Brigid Schulte

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Bridget Shulty, an award winning journalist

for the Washington Post and Washington Post Magazine. She was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize and is also a fellow at the New American Foundation. Bridget is a regular contributor to The She The People blog and has written for a Style, Outlook and other outlets. She writes about work, life issues and poverty, seeking to understand what it takes to live the good life across race, class, and gender. Her recent book is called Overwhelmed, Work, Love,

and Play When No One Has the Time. Here's the interview, Hi Bridget, Welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Your book is called Overwhelmed, How to Work, Love, and Play when No One Has the Time? And I enjoyed the book a lot. There's a lot of really interesting things in it that we'll talk about. And I certainly, I think suffer from a lot of the things that you describe in the book. So I'm looking forward to talking about it me too, I believe me.

I uh, I'm a work in progress. Yeah. I would say it's safe to assume that you wrote the book, you did a lot of research, and still being overwhelmed is something that comes and goes, I would assume in your life. I guess the thing that I really learned is overwhelmed doesn't ever go away. You know. There's just a lot of forces out there that kind of propel us to overwork and overdo, and technology keeps us on

all the time. So it really becomes much more how you look at it and how you manage it, and what you choose, what you choose to think about, what you choose to do. Well, let's use that is a place to transition into the parable. Um our show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves. And in that parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you how that parable applies to you in your life and in the work that

you do. Well. I have to tell you I first heard that parable a couple of years ago and it really really hit me. Um when I was writing this book, or getting ready to write this book, I think It was really the first time that I was able to kind of step off this treadmill of just being constantly busy and on the go and just filling my life

with stuff and doing and going. And I had that moment to reflect a little bit, and I realized that so much of my life had been driven by fear um And you know, I have often woken up in the middle of the night with anxiety and panic. And I read that that parable of the wolves, and and it just really it just hit me how much I had been feeding the wolf of fear. And it doesn't get you where you want to go. Your book is called Overwhelmed, and you refer to something as the overwhelmed.

Can you tell us what you mean by that when you say the overwhelm? Yeah? I decided to You know, when you write a book, you can you kind of

get to make up your own rules. So I decided to turn it into its own noun because I just wanted to describe what just felt like a state of being, not just not just that I was experiencing, but so many of the people that I was interviewing or or talking to, our reaching out to were feeling this just this kind of um almost this feeling like you are underwater and you are swimming against the tide and you are swimming as fast as you can, and you're sort

of underwater and you're kind of out of breath, and it's just this, this this feeling that life had become almost unmanageable, almost unbearable in a certain way. That that's why I decided to create its own, its own noun to to kind of refer to the state of being. Really, one of the things you said in the book is that this this goes for stress as well as the overwhelmed. That it's not necessarily what's happening, how busy we are, or what the stress in we are under. It's what

we think about what's happening or how we feel. How overwhelmed do we actually feel versus how much are we actually doing. Business has really become a badge of honor in a way, we show our status. So there are these external pressures that keep that sense of overwhelmed spinning and churning. And so where the choice comes in is is recognizing taking the time to to recognize, Wait a minute, is this what I really believe? Is this what I really want to be doing? Is this what I think?

Or am I just automatic responding to these external forces. So it is a measure of of taking that kind of a pause, if you will, to get a little bit clearer about just about the circumstances and where you

are and the choices that you're making. But I think that one of the things that was very powerful as I was doing the research and looking into time and time use research is that really it's our perceptions of time, our perceptions of stress, our perceptions of our lives that are in many ways much more real than than what somebody from the outside looking in on us might might

think our lives are about. And there's so much really fascinating research that say, for instance, stress it's the perception that it's really bad for you that leads to so many sort of bad outcomes. In one of the studies that I was looking at, I spent some time at the Yale Stress Center to try to understand what stress

and overwhelmed was doing to our brains. And what they found is that if you'd been through stressful events but also had the perception that you were very stressed out, your prefrontal cortex, the gray matter in there um this is our sort of executive part of our brain, that that that that structure was fully smaller in volue than people who did not feel so stressed out, it did

not have that same perception. So so I think that's two things that that's really important to remember that there are these external pressures for overwhelmed uh, and that it really takes some time to kind of step out of that, to get some clarity, to make different choices so that

your perceptions can become clearer and change about your own life. Yeah, I think there's so much in there, and I think we've probably all had the experience of having very similar days as far as everything that had to happen and there being a lot packed into it. In some days we feel like, oh, Okay, I've got this under control. In other days it just feels insane and we're really you know, and it's it's that that is all perception.

