How To Embrace Imperfection

Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Welcome to a new year and a new series of this podcast. So many of you have gotten in touch to say that what you love most about the Happiness Lab is the practical advice that you get from the show. So over the next few months, we're gonna make getting that practical advice even easier. We'll be bringing you an entire season of how-to guides, ones that we think will make your life much happier in 2025.

I've assembled a cast of amazing guests. They're the premier experts in their fields on topics ranging from how to live a richer life each and every day to how to find valuable relationship lessons from watching rom-com movies.

In each How To episode, we'll be breaking down the key takeaways. Each show will feature a half a dozen or so tips for tackling challenges like stress, navigating negative emotions, finding your purpose, and dating better. And today, we're kicking off this How To season with a topic that I struggle with a lot. How to be imperfect.

You see, I spend a lot of time wanting to do the opposite of this. I want everything I do to be perfect. I want to throw the best dinner parties and the most effective lab meetings and to be the best friend and wife and podcaster and professor. But there's a new book that has really helped me gain a better perspective on this.

It's called Meditations for Mortals, four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. Its author, Oliver Berkman, has been on the happiness lab before. He helped me find ways to fight the stress that comes from constant busyness. And Meditations for Mortals tackles a related topic. How can we start spending our time on the stuff that really counts? And Oliver's book isn't talking about meditations, like The Clear Your Mind and Take Deep Breath's Meditations.

No, his meditations are short philosophical tips for embracing the fact that the world is messy, that we're messy, and that striving for perfection isn't an achievable or a healthy goal. But you're based in New York these days, still, right? Oliver? No, I'm in North Yorkshire, so I'm just up the east coast. I sat down with Oliver to tease out his top five lessons for accepting our imperfection. Oh, the two places where I've spent my life Brooklyn and Yorkshire, so it's not surprising that

But I began by asking him about the new year, a time when so many of us hoped to turn over a new leaf, shed our bad habits, and become the perfect people we've always wanted to be. I've often thought that the new year is, in some ways, almost the worst possible time to be trying to implement major changes, especially I don't do this much these days, but especially if you're spending New Year's Eve at a sort of very high-octane party, then January the 1st is going to not be the day for wonderful virtuous new plans.

whether it's a calendrical thing or not, anything that piles on the pressure to kind of make a complete fresh start from now forevermore, that's a problem because I think what's going to work instead is the willingness to try things out, to experiment, to do things for a little while, even just to do them once without forcing them to be part of a very, very heavy and intimidating system of total transformation or something like that.

And so in some ways your book is a guide towards sort of fighting against that total system of transformation. You talked about this idea of imperfectionism. What is imperfectionism and why should we embrace it?

Imperfectionism is just my kind of umbrella term, I think, for the whole approach to life that starts from the assumption that we're never going to be able to do things as perfectly as we can imagine them, but starts from the assumption that there's always going to be too much to do, that we're never going to feel completely ready for new life stages or for interesting and exciting new projects.

that we're probably never going to fix all our massive personal problems that we have with procrastination or distraction or whatever else it is, and then says, well, OK, now what? And how can we develop the willingness to act and to really do the stuff that matters? And to hopefully most of the time enjoy doing a lot of the stuff that matters now that that kind of tormenting mirage is off the agenda.

And so in your book, you talk about some of the tenets of imperfectionism. And I have to admit that in some of these, I felt really called out because they're ones that I absolutely struggle with. The first of these is this idea that there's never going to be this fantasy day when everything is out of the way. What do you mean here and why is important to get rid of this notion?

Well, first of all, let me say that I'm confronting myself as much as anybody else. I'm calling out myself. So you can come with this from many different angles, but certainly just when it comes to the volume of stuff that we tend in the modern world to feel like we need to do.

there is always a bigger amount that feels like it needs to be done in any given time period, you know, by the end of the day, by the end of the week, than we have the opportunity to do. There are clear reasons of technology and economic culture in which we live and all sorts of things that just make that inevitable.

