Our favorite tips on exercise, sleep, and play

27:01But you're sort of like, I need to do this right now. And sometimes it can be bad if you're like, you can get into a pit because you're like, I want to feel creative or something, but you don't have a creative project you're really working on. So instead you go online and you start online browsing and shopping. And that's like fake creativity. It's just giving you a little bit of like a buzz. It's giving you a feeling that you're doing the thing that you seek, but you actually are not. And you might end up just buying something, then you look up and it's midnight or it's 1230 or something like that, 1 a.m.

27:40And so that's also really common among people who have high stress jobs and they're like, I need that break. If you are going to do those things, like if you do want to stay up and be browsing or whatever, you should not do it in bed. You should make your bedroom a space that you can actually relax a space that's just for sleeping. And I would say like to be reasonable also for sex. I mean, that's what most people do in their beds and that's like a healthy thing. But those two things and not online shopping, not working, not watching TV can help you a lot. And if you are up and you're like thinking about something, you're stressing about something, She says, get out of bed and just deal with it or write a note to yourself or whatever, and then get back into bed and try to sleep.

28:34Yeah, we've had experts on the show talk about this, and it seems like it just comes down to teaching your brain that the bed is a place to sleep. Yeah. And if you're teaching it that it's for anything else, I was having a conversation the other day with a therapist for my own stuff. I've been suffering with claustrophobia. And she, in the process of the conversation, said our brains are really dumb and it will panic even though you rationally know there's nothing to fear. And the same, I think, applies to a certain extent with sleep. If you're training the brain that, oh, yeah, this is a place where I shop on my laptop, then you're in a state that's not congenial necessarily to sleep.

29:14Have you talked about the claustrophobia thing on the show? Yes, I have. Although I'm in a whole new realm because I've been dealing with this for about three years now. And I'm now kicking it up a notch and getting serious about it because my family is getting very tired of me needing to take Klonopin to get on a plane because it makes me annoying in the moment and grumpy later when I'm hungover. mm-hmm i've had some experiences with claustrophobia too so i'd be curious to listen to any episodes that are specific to it it's a not uncommon phobia for me it's like i got locked in bathrooms a couple times and so now i'm like public bathrooms i'm like terrified to lock the door unless it's a lock mechanism that i can like yes see and you know know that yes i completely relate to that.

30:08Yeah. Nightmare fuel. But I know what you mean. That's what I was going to say. Like, I know what you're talking about where your brain is like, OK, but I'm fine. Someone is going to come and eventually and they will be able to get the door open. But I'm like, I'm going to die in here. It's just your brain goes to like a million, you know. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. So the dumb brain of ours. It's an amazing, it's not dumb, but in this way, it can be kind of dumb and it needs to be trained like in a very kind of obvious ways. And so if you're teaching it that the bed is a place to get activated or acquisitive or inquisitive or productive, for many of us, it will make sleep harder.

30:50Yeah. Another thing, by the way, that we learned was that it's very important to keep your bedroom at a cool temperature. I like to sleep a little more on the warm side, but Robbins was telling me, you know, you want to make sure it's under 70 degrees, ideally, even in the winter when you're trying to be all cozy, you know, under your sheets because they have done studies on this and they have data to show that when they increase the temperature from that, people's sleep was more fragmented. So they were tossing and turning more. They were more disrupted. They were having more nightmares. So that's another thing we can do to set ourselves up to be successful is like keep it cool in your bedroom.

31:38That was the third, just to flag for folks, that was the third tip for sleep that you've found to be helpful in your own life, keeping it cool in the room. I was interested to hear that you're a warm sleeper because I use air conditioning in the winter to keep the room cold. I have a lot of trouble sleeping unless the room is pretty frigid. I mean, I will say this has been a roller coaster over the past year because I did treatment for breast cancer and I went through chemo and had hot flashes, like really terrible hot flashes. So I dealt with that for a long time and that's shifted now. So then I was all about the air conditioner in the winter.

