I Choose...Micro-Moments of Joy with Liz Moody

You're listening to I Choose Me with Jenny Garth. Hi, everyone, welcome to I Choose Me. This podcast is all about the choices we make and where they lead us. My guest today is someone that is using her platform to have insightful conversations in the wellness space, and she is not shying away from opening up about the things that she's overcome. She's the author of one hundred Ways to Change Your Life and is the host of the Liz Moody podcast that I was recently a guest on. So

Oh, my gosh, ed so much fun.

You are so open and so honest and so vulnerable and so helpful. I just feel like you're so adept at taking stories from your life and turning it into wisdom to share with other people.

Well, I'm glad. Oh my gosh. Let's see for our listeners who might not be familiar, I want to go back to your early years. Want to start there, if that's okay. In your book One Hundred Ways to Change Your Life, you talk about that when you were I think two years old, your mother was in a serious accident and that had sort of this deep ripple effect on your life, and your parents ended up getting divorced, and you said that that accident made you aware that

It's so interesting because I didn't really have the insight at that age.

Of course I was two years old, right.

But one day my mother was there, and then the next day she was gone, and she was gone for months and months and months that she spent in a coma in the hospital, and at one point they were going to transfer her to the kind of place where they're like, you're never going to wake up from this, and my dad had to fight to trying to keep her alive and then she went to a rehab facility, and the next time I saw her, she was so

Do you think that you developed like a fear of abandonment, because I know when my dad got sick and I was young, I was like twelve, and he got really sick, and like you just said, he kind of came back from that a different person, and at that point, I feel like I lost something so vital to my life. Did you feel that way.

Yeah, And my relationship with my parents, both of them, was so impacted by that. They got divorced as a result of this accident, And it really was that one pebble that's thrown into the lake, that has this ripple effect that spreads out over your entire life. And I definitely think I still to this day have fears of abandonment, of letting people love me completely, of trusting that people will be there, whether it's by their own volition or something completely out of their control.

Yeah, it really does impact you for the rest of your life.

It really does.

And we're learning so much about attachment styles. I actually had doctor Judy ho in my podcast, and she is a psychologist who specializes in attachment styles. And I went into the podcast thinking I was anxiously attached, which I think a lot of people who struggle with anxiety or like, oh I'm anxious, I must be anxiously attached. And the episode is the process of me realizing I'm actually avoidantly attached, which was really interesting for me, and I think a

I think I might be avoidantly attached.

You should have just taught me something.

You'll have the same episode arc is Mine where you're like, you just.

Basically described, yeah, what growing up with that kind of when you have that break as a young girl and your mom and dad are left in some capacity or that's how you saw it one hundred percent.

And I also just internalized so young that the world wasn't safe. So a lot of my process of rebuilding my sense of resilience and my sense of self has been around making myself feel safe in myself, making myself feel like I can take care of myself and I'll be okay no matter what happens. And I really had to actively work to build that perspective.

Yeah, yeah, because we don't know that we can turn to ourselves.

No, we don't. It's crazy.

I have this tip in my book that's do a resilience practice.

Essentially.

We've all heard about gratitude practices. There's so much incredible researchund it, but I think a resilience practice is really cool, which is just reminding yourself of all of the times in the past that you've been resilient, that you've been faced with hard things and you've gotten through it and maybe even gotten through it better.

I think sometimes when these.

Overwhelming things pop up, were like, oh my gosh, how am I going to survive this? And it's like, well, you've survived before, not one time, not ten times, but hundreds of times before, and that has made you the person that you are today, and sometimes seen it all written out in a list is a really stark reminder of that.

I love what your message is. I love that you are interested in helping people who have, you know, similar issues that you have. I think that you know you're younger than me, and I did not have any of this figured out when I was your age, so it's so just refreshing and it lights something for me that you are able to glean these messages and these these lessons out of life and share them with other people. So I just think that what you're doing is awesome.