So if you approach life with this very sort of understandable but misleading notion that what you're going to do is first of all get all the little bits of stuff out of the way, deal with all the things that are kind of cluttering your mental world, and then you will find these great expanses of time for the things that really matter, the relationships or the projects that really count, you're going to end up spending your whole life clearing the decks, as it were, and never getting there. I think it's really important instead

to see that the skill we're trying to develop here, I would say, is the willingness to act on the important things right now, even though the decks are not clear. It's kind of an anxiety tolerance skill, I think. It's knowing that there are emails that will need your attention, but deciding nonetheless to spend the first hour of the day, say, on some things other than

answering them. Of course this will vary massively by people's personal situations and some people I know are in jobs where certain kinds of emails have to be responded to immediately or they might get fired. I think the underlying point here is there isn't this moment coming later when you're going to have all the time for the things that matter and so on. Some level you have to claim that time in the present instead.

can't tell you how important this insight has been for me. I feel like my calendar constantly has these moments of like, all right, I'm going to get to a new month, right? I'm going to get to get to January 1st. And then I'll try to get everything done before January 1st. And then I can begin and January 1st comes around and I have it. And then it's February 1st or it's my birthday or it's whatever it is. There's always this kind of trying to clear the decks before the state with the ideas. And then, you know, and then dot, dot, dot, dot, and it kind of never gets there.

I think part of this also is something else that you've cautioned against, which is this idea of the spirit of optimization that we might need to kind of reject this. What is that spirit and why is it so important to read? Yeah, or maybe even not say reject, but just sort of see through the alluring promise of, I think that's something that I'm often arguing for. It's just a sort of gentle

Understanding that these things are not going where we hope that they're going and then it's a lot easier to let go of them in the case of optimization and efficiency in general right there's certainly nothing wrong with making a few time savings around the edges thinking about your daily routines.

how you organize your house or your desk in such a way as to eliminate wasted time. You know, if it's taking you an hour to find your clothes in the morning, there's probably something wrong with how you have your house organized. But it's a very low level at which that stops making a difference. Because I think the illusion, the thing that sort of the which is us is this notion that we might be able to optimize ourselves to the point where we didn't have to make difficult decisions about what to do with our time.

where we could say yes to everything that was thrown onto our plates we would never have to disappoint anybody we would never have to put any of our ambitions on hold we would never have to neglect something that felt like it was crying out for our attention and i want to say that it's just baked in to our situation as finite humans but that's not how it works.

that you're going to have to disappoint some people, that you're going to have to put some ambitions on the back burner, that you're going to have to not do all the things that feel like they need doing just in order to do any things and to make a difference to anybody's lives and to pursue any of your most cherished ambitions. So optimization can be a real diversion of energy and attention. It also has this very specific hidden danger that if you are telling yourself,

that you're going to make time for everything somehow. You stop asking serious questions about things that arrive, right? Somebody asks you, could you do this task? Could you meet this demand and say it's one that you are in a position where you're allowed to say yes or no to it? Well, if you think you're going to get everything done, you're just going to say, yeah, sure, throw it in the hopper. There's no problem here. I'm going to get everything done. And so it's a very alluring thing. But what happens is that your life gradually starts filling with more and more stuff that you didn't really want to do other people's agendas.

Things you could have said no to in fact, but felt like you were on the path to being so powerful that you didn't need to, you know, so all all capable you didn't need. So I get the effectiveness of this approach of kind of, you know, loosening up on our optimization and recognizing that we're never going to get everything under control. I get how it might be functional, but I also find it quite depressing. But one of the things that's interesting in your book is you argue like this should not be depressing at all. This should be incredibly liberating. Explain how that works.

Sure, I mean, I come across this objection, I understand it, right? There is definitely a kind of a defeat that is involved here. I'm trying to argue that it's a productive and energizing and empowering kind of defeat, because it's the defeat of trying and struggling to do something that was never on the cards to begin with. I think that what you do, and I certainly don't claim to,

perfect at this i'm reminding my point if i did i think but what you do when you get a little bit better at this is you spend more of your precious time doing things that make you feel more alive i'm hardly talking about hobbies and recreational activities and.

Meaningful work, but even things that feel like duties in your life, if you're doing them in this context of having chosen them as against other things, they can become imbued with greater meaning. There's a British born Zen master who I quote in the book, and I always quote because the quote means so much to me. Who knew Kenneth was her name, and she died a while ago now, who used to say that her approach to teaching was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.

And I still get goosebumps when I think about this quote because it really is the essence of what we're talking about here. I think it's like you are struggling under this impossible burden of trying to do everything, trying to get your arms around at all, trying to make yourself be perfect before you take the high stakes actions. And it's just a lovely feeling to be able to set that down on the ground. And it's a feeling that leaves you more energized to go and do things or to keep climbing the mountain or whatever the metaphor is that we're dealing with here.

So if Oliver's convinced you that rejecting the pursuit of perfection is a liberating step, you should stick with us for tip number one in his guide to how to be imperfect. It's coming up right after the break.

