How to Regulate Your Emotions and Mental Chatter When Bad Things Happen | Maya Shankar

26:55I actually find that there's a lot of hope in this message because when we are at the outset of a change, let's say it's a loss, an illness, an identity crisis, which is often accompanying most of these big changes, we can often feel very daunted, like we are just completely ill-equipped to navigate the road ahead. But then we can remember that we actually become, and we will become, different people on the other side. By the way, Dan, that is why my book is called The other side of change because we will become new people on the other side. The pressure test of change will unlock new perspectives and new values and new abilities, new ways of seeing the world that we previously had not accessed.

27:39And all of those things can lead us to not only navigate the change with more ease and possibility, but to actually become better versions of ourselves. And by and large, the people that I've interviewed over time have told me, look, I'm not happy the change happened. I mean, who would say that? Who would invite illness into their lives or loss, right? But they were really, really grateful for the person that they became on the other side. As I was starting to observe this insight among the people I interviewed for the book, look, I'm skeptical. I'm cynical. I'm all the things that most people are.

28:16So I was suspicious because I'm allergic to two things. I'm allergic to soy and I'm allergic to cliches and platitudes. OK, so I was like, are we sure this silver lining thing is true? But then we could talk about this later. I actually experienced that same evolution within myself post all those losses in my life. And so when I saw it firsthand, I thought, oh, wow, there must be something. Maybe your cynicism wasn't well placed here. There is truly a powerful evolution that's happening through the experience of change. I think I hear another value proposition here. I mean, I completely agree with you about the silver lining thing and notwithstanding the fact that it is a cliche, although I would add that there's a reason why cliches become cliches, which is annoying.

29:00I know. I think there's another value proposition, but I want to check it with you. Yeah. Because many people listening to this right now may not be in the throes of some major change. Absolutely. But they may be in the throes, as I keep harping on, of constant catastrophic thinking about possible future changes. What I find so calming and soothing about the end of history illusion is, yeah, bad shit is going to happen. I don't know what it's going to be. It may be related to my career. It may be related to my health. It may be related to the health of the people I love, maybe related to the political scene, although that has already happened.

29:33It may be, by the way, in an area that you're not even thinking to solve for because that often happens in life. Totally. It's like, whoa, didn't think this was going to be a thing. Yes. So the good news, or I think the other piece of good news here is that we can handle it. You know, I think if you just, and I haven't done this, this is a guess, but I suspect every time you find yourself in a spiral of catastrophic thinking, if you brought to mind the end of history illusion, like, yeah, dude, you'll change and grow and you'll manage it. And like everything else that's happened in your life, like you will deal with whatever bullshit you're worried about right now.

30:12Anyway, again, I said a lot, but does all of that land for you? Absolutely. First of all, you and I are totally the same in this way. I honestly have spent so much of my life living in the future that I only recently realized there was a present to be lived. Okay. So, so much of my life was spent trying to anticipate the future and also catastrophizing the future. And so I actually have written this book, just like you said, not simply for people who are in the throes of change, but who are either trying to process a past change differently to change the relationship with that change, or more importantly, who are irresistibly consumed with the threat of future change.

30:54and so many of the strategies I put forward are about liberating people from that mental spiraling and all of that negative chatter and all of those catastrophic images that they see play on loop in their minds. One reason, by the way, people should feel empowered through the end of history illusion is that we tend to think we have a fairly good understanding of self in any given moment. So when you think, for example, oh my God, my whole career is going to fall apart and the Dan that I know today is not going to be able to handle that. Well, guess what? The Dan you know today is actually a fairly incomplete model of who Dan even is today because your self-understanding is based on a fairly random set of data points that you've happened to collect over your lives through the arbitrary set of experiences that you've had.

31:46You have not had a comprehensive view of who you are, including values that have remained hidden from view that you're sort of laboring under, operating under, that are kind of subconscious. You are not actually aware of all of the abilities and your potential. And so I think there's something exciting about the prospect that change can actually serve as revelation. When a big negative change happens in our lives, it can feel like a personal apocalypse of sorts, right? Like the world we knew has now been destroyed. And what's really interesting about the etymology of the word apocalypse is that it actually comes from the Greek word apocalypsis, which means revelation.

