This is an iHeart Podcast. Hello my lovely listeners.
By now you know the more knowledge we have about ourselves and the way our bodies work, the more empowered and in control we are.
And this is also true when it comes to our sexual health and what to do after unprotected sex. That's where Plan B comes in.
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And because it works by only temporarily delaying ovulation, it won't impact your ability to get pregnant in the future.
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You might not be thinking much about insurance right now, but let's get real for a second.
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day this is john fry from okay story time are you an aspiring singer songwriter i have a confession to make i am in love with live music and y 'all i have a very exciting announcement for those of you who share my passion so much that you are singer songwriters making and performing your own music tiktok live and i heart radio are teaming up for next up live music the ultimate music talent discovery show well this is your shot to perform at the iconic i heart theater in los angeles this this fall and get your original song heard on radio.
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Hey it's Gemma And I have something really special to share with you.
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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of your 20s.
Today, to just jump straight to the chase, we are talking about perhaps one of the the most defining parts of our 20s, the overwhelming uncertainty of just being in this decade.
If this decade had one word to describe it, one theme to trump them all, it would be uncertainty.
We are lost in this very weird haze of not really knowing who we are, not really knowing what the future holds, what's going to happen with our jobs, with our friends, with our finances with our love lives and even once you think you have some part of it figured out another part of your life suddenly crumbles and you're kind of just left feeling as lost as you were before so i got this dm from a listener the other day that i wanted to share which really inspired me to talk about this because going back through the archives i realized we have never sat down and done a full episode dedicated to
this feeling despite it being i would say universal this is what her DM said.
Hi Gemma, I'm in my 20s like I'm sure most of your listeners are so there must be others who relate to this feeling.
My dilemma is that everyone tells me to just try something and that it doesn't matter what path I'm taking in my 20s as long as I'm moving forward. What really paralyzes me though is not knowing whether the path I choose to take will make me happy or at least happier than any other path.
When I visualize my future it just feels like a big big ominous gray cloud and I can't help but feel like if I just knew one part of the story I could decide once and for all what direction to take.
How do I deal with my fear of uncertainty?
It's the biggest thing holding me back.
I just knew like instantly upon reading this how many of us and I can include myself in this group can relate to that feeling.
The feeling that our futures are not necessarily exciting but actually really scary and really ominous and a lot of that fear of the the unknown really fuels indecision and it fuels not making decisions that are important to make at this stage in our life, which of course fuels later dissatisfaction.
But I think when you understand why we feel such uncertainty to begin with, why it is human nature to turn away from the unknown, but also how we can shift our feelings about uncertainty so that it feels feels less scary, that is when the sensation has less control of you.
You're no longer fighting a losing battle against it.
Uncertainty can become perhaps your sign that you're going in the right direction.
It can be a sign of growth.
It can be a sign that you are trying new things and you're expanding as a person.
So you welcome it. You welcome the sensation rather than running running away from it.
If that sounds kind of implausible and out of reach let me explain how exactly we can get to that point.
If you want to get to that place we're going to have to make uncertainty feel like an asset and we need to have a better strategy for coping with this feeling and so that is exactly what we are going to talk about today.
How we can celebrate rather than fear Year of the Unknown, how we can integrate this feeling into our life plan, see it as a sign, but also some of the origins of why we feel this way, not just in our 20s, but as a species.
All of that and more and so much psychology, so stay with us.
My fear of uncertainty, I think, definitely shifted when I realized that uncertainty is the opposite of boredom and predictability.
If I knew exactly how my life was going to turn out, if I knew what was around every single corner, the name of every single friend I would meet, my entire resume until the time I retire, yes, I would feel less uncertain.
But what would the point of being alive even be?
I think the newness of life, the experiences, the surprises, they are really what makes this whole thing worthwhile in a sense.
You can't have surprises.
you can't have unexpected joy you can't learn you can't have excitement and anticipation without uncertainty it is a core ingredient in so many otherwise really amazing and pleasurable experiences and that's what I'm personally learning to appreciate and focus on when I do have those very natural moments of being paralyzed by all that I don't know yet I'm kind of jumping the gun here, yes, uncertainty may have its upsides.