Oliver Brickman's simple philosophy is that trying to be perfect and do everything is an impossible burden, a burden that weighs us down and prevents us from dedicating ourselves to more meaningful activities. And the first step on the road to embracing imperfectionism is something that a perfectionist like me struggles with. It's actually doing things. You know, actually bake that cake or write that book or travel to that destination.

And this tip kind of feels like being called out. I never get around to baking the cake because I spend way too much time trying to find the perfect cake recipe. I don't take many vacations, but I spend a heck of a lot of time researching the perfect travel spot. In my attempt to set up everything perfectly, I rarely get around to actually doing stuff. It's like I'm looking for a method or system to get perfect results every time, no matter what I'm doing.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is for many of us very alluring, right? The idea that there's some set of rules or some way of doing things that if you could only discover it or perfect it would make everything work. And actually, on a deeper kind of subtler level, almost would live life on your behalf, right? It's like the deal is I will follow all these rules every day. And when I get back from it is that I don't quite have to show up for life and grapple with life in all its kind of messy, muddy,

unpleasantness and difficulty and uncertainty and all the rest of it. So I've got nothing against systems and rules per se. And in fact, the new book has plenty of outlines of ways to build one. But I think it's essential that we put them in their place. They are tools that we use from our position here in the midst of life. They are not things that can get us out of that situation. So how is this relevant to the idea of just doing things? I think that

One way in which we use systems in counterproductive ways, we want to do something, we want to do more of something in our lives, physical exercise, meditation, pursuing a creative hobby that we've let neglect or nurturing certain relationships that we've sort of allowed to with or something.

And then we immediately go to what's the system that's going to change me into the kind of person that does this better, right? What are the goals? What's the morning routine I'm going to do every day for the rest of my life? What's the equipment I need? What are the 10 books I can read so that I really know how to do this thing?

Yeah, I'm totally still prone to doing this sometimes, right? But my first thought always like, find a book, find a set of information that I can build a system from. But firstly, that is not the same as doing the thing. Secondly, it can actually be counterproductive, I think, because it becomes a much more intimidating or unwieldy thing, the prospect of having to do something every day for the rest of your life can really put you in the mind of not wanting to do it at all. Or you feel terrible if you fall off the wagon one day or whatever it might be.

A really powerful skill to develop, I think, is the willingness to say, OK, that might have some role later. But what if I just meditated for 10 minutes? What if I just went for a brisk walk? What if I just picked up the phone and talked to the long lost friend with no confidence that I would do it well? No certainty that I'll do it every day for the rest of my life. No guarantee that it's going to turn me into the kind of person who does that kind of thing all the time.

But it's still worth more than all those things combined because it actually happened in reality. Okay, can I share my experience that like fits with this to a T when I was reading your book, I was like, Oh my God, he's literally in my head right now. So sometime last year, I was watching these documentaries about DJs. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to learn to do some turntableism stuff. Like I love records and so on.

I immediately went to look, I started researching books. I didn't even just buy books. I spent like weeks researching like, what's the best way to learn about turntableism and stuff? And I bought these books and I went to what's the best possible way. So I downloaded this syllabus from Berkeley College of Music of the best ways to do this.

And I spent hours and hours researching how to learn to turn tableism and then bought these resources and then completely intimidated myself because I was reading from the best DJs and people who are in music school and I'm like, you know, professor and podcaster and have like four minutes a week to do this.

And then I never picked up a record or did anything, right? And reading your book is like, I could have just like downloaded some app and started playing some music and just kind of pretending and messing around. And it wouldn't have been the perfect system, but at least I would have done something. It would have been fun rather than kind of make me feel ashamed and like I'm never going to do it in the huge waste of time.

Yeah, that resonates a lot. I think it's so interesting. We can learn a lot from young kids in this regard, I think. DJ example is interesting to me, because our son often professes the desire to be a DJ when he's older. I don't know. And he just dive into assembling playlists and setting up disco lights and whatever. You just do it. And you do it for 25 minutes one day after school, and then you've done it. And then maybe you do it again and again. And maybe you don't. Something about becoming an adult.

It seems to be associated with this idea that it's got to be done in a very controlled sort of a scheme. Okay, so that's idea number one. You just need to do it and the advice is really just like, whatever you can do in 10 minutes today, just do that and it's probably good enough. The second tip that I also struggle with a lot is you've argued that we need to fight back against this idea of productivity debt. Something I fall prey to all the time. What is productivity debt?