But it's always interesting to me, how, you know, perception is one of those things that we have some degree of control over and then at some point, you know, external circumstances also are it's that combination between the two that is challenging. Again, one of those moments where it was only in hindsight that I got some perspective on it.

You know, a couple of years ago, UM, my daughter was taking a ballet class in the afternoon at four thirty, which for most working parents is an impossible time it's for to take your child to a dance class. So I had hired an after school babysitter high school, a high school student, and she called me at the last minute to say she couldn't take my daughter to ballet class. So, without even thinking I was really stressed out. I was

working on a big story on deadline. Um, without a second thought, I just I just immediately assumed I had to take my daughter to ballet class. And I left work and I rushed home, and I'm stressed out of my mind, and I've got my BlackBerry in one hand, and I'm making phone calls and I'm yelling at her to get her, you know, get her tights on, and let's go, let's go, let's go. And I drop her off and we're getting a big fight on the way

down there. And it was only in hindsight that a friend asked, It's like, well, would your babysitter couldn't go,

Why did you think you had to go. And it was really in kind of taking that moment to sort of take a breath and step off the treadmill, that I realized, you know, I was so I had been such a guilty working mother, feeling so guilty that I worked, and that I was, you know, not giving my kids this perfect stay at home mom childhood that I just couldn't even bear the thought of her missing a ballet class because I was working. I mean, I was I

couldn't even see clearly. And uh and so I guess that's what I mean by you know, sometimes we don't even have perspective on why we're doing things. And it was only in hindsight that I thought, you know, she could have missed that class. You know, I didn't have to take her. I am not a bad mother because I work, you know, And and sometimes we just get so busy and we just get so overwhelmed we don't take the time to you know, to get that perspective, dude,

to think more clearly about about our lives. Yeah, and I'd like to explore some of that a little bit later on, around that ambiguity about Okay, I feel like I have to do all these things, Um, I was struck though, with that idea of business as a social status, because once upon a time, being idle was considered the thing. If you if you could be idle, that was social status. It was only the you know, the poor who worked so hard. And it's interesting that that's flipped so much

on its head. It's crazy, isn't it. I mean, that was a really fascinating thing. You know, the whole history of of the of leisure, if you will, throughout human history. That was always throughout human history what you aspired to. Um, the Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorston Veblen, which is sort of the classic on leisure theory. You know, it sort of went back to Barbarian times that once we figured out how to survive, uh, you know, and you had enough food and you had shelter and you

had clothes. Um, you know, once we figured out how to survive, then our society is very quickly stratified. And the higher your status, the further away from that kind of drudgery, the drudge work of daily life. You got you know, from farming and from a house cleaning and from cooking. And those tended to be high status men who were the leaders and the priests and the warriors, and you know, you weren't always at war, So when you weren't at war, the warriors got to hang around

and play games. And you know, the priests weren't always you know, saying prayers, so when they weren't, they got to sit around and think great thoughts. And the philosophers the same way. And that's sort of throughout human history. The higher your status, the less you kind of quote

unquote drudge work you did. And uh, and that's never what that was never true for women, which was so interesting that if women had kind of leisure time, it was all as a reflection of the men in their lives because their father had high status, or a brother or an uncle, or a how spend or a son or as one woman said, well that's why one researcher said, well,

that's why women used to become nuns. That was that was the way they could get leisure time and away from the drudge work in a society sort of a socially acceptable way. I mean, I don't want to you know, I'm sure people had very honest vocations as well, but I do think that was sort of a funny comment. Um, but but you're right, in the last century that's completely

turned on its head. In the mid centuries, in the nineteen fifties, there were people who were looking at how productive we were after World War Two, looking at all of the income gains, and they just figured, boy, we have got it wired by the you know, by now, but the you know, the nineteen nineties, they were predicting we'd work maybe four days a week, maybe six months a year, that we'd all retire at thirty eight, you know, that we would have these long lives of leisure, and