I felt like at one point, So I went through a multi month period where I was a gorophobic and I would essentially have panic attacks whenever I left the house, and I felt so many different ways. I felt like I could justify my situation. I remember laying there with my computer propped up next to me in bed and being like, well, I have YouTube, I can send emails to people like this could be a nice life, and kind of almost validated that I didn't ever need to go outside again.

I also felt horrifically depressed.

Also, at times I felt so uncomfortable inside of my skin because of my anxiety that I wasn't sure that I wanted to survive longer.

Because that discomfort.

The idea of facing that discomfort for the rest of my life felt completely untenable. So it was a real range of things. And it's one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about sharing these things. I think people and I'm sure this happens to you to an even more extreme degree. But people see my books, they see me doing glamorous things because the podcast, they see me on TV and they're.

Like, Wow, that's so cool.

And I want to be like, this is not where I started. I started unable to get out of bed. And when I was unable to get out of bed, I would look up interviews of celebrities with anxiety and I'd be like, look, if Amanda Seifried can go on Jay Leno and have a panic attack, then I must be able to go to the grocery store someday. So if I can be that story for even one person who is listening to this or who engages with my work in anyway, it will feel worth it.

That's beautiful. I want to ask you, what do you think was the tipping point for you? Like, how did you get to not wanting to leave your house and having those feelings?

There was a number of different factors. I had a seizure when I was traveling in Brazil by myself, and I think I had a lot of PTSD about what was happening in my body after that. But it was during my party phase of life. I was doing a lot of drugs, I was traveling around a lot, and I didn't attribute it to that. So I would sit down, I remember on the curb a lot, and think I

Really, really really long time.

The seizure was drug induced and anorexia induced. And I also didn't want to admit myself that I was doing enough drugs or had enough of an eating disorder to cause that type of thing. So I had a general sense of lack of safety in my body that I wasn't dealing with in any way, that I was just pushing away, pushing away, pushing away. And then my now husband and I moved to England, he got into a graduate school program, and I was so excited about it.

I considered myself a world traveler.

I was like, I'm going to be sophisticated and glamorous in living this European life. And I really really struggled almost from.

The get go. I had a really hard time.

Building community, and my world just became so isolated, and it really underscores the importance of community in our life. Not having that community was the tipping point for me where my world just got smaller and smaller and smaller, and then the outside world got scarier and scarier and scarier. And now there's incredible research to back that up. The world's longest study on health and human happiness. It came

Real way because at that time, you just had that relationship with your now husband.

With my now husband, and that was beautiful and wonderful. But he was off at grad school all day. London also is very spread out as a city, so he'd go to grad school almost an hour away, and he'd invite me to come hang out with his grad school friends, but it was over an hour.

Away on the tube.

And I regret a lot of my choices at the time. Honestly, I wish I had understood the importance of community more and spent more time prioritizing that.

But I didn't know. I didn't know how huge that was.

And how are you feeling today with it all? Like you seem like a completely different person, but maybe you still struggle internally. I don't know.

I am a completely different person, and I'm so grateful for that. I genuinely cannot overstate that I had panic attacks when I left the house. I tried to go grocery shopping once and I abandoned my basket at the grocery store because I could not handle waiting in the checkout line. And now I fly all over the country. I get to host an incredible podcast, I get to write incredible books. I go on live TV, which I still find incredibly nerve wracking. That's like a different type

That's good, you've learned what the triggers are. Yes, yep, yeah.

But I also think it's important to say, and I think you said this when you're on my podcast as well, that it's not like a oh my gosh, I'm better thing, you know. And I don't want to promise like, oh, your anxiety just will all go in and you won't ever have to think about it again.

It's a ongoing.

Front of mind thing for me. I have a tip in my book that's called find Your Why, and the idea is that in the health and wellness world, we're often stacking our routines and spending all this money and we don't even know the reason why we're doing that. We're just doing it because some influencer told us to do it, or we read about it in some book,

My anxiety on a day where I do move my body in the morning.

And I've figured that out for myself and now I'm deeply protective of that time.

That's such a good thing. What about when you're traveling though, Like, it's when I'm traveling like this last month, I was home maybe five days out of the whole month, and I was so hard for me to stay on my routine of wellness and taking good care of myself and working out in the mornings and doing all the things. Are you able to manage it when you're traveling so much?