Productivity debt is my label for this sense that so many of us have that we sort of wake up in the morning in a kind of a debt, right? That unless we produce a certain amount or do a certain amount of things, we haven't quite justified our existence as humans. We haven't quite earned the right to be here on the planet. There's an important caveat, which obviously, if you do any kind of work for money, there is a sense in which you're in productivity debt, right? If you get paid a salary,

you have to do the things that your job entails in order to get the salary. I'm talking about this much deeper existential notion that we don't get to feel okay as human beings unless we have paid off this debt during the day. And it's very depressing because obviously to continue the analogy with a debt in a bank account or something, the very best thing that can happen is that you get back to zero by the end of the day. That is literally the very best thing that can happen.

If you work in this kind of deficit based mindset and obviously most of the time you're not going to feel that you even get there and then you're going to wake up the next morning and it's all back again. You've got to like push the rock up the hill for another day. So I think, you know, just seeing that.

can be very powerful for a lot of people because on some level, we know that that isn't how it is, right? We don't really believe that we sort of don't get to qualify as adequate human beings if we haven't done a certain amount. And then beyond that, I think, you know, there are all sorts of tactics like the very simple idea of keeping a dumb list, keeping a list of things that you have completed through the day as you complete them that can help us sort of, you know, to continue that metaphor. What if you started each day at zero and everything that you did was paying in and you ended up like,

building your credit, and then the next day you build your credit some more, right? Is it possible to think of the things that we do as expressions of the fact that we already are adequate instead of ways that we're struggling to try to achieve a sense of inadequacy? You use this term in the book that I resonate with, you know, psychologists sort of have a word for people who fall prey to this idea, this idea of insecure overachievers. I think I know what this term means, but I'm going to have you articulate what it is and how you've seen it in yourself, maybe.

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm always struck whenever I use this term like in a public event or something, the ripples of recognition are there. I don't know about a sort of very formal definition, but for me, what it means is, you know, we're talking about people who do a lot of stuff, who are very driven is a word that might get used, right, who probably have a lot of

Accomplishments under their belt and maybe are to some degree celebrated by their friends or admired by people for doing it. But ultimately are doing it to kind of shore up this inner sense of not being adequate or okay unless they do enough. And this certainly can take very toxic forms. But I think it's very normal, really, for a lot of us who sort of do a lot of things and get things done and feel proud of that to realize with a start that actually on some level, we wouldn't

do them or we might do different things. We certainly might do them in a less grim faced way if we weren't starting from the idea that there was some deficit that needed to be filled or paid off or whatever before we could enjoy ourselves in life.

Yeah, the reason I really love this point is that for me, it wasn't so much that I need to stop doing things. It was kind of the way I do things, right? Like even now, just before I sat down to record the podcast, I kind of was done my other meetings 10 minutes early and it was like, well, I have 10 minutes. What can I do? I'm going to water the plants. Like, oh, the plants need watering. Like, oh, I'm to the dishwasher. And it was like, and I had this just moment of noticing what was happening where it was like,

My whole goal is to take as many things off as possible. And that's just kind of a miserable way to live. Yeah, no, yeah. Yeah, I could have spent that 10 meetings, 10 minutes just being or noticing the world or relaxing. Or doing something productive and constructive, but you would have chosen it.

with some eye to enjoyment as well, right? Otherwise what happens is you end up living, we talk a lot about living in the future in terms of living for years from now, but it's very easy to spend your whole life living about two hours in the future, right? But that sense that like, it's just when I've done that, it's just when I've done that and it's the end of the day and when I get to bed and go to sleep, there's always another thing and it just, it almost makes whatever's happening in your life into a sort of an unwelcome

obstacle to getting to the end of the day or whatever and sometimes things are like that but other times they're not unless you make them unless you turn them into them.

And so another tip that I think is especially relevant for we insecure overachievers has to do with the information overload that we all face. I imagine there were insecure overachievers in the 70s and 80s, but they didn't face the kind of firehose of information and things to care about that so many of us face these days. And another tip that you've suggested is just to recognize that we can't care about or find out about.

everything. Why is this so essential to kind of give up on trying to bring in as much information as possible? On some level, it's the same reason that sort of underpins everything we've been talking about here and that I've written about, which is that if the supply is effectively infinite,

then attempts to get through the supply faster or to get your arms around the supply completely are doomed to fail and they're going to lead to all sorts of sort of unintended consequences. So yeah, just in that simple issue of too many things to read, too many articles in your read it later app that feel like they're probably essential in some way or could you be a really good idea for your work or could make you healthier or calmer or something. There's nothing wrong with collecting those but I think it's really important to treat them as I say in the book as a

like a river rather than a bucket. In other words, not as some sort of place where they all collect and your job is to deal with them all until the bucket is empty again. But just as a kind of a stream that flows past you and that you pick things out and focus on them without feeling guilty about all the ones that you let go by.