people were some people were heralding it, saying, this is great. So you know, everybody can explore their passion and a hobby and you know, even the lowliest carpenter can become a painter if they feel like it. And others were really worried, like, oh my goodness, what are all of the great unwashed masses going to do with all of this free time on their hands? And they were ears, I don't I think we've answered that, right, right, so right,

but it is interesting. So now you know, you've got billionaires who jet around the world and they're you know, they're doing great things there. You know, malaria solving world problems. But nobody is nobody is bragging about sitting around idly. You know, that's not the people that we look up to anymore. Well, what I thought was interesting in that is, I think it's there's I think there's some clear reasons

maybe why some of that has happened. I think as for some of us, work becomes, um i'll call it higher up, you know, higher up the drudgery scale. Right, it's less drudgery, and it's you know, there's some real enjoyment and love in it. Those things blend blend together. Um. The other thing that and you you sort of presented both sides of this argument, some people saying, look, you know, sort of back to that um, you know, idle hands.

People who are idle aren't happy. And then the flip side being well we're just compulsively busy, and what's that what's the middle ground? But you said that in the book that there is um that a lot of people don't understand what leisure really is. That's so true. I didn't, you know, when I first started working on the book, I sort of thought, you know, leisure was a waste

of time. You know, I was very work identified you know, I think that most of us in the United States are We're a very work focused culture, you know, and we do believe in hard work. That is sort of part of the American way, if you will. Um. And so there's this feeling that somehow you're kind of a whimp or a little bit of a woos if you take time off for if you take vacation or um, you know that you can't hack it or what did Margaret Thatcher say something like, you know, sleep is for whimps?

Or you have t shirts that say all I'll sleep with it when I'm dead. And the idea is, you know, you're working, and you're right, a lot of our jobs are what the Greek philosophers would have considered leisure, you know, science and writing and uh, you know, it's not like we're all out in the fields toiling all day. So you're right. Our our jobs have changed, Our work has changed, the nature of it has changed. It's much more engaging and intellectually stimulating and fun and and and pat we

get passionate about it. So it does make it harder to pull away from it. Um. But leisure really, it's so it's so interesting. I read this one book that sort of opened my eyes. It's called Leisure the Basis of Civilization and it was by this German philosopher and I picked it up. It's like, what, what's he talking about? But he made the argument that it was really only in leisure time when you are away from the getting and the doing and the earning and you have kind

of a timeless state, if you will. You know, the Phy College would call it flow, when you're kind of out of the hurly burly and the grind. Uh. You know, that's really when art has been created, or philosophy, um literature, great discoveries, it's all been in moments of leisure. You know. When you look at the Right brothers, their work was at a busy bicycle shop in Ohio. They closed up their shop and they went to North Carolina and in

their playtime, in their leisure, they invented the airplane. So, I mean it was a it was a real eye opener for me. And so you know, people have asked, well, what is leisure time? And I think the best, you know, the best definition came from a leisure researcher I spoke with who has spent a career looking at leisure, and he said it's first of all, leisure is really completely unique to the individual. It's leisure is what leisure is to you. Whatever it's going to refresh your soul, whatever

gives you kind of juice in the moment. And he said for it to feel to feel like true leisure, you need two qualities. One you have chosen this activity or or or not an activity. And to you have control over the time. And when you have those two elements and you've chosen it and it's something you want to do and it's it's giving you joy or refreshing you,

then that's leisure. Yeah. What I think is so interesting is how for many of us something that we will allow, let me say this, I will allow something that is leisure to blend that line into work. Like I enjoy it, I'm loving doing it, I'm controlling the time, and then

the pressure starts and I should do more of it. Well, if I did this, then it would be you know, with music, I had to really take a step back for me with playing guitar and take it totally as a enjoyment leisure thing instead of thinking it needed to lead somewhere or something had to happen. It's so American, though, isn't it. Listen. Oh god, I totally I totally get that.