32:18I was like, this is no problem for me. I don't even need the heat on. But my base level, yeah, I feel like my little like my hands and feet get cold and I just want to be tucked up. Now I understand why you reacted the way you did to my saying the thing about my dad being a radiation oncologist. He was actually a specialist in breast cancer before he retired. So I'm sorry to hear that you went through that. Are you doing all right now? Yeah, I am doing as well as I possibly could be. So my scans have been clear basically since surgery, but they did all the other things as a just-in-case, you know?

32:56That's how complicated it is with cancer. It's like they don't know for sure that like a little bit of it didn't get out. A little micrometastases could be somewhere in your body. That's why I had to do chemo and that's why they do radiation. But I get checked regularly. It's hard to know what to say because people who haven't gone through cancer or like haven't maybe had a family member go through it, they ask, or are you in remission or are you cancer free? And it's like a little hard to answer those questions. like as far as I know, but I feel good. I feel healthy. It's just one of those things that is going to be with you.

33:39It's just going to be a thing that you have to be careful about and check on. And I was already interested in living a healthy life, but now I also know what a big role these kinds of practices play in preventing a recurrence of breast cancer, specifically because breast cancer is hormone mediated. And so sleep plays a big role. What you eat plays a big role. And also exercise does. There have been studies that show it can decrease the risk of recurrence significantly if people, women, exercise regularly, like get like the recommended amount that the government recommends every week. And so seeing those numbers, I was like, okay, I really need to be consistent about this.

34:29This is going to help me maybe as much as taking this pill is helping me, you know? Yeah, motivation to get even more serious about the things we've been talking about, but also perhaps even an enhanced and broadened perspective on the whole business of being alive. Yeah, I definitely don't take it for granted. I never did, to be honest. I lost a few family members when I was pretty young, an aunt and an uncle who both died young. My uncle was, I think he was like 52, died from a heart attack. And my aunt, my tia, she died from colon cancer in her 50s. And I was like under 10 years old, very close to both of them.

35:13So I think I always had this idea that that can happen, you know, when you're pretty young. and I've always lived in a way that's very like seize the day kind of nothing is promised and I was always pretty careful that's the thing like a lot of people who get cancer young are like wait I did all the right things I thought I was doing all the right things and then you realize there are more things you could do and there's more like ways to avoid environmental toxins or try to but there's this feeling of like maybe I've realized that you can do all the right things and bad things can still happen it's not your fault but also very much like I said this to some friends and family at the time people were asking me if I was feeling like why me why did this happen to me And I was like, you know, not really, because it's a little like, why not me?

36:12I think it's one in two people get cancer in their lifetimes and one in eight women get breast cancer. So I was like, well, those aren't great odds. It has to happen to somebody. But if it's why not me that this could happen, then also why not me? Why can't I have amazing experiences after I'm done with treatment? I just want to have like a beautiful, brilliant life. I want to still be able to have a kid. I want to, you know, like find the the partner who's the right fit for me. I want to have like a great community and learn how to carve wooden spoons on Monday nights in Brooklyn. Why not me?

36:50You know, flipping that has helped me. I could get you into an artisanal yogurt. Let's serve if you want. You know, I'm lactose intolerant, so I can't take you up on that. I'm sure they have vegan variants knowing this crew. Okay. I'm curious because when we went to, my team went to you and said, hey, we'd love to have you on, talk about fitness. What have you learned? You came back with three things that have really hit home for you on the exercise front and three things that have really hit home for you on the sleep front. And then instead of talking about diet or something sort of obvious on the nose when it comes to fitness, you wanted to talk about play.

37:33Why play and how does that link to fitness in your view? Yeah, we've done some episodes on this and they confirmed what I think I felt intuitively, which is that play is a basic human need. We interviewed someone named Stuart Brown, who has been studying play for his entire career. And he talks about, first of all, that humans aren't the only animals that play. Lots of animals do it. Bears, leopards, bison, ravens, dolphins. From an evolutionary perspective, it might not seem to make sense at first, because it could often be risky, it could be costly, like why do we do this thing? But animal play scholars and biologists argue that it actually serves an important role.

