Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554

0:00Coming up next on Passion Struck. There's an intimacy in the darkness and an intimacy to being warm when it is cold that I think can really foster connection. I think conversations can deepen and it's a sense of being closer together because who do you do that with? Who are you with in the warmth and the light when outside it's cold and dark? Those are usually people you feel very close to. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

0:44Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Welcome to episode 554 of the PassionStruck podcast and the very first episode of 2025. As we begin a brand new year, I want to take a moment to reflect on what this time represents, a chance for renewal, growth, and setting intentions for the journey ahead.

1:29Whether you're a longtime listener or joining us for the first time, I am so grateful to have you here as part of this incredible community focused on living with purpose, passion, and bold intentionality. If you're new to the podcast, welcome. With over 550 episodes designed to help inspire transformation, we've curated episode starter packs to help you dive right in. Whether your focus is leadership, mental health, or personal mastery, you can find them on Spotify or at passionstruck.com slash starter packs. And if you're looking to take these lessons even further, sign up for my live intentionally newsletter at passionstruck.com.

2:04It's packed with weekly insights, challenges, exercises, and tools to keep you inspired. And as we start this new year, let's reflect on the empowering conversation from earlier this week with Shira Gill. Shira's insights on simplifying our lives and creating systems that align with our values provided the perfect blueprint for starting 2025 with clarity and intention. If you've missed it, I encourage you to go back and listen. It's a practical guide to cutting through the noise and focusing on what truly matters. Today, I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Keri Lebowitz to the show. Keri is a Stanford-trained health psychologist, Fulbright scholar, and leading expert in mindset science.

2:42Her groundbreaking research examines how our mindset profoundly influences our health, well-being, and ability to navigate challenges. Carrie's book, How to Winter, Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days, is a transformative guide to finding joy and meaning during life's toughest seasons, both literal and metaphorical. Her work is rooted in her time living above the Arctic Circle, where she studied how people flourish during the polar night, a two-month period without sunlight. By cultivating what she calls a wintertime mindset, people, even in the harshest conditions, found ways to experience joy, connection, and resilience.

3:17In today's episode, we'll explore how mindset science can transform not just how we experience winter, but how we approach life's most challenging seasons. We'll go into the surprising lessons Carrie learned from living in the Arctic and how they apply to building a more intentional, restorative life. She explains why rest and slowing down are not just indulgences, but essential practices for growth and renewal. We also discuss the role of intention and small deliberate choices in fostering resilience and finding meaning in difficult times. Lastly, we discuss how Carrie's work at Stanford's Mind and Body Lab and her experiences with the Dalai Lama have shaped her understanding of human potential and what it means to thrive.

3:56As we step into this new year, Carrie's insights can be more timely. Whether you're preparing for the literal challenges of winter or navigating a metaphorical winter in your life, this episode will give you the tools and perspective to find light in the darkness and strength in the struggle. And don't forget, you can watch this interview on my YouTube channels, John R. Miles and Passion Struck Clips, where you'll find the full conversation as well as highlights to share with others. Let's start 2025 with purpose and resilience as we dive into this empowering conversation with Dr. Keri Liebowitz.

4:27Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

4:40Hey, PassionStruck family. I am so excited today to bring on Dr. Keri Leibowitz to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome, Keri. Thanks so much for having me. I've been excited for this conversation ever since Dave introduced us, and I love the title of your book, How to Winter, Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult days. Congratulations on it being selected as a next big idea club must read. Thanks so much. Yeah, I was really excited to get that endorsement because they read a lot of great social science and behavioral science books. Well, they do, especially given who the curators are.

5:21Before we go into the book, I want to go a little bit into your background. I knew you grew up in New Jersey. What was life like for you growing up as a kid? So I grew up at the Jersey Shore in Asbury Park, which is a Bruce Springsteen country. They're actually, they're filming the Bruce Springsteen biopic there these days. And it's a beach town. It's a summer town. And so I lived in a place where summer was king. And especially as a kid, when you have summer break, Like that's what you're waiting all year for. And winter is really the time of year that you just have to get through to get to the good season.

6:01And this was so ingrained in the culture around me that I just thought it was fact, right? Winter is a bummer. Summer is great. And in the winter, you're going to be cold. You're going to struggle getting up in the morning for school. That was really hard for me in the darkness. I just felt like I was shivering for months. And all the things that we like to do, going to the beach, going to the boardwalk, going to concerts, getting ice cream, those were all sort of summer activities. So I really grew up with this bias that I think is common in a lot of the U.S., definitely in New Jersey, where I was from, against winter.