I have a travel wellness routine and then I have a home.

Oh okay, you do.

I love.

So they differ from each other, but it also takes the decision fatigue out of it because I'm not like, Oh, I'm traveling, what am I going to do? I'm like, no, I'll just go to my travel wellness routine.

Wait, what's what's your travel well I need to know.

So I have online workouts that I love to do. I like Megan Roup the sculpt Society. She has these workouts that are like fifteen to thirty minutes. You can choose and you can do them in a hotel room and you get a pretty good workout in or in an airbnb. Sometimes I'll go to the hotel gym if it has a nice gym, But I do that first thing in the morning when I wake up. I also always travel with purely Elizabeth oatmeal or what is it called seven spoons or something like that. They have a

So if I'm starting the day with a.

Croissant, I will never feel as good mentally for the rest of day the croissants for later in the day.

Oh my god, I've had my.

Protein bad advice. This is so good. I travel also with my protein items, all my powder, and I always get stopped at the chef airport.

Yeah, for sure, but.

It's dry and you can bring it on. I've never gotten it taken away from me. They'll always just kind of like take it out and look at it.

So I'll do that.

I also, so we have a cold plunge in our house. That was our big pandemic purchase that I love so much. I actually went away on a trip and my husband had bought it when I got home, and it's like, it's.

Like, Wow, this is a big purchase. But I love it. I love it so much.

And cold plunging is really helpful for balancing dopamine levels. But in my travel routine, I'll just take a cold shower, which is what I did before I had the cold plunge, and I'll end my shower on a minute or two of cold, and that's really helpful for again keeping those dopamine levels balanced. I always travel with an eyemass so that I can get good sleep. There's really good research around how any light reaching your eyes impacts your quality

I do that those are like the big, big ones.

I travel with a silk pillowcase, which that's good, that's great, but I like it and I like feeling like my head isn't touching the hotel sheets kind of it gives you that that sense of home a little bit and a little bit less of the grossness of thinking about how many heads have been on those sheets?

Totally. Yeah, When anxiety or panic attacks are something that you are feeling and your partner hasn't experienced it, how do you suggest people make their partners aware and like, what should a partner be doing to support someone who is struggling with anxiety.

It's going to be so different person to person. So I like to do an inventory in my own brain and the times that I've had panic attacks and the times that I felt the most anxious. What have people done that's the most helpful? And that can range from left me completely alone and didn't try to make a conversation with me at all, which is still what I need my husband to do. On planes, I'm a very anxious flyer and he'll like be sitting next to me trying to make jokey comments, and I'm like.

I'm holding the plane aloft with my mind.

I need you to not mess with my concentration in this moment. But sometimes it can be holding you. Sometimes it can be putting ice in your hands or doing one of those little tools or techniques. Sometimes it can be guiding you through a breathing exercise. I think reflecting on what were the moments that were most helpful that other people did, and then almost writing those down so you can have that as a list to give to somebody that that loves you and that wants to be

Mm hmm. That's good. Getting some fresh air, I'm sure helps too.

What helps you? What do you ask people that love you in your life to do?

I well, I don't ask my girls really of much. They they kind of just know when I'm having anxiety or when I'm stressed, and they kind of take care of me a little bit more than a little bit of role reversal. But my husband, I like him to hold my hand and hug me, like just hold me. You know that what you said, like hug me. So it really is like there's something about when my husband touches me. It just calms me down. And I am so thankful for that that it released me.

Yeah, it's it's same with my husband, and I love it so much. But also if you're listening and you don't have a partner, get a lot of those benefits with a pet. I think pets are very underutilized. Oxytocin sources a pet.

Oh, yes, I do. I have a picture of right here.

What's her name? This is a kitty I'm looking at.

Yeah, she's a cat.

I have.

My friends got me this when my book came out. It's my cat reading my book, so you know that she's very smart. Her name is Bella, and which is the most basic name. And there was a period my husband kind of looks like Robert Pattinson and so there was a period during the Twilight Heyday where people thought I'd name my cat Bella. And I was dating a guy who and I haven't seen the movies, but I was people thought I was really into it.