32:28Change can upend us, but it can also reveal really important things to us about who we are. Some of the people that I've interviewed for the book, they did not realize, for example, that they were carrying massive shame around their family's history until they went through the change. They did not realize they had a deeply avoidant attachment style until they went through their change. They did not realize they were so beholden to what other people thought about them and their need to people please and to curate an image until they went through their change. And so change can be this forcing mechanism of revelation where all of a sudden these parts of yourself, savory or unsavory, come into the light.

33:08You're now forced to confront them and challenge them and revisit them. As uncomfortable as it may be to revisit your beliefs, that's actually a huge way to unlock freedom. And then they were able to shape a better version of themselves that ended up dealing, like you said, with the crap that the future gave them. I love that thing about apocalypse and revelation. It's just so hopeful. None of us is sitting around wishing for apocalypse, but it's going to happen. And so it's just comforting to know that a lot can be revealed and healed in those processes. I don't and I didn't want people to have to go through the apocalypse part to learn the important lessons I and others and researchers have discovered about going through change.

33:51The idea is that I want to teach people all this stuff before they have to go through the future thing so that they are armed. They have all the skills they need. They have the right questions to ask. They have the right thought experiments. They have the right tools in their toolkit. And that way they will deal with any future change or even just minimize their anxiety in present day. thinking about that hypothetical future change because they think, okay, I've got it. I have what I need to do a good job in this situation. Yes, that is just so helpful. And it's exactly what I think personally I need.

34:25Coming up, Dr. Maya Shankar talks about how to reexamine your beliefs about yourself, the utility of distraction and denial. I was surprised to hear her make this case, and some tools for getting unstuck from rumination.

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37:44I do want to pick up on something you just said there about challenging beliefs about yourself that were implanted or formed in childhood. Is there more to be said about practically how to do that? Yeah. Most of us subconsciously think about our beliefs and our values as these immutable truths about the world, right? Because in everyday life, we're busy. It's not like I wake up every morning thinking, hmm, I have so much free time on my hands. What belief would I like to challenge today? You know, none of us have the bandwidth to do that. And I think we also believe that most of our beliefs are the results of very thoughtful deliberation and good reason.

38:28And the reality is that that's just not true. We likely reached many of our beliefs via mental shortcuts. So through intuition, through subconscious messages we absorb from loved ones or societal norms. I mentioned earlier that so much of my self-worth was rooted in becoming a mom one day because of these sorts of societal norms, right? And I never really interrogated if there was merit to that. Just to help people see the fragility around their beliefs. we're affected by the emotional state that we are in when we hear information. If you're a young child and you're hearing something passed down to you by a parent or a caregiver, your sense of love and belonging and attachment is bound up in that message.

39:15So naturally you're going to take it in because if you don't, what does that mean about the safety of your caregiver structure, right? Right. You'll also be affected by who the messenger is or maybe over interpreted or misunderstood a message that you were given. One of the stories I tell in the book, it's this fascinating story of a woman who had a lot of shame around her family's Colombian heritage and some of the indigenous traditions that she had. What I tried to do, by the way, for this book, Dan, was search the world for the most fascinating, extraordinary stories of change because I wanted this to be a page turner for people where it's story first and you're just in it with that person.

39:54And then it's kind of like, you know, hiding broccoli and kids' foods, like the lessons are there too, but you just sort of don't even notice that you're learning along the way for all of us going through maybe slightly more ordinary changes because they're just such griffing reads. And so this woman has a biking accident and it leaves her with amnesia. So she is kind of left with a blank slate where she has forgotten so much of her past. And what's so curious about her experience is that as memories start to come back, and at one point when her family's memories come back, she's able to see those stories anew without all of the discrimination and the shame and negativity that she had attached to them pre-amnesia.

40:35and when she does revisit those stories without all of that, she thinks, oh my God, these are such beautiful, rich, amazing stories. And she renews her relationship with her family's history in that way. And only later does she remember the shame part, but it was too late. The shame part just felt intellectual at that point. She's like, no, no, no, no, no. My brain has already decided that these stories are great. And maybe I should question all the times I was judged for having this family history. And so in this case, I think Ingrid's story is a wonderful reminder that we could have been totally different people had we experienced a slightly different version of life.

41:14Had we learned something before something else, like in a different temporal sequence, or had certain people told us different things along the way, we would have ended up with a drastically different worldview. And I think that's a wonderful thought experiment for all of us, because a lot of our beliefs might be holding us back. This belief that Ingrid had was holding her back. She was a writer. She never wanted to write the memoir version of her life. And guess what? After this amnesia episode, she ends up writing a memoir and it becomes a Pulitzer Prize finalist. So good thing she revisited that relationship.

