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

0:00Welcome to Live Well, Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10I think it's amazing that we all want to be better. I think that's an amazing thing. And that's fundamentally the essence of the quality. I think the essence of all the work that you write about is that ultimately we want to be 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 works. 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

0:31Oliver Burkeman:i haven't really thought about in those terms but like the wanting to be better that is not antithetical to um aliveness that is the expression of aliveness exactly 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 um that's not to be uh 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.

1:24You can't know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is astringently 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. Yeah. To say, Sarah's excuse from this class. Yeah. 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 like, okay, I'm allowed to step outside the classroom. I'm allowed to do this. I think about that in my own life.

1:59Do you have any ways that people can like, you know, lessen their grip, loosen their grip, allow themselves permission to stop? Like how are you doing that actively now? Thinking about terms of living more alive and being more alive in the future and now, I guess.

2:16Oliver Burkeman:I mean for me and I am a certain kind of like left brainy intellectual 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 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 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 for it to be like an active ingredient that in reading it you might you know a short chapter every day for a month as i suggest you might actually sort of go through some of that process of unclenching of letting go and then i think 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 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 actually surprisingly easy then to sort of get back into the to become conscious again of like what you're doing and the choices that you're making there's a dutch zen monk i quote quite a lot in this book uh who wrote his own book time surfing which is very uh highly recommended by me he's called paul lumens and he really goes in deep on like the weird importance of what he calls or his english translator calls uh you know taking breathers through the day right it seems like some little extra luxury and the first thing that's going to go when you've got a busy day but in fact in those moments of stepping 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 luxury it's actually the moment in which you're sort of called 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 Jung, Carl Jung says, which is like what is the next most necessary thing?

5:07Oliver Burkeman: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 and back 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 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 but so that you can forget about it because like you can't forget about right it is just literally that job of calling yourself to my calling things to mind again throughout the day falling off the wagon 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 okay for that to just be an ongoing ever unfolding thing of seeking to become and to stay more and more 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 on some level, unconscious and compulsive and messed up for the rest of my life.

6:32Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.