For A that's so funny that you bring up twilight. Oh my god. When you're working and you're in your studio, do your lights give you anxiety? Because I'm really affected by LED lights.

Yeah, that's interesting.

They don't, And I think that's because of what I am doing in my studio. I think if I was doing anything else than I was around these lights, I might feel more sensitive because I am in general sensitive to lights and noises. One of my top anxiety tips is to get noise canceling headphones, particularly the Bose noise canceling headphones. That will completely change your experience of flying, walking down busy streets. It just lowers your cortisol level

Yeah, you're focused on something bigger.

Yeah, it's the human connection. For me, the human connection comes above all else, and I think it's something that the wellness world gets wrong, is we want to prioritize the cold plunging and the supplements and all the things we should be eating, and red light therapy and SNA and all these different things, and we forget that the thing that has been studied the most to help our

The other things in our routine done.

There are so many other things. I feel like every time I turn around, there's somebody else telling me how to live better.

You know well, and that's why I love to find your why.

Figure out your why so then you can always be running that script in your head. Is that something that is relevant to me? Is that a why that I'm looking for? And it's going to change all the time, And this moment, maybe you're looking for whys around your mental health. In another moment, maybe you're looking for whys around your gut health, because that's the thing that's dominating your experience.

Of this world at that time.

M hmm. That's good. In your book, you have a chapter titled Think about Your Deaths, And we all know that death is part of life. But break this down for us, because when you think about death, what do you envision?

M Yeah, this is one of the very first chapters in my book which shows how important I think it is.

I think it's one of the things you should be doing.

The rest of the book is really written in a poo poo platter style, where you can take what you need when you have a certain why. You can work on your relationships, you can work on your longevity, all these different things. But think about your death as something I think all of us should be doing to get a sense of what we want our life to be at any given moment. And this is just a zoom out picturing yourself at eighty ninety one hundred years old.

Is ninety five year.

Old you going to be like, Yes, that was a great use of your time, or are they going to be like I would give anything to be back running on that beach, feeling the sand in my toes, feeling the sun on my skin. And that can be really sense making. Will ninety five year old you'd be glad that you stressed over that work email for two hours and that you beat yourself up for missing a word.

I don't think so.

So I find it really really helpful. And there's another little trick that I learned from doctor Cassie Holmes. We did an episode of the podcast around unlocking how to use our time in ways that will make us happier, and she has this exercise where it's kind of sad, but you think about the amount of times that you have left to do a thing that you love. So, if you have a dog that you love walking, actually, how many times do you have left to do walks

Oh?

Yeah, this is sad, it's sad, but it's really beautiful almost to realize it's so many less than you think, and then you treat them with the reverence that they deserve. This Christmas should matter, because you don't have infinite Christmases. This dog walk you should be present for it.

You should be appreciating it. She told the story on this.

Podcast of a guy who realized how important his dog walks were to him, and he started taking his dog to this beach that she really loved and doing their walks there. And then a few months later, the dog got cancer and ultimately passed away, and he was so glad that he'd done this exercise and that he'd realized the preciousness of those moments before those moments were gone.

Yeah, we get so caught up in doing and thinking and tasking and that you stop thinking about the preciousness of them, and.

We think it's all going to last forever, and it's really really not. It's really not. And I don't say that morbidly. I say that because how beautiful does that make this moment? How beautiful does that make this conversation? How beautiful does that make it? That you can hold your pet, that you can write in your journal, that you can feel the sun on your skin, that you

I think it feels like what you're saying, it's just tapping into gratitude for what you have left, what you have right now.

Gratitude and presence.

I would say, I think I suffer from, and I know a lot of people that I talk to suffer from a real struggle of presence. And there's a lot of factors working against us being present in our lives at this moment, and I think we're all all.

Looking for ways to tap into that presence.

Yeah. So when you say think about your death, you're not saying like, think about how you're going to die?