41:48So most of us are hopefully not going to have bike accidents. Are there practical things we can do to challenge some of these self-limiting beliefs? Yeah. So my advice to everyone is get amnesia. No, of course. So obviously I don't want anyone to experience amnesia. And I think change can be a wonderful moment to reexamine our beliefs. Beliefs that we discover are not in fact the sacred immutable truths. So there's a lot of great advice out there around how to change your beliefs, which is by the way, very hard because our beliefs about ourselves constitute what's known as our narrative identity.

42:25This is work by Dan McAdams and others. We really value consistency when it comes to our narrative identity. We don't like the idea of changing single beliefs because they may be deeply entangled with many other beliefs. And so that can be a disorienting process and something that we're reluctant to initiate, but it's worth the payoff from my perspective. So the biggest thing is to treat your beliefs as hypotheses that should be tested. So what this means is you should actively seek out data, even if that contradicts your views. You want to stay curious and humble. You want to be constantly questioning your assumptions.

43:05And importantly, and this harkens back to our earlier conversation about identity, you don't want to tie your beliefs to your self-identity. Because what happens when you do that is then when you challenge a belief, you think you are under threat. Your sense of self is under threat and that's not setting you up for success. Some other helpful prompts are you can ask yourself, how did I actually get from point A to point B in my thinking? So Ingrid, in the case of the woman who had negative beliefs about her family story, realized, oh, it actually came because when I was little, my mom told me not to share these stories because she was worried that I might be on the receiving end of violence or discrimination.

43:45But that didn't actually mean that my mom was ashamed of these beliefs. She was just issuing a warning to me. Okay, now that I understand that, maybe I would have gotten to a different destination that wasn't shame based on her advice. You can also ask, based on what existing beliefs, you formed this new belief. A lot of times the beliefs we form are just layering on top of other beliefs. And then when you do that exercise, you may realize, oh, wow, there's actually this foundational belief that I have that's really problematic. And maybe I learned that from my culture or because I was born into a certain family at a certain time with a certain worldview.

44:21Okay. And then my favorite, favorite, favorite one is, and I like using this not only on myself, but with other people, in theory, what evidence would persuade me to change my mind? And I love this one. And this is based on work by Arnaldo Camufo, the economist, and Adam Grant writes about this and think again, it presupposes that you ought to be willing to change your mind in the face of evidence. And that's one of the best ways to recognize that there is in fact flexibility in the things that we think. And so that's one of my favorites. But I think the broader thought experiment here for everyone listening is just imagine that you were born in a different time or place or into a different culture or family.

45:09Would you have the same beliefs that you have now. Almost certainly not. It feels to me like perhaps a foundational step here would be to do a taxonomy of your beliefs about yourself. What are the things? I don't know that I've ever done that or that most people ever do that. That seems like a healthy first step. Would you agree with that? Yes. Yes. Because I think what we do is we sometimes do little personality audits like, okay, I know I'm neurotic in these ways. I know I'm hopeful in these ways. I know I'm pessimistic, but we never actually do the same exercise when it comes to our belief systems.

45:42And our belief systems are so entangled with our well-being and the way that we see the world and the way that we interpret new information. I've started to do that and I've realized how many faulty, problematic, non-evidence-based beliefs I have. And that's true for all of us. I grew up in a family with a theoretical physicist. It was a very scientific household. And yet I still, because of all of the forces that influence the way that our brains think and operate, have so many views that I've had to revisit about other people and most importantly about myself. Again, beliefs that have really, really held me back.

46:19And by the way, I want to make sure I'm super clear on something. I'm not telling you to believe things that are just self-serving. The facts matter. The data matters. Evidence matters. You can't just opportunistically choose what you want to believe because it makes you happier But what you might learn is that you have unfounded beliefs that are making you unhappy and those are worth revisiting Yes, okay. There's a big section in the book about Getting unstuck from rumination rumination Can happen obviously when bad shit happens to us Or when we're contemplating bad shit, which I guess in and of itself is a form of rumination and there's a whole menu of techniques for pulling yourself out of these spirals.