And the point you alluded to at the end of your question, more difficult, I think, for many people who feel committed to making the world a better place, is that this does ultimately have to apply to good causes and the suffering of the world as well, right? If there is more of this stuff than you can hope to address, even collectively, even in groups, because they're still finite too, they are groups of finite people.

then to make any difference to a given cause or something like that, you're going to have to be willing to neglect some others, not because you've convinced yourself they don't matter, but just because that's how it is for us. And, you know, that might mean taking some instance of a cause, an important issue that you feel drawn to giving your attention to and saying, I'm going to pick my battles and I'm not going to choose that one. And it's not because it doesn't matter. It's because I want to have some effect in what I do.

Any strategies for kind of staying sane and self-compassionate when you do that, when you say important thing, don't go time for that. Well, you know, I think above all, it comes from seeing and reminding yourself again and again that the reason you are neglecting some things

maybe other reasons, but one core reason that you will be neglecting some things is because being human means neglecting some things. And there are sort of ways of handling this in a more practical sense. I've written the past about this idea of keeping two lists, one that is kind of endless and has as many items on it as you like, and then one which has a very fixed number of slots and you feed them through so that you only ever got sort of say five or 10 items on your plate, but you're very well aware that there are

500 items calling out for your attention and just sort of a climatizing to that situation of there being more to do than you ever could do. Another metaphor that works for me is to understand that these kinds of lists are menus and in a strange, strange way.

the list of all the suffering going on in the world, the list of all the critical causes needing our attention or our activism or our donations or anything else are also a menu, because a menu is any list that you're going to have to pick from instead of get through. And there is a possibility when you see it in that way of approaching it with a lighter spirit, you know, that sense that you're doing something that counts and you actually wouldn't be doing more or better if you ran around in a frenzy trying to sort of make sure you touched every single one of those items.

So that's sort of trying to make sure you don't do everything. But another tip is about how you deal with the things that you have chosen to do. And you've argued that we need to be much more comfortable choosing not to whole ass stuff as you put it. I think I know what this means, but what is whole assing things and why should we maybe be gentler with ourselves about that?

This is a quotation I stumbled across in the comments of a Washington Post article from a woman who says that her parents always used to get on her case about half-assing things, but actually now as an adult woman with an accomplished career, she realizes there are very, very few things in life that really require her to invest her whole ass. Quite often, half-assing is fine. This applies in lots of different contexts, right, because it's all about

the amount of attention, the amount of energy that you're willing to give something and being okay with giving something less of your energy, less of your attention. It's also to do with dropping that assumption that everything we encounter in our lives that is important has to feel difficult, has to feel very effortful about allowing the possibility that

Maybe there are some things that you could sort of glide through and coast through. And even this is a subtle point. It's tricky to express, I think, but like even genuinely very difficult things can be approached in the spirit of their being easy. I know what I mean by this. I don't know that I've conveyed it perfectly, but you can bring ease to a process that is almost guaranteed to be at the very least frustrating, like filing your taxes is the classic cliche.

And I think you can bring ease ultimately to situations that are much worse and, you know, fraught and involve grief or sadness or conflict. You can still not assume that it's got to be a question of throwing your brow, bracing your muscles and going in for a fight. And you can absolutely assume that when it comes to sort of creative work, for example, all these contexts where we think like, OK, this is worth doing. I'm going to come up against a lot of resistance and I'm going to have to punch that resistance in the face.

It's like if you walk up to someone in a bar ready to punch them in the face, right? They may have had no plan to be in conflict with you, but they soon will be if that's the attitude that you take to what you're doing.

I mean, you're mentioning trying not to always hold last things in the context of things that are really hard, but in my own experience, sometimes this comes up for me even in things that should be easy, right? You know, friends are like, oh, you know, should we get dinner? Like, oh, yeah, come over the house for dinner. And then I'll be like, okay, I'm going to make a really great entree and there has to be dessert. I got to like go to the wine shop to figure out the perfect wine. And now this thing that was supposed to be kind of fun for me has turned into this like,

stressful choice overloaded situation that in my brain, I have four different ideas about how to do perfectly and whichever one I picked, it's not going to be perfect. Right. Specifically, in the dinner party context, you've argued that we need to embrace this idea of scruffy hospitality, which is one that I love. What do you mean by this year?

