But wanting to be better in order to get to a standard where
you can then finally relax, that's the thing.
That or where you can finally not have to feel bad about
yourself and like you're a huge loser, that is antithetical to
aliveness. So it's really interesting the
distinction there because yeah, no, I, I totally agree that that
urge to grow is that is life, then that is that is that's not

(01:04):
to be let go of. Well, I think it feels very
right now to read this quote, which I think is kind of
connected to people always want to think about the future and
how we can implement these things.
But but you wrote you can't. And I know this because I got
from these, from your favorite quotes that you pulled out that
Alice sent me from your book. You can't know that things will

(01:25):
turn out all right. The struggle for certainty isn't
stringently hopeless. So you have the permission to
stop. Something about saying that to
yourself. And I call them permission
slips. I have them for myself where
it's like writing a little permission slip to myself, as
you would at school, to say Sarah's excused from this class.

(01:47):
She's allowed. There's something about I was
didn't want to break rules when I was a kid, but if I was given
a permission slip, I was OK. I'm allowed.
I'm allowed to step outside the classroom.
I'm allowed to do this. I think about that in my own
life. Do you have any ways that people
can like, you know, lessen theirgrip, loosen their grip, allow
themselves permission to stop? Like how are you doing that

(02:08):
actively now? Thinking about terms of living
more alive and being more alive in the future and and now I
guess. I mean, for me, and I am a
certain kind of like left brainyintellectual, first kind of
person, there's a lot of power in in understanding the futility
of a quest that I'm beating myself up for not having

(02:29):
completed, right. So getting everything done, it's
very helpful to understand that the supplies are infinite and
that they will never be done feeling certain about the
future. And as in that quote, it's very
helpful for me to see that that it's just not in a human.
It's not in the gift of humans to be able to feel authentically
certain about the future. So for me, that kind of

(02:52):
perspective shift is important. And not to do a sales pitch, but
that is what I was trying to do in the structure of Meditations
for Mortals, right? To try to sort of have the book
not just be some information about some things that you might
think about differently, but forit to be like an active
ingredient that in reading it, you might, you know, short
chapter every day for a month, as I suggest, you might actually

(03:15):
sort of go through some of that process of unclenching of of
letting go. And then I think you really it's
just anything in the course of the day that enables you to get
a little bit of of distance on of sort of perspective on the
situation. So it's almost like it's just

(03:36):
like deliberately stopping. If you want to remember one
thing to do it is to like take breaks and get up from the desk
and stare out of the window. And if you remember that one
thing, I think it, it's actuallysurprisingly easy then to sort
of get back into the to become conscious again and like what
you're doing and the choices that you're making.

(03:58):
There's a Dutch Zen monk I quotequite a lot in this book who
wrote his own book, Time Surfing, which is very highly
recommended by me. He's called Paul Lehman's and he
really goes in deep on like the weird importance of what he
calls or his English translator calls, you know, taking
breathers through the day, right?
It seems like some little extra luxury and the first thing

(04:22):
that's going to go when you've got a busy day.
But in fact, in those moments ofstepping away, maybe doing
something physical instead of mental, it does not count to
stop working on a piece of writing and then just surf the
web or social media, right? You've got to physically move
your your context. But it's much more than a little

(04:43):
luxury. It's actually the moment in
which you sort of call back to yourself and you sort of can see
that you were maybe starting to scuttle off down one of those
avenues of like desperate for control and beating yourself up.
And you can sort of like return again and then ask the only
question you ever need to ask, as young Carl Jung says, which

(05:04):
is like, what is the next most necessary thing?
What's the what's the thing I'm going to do with the next
moment, which might well be going back to the task you were
on. Fine, but it's that sort of
presence of mind coming back andback, which is actually one of
the original meanings of the word that gets translated as
mindfulness in the meditation literature, right?
We think of mindfulness as sitting down and closing your

(05:26):
eyes, following your breath. But actually that sort of
ability to have the presence of mind and I can't really give
you, and no one can like a sort of scheme or technique or or app
or something to to always have that presence of mind so that
you can forget about it. Because like you can't forget
about, right. It is just literally that job of

(05:47):
calling yourself to my calling things to mind again throughout
the day, falling off the wagon loop, getting distracted, coming
back and not expecting it to be anything else.
Yeah, I think it's, it's really,it was a big deal for me when I
realized I wasn't, it was OK forthat to just be an ongoing, ever
unfolding thing of seeking to become and to stay more and more

(06:10):
conscious rather than beating myself up for not having become
perfectly conscious yet. But now I never, never expected
to do so. You've given yourself agency,
which is the best thing ever. Permission slip to continue
being on some level unconscious and compulsive and messed up for
the rest of my life. Thanks so much for listening to

(06:34):
hear the full episode. There's a link in the
description.