6:40Well, it's interesting. I remember growing up as a kid in Pennsylvania, and I always loved fall. those days where you'd go out in the morning and it'd probably be in the mid 50s and you could see your breath and it was so crisp and then you'd come home in the afternoon and it'd be in the 70s and you were wanting to do anything you could with that jacket that you wore earlier in the day but I do have to say looking back the winters could definitely be long periods of time now Luckily, I love playing hockey. So that for me was a really fun part of that season that I look forward to was getting to ice skate because all our rinks were outside in Pennsylvania.

7:26But it is a long stretch. And I remember it being just gloomy outside. And besides that, you were just hoping for snow days. Yeah, and I think you bring up a really good point is I'll talk about this more later. But I think people who have things they like to do in the winter, like playing hockey or winter sports, tend to really enjoy the season because that's an opportunity there. And actually growing up by the Jersey Shore, because you're on the Atlantic, it doesn't stay below freezing that often. So every once in a while, some of the lakes would freeze over. But I think it's unlike in Pennsylvania when you're more inland, you can't really count on that every year.

8:08And so really that climate difference of being somewhere below freezing where things freeze, you can ice skate, you can play hockey, maybe you get more snow, can make a big difference in what activities there are to enjoy in the winter. For sure. And I always talk to people in Denver who say, I can't stand living in Denver, and I would be in hog heaven getting to ski all the time. Totally, yeah. So you have a really interesting background. Your work has taken you from studying Tabishan mind-body sciences into India researching at the Stanford Mind and Body Lab. How, for you, have these diverse cultural and academic experiences shaped your understanding of how our mindset impacts our health and resilience?

8:57Yeah. I mean, I've always been interested in understanding how other cultures perceive what it means to be a good life. And I studied contemplative science and compassion meditation with Tibetan monks and nuns in India when I was an undergrad. And that really opened my eyes to not only how much our subjective experience creates our reality, but also the ways that we can exert more influence over our subjective experience than perhaps we realize that we're not just passive observers like a video camera taking in what's happening around us. We're constantly selectively attending to things, interpreting those things, and making meaning out of our experiences and the things we see in the world.

9:51And so I really became fascinated in this idea of how can we use this to help people? How can we use this to help people thrive, live more meaningful lives, overcome challenges? And that was what I really spent my time in graduate school studying when I was part of the Stanford Mind and Body Lab, which is led by Dr. Alia Crum, who really studies how our mindsets influence our health performance and well-being and there i was really introduced to a way of using western science to rigorously measure and understand the impact of our subjective experience our mindsets our beliefs and how that is shaping our day-to-day feelings emotions health well-being and how by intervening on these mindsets and these subjective interpretations, we can help people be happier and healthier and perform better and thrive.

10:53Yeah, this is all really at the epicenter of my podcast. People tend to think of it as a self-improvement podcast, but it's all actually an alternative health podcast because I'm really looking at how our intentional behavior changes drive not only our physical and emotional health, but our relationship health, career health, spiritual health, emotional health, et cetera. And mind and body are intertwined with this, of course. Well, Kerry, as I was doing the background research on you, before you ended up going to Stanford, you did your undergraduate work at Emory Great School in Atlanta. And while you were there, you had the privilege of organizing His Holiness the Dalai Lama's visit, which must have been an extraordinary experience.

11:42You're now maybe the 10th person I've met who's had an audience with His Holiness. And the Dalai Lama often speaks about this intersection we've been alluding to here between science and spirituality. And I remember, I'm not sure if you know who Dave Vago is. He's a neuroscientist, used to work out of Vanderbilt. But I remember talking to him and the Dalai Lama actually gave him a calling. And it's interesting when I have heard people who have met him, he has given callings to different people. But for David, it was he wanted to meet with them because his work around meta-awareness and consciousness and mindfulness, he thought was very important.

12:32And so he called upon him to help address human suffering. And I was wondering when you met with him, did he have a mission for you? Well, I really felt like I was already part of one of the mandates that he had given. So my mentor at Emory is named Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi. And Geshe Lobsang was a Tibetan monk for many years, and now he runs the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Emory, which has a lot of different components. Some of it is training people in compassion meditation and bringing compassion meditation to Western communities. Some of it is a new curriculum they're developing on social, emotional, and ethical learning.

13:16And another branch, which I was involved with, was called the Emory Tibet Science Initiative. And this goal was really to marry contemplative Buddhist knowledge and their rigorous tradition of the science of the mind with Western science. And so this organization at Emory was formed to facilitate cross-cultural knowledge and research and understanding between these two groups. So as part of this, there were professors from the U.S. who were brought to India to teach Western science, physics and neuroscience and biology to Tibetan monks and nuns. And we also were bringing contemplative practice meditation to Emory and other places in the West.

14:06And I was working on a summer study abroad program where we brought Emory students and other American students to study in India and to learn about Tibetan Buddhism and culture and medicine and science and meditation to really facilitate these kinds of cross-cultural exchanges. And you've seen over the last decades, I think really in part largely to His Holiness the Dalai Lama's vision and leadership in wanting to bring these traditions together. There are so many scientists who have been given this calling to use their research to further these goals. And now we have monks and nuns, some of whom are my friends from my time at Emory and in India, who are well versed in Western science and can bring these traditions together.