Hey, what to But no, No, use it as a perspective maker, Use it as a way to help you make decisions. Use it as a way to help you gauge what's important. Use it as a way to help you gauge what matters in life.

Okay, I'll think about my death if you insist. Liz Moody, did you know that my this is just completely off topic. But my husband always when I get like in a mood, you know, he'll say, you're being so rudy Giuliani.

Rudy.

Like he'll say, I'm being rudy. Now it's if I'm in a mood. He'll say, you're being so Liz Moody. Wait, I say your name all the time in our house. I'm feeling Lis Moody right now.

Oh my gosh.

I don't know why. I just had to tell you that.

Have you ever had to die on screen?

Die? Completely die?

I feel like they put you through so much and all of the stuff that you've been I don't think.

I've ever really fully died. Yeah, like I've almost died a million times.

That's interesting.

I always wonder that for actors, like how dying would on screen and tapping into all those emotions would impact how you lived your life.

I've always wondered.

Yeah, can let me know if you ever have a death scene? Okay, I will report back. So you say that finding happiness is such a key part of our mental health. So how do you find your happiness? Like? What makes you happy? And how did you find that? How do you find that on the daily.

I don't think that happiness is a state. I think that what I aspire for is peace, contentment, connection, and I aspire to pepper my days with these little moments. So I've identified the things that make me feel the way that I want to feel, that make me perform the way that I want to perform, and then I sprinkle them throughout my days that I'm not spending my weekdays waiting for my weekends. I'm not cycling in and

I want you to want more things.

So we end up on this perpetual cycle of desire without ever feeling satisfaction. And I take a lot of pains to build that satisfaction into my life. So these micro moments of joy look like I do my Cirque walks every single morning. I love that so much. That's just going for a walk outside as soon as I wake up. That's going to help set my circadian rhythm. But also on those walks, I look for little moments of AWE.

This is a.

Trick that a professor named Dhaker call Wultner, who studies the psychology of emotions, taught me. He's researched AWE and he says his AWE prescription is six minutes a week.

Not very much, but we.

Need to infuse our lives with six minutes a week of AWE. It's going to help our inflammation levels, it's gonna help our happiness, it's going to help our contentment, it's going.

To help our sense of being part of the universe.

So on these cirqualks, I'll look for these tiny little things like, oh, that flower is blooming over there, and I didn't notice that yesterday. I've been noticing around my neighborhood we're starting to get some fall colors, which is really exciting and cool, And it's just having that real sense of presence of looking around, looking at the clouds,

I also like to pepper.

In micro movement throughout the day, which really helps keep my mental health feeling good. And I also like to do micro connections throughout the day. I have literally time put into my calendar where it's like call a friend for ten minutes, go hang out with Zach for ten minutes, so that I just have these little breaks.

It's my husband, he works for You're.

So smart, Liz.

How'd you get so smart?

I have so much knowledge.

I study it. It's been over the course.

I mean, we have two hundred fifty six podcast episodes with the world's leading experts. So I feel like I've gotten so lucky to be able to interview these people and assimilate all of their knowledge and also help people make it actionable.

I think that's a big thing for me.

Is like one thing to have the research, it's another thing to put that into your life other little tricks.

Do you know?

Reading reduces stressed by sixty eight percent in so minutes. That's a big number, sixty eight percent, six minutes. So I love reading, and sometimes if I'm feeling really overwhelmed, I'll just take a fifteen minute break and read some fiction and it feels so completely decadent and it's just fifteen minutes, and then I can get back to the rest of my workday.

That's one of my favorite favorite things. I need you to design my daily calendar.

Send it to me every fifteen minutes. What to do.

Yeah, by the end of the day, I'm gonna be like floating on a cloud.

I do think.

I think calendars are also important, and we don't talk about that enough because we put our meetings, our tasks, are to dos on our calendars, but we don't put the things that are gonna make us feel our best.

If they are still there.

Yeah. Yeah, you're so stressed out by all the to doos. There's not a lot of room left for those moments.

Yeah. So I'm a huge fan.