47:02I'm going to list some of the techniques and then you can pick up on and expand on any of the ones you want to talk about. Zooming out, cognitive reappraisal, mental time travel, relinquishing the need for closure, awe, affect labeling, distance self-talk. Which ones should we talk about? I mean, are you getting the sense that I as the author might have some challenges with rumination, Dan, because if so, you're correct. Rumination has been like a hallmark of my life, as I mentioned. Actually, if I can just share this, something that I talk about in the final chapter of the book, which is actually memoir.

47:35So the other chapters focus on another person's story, but I kind of turned the mirror on myself and tried to figure out how I was navigating my current change. But while my peers were having a really fun, adventurous time in college, I, after reading about some hate crimes, descended into this incredibly oppressive, ruminative space around my future children's suffering. You don't choose the things that you're going to fixate on in your life, right? But if I had to put the pieces together, it's Maya's dream is to one day become a mom. Okay, Maya also might have a self-sabotaging personality. let's find something that she can endlessly fixate on that might threaten this dream that she really wanted for herself and so I just remember as a 17 year old being in my dorm room endlessly looping through the ways in which my hypothetical I don't even have children I'm so far away from ever having children and yet this was gripping my mind all the ways in which my future children could suffer.

48:43The reason I share this is that there's the fear itself. And then I think there is also this meta frustration that we have with the fact that we're ruminating over this topic at all. It's like, why the heck am I doing this when I could be at a party with my friends like a normal person? Salman Rushdie, in his memoir, he talks about Orwell's 1984, and there's this torture chamber in the book. And this torture chamber, this room 101, is a room that represents your worst nightmare or the biggest fear that you have, your worst nightmare come true. And so for the protagonist in the book, it's a fear of rats.

49:26That's just his thing, a room full of rats, like that's his worst nightmare. And for whatever reason, my room 101 was occupied by future children of mine suffering because I was so deeply troubled by suffering. And I hated the idea that I might in some way be responsible for that child's suffering or the world might just cause these humans that I love to suffer. I just want to share that because it's so easy to resent your own brain. I resented my own brain for so long. And I just want to normalize that you just don't have control over the things that cause you angst. That's okay. You have to have a little bit of self-compassion.

50:07For you, Dan, it's, I'm worried my career is going to end abruptly one day, and I'm going to be living under a bridge. And for younger Maya, it was, I'm worried that my kid is going to be on the receiving end of a hate crime, for example. Okay, so just want a table set that can help alleviate some suffering for people who are listening. In terms of strategies, I'm going to go through the really quick ones first. So one of my favorites is affect labeling. This involves just taking a step back and trying to identify what negative emotions you're experiencing as a result of your rumination. So research shows that giving a negative feeling a specific label, so for example, frustration, despair, envy, that labeling process can reduce the intensity of the negative emotion.

50:55And that's because when you name something, it fosters psychological distance by shifting your perception away from being the emotion to simply having the emotion. Because when we have this flurry of negativity in our brains, it's easy to think, oh gosh, this is who I am. I am this negative whatever. And you're now saying, oh, actually, I'm feeling frustration. This is an emotion that I'm feeling. Another one that I love is called mental time travel. So our brains have this remarkable ability to travel both forward and backward in time. We can travel backwards to contextualize present day challenges within the larger story of human history.

51:33So we might feel, for example, quite a lot of despair at this present moment in time. And then we can look back in human history and think about all those moments where we faced existential crises and through a combination of collective action and self-sacrifice, we as humans were able to overcome those challenges. We can also go into the past to mine our personal history, for examples, when we showed extraordinary resilience or courage that we didn't expect we had, and that actually led us to fairly good outcomes on the other side. and then we can travel into the future to remind ourselves that our current situation is transient and I do this one by the way all the time so I was up at three in the morning recently just ruminating over an awkward interaction with someone and you can ask yourself in that moment right at 3 a.m when you're so annoyed that you can't fall back asleep how am I going to feel about this in five hours five days from now five years from now Chances are it's going to have less significance to you.

52:40Maybe it was a coworker, right? You might not even be coworkers with this person in five years. And so it just helps you break out of the little mental prison that you've built for yourself and to remember with some distance, oh, this is not a fixed state of the world. This will probably not carry as much importance to me down the line. I love both of those. Are there any other techniques? You said you were going to start with the quickest ones. Are there others that are more detailed? This one I love, which is seeking out awe-inspiring experiences, because we can do this all the time, everywhere, every day.