38:22It can help us adapt to difficult circumstances. It can help us practice skills we need to survive and help us problem solve and collaborate. And there are studies on this. Mostly there are some in animals, and I think it might be a little harder to study play in adult humans and see the outcomes. But just based on the data that they have, they believe that play plays a really important role in our lives. And then I think we can also feel this when we do it and we just like kind of intuitively see the benefits of it. So play, I think, can be lots of different things, though. It's not necessarily like let's go fly a kite or games that hopscotch or things that you did as a kid on the playground, though, if you're into that, cool.

39:09but for me a lot of it a lot of it is about creativity a lot of it is about storytelling I find my play through fashion through nature like I was saying I like to watch and watch little hermit crab building a digging a hole and I find that playful almost like talking to the hermit crab that's an element of play or even sometimes you can be playful with yourself you're in the kitchen and you do something stupid i have this like water filter that takes a long time it's a reverse osmosis filter it takes a long time to like fill up my jug of water so i'll just like leave it going and then on the countertop as the thing is filtering and i forget about it every other time i forget and it starts flooding like it starts flooding the the countertop and then onto the floor and I'm like, oh my God, like you did it again.

40:07Instead of being like, oh, like I'm so stupid. Like sometimes I'm just kind of laugh at myself, like I'm my own bad roommate, you know, you can just sort of be like, oh, you goon and sort of like have a moment of play with yourself, you know, or you could do it with a little bird that lands on your windowsill. You find these moments throughout your day, just like we talked about with exercise snacks. Yeah, it's not just a practice. It's an orientation to life. I like that. Yeah. One of the things you mentioned in the little memo your team sent me about takeaways that have been important to you vis-a-vis play.

40:43One of the things that you talk about is that for many of us, like we don't even know where to start. We hear that play is good for us. And then we look at our lives and we're like, yeah, well, I haven't thought about this in a long time. I don't see how to fit it in, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the experts on your show advised that if you want to get a sense of what your play style is, cast back to interpolate back to your childhood and what were the things you enjoyed doing then. Can you say more about that? Yeah. So one of our experts, he was saying, what were your favorite ways to play as a kid?

41:20Were you super into Legos or erector sets? You know, did you like finger painting? Did you like make-believe or catching fireflies or seeing how far you could catapult yourself off of the swing set? I really liked playing with Barbies and telling stories with them and dressing them up and little dramas and love triangles and things. We added on to that with what we learned from Stuart. Stuart Brown worked as a psychiatrist for many years, and he would ask patients about their early experiences with play. he and his colleagues would review the notes and they noticed certain types and they came up with basically a list of play personalities.

42:01I think there are eight of them. You can be more than one of these, but maybe, you know, you see kind of where your clusters are. You might be the joker who loves to laugh and make other people laugh. Practical jokes, physical comedy, wordplay, like could be a lot of things. You might be the artist creator, which resonates for me. You might be the kinesthete who finds joy in movement. So like swimming, running, stretching, whatever it is, archery. There's the director who loves to call the shots and to plan parties, stuff like that. There's the storyteller, which also resonates with me, maybe, obviously, and for a lot of journalists.

42:39You can refer to his list, Stuart Brown's list, to see which of those personalities resonate for you. Or maybe you'll come up with a category of your own.

42:51Coming up, Mariel talks about how to assess how much play you're getting in your daily life and how to get more.

43:00I'm curious, like when I was preparing for this interview and I was thinking about, you know, how much play do I have in my life? I mean, I do play the drums, but not as much as I would like. I do exercise a lot, but it doesn't feel super playful unless I'm doing it with other people. Then I was thinking about socializing. I really like to see my friends and I, so several nights a week, I probably could do it every night, honestly, will go to dinner with friends. I really, really like that. And so like I did last night, I'm doing it again tonight. That seems to incorporate both storytelling and joking for me in my experience.