Yeah, this phrase comes from an Anglican pastor in the Tennessee called Jack King. What he's talking about is based on his own personal experience, which is precisely this sense that when you make a big deal out of it, in the way that you describe being tempted to do,

Part from anything else in a very subtle way, it slightly puts you off doing it again in the future, right? Because it's like some part of your mind knows it's going to be a whole thing. And even in the doing of it, just that once, you know, there's a certain sense of being distracted by making sure that the beautiful facade you are putting on for your guess is intact and it's all going well.

Jack King makes this point. He talks in going through this himself and deciding with his wife that they were going to just start inviting people around in the mess that the house was in, to eat whatever they could cook with what was in the cupboards, and finding, firstly, obviously, that it's a lot easier to have people around for dinner more often if you allow yourself to do that. But also, there's a sort of depth of connection that comes from that. And there is something about, not just in the case of dinner parties, but in life in general, there's something about dropping the facade

owning up to the faults and the imperfections, that is very powerful in terms of forging bonds with people. And I write in the book about how even before I encounter Jack King's work, if we were going to have friends around for dinner and I saw like crumbs underneath the fridge or kind of mail stacked on the toaster for no reason or something, I'd be like, oh my goodness, like clean this up and it's awful. We live in a pigsty. But if I ever saw that at somebody else's house,

I wouldn't have that reaction at all. And in fact, I would feel kind of privileged to have been let in to their real lives. Just briefly, one of the things that it also always reminds me of is when I'm writing my email newsletter, you know, I try to offer insights and thoughts and sometimes tips on how to do things in a certain way. The times I get the most positive feedback is when I sort of admit very openly to still struggling with some issue, but I'm offering advice about because there is

a connection in just knowing that we're all in this boat together. And nobody believes that the people you're inviting to dinner don't also have messy houses half the time. We all know this stuff. And so there's a kind of a barrier that we're putting up and a thing we all have to go on believing. And if we just dropped it, we might actually connect better to each other.

Yeah, psychologists talk about this bias that's called the beautiful mess effect, right? So we have this sense that like somebody comes over our house and they see the crumbs on the floor if we're vulnerable, you know, in our professions that people will not like us or judge us or that will distance people from us. People will kind of think we're too messy or something.

But all the research suggests that the recipients of that kind of crumbs on the floor or a little bit of right. They really like it. They feel much more connected to us. They like us better, right? This is the beautiful mess effect is that when we're messy, people actually like it. They find it beautiful. They find it connected. But like our minds assume that we don't have to do this. This came up really recently for me, my friend.

just had a newborn baby, a two-week old baby, and I was coming by to drop off food. And I showed up and they have a two-week old baby, and she was trying to nurse, and I'm just trying to put, and there's stuff all over the place. And they were really embarrassed by this, but I'm like, no, this is cool, right? I'm seeing what the nappies are and getting a real glimpse into what your life is actually like. I felt more connected to him then when I saw his real life than I did.

It was all polished and perfect and pretend. Or if I just had to drop the food off at the door, because they were too embarrassed to let me in. Right. And as someone with a very tidy house in the weeks after a newborn baby has arrived, has possibly got wrong priorities, right? Something's wrong. Something's really messed up. Yeah.

Thanks to Oliver, I now don't mind admitting that my office can be a bit messy, and don't even get me started about the inside of my car. But Oliver's next tip really hits home. Why is it that I can't stop worrying about the future? We'll find out.

Here on the Happiness Lab, we often extol the happiness virtues of mindfulness. Since making the show, I've gotten better at nipping rumination in the bud and taking my mind off worries from the past. But I still struggle a bit with what's around the corner. Because let's face it, the future is really scary. It's full of things I can't control, and events I may not be prepared to deal with. On days when my mind gets going, it can feel like it's all gonna be a total disaster.

Author Oliver Berkman dedicates a decent chunk of his new book, Meditations for Mortals, to our fears about the future. And his tip for dealing with that dread can be summed up by a saying that he was taught as a child. The phrase I think you're referring to is just that we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, right? Which I feel like has been said to me probably thousands of times by the time that I felt like I really understood what a powerful thought

it is, because of course, you know, it's tautological in some sense, you can only cross a bridge when you come to it. I think any of us who are prone to anxiety or worry, I think what worry is, you could even say, is the attempt to sort of think our way over every possible bridge that we could come up to and reassure ourselves that we can successfully traverse it.