53:15So what is awe? Dacher Keltner describes it as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world. This sense of vastness can be produced by anything that's larger than we are, right? So it could be physically larger, conceptually larger, and it could be in the domain of music and art or architecture, or my favorite one is moral beauty. So other people's kindness or courage or self-sacrifice or fill in the blank of any other outstanding character trait a human can have. Or maybe it's the complexity of a math theorem or a transcendent experience that comes along with a guided psychedelic trip.

53:55Awe is everywhere. Nature, right? If we are perceptive and attentive and are keen observers. And the reason why awe is so effective is that when we experience awe, it creates these little earthquakes in our minds that prompt us to revise our existing assumptions about the world. And it diminishes our sense of self. There are neuroscience studies showing that when we experience awe, areas in the brain that are associated with self-focus decrease. And that allows us to step outside of ourselves and to see beyond our individual wants and needs and anxieties and to internalize that we are part of a larger whole.

54:40We are part of a connected set of humans who are likely going through similar experiences to what we're going through. I think there's maybe two other techniques that I love to share. The first is that distraction gets a really bad rap, but actually research shows it can be a very productive and helpful tool after a negative event. So I think one problematic narrative that has emerged in social media circles and also in Western conversations around wellness is that the only healthy way to process a bad experience is to fully and directly confront those negative emotions all the time. Otherwise, you risk having those negative emotions resurface in the future with even greater force.

55:26So I had a friend of mine who lost his daughter in a car accident, and he was concerned because his son was actually doing okay and was engaging in distractions. So he loved playing basketball. He loved hanging out with his friends. And I remember my friend telling me, is this just going to rear its ugly head 20 years down the line and he's going to be in therapy forever and it's just suppression? And the reality is that recent research on resilience shows a much more complex story in which individual differences play a massive role in determining what makes for a healthy response in any given circumstance.

56:05And so there are people for whom distraction is actually good and effective. And when you look at long-term outcomes from people who were distracting themselves in the short term and didn't feel these negative emotions constantly resurfacing, they do really great long-term. And so I think the upshot of the research is that if persistently confronting your emotions, for example, with a therapist is working well for you, great, stay the course. But if you're not gravitating towards that approach, or if some combination of both approaching the problem and avoiding the problem is your sweet spot, I don't want anyone to feel guilty about that approach or to fear that they're going to pay for it later.

56:47because that's just simply not what the research says. So if you're like me, go watch reality TV, take up a knitting habit, go do a dance class. Like that's totally great. Are you using distraction and denial interchangeably? So I'm not. Okay. Distraction is engaging in any activity that temporarily shifts your attention away from your negative emotions. Denial, well, there's two different types of denial. There's first order denial and then there's second order denial. Those differences don't matter for your question. But that means literally not recognizing the facts of your situation. Is there any argument for the utility of denial?

57:29Yes, yes. So that's one of the things I discovered doing research for this book. There's research showing actually that denial in the short term actually can lead to better outcomes. So there was this one study where they looked at patients who had been hospitalized for heart problems and they found that those with higher levels of denial had better short-term outcomes. So they spent less time in intensive care and had fewer heart-related symptoms during their hospital stays than those who had low levels of denial. But what that same study showed is that in the longer term, people with high levels of denial had worse outcomes than those with low denial patients.

58:08Researchers think about denial as a psychological immune response. And the researchers, Elizabeth Kupler-Ross and David Kessler, they talk about denial as having grace and it being nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle. So I think if you're going through a hard time or you're seeing someone else go through a hard time, and in the short term, they're showing some symptoms of denial, you can actually be reassured. That can also be part of a healthy response to a change. Because the processing time around especially things that are very harrowing, like a death in the family, for example, it can take your mind time to fully process those events.

58:49And we need to have patience and self-compassion during that period.

58:56Coming up, Maya talks about some more tools for breaking out of the mental prison of rumination.

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1:02:10We've been talking about rumination, but I took us away to talk about denial. You did mention a few moments ago that there were two more things you wanted to talk about under the aegis of rumination. We got to one of them. I want to give you an opportunity to discuss whatever the second might have been. I'm going to add on one more as well. So just two more, two more. Sorry. It's in the broader category of what's called psychological distancing. This basically refers to the idea that we want to forge as much distance between us and our current preoccupations as possible, as much emotional distance as we can.