15:01And I think it's really powerful because I think Western science has a really good model for empirically testing questions objectively and really understanding and measuring things objectively over and over again. but this idea of taking a scientific approach to your own mind and your own consciousness and your own internal experience is something that the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has a lot of experience with and a lot of knowledge of how to do that systematically and rigorously and so certainly my audiences with his holiness and my time studying Tibetan Buddhism have really informed the work that I'm doing now.

15:47And it was just such a great job to be a part of organizing his visit to Emory and leading these students abroad in India and playing a small role in the mission of what the team at Emory is building under sort of the guidance and supervision and insight of His Holiness and spearheaded by Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Nagy, who is really putting together a bunch of these programs at Emory. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And it's interesting that the Buddha once described the mind as a wild horse. In the Eightfold Path, one of the things that I have been trying to immerse myself more into is practicing right effort.

16:29Because people often ask me, we have these beliefs about ourselves that get in our way. And I call it, We're often our own visionary arsonist, but this right effort is really about clearing our minds of negative, unhelpful thoughts. How have you saw things like this and science come together? Well, I think this idea of how do we do that, right? What does it look like to clear our minds of unhelpful or harmful thoughts? How can we help put people on different paths? And I think that meditation is certainly one way to do that. It's a really a way of training your mind. And these mindfulness practices give you that meta awareness, that moment of noticing when you're in a thought that is unhelpful or destructive, or noticing when you're in a pattern that is maladaptive.

17:28And I think testing some of these strategies empirically, not just meditation, but other interventions as well that can help people notice and understand and harness their thoughts. It helps, I think, legitimize these practices in Western culture. It helps give people something to go on. It also gives us a way of directing our energy and attention, right? So say you were going to implement something in schools or with your students or with your kids or with yourself, right? You would want to do something that is impactful. And I think using science to test these things can help us really understand both what their impact is, how big their impact is, and the mechanisms by which these things work.

18:17And one thing that I was also taught that the Buddha said that I really think about in my work is that the Buddha said, you shouldn't take my teachings just because I said them, you should go out and examine them for yourself. Like it's a piece of gold, right? Like you don't just believe it's gold because I hand it to you. You would do some tests. You would make sure that it's actually real gold. And that's something that I really aspire to do with my work is I want to have the research. I want to have the data to show you, oh, yeah, we know that these practices improve your positive emotions or improve your health or improve your well-being.

18:52But you know what? Go out and try them, because if they don't work for you, if they don't fit in your life, if they don't feel true for you, then that's not the right strategy for you. And so I think this idea of marrying, okay, here's what science says is helpful on average with you have to find what works for you by trying things in your own life with sort of an open-minded experimental attitude is something I really like to do when I'm giving people strategies or tips for how to change their mindset or how to embrace winter or whatever it is. I really want to say that these things aren't one size fits all and different people are going to find different practices that work for them.

19:36It's interesting. When I first heard that term meta-awareness, the person who I was talking to, I asked them, what is it? And they said, it's being aware of your awareness. And I said, what the heck is that? but it really is self-awareness focused on how do you process your own consciousness it's like how do you think about what you're thinking about which is saying totally and i think it's really easy for us to go along and just be lost in our thoughts or not realize that we have mindsets that are impacting us and it's only with that meta awareness that we can start seeing oh yeah actually these thoughts are just that they're thoughts, right?

20:22They're not necessarily an objective view of the world. They're not an unbiased view of the world. And so I can examine them and maybe intervene on them if I want to. Absolutely. And I love something about you. One of the things I love about you is that you do quote unquote me search, which is really getting out of the classroom environment and taking this into practical real life experience. So we're going to talk more about that. But since we brought up mindset a couple of times, in your writing and in your workshops and in your speaking engagements, you really explore the practical applications of mindset science.

21:05Was there a pivotal moment or experience that made you realize how much the power of mindset helps people thrive? Well, I think it was meeting my mentor, Dr. Alia Crum at Stanford, who is really a mindset pioneer in the vein of Carol Dweck, who I also had the opportunity to work with at Stanford, who was very well known for her work on growth and fixed mindsets. And what Ali Crum has done is really expand a lot of this work into health domains, marrying the decades of research we have on things like placebo effects, right? You take a placebo, a sugar pill, and patients get better. Well, what's happening there?

21:44It's not that the sugar in the sugar pill has some healing properties. It's things happening in our psychology, in our expectations, in our environment, and interactions with other people, and in our mindset. And so really trying to quantify how does that help our health and well-being how does that impact our health and well-being and especially coming off of my background in the meditation world and in contemplative science it was really compelling to me to have a different way to think about our subjective experience and intervene on our subjective experience because i think meditation is a really powerful tool and I would love it if everyone meditated, but it's not for everyone, right?