Put on your calendar, put your meditation on your calendar, put your work out on your calendar, put a phone call to your mom on your calendar. And if you can fit in more than that, great. I'm not saying you have to be so rigid about it, but if you don't carve out the time in the first place, it will likely take last priority and not happen.

I think that's a great thing for people to try. And I know my daughter Luca has talked to me about this too, and help me with this before actually is writing down how I want my day to go, like moment to moment and what I want to do, and just following that for a day or following that for a week and seeing how it changes things, and then thinking, well, I love feeling this good. I'm going to keep doing that, you know, and like I'm going to keep that in my schedule.

Did what did you learn from that time?

I learned that it's better for me to have like a scope of what I want to achieve in a day, and not just the toa dooo's, because I have plenty of those. But yeah, like take a little walk, stretch, go to the kitchen and have a glass of water, like I'm going to add in fifteen minutes of reading because I get for sixty eight percent.

Isn't that wild?

I love that sat so much because reading is also incredible, But it's essentially a meditative exercise. Your attention will drift away, you'll bring it back to the words on the page. Your attention will drift away, You'll bring it back to the words on the page, which is a mindfulness meditation. But you're getting to do it with like a juicy rom com.

I love this. It's so good.

It's amazing.

I mean along that line, sticking to habits is really hard.

Myself one hundred percent.

I mean, I can use the example that I talked about, which was I exercise now for my mental health to illustrate this point. I tried to stick to a workout routine for years and years and years. Everybody told me I should do it, But the reason that I was doing it was because I wanted my body to look a certain way. So I would go to the gym, I would do my workout, I'd lift up my shirt, look at my abs. My abs looked the same, and I was like, what this is bullshit? Like why am

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean I can relate to that because I used to work out for how I looked also, and I would always get frustrated that I wouldn't look the way in my mind I thought I should look when what is in my mind, as you said, is unattainable societally put on us. So now when I work out, I to do it for my mental health and I do it for my physical health. And those are the reasons I drag my ass out of bed at six am, three days a week because it's really important to making

It makes me feel so much better.

I also have two other little actionable tips for sticking to habits that I use a lot. One is a commitment device, So if you have a hard time sticking to something, we are better at keeping commitments when they happen outside of ourselves.

So you can make a.

Wager with a friend where you have to buy them dinner one night if you don't turn in the manuscript to the book that you've always wanted to work on.

You can make a workout date with a friend.

You're going to be so much less likely to disappoint that friend than you are to disappoint yourself. For me, this was another part of my workout journey. I started booking non refundable classes in the morning and because I didn't want to lose that money out of bed, and I will go to the class, and that was really the thing that kicked off me being able to do it on a consistent basis. So commitment devices are really

To stick with it. That's good. Yeah, Okay, well I feel like I've learned even more than when I was reading your book. Did you also give me a box a game? Yeah, Conversation Cards, the conversation Cards. I'm loving your conversation We've been playing them for the last week solid and it's so they're so great.

Thank you.

I am so into conversation. I actually just did an episode of my podcast that's about small talk and how we can all be incredible at small talk and we don't have to be so anxious around it anymore. And I do feel like there's a lot of anxiety around that conversation piece. But we all want to connect, so I like to empower and enable people to do that.

Okay, wait, small talk, how do you do that?

Okay, Well, there's a lot of interesting research.

And first of all, it's a whole it's a whole episode, so definitely a listen episode. But I mean, some of the most interesting research in that episode I found was that we don't we think that we don't like small talk because we're afraid of getting rejected. So we're afraid that we're going to try to talk to somebody and they're not going to want to talk to us.

And then it's all going to be a flopper.

We're going to start to talk to somebody and they're not going to have an enjoyable experience. But study a show, that's not true at all. It's literally true zero percent of the time. So if you get rid of in your head the idea that you are going to be rejected either for the quality of your conversation or for even trying to have a conversation in the first place, studies show that we actually do really like small talk. We think we don't like small talk because we're afraid of being rejected.

But if you remove that element.

And actually are able to survey people after they set up this whole thing on the subway where they like assign certain people to talk to people, it's a really interesting study. But people actually really enjoy small talk, but we're just so afraid of getting rejected that we don't think that we do.