43:36But I don't know. Does that make sense to you? I think your dinners could be playful or they could not be, depending on what's going on at them. I think we've all been to dinners that feel more like a funeral. And then we've been to dinners that feel super playful and have those elements. So if it's good vibes, if you can joke around with your friends and lean into that. I went to a dinner party recently and we did Esther Perel's game. I think it's called Where Should We Begin? And it has the prompts on it. And that led to some really playful conversations. Some people like to get together with their friends and literally play games like board games and things, which I do not like.

44:15I don't need to learn new rules to anything ever again. I don't like it either. I'm like, I am going to want to do this really well. And you've been practicing this because you own this game. You've been practicing this thing at your house for years with every person who comes through, and there's no chance I'm ever going to win, so we're not playing this. Maybe we could play Candyland, but we're not playing, like, a strategy game. You learn what you like and what you don't like. You learn what feels like play to you, and it's going to be different for every person. And, yes, you can go back to childhood and think about what felt like play then because sometimes that's, like, a more pure vision of ourselves.

44:53Or it's like when we had less maybe distracting us and we just kind of gravitated towards what we liked. I'm curious for you as a kid, like what were your favorite forms of play? Music. My parents were really into what we would now call classic rock, although at that time I don't think they called it classic rock. So just current rock then, you know, the Beatles, the Stones, Creedence Clearwater. I was born in 1971, the band. And so that definitely scaled up to me learning the drums as a kid and still, you know, my son, who's 10, plays the drums. And so there's that. Definitely joking around. It's a huge part of my life.

45:30Storytelling. I keyed in on the thing you mentioned before about, like, being on the swing and then jumping off. I don't do enough of this, but there's something about that we feeling. Yeah. That biking, skiing, rollerblading, skateboarding all have that to them. And I can see it a little bit. Yeah, I was on a beach vacation with my son recently. We're boogie boarding. That sensation is, I think, really powerful. I love that. So this is reminding me, as I was thinking about this this morning, I remembered a C.S. Lewis quote that I wrote out and had taped on my bedroom wall when I was in high school.

46:08And it gets at this, and I wanted to read some of it to you. so he says you may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread you know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them though you cannot put it into words but most of your friends don't see it at all and often wonder why liking this you should also like that and i'm fast forwarding here even in your hobbies has there not always been some secret attraction of something not to be identified with but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop, or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side.

46:47Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling, but faint and uncertain even in the best, of that something which you were born desiring, and which beneath the flux of other desires and in the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age you are looking for watching for listening for i like that a lot yeah and i think for me it would be something around humor humor and the we i love the we thing like that is a common yeah that's a common thread and you can think about what else might get you there is it a physical thing like roller coasters?

47:33You know, do you like that feeling of physically being suspended, sort of, in the air? Or is there like a mental thing that it's like, it's a loss of control, but like a controlled loss of control? Yeah, these are really interesting things to think about. Let's just close on this. This is another tip for play. And this comes from Catherine Price, who has been on this show and is a friend of mine and wrote a book about play and gave a great TED talk on the subject. And she, Catherine, has this acronym that stuck out to you, SPARK, S-P-A-R-K. Can you walk us through it and why it stuck in your mind?

48:15This is from an episode that was reported by Julia Furlan. She's a journalist here in New York. and I really liked this bit of it because I don't know acronyms they just they help you remember stuff you know so I love an acronym the S so it's SPARK the S is make space in your life for fun it's like we fill up our lives with all kinds of things and some of them aren't actually nurturing us for me that's social media is often not nurturing me and it's taking too much of my time A lot of the things that go on in my phone, online shopping and just even activities that feel obligatory but actually aren't.

48:55The people that you don't really vibe with that much, but like you keep going to that meetup or you keep hanging out and you're like, actually, I don't have to do this. I don't have to invest in this connection. I can say no to that to leave space for other things to grow. I think that's really important. And not always rush in to fill the space. Like let it happen. P is for pursuing your passions. So again, what is that? Look for that common thread that we were talking about. The smell of cut wood in the workshop, that wee feeling when you're jumping off the swings. Those things that for some reason it resonates for you in here.