There was a several years ago I learned how to play the I or is learning how to play the Irish harp and it was beautiful and I loved it and it was so fun. But in the back of my mind it was so weird. I had this bizarre pressure, boy, I better get good so that I can cut a c D. And I'm like, where is that coming from. You're not a musician. But it's like, you know, we

do have it yet, that American idol thing again. It's like, oh, if I'm going to do something, I gotta be like I gotta be amazing at it, rather than boy, I really like the sound of this Irish harp and I'm just going to play it for fun. And we have a hard time in the United States doing things just because they're fun. You use a term in the book called cantin himinated time. I love that term. That was another revelation. It's so funny. I writing this book was

sort of like the biggest gift. I got to basically

report our modern lives. You know, what a what a great gift, and I was talking with it's a it's a term that time use, researchers and sociologists use, and basically what that means is that when you're so in your head, when you're so caught up in your thoughts and you're worrying about the future, and you're uh, you know, ruminating about the past, and you're going over your to do list and you're thinking about all the stuff you gotta do and how busy you are and how busy

you should be, and how much more you've got to do. You're kind of everywhere and nowhere, you're not in the moment, and it contaminates your time. You could be on a bike ride, you could be at dinner with your family, you could be you know, even on vacation. But what's going on in your head is really what your reality is. And if if what's going on in your head is like the toilet running of thoughts, then it's completely polluted and contaminated your time. And I love that because that

was so it was so apropos. I have plenty of instances where I've looked up and you know, you don't know, you don't even remember, like how you've driven someplace because you've been so lost in your thoughts. And for me again with the you know, talk about the two wolves usually feeding the one that was anxious, worried and afraid. So, um, that's why I love that term. I think it's it's

a it's one that we can all unfortunately relate to. Yeah, until I heard that from you, I used to refer to contaminated time as any time I had to spend with Chris over here. But now I know it's a poor guy. He's not on Mike, so I take advantage of it. But now I relate with that so much that it's that it's that not being where you are

at all. And I'm not one of those people that I think sometimes we overplay it like mindfulness, like we should be aware of everywhere, Like you know, sometimes driving home, it's perfectly good place for me to be thinking about something else. I don't need to be paying attention to

every you know, little spot on the road. I don't think, right, I think that there's a place for being in your thoughts, But I think what what you said there is when it's those other moments that we're trying to do something relaxing or we're trying to be with our family or do something fun, in our mind is just always on

what we still have to do. Yeah, And I do think that's a really important distinction though, that you make, that there are there are a couple of different states of mind that can be beneficial and you know, and that you can kind of choose to flip to. You know.

One of the things that I try to do. I mean, I still get lost in my thoughts and anxiety and worry, and I would say, what I what I'm getting better at is interrupting it, you know, stopping it, stopping the kind of the crazy stupid busy train, you know, stopping those negative thoughts and just saying, Okay, I see you, there you are again. Um now I'm going to think about something else. So so I try not to spiral down,

you know, like I used to. But I think it's really important that mindfulness is a very powerful tool and it's uh, it does amazing things. I was just talking to one of the Harvard neuroscientists who uh, you know, put some people through an eight week long mindfulness based stress reduction program and then compared what happened to their brains against a group of people who did nothing, nothing different for eight weeks, and she found changes in five

different regions of their brains, which was fascinating. They got they got thicker, you know, and it was about attention and um, kind of your self identity, your sense of self, I mean, really important regions of the brain. So mindfulness is I think a really important tool that we can all learn to use. But it's not like like you say, it's not a state that that's particularly natural to humans.

And there also is a really good argument for spacing out, for getting lost in your thoughts, you know, as long as you weren't ruminating and kind of going down the going down the drain of negative bit. But you know, there's really great research again about being idle, spacing out, doodling, daydreaming, that that's often the precursors for insight creativity, and and that's not mindfulness. It's actually a different brain system that gets lit lit up. So you actually those are two

really great states of mind. So, yeah, be mindful and then we don't feel like being mindful space out right, Yeah, I think there's a you know, there's a place for everything, right or that middle ground. Um, you said one thing in the book, and this just blew me away. And it's one of those things that I instinctively like want to debate because I'm like, that can't be your but and I'm sure it's from a study, but that the average high school kid today experiences the same level of