So you're telling me that I like small talk, I don't like to find leave.

According to the research you do.

And it's interesting because it's these little moments of human bonding.

That's so true.

And then I have a little small talk tip that I like, tell tell me I share in the episode, which is okay. So in the Victorian era, if you were like a fancy lady, one of your jobs was to show up at social events armed with conversation. So one of your jobs was to kind of keep abreast of what was happening in the cultural world, in the social world, and the arts world, so that you could have sparkling conversation on hand at any point. And I

So what I'll do before I go to a party or the hair salon where you have to make conversation for like.

Hours, two hours, for so long.

Anytime I'm going somewhere that's going to be a small talk rich environment, I'll literally listen to a podcast that would be interesting to talk about.

I'll read an article.

I'll arm myself with conversation topics intentionally so that when I get to the hair salon, I can be like, oh my gosh, I was listening to this really interesting podcast, what do you think about this? And I go in with those conversations prepared, and you can also use conversation.

Cards to do this.

It can feel a little weird sometimes to break out conversation cards with about your cards, but you can say like, oh, hey, I was doing this conversation card with my husband earlier and we got this long talk about it. What do you think about this? And then you just say a question from a conversation card, and then you're often rolling. It's just about giving you that little initial push, which.

We all want. We're all rooting for that. So people are going to be really receptive.

Okay, I'm gonna try just not trapping.

In your pocket, be a Victorian lady.

Okay, well, yeah, because I kind of can understand what you're saying, Like when I'm in the grocery store line and someone will talk to me and I will connect with them and talk back, like it does feel good.

I think it feels so good, and I think we need it now more than ever, because otherwise we begin to associate our fellow humans with all of the comments and the things that we're seeing online, and that is not an accurate portrayal of human humanity.

Oh my god. Yeah, it's so so important to connect. And I have a tendency to not do that. Like I, I don't like to make eye contact when I'm kind of out in the world because I feel like if I don't make eye contact, there won't be that awkward moment, and then maybe it might be a little different. Because I was wondering.

With me, we're so young, has impacted your ability to have those micro connections in a way, And that makes me, honestly really sad that it interesting side effect of fame that I feel like we don't talk about.

It's true and I but sometimes I break out of it and I do it and it feels good. So I think I should try doing that more. You're so inspiring, Liz Moody.

Thank you, thank you. You are too.

Okay, before I let you go, Liz Moody, what was your last I Choose me moment?

A big I Choose me moment in my life is that I'm an intentional drinker. So I gave up alcohol almost completely about two years ago, and I choose on a pretty regular basis to maintain that choice. I call myself an intentional drinker because I've never struggled with addiction, and so I still have alcohol on the table for myself, which I find really helpful as somebody who used to struggle with eating disorders and restriction and that type of thing.

It was right after.

Cigarette smoking, which blew my mind because I think in my head I was very much like, of course, if I was going to choose to smoke a cigarette, of course that would be causing cancer. But when I was throwing back drinks most nights every week, I wasn't making any cancer connection there. So once I read that research,

And it's been.

I have felt like I'm giving up anything. I felt like I have gained so much, and I wish we could switch the conversation around it to be more about what are we gaining versus what are we losing. I'm gaining back a sense of vibrancy on all of the days that I was hungover. I'm gaining back a sense of energy both the nights that I was going out drinking and the hungover days. I'm gaining so much connection because I remember the conversations that I'm having with my

I love that. That's a really good I choose new moment. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. You're just You're so lovely and I love talking to you.

Dittoh, right back at you, Liz Moody. I'm gonna always call you your full name.

By the way, it's a good name. I like it.

Yeah, bye bye oh. That was such a great conversation with Liz Moody. I hope you all check out her book and her podcast. Be sure to listen to the episode that I was on. We had so many giggles. As we continue to choose ourselves each week, I want you this week to take some advice from Liz Moody.

We post great.

Content, So open up the show notes now and go click follow, leave us a review on whatever platform, and make sure to use that hashtag I Choose Me. I will be right here next week. I hope you choose to be here too,