But of course you can't ever find that kind of security about things that are in the future because they are in the future. And so I think that explains the sort of compulsive quality of worry right you go around around around hoping this time you'll get the reassurance and you never do because you can't be reassured in that way about the future and when you start to really feel into how.

absolutely inevitable and unavoidable this situation is. I think there is where you can actually let the future be the future a bit more. If you think it's very difficult to cross bridges before you come to them, then you'll keep doing it and struggling. If you think it's impossible, you might unclench a bit and you might relax in the present about the future. And there's a quote I mentioned there from Marcus Aurelius, a great Stoic philosopher and emperor, who says basically,

Don't worry so much about things in the future because you'll meet them with the same inner resources that you meet the things within the present. And I often want to say this to people and to myself as well, right? It's like you got to this point every single time you thought you couldn't handle something in your life. Turns out you could. So there's at least a reason to err on the side of thinking, but the future things you think you won't be able to handle. You actually will.

But also jumping into the future now also messes up these times when like you're really worried or horrified about some future event that's like not even going to happen in the way you think. This came up for me recently. I just recovered from COVID about a couple of weeks ago and I had this new variant where I completely lost my sense of smell.

And on day one of losing my sense of smell, I was like, oh, my God, my smell has gone forever. I'm never going to be able to cook. What can I do with this? I ordered these smell kits online so I could start training my smell. I read all these neuroscience papers on how do you get your smell back if it's gone? And blah, blah, blah.

I complained to my poor producer who's listening right now, but I was never going to get my smell back. And how could I deal with this? And then like two days or three days after my stuffy nose cleared up, it kind of just came back. But like those three days were spent in utter horror, like complete planning. Like my whole life was built around like, what could I do to live life normally given that I'm just never going to be able to smell again? And that was like utterly futile because like it kind of just came back in a way.

But at the time, it felt like the only thing I could do would be to anxiously try to plan for this terrible future. And so any advice for how to stop the rumination and stop the worrying and future planning, what it feels like, like, how do we take the sort of Marcus Aurelius breath and be like, it's going to be all right. Well, I find a lot of

the benefit to me comes from encounter and i know exactly what you talk about that a lot of the benefit does come from pondering these kinds of phrases and part of the idea for this new book of mine is to kind of create a structure in which those kind of perspective shifts can sink on your skin as it were there's another lovely insight from.

the spiritual writer, Michael Singer, who says reality doesn't need you to help operate it, which I think is a very powerful insight. That one resonates with me to feel really called out. Thanks, Michael Singer. In terms of something more practical, I mean, one thing that I think can be surprisingly useful in the context like you talk about there is sort of, I expect this is called something like worry, postponement, but I don't know if it really is, right, which is

place a market in your calendar on your year planet, whatever it is on your phone that in two weeks or three weeks you will allow yourself once more to really like freak out about that thing. So as to just create a little island of calm right now and also to remind you as you will find again and again and again that by the time that that period has elapsed, the thing is no longer an issue and it didn't matter.

I do do this to this day with certain things if I'm sort of particularly concerned about some aspect of parenting or aspect of household finances or something. I'll be like, first of all, if I'm doing this really badly,

And I've been doing it really badly for years. Like two more weeks isn't going to make a difference. So for now, let me just put something in the calendar for two weeks ahead from now and see what it's like if I just postpone it. And it's not perfect. You still worry a bit, but it does create space and it enables you to see two weeks later that actually the thing doesn't feel so bad. I was laughing at those examples because my producer, Ryan, who's on the line, who's often the one that helps me postpone my worry, literally set me a text when I was in this COVID situation where he said,

Why don't we wait at least 24 hours till you're testing negative to forget that you're never going to be able to smell again. But I think this idea of being kind to ourselves when we're in the midst of worry, I think, gets to the last tip that I love so much in your book, which is this idea that we all need to follow the reverse golden rule.

Which is very consistent with a lot of advice we talk about on this podcast so what's the reverse golden rule the reverse golden rule in the version i know comes from the philosophy to land out and it's just the idea that you should not treat yourself in ways that you wouldn't treat others specifically other friends i think.

I've definitely struggled with the whole notion of self-compassion. There's definitely this whole world. I think it's fairly obvious that this is a good thing, but I have always had a sort of an aversion to it that probably is a sign that I really need it because that's what those kind of fringe reactions usually are. But a big moment for me in understanding this was to realize how common it is

to berate yourself in a monologue through the day or whatever it might be, in ways that you just would never dream of doing to a colleague or a friend. You probably get fired to a colleague. There's a quote in the book from the psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, who says, if you met this person in your head in a social context, you just think there was something wrong with them. He says, he would just be boring and cruel, which I think is brilliant.

What I take from this is, for those of us who are averse to any idea that we're being asked to think of ourselves as incredibly special and as the center of the universe and showering ourselves with love, it's like, no, it's just don't be more mean and less friendly to yourself than you would be to other people. And this feels very manageable to me. It's like, oh, OK, yes.