anxiety as a fifties psychiatric patient. That blew my mind as well. And that does come from a study. Um, you know, that's when when you look at the research about anxiety and what sort of what all of this dizziness and over work is doing to us, it's really really quite sobering. The World Health Organization did a global mental health survey a couple of years ago, and the United States they rated as the most anxious country in

the world. I mean, that's that's astounding. Where the richest country where you know, the leaders of the free world, and they determined that in our lifetimes, fully one third of us will be so anxious as to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. So at that point, you really do you have to you have to step back and say, you know it's not you know, yes, there are individual tools and strategies you can use, but there is something in the water going on here when you've got that

level of anxiety going on. Yeah, you know in a country like ours, Yeah, the cultural pressure is absolutely there. Um. You talk about ambiguity in the book. Explain what you mean by ambiguity, and then what are some strategy jus for dealing with it? Yeah, ambiguity is tough. You know.

It's sort of like the way that people have described it as sort of like you you're kind of fighting a battle that's kind of no win because you're sort of like, well if this, uh, you know, it doesn't really I don't know if I want this one to I don't know if I want that one to win. You're not really committed fully to anything. Um, And you know, boy, I have struggled with that a lot in my life, just to kind of I don't know if this is the right thing. I I don't know if I should

be doing something else. Am I doing the right thing with my life? What about this? You know? And it can really pull you down and it's just gonna leave you sort of in this kind of paralyzed state. And so honestly the best way to deal with it is just to recognize, I don't know, you know, the answers are not clear, I am uncertain. I'm going to choose one thing and just go with it, and you know what, and it may be the wrong choice, and I'm just

gonna make it anyway. It's almost like we're too paralyzed to make a choice because we're so afraid it's going to be the wrong on one um, you know, or there are two good choices and you honestly don't know which one to do to choose, And I think living like that, living in that state of ambiguity can be very painful, uh you know, um, And it takes a lot of energy and kind of SAPs you. I can say that from personal experience, and so sometimes it's just like, well,

I don't know, I'm gonna make a decision. I'm going to go with it and and if it's the wrong one, you know that, revisit it and make another decision down the road. And I think that ambiguity is in a lot of ways, is a result of I think what what should be considered a positive life. Right The one that I run into all the time is like there's not enough time to do all the things that I care about. That's ultimately probably a good problem, right, You

know that I've got enough things to care about. My life is full enough that I have to make that decision, but boy, it does become very painful. And I think you're you know, I think your point is right sometimes just making a decision. The other thing, I back to your thing about ballet classes, to try and get things in perspective like you can't you can't be everywhere or I can't be everywhere all the time for everyone. That's

just the reality, and that's okay. And um, we'll talk about time management or time plan in a minute, because I think that's You've got some good stuff in there that I was very similar to what I do with people I'm I'm working with in a one on one way. So I was glad to glad to see that. But I think sometimes it's having a wider time perspective. So if I look at just tonight, you know, my my

daughter's ballet versus work, that's very difficult. But if I broaden that horizon out a little bit and I try and keep those things balanced over a broader time horizon, it becomes a lot easier to do because I can make I've got more chances to make adjustments and balance things out. But I tend to go right to that minute, like, Okay, these three things that need done right at the same time.

I can't do it. Someone is screwed. This sucks. Whereas if I, you know, again, broaden it out over the next month, I can probably make sure everybody's taken care of to some degree, right. I think having that broader perspective is so important. You know, we do tend to think I got to get all of this done, or if we think, you know, the only way to have balance, if you will, is to do work and have time for my family and play every day, and that's just

really not realistic. There are going to be days when you know, when work is going to take precedence and there's some deadline or there's something going on that's just going to be very heavy work. There are going to be other days when your family is going to take precedence and a kid is sick or you've got to go to a doctor's appointment. That's just the way it's

going to be. There's gonna be this kind of constant ebb and flow, and you know there are going to be hopefully days that you will take to play and put everything else on on the on the back burner that that that might be on the weekend. Um. So it's really much more a sense of how do you integrate these different parts of your life. And one of the things that's helped me is, again, like you, if I look on a day to day basis, I'll feel