22:33So for whatever reason, some people are never going to be into that practice. Maybe it's not useful for them. Maybe they can't find the time. Maybe it's hard to commit to that practice. And so the question is, how can we take some of the things that we know from the mindfulness world, from the meditation world, and harness them in different places? So for example, some of my research has been in understanding mindsets in healthcare and training healthcare providers to recognize patient mindsets and try to have conversations with patients that help them adopt more useful mindsets. And certainly many doctors don't have time to do an in-depth meditation training with their patients to help them see their chronic illnesses differently, but maybe they can have these other short conversations that are going to intervene on mindsets and instill more adaptive mindsets.

23:25And so I was really inspired by the work that Ali Crum was doing in the Standard Mind and Body Lab. And I saw just a lot of potential there for harnessing a lot of these principles in new and exciting ways. Well, thank you for sharing that. And I'm just going to point the listeners to if you want to learn more about Carol Dweck's work, I haven't been fortunate enough to have Carol on the podcast, but I've had Edward Brasino, David Yeager, and Mary Murphy on the show, who are all students of Carol's and go into different aspects of it in their work. And you can tune into those episodes if you want to learn more about developing a growth mindset.

24:09So, Carrie, in your book, How to Winter, getting back to it, you describe mindset as a self-fulfilling prophecy. And your book really focuses on preparing and experiencing winter with intention. How, when you're thinking about preparing for winter, do small preparatory behaviors, like setting out clothes, blankets, or stocking up on tea, or reshuffling your wardrobe, relate to the broader philosophy of being intentional about how we approach things that may cause us discomfort? I think so many people just let winter happen to them, right? I think this is what our culture really encourages us to do, right?

24:57We live by the calendar or the schedule or our routines and not by the seasons in nature or the cycles of light and dark in a year. And so So one thing that these activities do is they bring that mindfulness. They bring in that awareness that it's going to be winter. It's going to get cold. It's going to get dark. And these actions help us take a little bit of agency over something that we can't control, right? We can't control the weather. We can't control what time the sun rises or sets, but we can control how prepared we are to meet those challenges, right? Whether we have the right clothing to go out when it's cold, the right accessories at home to feel comfortable, the right lighting to help welcome in the darkness during the darkest days of the year.

25:46And so I think it starts tuning us into the opportunities of the season. So when these little behaviors or rituals become things we look forward to. Every year on the first cold day, I make my favorite pot of soup or when it starts setting, the sun starts setting really early, I make myself a cup of tea in the afternoon to enjoy. they're small fluffy feeling things but they really help us reclaim a time of year that I think a lot of people experience as dreary and depressing as actually an opportunity for little moments of comfort and pleasure and I think it's the same as what you were talking about of loving winter or looking forward to a winter when you were growing up because you played hockey because that was a special thing you only did during the winter that you looked forward to.

26:43And so what a lot of these things are asking us to do is to make ourselves comfortable and start orienting to, okay, what are the things we can look forward to in winter that can help us enjoy this season? And then I think it's also to go a little bit wider with it, it can help us meet other things proactively, right? So there are going to be other challenging seasons of life, right? Maybe you have a big transition coming up in your work or your home life. Maybe you are going to have surgery and you're going to need to recover. Maybe you're pregnant and about to give birth. And if you do these things that can help you prepare, you can feel a little bit more ready to meet these challenges.

27:30You're facing them ahead on. These are what we call active coping strategies. So rather than denying or avoiding or doing other unrelated behaviors, just scrolling on your phone or disengaging or being in denial, they help us move towards these challenges and then can actually provide us a little comfort during a dark or difficult time. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And one of the things going back to the me search is you have studied cultures that thrive in extreme winters, countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, which some people might not think gets that cold, but having been there 20 something times, I can tell you it gets darn cold.

28:16What specific practices or philosophies for you stood out and did you see commonalities across those countries? Well, I'm extremely jealous that you've been to Japan 20 something times because it was one of my favorite places that I went when I was researching the book. This all really started for me when I spent a year living in the Arctic in northern Norway in a city called Tromsø. And Tromsø is so far north that they experience two months of what's known as the polar night each year. So that's a two month period where the sun rises and then never comes above the horizon. And so it's very dark.

28:55It's a very long winter. It's a very cold winter. And what I observed in Tromso, I've seen in other places around the world that winter well. One of the main things I see is a willingness to adapt to the season in some way. So again, this comes back to the idea that sort of living by our modern conveniences and calendars and routines, I think, can delude us into thinking that we don't need to change our behavior in the winter, but then all of a sudden we're surprised that we're really tired during the darkest time of the year, or we have little motivation or energy, or don't feel like socializing in the same way after the holidays in January.