I'm a nice person, basically. I think I wouldn't do that to anyone I cared about. So how about I don't do it to myself too? And of course, it's just a matter of catching yourself in the act of calling yourself an idiot or whatever it is. But I think that idea of just self-friendliness really sort of cuts it down to a manageable concept.

And I love that you've made even this concept of following the reverse golden rule, one that you just called manageable, right? It's not like being perfect to yourself in compassion all the time. It's just like not treating yourself worse than you would treat another reasonable. Right. And the way that you treat other people in a friendly way does not always need to be self-indulgent, right? There are times when you might decline to buy your friend another drink at the end of the night or something like that, right? There are times when firmness is called for. So tough love has a space here.

But it's clearly done for friendly reasons, as opposed to what we're often doing to ourselves, which is just sort of screaming and yelling at ourselves. And another thing we shouldn't scream and yell at ourselves about is the idea of imperfectionism. You earned your book, I think, with one really important tip, which is like, we've just talked about all these ways. You can become more imperfectionist, but you can't take a perfectionist attitude towards your own imperfectionism.

Which I'm glad was a tip that you had in the book because it was one that I needed, because I was ready to jump into perfectionism in the most extreme drill sergeanty way. So any advice for how we can try to be imperfect in imperfect. Well, I think, you know, just seeing it, reminding yourself right. Exactly. It is so easy to take any useful idea.

even ideas which seek to push back against that sort of absolutist perfectionistic stance and turn them into new things that you're going to try to do perfectly and won't allow yourself to fully show up in life for until you've done them. You are now kind of an expert on imperfectionism, but you're the kind of person who has these insecure overachiever tendencies. How have you kind of become an imperfectionism guru but not gone too far with it?

Well, I think I'm often in danger going too far, but I think that the answer to that, such as there is one, is to find ways in your life to keep returning to these ideas and this material. So not to self-promote too much, but the structure of meditations for mortals is a four-week structure with a day's chapter for each.

Day of that 28 year period is designed to feed into that to counter the risk of thinking that this is something that you can get once and for all. And as you say, right at the end, I say, don't actually expect to completely transform your life in four weeks. If you've been following what we're saying, I hope you understood this point. That was not the goal. Another aspect of this for me that I think is really important in my life is just any form of journaling, right? So morning pages is the one habit that has really stuck with me for decades.

Now, not because I decided I was going to do it every day and mark it off on a schedule, but because it was so useful for me that I just naturally wanted to do it. So I never have to sort of make myself do that sometimes, especially since becoming a parent. I don't necessarily get the opportunity to do it, but that's a different point. And anything way or just sort of reflecting your thoughts back to yourself in that way, to me has the effect of sort of keeping you honest, keeping you on a straight line here.

and making you realize when you are running away with the idea of, oh, this is a new thing you're going to make into a perfect thing. Even that is almost too much, right? Or even there, I don't want to give people the idea that if they just do morning pages every day, it's sorted. I am deliberately attempting anyway to sort of constantly pull the rug from under this notion that there's a system that will do it for you. And then you get to not really show up. It's precisely working the muscle of not doing that and coming back and back and back to the real messy imperfect.

reality that we're always in. Everybody's a work in progress, I suppose. Absolutely. And whatever happens, we'll meet that moment and that moment and then that moment.

I think that's a nice and comforting sum up of life. It's a series of moments that we'll meet, much as we've handled the moment that just passed. We'll never be perfect, we'll always be messy, but we'll be okay. In fact, if we can embrace imperfection, I think we might even be more than just okay. I think we might just wind up becoming happier.

So that's your first how-to guide in this new season. And just to recap, here are Oliver's tips one more time. First, you gotta do things. Don't get stuck in that perfectionist fantasy-planning phase. Dive in and get going. Tip number two, fight back against productivity debt. You don't need to justify your existence by getting through some huge to-do list.

Tip number three is to remember that there's a cost to information overload. So resist the urge to stockpile all the knowledge possible and the urge to care about everything. You've got to just let some important things go. Tip number four is to reject the urge to always hold ass stuff. Shoot for 80%.

and remember the benefits of scruffy hospitality. Tip number five, let the future be the future. There are lots of bridges we'll cross when we get there. Tip number six, a little self-compassion goes a long way. And the final tip, number seven, is not to bring a perfectionist attitude towards imperfectionism. And so our next how-to episode will build on what you've just heard. It's a guide on how to be enough. That's all next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.