like a failure because I won't get to everything. But if I broaden it out, I started looking at my calendar over a month and I was like, oh, I did I did make time for that. Oh look, I did make time for that, you know. And I do think that that helps you, um to kind of to see that there are a lot of different moving pieces in your life. You can make time for more of them when you have that bigger perspective. But I think the other thing that's important again, it goes back to,

like again, having to make choices. Being busy sometimes is not a function of doing a bunch of stuff we don't like. Sometimes it's doing a lot of stuff we do like. And if we don't want to be so busy, then we have to make some choices that some things might need to wait, or sometimes some things you might just not do it at all. I think we all in this culture, and I'm guilty of it certainly. How are you doing? Busy? Busy, busy. What I've tried to start doing is get away from it as a complaint

because I'm clearly choosing it right. Like I mean, I've recognized that with myself, like I put, I keep stacking things into my life that I want to do and that I care about, and I just feel like it's not fair. Actually just it's it's back to that perception thing. When I feel like it's being done to me, I'm so busy, then I get stressed and when I go, no, you know what, I'm making this choice. I chose to take this on. I chose to take that on. I don't have to. Then I get I'm able to breathe

a little bit deeper. But I definitely do do it to myself. Um, And I think I must prefer it that way because I keep doing it well, you know, and that's something that only you you can answer. But but sometimes, you know, I think we do keep doing it that way because it's just what we've done for so long, you know, We're used to it, and I think a lot of us don't know what we do being idle with or with leisure time. I mean I

still struggle with that. You know, there was a study not long ago that some people preferred receiving an electric shock rather than just being alone in a room with our own thoughts. So I mean that's kind of crazy. But we do live in a culture where, um, kind of taking the foot off the gas pedal at full throttle is really an uncomfortable thing to do. Yeah, yeah, it is. And I think it's it's back to that, particularly if your leisure activities tend to be, you know,

active ones. I've I've just kind of learned through experience over life that I am one of those people that being left too idle has not proven to be good for me in the past. Um that and and I think everybody's a little bit differently. I've just kind of learned that about myself. But the key is to be able Can I live that way without stressing myself out. One of the things that you talk about, and I

first learned this, I think from from Stephen Covey. Um, and you talk about putting the big pieces of your calendar in first. And I think the analogy that I read that he had, although I think a lot of people have heard it is that idea of if you have like a jar, and um, if you're trying to plan your time, and you you put the big rocks in and it seems like it's full, but then you can put all the gravel in it still fits in.

And then you can put pebbles in, and then sand and then water and and you just kind of there's lots of room for the little off if you get the big important stuff in place first. Yeah. Yeah, that's so that was a real lesson to me because I think so much of my own overwhelmed. It was sort of it was also partly my approach to things. And I'm not quite sure why I did it. I think I was always sort of revving and panicked. I mean,

I stopped drinking coffee. I was always so stressed out, you know, I drink decalf and I always still kind of panicked, and I would sort of approach the day thinking, Okay, I got all this stuff to do, so I'll just get this little stuff out of the way, and then i'll clear the decks and I'll get to the big stuff.

I'll just get it out of the way. I'll just cross all this stuff off my to do list, and then I'll get to the big stuff, and then I would find that I would get caught up in the little stuff, and then it would take so much longer to get to the bigger stuff, and then I'd kind of get lost in the bigger stuff, and then it would be late, and then it would be time to come home, and then I didn't want to leave that

bigger stuff. And and yet the next day it's like I never learned the lesson talk about like hitting yourself over the head with a hammer. Every single day, I start with the same way, Well I'll just get this little stuff out of the way. And it was crazy, And so it's really true. I have now. I have my running partner and I when we go for our run in the morning, will stop and we'll say, what's

your one thing? And instead of thinking about the seventy five things I've got to do, it really helps us focus on what is the one most important thing, and then I really try to do that first. Yeah, I think that's such sound strategy. You talk about something in the book called pulsing. Can you explain what that is? Yeah, that was something that I learned from Tony Schwartz, who's the founder of the Energy Project, which is just a

really wonderful organization. They do doing some really interesting work. And from his books and from some of his research, um, you know, he makes this argument that we have ninety minute attentiveness cycles during the day, just like we have