1:02:45So you can do this in a couple of ways. The first is you can replay an episode that happened in your mind. So let's say a tense exchange with a coworker, but this time you imagine it from the point of view of a third party observer. So a fly on the wall. What you're trying to do is actually poke holes in your own self-narrative of what happened. So you might've left that exchange, maybe thinking one of two extremes, right? I'm totally in the wrong or I'm totally in the right. And the point of this exercise, I think, is to draw a slightly more balanced perspective of what actually happened so that we can take accountability for where we went wrong and hold the other person accountable for where they went wrong.

1:03:22The reason why this is so effective is that when we are mired in all of those in the hormonal fog of all the emotions that we feel coming out of a heated exchange, for example, it is just impossible to see the situation for what it was, to see it clearly. And so we can often find more constructive solutions to our problems when we take that perspective. The other thing you can do is imagine that you're counseling a friend. So if you're like me, Dan, you're very, very self-critical and you engage in a lot of self-duration when you feel like you've messed up. I've definitely done this, so I'll often ruminate about ways in which I've erred.

1:03:55One thing that's been helpful is to imagine that I'm actually helping another friend. And when I help a friend, I'm not using such disparaging language, and I'm not being so critical and harsh. I'm showing them a lot more compassion than I would show myself. And we know from research by Kristen Neff and others that when you have more self-compassion, it actually leads to a more productive response. It's not just the nice, feel-good thing to do. people actually take more action when they show self-compassion because they don't feel that criticizing themselves or pointing out ways in which they've gone wrong is a sign that they are bad, but simply that they engaged in a bad action or that they had a bad behavior, right?

1:04:37A third way to achieve the psychological distance is to just, this is something that the psychologist Ethan Cross talks a lot about. He says, talk to yourself in the third person versus the first person. So rather than saying, oh my God, I need to get a grip, you say, oh my God, Maya, you need to get a grip. It sounds really gimmicky, but it's been shown super effective in so many studies across a wide range of emotions. The Maya distances me, right? And then the you actually, because it's the universal you, reminds you that this is probably something faced by a lot of other people. So it sort of contextualizes the problem that you're dealing with.

1:05:13The other thing is, and I think this is a topic you've discussed on the show, even if you didn't use this exact name, cognitive reappraisal. So it simply means interpreting a situation differently to alter its emotional impact on a person. And so one of the people that I interviewed for the book had a similar experience to you, Dan, Matt Gutman at ABC. He had a panic attack on air, threatened his livelihood. And he was absolutely convinced after the fact that he was a faulty human being with screwed up genes. And that was the only reason why someone like him had made it and had been born. That's how he appraised the situation, right?

1:05:54He was like, my panic attacks are a sign that I am broken in some way, that my brain is broken. And then with the help of an evolutionary psychiatrist, he comes to see his assessment differently. So this psychiatrist tells Matt, that actually our ability to panic is a crucial reason why humans survived as long as they did. You in the past, if you've been a member of your tribe, might have been the one to save everyone from danger. So yes, are you overreacting? Sure. But does this make you a faulty human? No, it doesn't. And that small reframe in terms of how he sees the situation, oh, panicking doesn't mean that I'm broken, panicking means that I'm not broken, allowed him to free himself from his shame and start to actually take productive steps forward because he saw himself as actually redeemable, right?

1:06:48If you are so consumed by shame, there's nothing to fix because there's no ability to fix who you are. That was a very effective strategy. A parting thought on the rumination stuff, which has been very helpful for me. I think that when we are really deep in our mental spirals, we come to think that we are exceptional in some way. That the particular complicated knot our minds have tied is unlike anyone else's knot, and no one can understand us, and no one can relate to us, and we're unique in this way. I remember when I struggled with insomnia in 2020, I started to believe that all the thoughts I were having were not like other people's thoughts.

1:07:29And being in community with others can really be a powerful antidote to this belief. So one person I interviewed on my podcast, Florence Williams, she found out that her husband had had an affair. And she spiraled into this mental vortex, asking all sorts of questions and feeling even physically ill as a result of it. And it was only when she visited the Museum of broken relationships and saw these exhibits devoted to all these people who had been through similar experiences and were similarly brokenhearted, that she, for the first time ever, was able to zoom out and see that her response and her condition had not been exceptional after all, and that she was part of this bigger community of people and that she could actually learn something from their experiences.