49:34The things you're really passionate about and you don't have to try to become expert level at them necessarily. Like you're just doing them for the joy of doing them and maintaining that passion. You don't have to monetize them either. The A is attract for attracting, attracting fun. And that's really about developing an attitude that's open to it. And again, I think it's that playful mindset. I try to live in that playful mindset and one that's very like I meet new people I ask them what they've got going on in their lives I make connections I went like I'm trying to learn the drums but a different kind of drumming I love bomba music in Puerto Rico my dad is Puerto Rican so I just went and saw like a group of of female bomba drummers and I I say that because traditionally it's the men who play and the women dance but yeah so it was all women playing the drums and I got the number from a guy there of his daughter who lives in New York and teaches bomba.

50:32So it's like, whatever it is about percussion, I'm really feeling it. It feels right to me. It aligns with some other things that I like. And when I show up in that space, I had an open attitude. I talked to this woman who was dancing because I thought she was beautiful and I thought her dance was like really incredible. And then she introduced me to this guy who had the daughter who teaches the drums. So you got to come at it with like not knowing exactly why you're saying hello to this person or whatever. You just like it. You like what you see. You like what you saw them do. You're curious about them.

51:08And then R in the spark is for a little gentle rebellion. So like it's doing something that might feel kind of rebellious, like you'd get in trouble for it if you were in high school. So going roller skating in the middle of the night or jumping into the pool with your clothes on or something like that. I know our sleep is very important to us, but like we could spare one night for some shenanigans, some whole, some shenanigans. And then the K is about keeping at it. And just like, I guess it's like, it's not a job. We don't want to make it into a job, but having fun is something that you should consider a basic human need and work it into your day-to-day life.

51:54Just to pick up on the K, Clay, you don't want to make it into another thing on your to-do list, but you also don't want your whole life to be your to-do list. Right. And so that's the balance. Yeah, totally. I try to leave space now, too, especially when I travel, to not really program it, to just be like, yep, I know I'm going to this place. I'm going to stay in this one space and I'm going to bop around. I'm going to go to the beach this day. I'm going to go to the beach that day. I don't want to have another list of things to do. And it lets me follow the breadcrumbs a little bit. Yeah. Yes.

52:35Mariela, it was a huge pleasure to get some time with you. Yeah. Just before I let you go, can you remind everybody of the name of your show and where we can find it, how often it comes out, the types of things you cover? Yeah. I know this makes some people uncomfortable, but plug away, please. Okay, let me do it. Yeah. So the show is called Life Kit. It's from NPR. We're a service journalism show, which means we talk to experts and then give you research-backed advice. We do a lot of different kinds of stories on health and money and life skills. So some of my favorite episodes are the ones that could potentially save a life.

53:19The ones about breast cancer screening or how to do CPR or how to prevent kids from drowning, like the things you can do ahead of time to make it safer. The money stuff, we love saving people money. How to negotiate down a medical bill, for instance, was a really helpful one, I think. And then we do stuff on life skills, like relationships. We're about to do one on how to ask people out in real life because everybody's tired of these dating apps. Fun stuff like that. Or even like how to make a turkey for Thanksgiving, things that people can take home and use that day. You can find us across platforms.

53:57So the podcast, you can hear wherever you get your podcasts or as Alexi Horwaz-Gazi said yesterday, wherever the pods are cast. I thought that was cute. He's one of the hosts of Planet Money. And then we also have a radio show, which you can hear on your local public radio station on the weekends. And we have an Instagram, which we post all kinds of lovely videos on. It's at NPR Life Kit. And then we have, you can go to npr.org slash life kit and we have written up versions of stories, digital versions that have beautiful art alongside them. And I'm Mariel Segarra. Mariel, thank you very much for doing this.

54:43Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was really fun.

54:49Thanks again to Marielle Sagata. Awesome to talk to her. I also want to remind you to visit danharris.com for more information on how to get all of the bespoke Get Fit Sanely meditations from Cara Lai in your inbox. As mentioned, we're doing tailored meditations for every episode this month, all of the Get Fit Sanely episodes. And if you're a subscriber over on danharris.com, they come to you in your podcast feed and in your inbox. Finally, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

55:27Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.