ninety minutes sleep cycles at night. And so, uh, you know, his whole theory is, you know, we breathe in and out our heartbeats, we have these kind of natural kind of rhythms, you know, even stress, we have stress and release that that is sort of the way humans have evolved. We have our brain waves, you know, And so he said, why wouldn't we have attentiveness cycles that would also kind of you know, cycle or pulse and so so his we had a very funny conversation. I when I called

him up for my interview with them. The first thing he said is, I bet you're writing your book the same way I wrote my first couple. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, change to your desk with your button to chair for ten hours straight. And I kind of laughed and like, well, yeah, because I thought that's the best way to work, right, Just power through and sit there and just keep at it and go, go, go, And he said that he's he doesn't work that way anymore. He said he works in

what he calls four nineties. So he'll work for ninety minutes and then take a break, and then I work another ninety minutes, and then he said, and then he'll completely change the channel from like ninety minutes and go for a run or go do something co completely different to kind of give his brain a completely different kind of mode to be in, and then come back and do another couple nineties. And he said he's more productive now than he's ever been, and he's written his books

and like half the time. So I'm not quite at the ninja level of Tony Schwartz. I think that's pretty amazing. Uh. And sometimes it's harder to do, you know, when you have deadlines or you're trying to work with other people. But when I can, I really do. For my book in particular, I wrote my whole book in pulses and

it made a huge difference. And now that I'm working at the Washington Post again, uh as a staff writer, when I can, I try to work in those um really concentrated chunks of time and I will say I have been far more productive, particularly as we move more to digital and you have to be, you know, the more productive, and uh, I it's it's really it's it's been very noticeable to me that's been much more productive. And it's my easier, you know, when I focus on the big stuff first and I and I do work

in those concentrated pulses. Yeah, it's remarkable how much can get done in short, very extremely focused bursts the time with breaks in between. I mean, it really is a it's a fundamentally different way to approach getting work done than most of us do, which is to settle in at a desk for a long period of time and do a bunch of different things scatter shot. Um. The transformation in myself and and in people that I work

with who put that into place is dramatic. Um. We are very near the end of time, but I wanted to um, not the end of all time, the end of this show, thankfully, as far as I know anyway. But you've got a line in the book, and I think you it was a quote from someone, but I thought it was such a great, great line and such a reason sort of why I started doing this show and why the parable is important to me because my mind tends to go to by default, not necessarily the

best places. And it was that entropy, disorder, chaos, and decay is the default option of consciousness. Yeah, that was from research that Chick sent me high Dead when he wanted to try to understand people's not only what they did with their time, but their perception of it. And he came up with this it's called it experienced sampling method, and he gave people beepers and he would beat them at random times through the day and asked them not only what they were doing, but how they felt about

it and what they were thinking about. And he initially thought, oh, I'm gonna I'm going to hear great thoughts and people are gonna be dreaming great dreams, and there's going to be imagination. It'll be awesome. And then what he found after he actually beeped people and asked them what they were thinking, that it was all chaos, negative thoughts, you know, craziness. And and that's when he really realized that it would take work and will andy Tis to really change the

way we think. Yep, and I think that is absolutely it's certainly my experience. You know. It's and I when I talk about why we started the show, that was a big part of it was just to give me away to learn more about how do I I think that you know, to use the parable. I think the bad wolf is pretty good at feeding himself. There's lots of food laying around, it's just everywhere. He's always hungry. You know. It's the good wolf, at least for me,

that needs the that needs the extra effort in getting fed. Yes, that's so true. And I will say that, you know, I've always kind of suffered from insomnia, and so one of the things that I started doing a couple of years ago is like when I have an attack and I can't sleep, I'll just take a breath and I just start listing everything I'm grateful for, you know, and and then my my good wolf gets gets nice and fall and I dressed off to sleep. That's a great way to go to sleep. Well, thank you so much

for taking the time. Um. I know, despite writing your book, um, you still have a very busy schedule. So I appreciate you fitness in I'm happy to do it. It was wonderful talking to you. Okay, you too. Bye. Bye. You can learn more about Bridget Salty and this podcast at one you Feed dot net slash Bridget