1:08:19And that was a wonderful way of just breaking out, again, of these mental prisons that we build for ourselves when we are in the state of rumination. Let's close on this. You mentioned before that you've had an evolution and you're thinking about motherhood as this struggle has evolved. Where are you now? I think that one thing that can happen when a big unexpected change occurs in our lives is that the possible selves that we create can just vanish from sight. So researchers talk about these possible selves in a couple categories. So there's the hoped-for selves that reflect our dreams. There's the feared selves that embody our worries.

1:09:03And then there's the expected selves that simply represent what we think is most likely to happen, good or bad. What can happen in the face of a negative change is that all those hoped-for selves go away, and all the fear selves loom large as we anticipate what the future will look like. One thing that I learned from writing this book is that, of course, our set of possible selves shifts dramatically in response to our new circumstances. If I'm no longer going to be a violinist or I'm no longer going to be a mom or whatever it is, let's say you're no longer going to be a journalist, then of course our possible selves in the future don't reflect those visions.

1:09:44but often our minds constrain us beyond what is necessary and that's because our possible selves are shaped by our prior experiences and our social and cultural environments and for that reason the possible selves we generate don't always fully encompass the range of what is actually available to us. So to make this concrete, we might have assumptions or stereotypes around what possible selves exist for someone who is a high school dropout or who is a teen mom or who is incarcerated or who is a caregiver or who is jobless. Those expectations often don't actually reflect the full landscape of possibility.

1:10:32All of this to say, one thing I explore in my book is how we can conjure up new possible selves, right? How we can use evidence-based techniques to actually crack open our imagination about who we can be. And using these techniques, leveraging all the wisdom that I accrued from the people that I interviewed for the book has left me in a place that I literally never saw coming, Dan. If you had asked me on the night of the second miscarriage, what does the future look like? Is anything good going to happen from this? And could you ever feel whole not becoming a parent? I would have said, absolutely not.

1:11:17I'm going to get to that goal no matter what. But then slowly, and I think just over time and subconsciously by learning these messages, I still remember this one day where my husband came home moment it was six or seven years of being in this space, right? We had explored adoption, obviously surrogacy, but it never had occurred to either of us that maybe a child-free life was a possibility for us. Because again, so much of my self-worth and identity had been wrapped up in this. So why would that ever be on the table? And I still remember when my husband brought up the idea of maybe just hitting pause and like maybe not trying to become parents.

1:11:56And for the first time ever, I didn't feel my life convert into grayscale. I didn't feel fully empty. I didn't feel that my life had been sapped of its meaning and its purpose. I still felt fully intact. And that was so surprising for me given my starting point. And I think that's the power of change. That's where I have gotten to on the other side of change. someone with new perspectives and new values, new positive possible selves that project for me a more hopeful and rich and wonderful child-free life such that that is now a real possibility for us. And I just feel so much gratitude to have gotten to this place because no matter what the future holds, whether I become a parent through surrogacy or adoption or fostering or I don't become a parent at all.

1:12:50I just don't feel my identity hinging on it as tightly as it had before. And there is something so freeing and liberating about the kind of detachment that Buddhists have been talking about forever, right? To have achieved that in my own life, I am the happiest and most hopeful version of myself that I've ever been. And that's the end of history illusion. You know, I did not remember that I was going to be a new person on the other side of this. And I'm grateful for that experience and I'm grateful for all the wisdom of the people that I interviewed for the book. And I really hope that no matter what readers or listeners are going through in their own lives, this will at least give them a sense of hope that they too can become new people.

1:13:35And I think there's something very energizing about that. I agree. And that's a real achievement to have arrived where you have. Dr. Maya Shunker, author of The Other Side of Change and host of A Slight Change of Plans. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Dan.

1:13:56Thanks again to Maya Shunker. Always great to talk to her. I'll drop a link in the show notes to her prior appearance on this show if you want some more from Maya Shunker. If you want to meditate with me, I highly recommend you check out my new app. It's called 10 % with Dan Harris. You can get it over on danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial. If you want to try before you buy, we've got tons of meditations. We're creating new ones all the time. We have relationships with many of the greatest living meditation teachers who are guiding practices for us and for you. We also do weekly live meditation and Q &A sessions.

1:14:33We've got community features And we're growing all the time Would love to have you sign up DanHarris.com Finally, thank you very much To everybody who worked so hard To make this show Our producers are Tara Anderson And Eleanor Vasili Our recording and engineering Is handled by the great folks Over at Pod People Lauren Smith is our managing producer Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer DJ Kashmir is our executive producer And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands Wrote our theme

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