We definitely can think about it differently, but why do we even experience it to begin with and what makes it so freaking uncomfortable?
That's really what we have to nail down first. Like I said in the beginning, uncertainty in our twenties are basically two peas in a pod for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, Honestly, I want you to give yourself some grace.
You are doing everything for the first time ever, basically.
You are basically an adult toddler or an adult child who, yes, can read, hopefully, and can write and is hopefully potty trained and all those things.
But you are now experiencing the next level of situations, the next level of learning experiences that are emotionally complex and not straightforward. forward and as you're experiencing that you also are without the same safety net that you relied upon when you were younger and you're without the reassurance and the security of teachers and parents and a school system and a societal system that hopefully isn't going to let you fall through the cracks.
You're on your own and uncertainty therefore feels a lot more alarming because you you feel like you're the one who is going to hold the burden, experience the full burden of any poor decision or any poor outcome you made.
It's all on you at this point.
Another element of this is that because you are an adult toddler, you haven't had enough life experience yet to know that things will eventually work out for you, even if they don't the first time, even if they are not working out right now.
People in their 40s and their 50s and later, they know that the breakup isn't the end of the world because they've experienced them and survived before.
They know making a major mistake or losing a friend or losing a job isn't the end of the world because they have evidence from previous life experience to tell them that.
But you, you don't have those same data points.
You don't have that same catalogue of examples that tell you everything is going to be okay.
OK, uncertainty for you and uncertainty for a lot of us in our 20s doesn't have a conclusion the way that it has for people who are older.
Then, of course, just to add even more fuel to the fire, there's the fact that you're kind of living between milestones.
And this decade is definitely one of perpetual transition.
You know, you're no longer a teenager, but, you know, you don't really feel like an adult yet.
you're not at that financial level you're not settled in a career you're not settled in a relationship the way that you expect adults to be what are you really it's what psychologists call a liminal space the in -between and liminal emotional spaces are by nature by definition disorientating because they don't come with a clear script and of course there's no accurate way and there's no one who's going to be able to tell you like, okay, you're doing well.
You're doing fine. You are successful.
Earlier in life, this is something I talk to people about all the time.
Earlier in life, your entire days, weeks, months are set up in a structure that will tell you if you are doing well.
There are clear benchmarks for life performance.
Things like grades, things like passing to the next year level, things like a whole cohort of people in the same situation at the same time and the same age as you with whom you can mark your progress against. And they're probably all in the same environment like at school.
You don't have that that anymore.
You don't have that same framework to look around and think, okay, I'm doing okay, or I'm not doing okay.
And these are the areas I can improve, or these are the areas that I'm excelling.
You don't have that anymore.
And it might seem really arbitrary, but those social structures and those environmental structures, and that context actually provides a great deal of, and a great sense of calm and stability.
So you have during this decade, almost suddenly lost a lot of what previously allowed her to stay grounded.
Security, structure, direction.
And of course, finally, what may feel like a curse, but certainly isn't, is the fact that as a generation, we have more choices than ever.
We really do, and it's a beautiful thing, and everyone tells us we're very privileged.
We also know that that creates a real paradox of choice that can be quite stifling.
You know, it is amazing that when we're in our 20s, like like 80 % of the doors are open to us.
Definitely there are some things that we probably can't do anymore, you know, unfortunately you're probably not going to become an Olympic gymnast if you haven't been training since you were a child but in general, you know, you're at the start line of pretty much everything else.
All the doors are open.
Do you know how utterly terrifying that actually is?
You probably do because you're experiencing it but it certainly does feel like like with each decision you make, the more doors you seem to close with no certainty around whether you might actually want to go back through that door later and no certainty around what might happen next.
Closing those doors seems a lot more scary than it does fulfilling.
So you do nothing. You're paralyzed by choice and the endless pro -cons list that we know as decision paralysis.
paralysis that's really the 20 something explanation for uncertainty there's also a more human explanation as to why uncertainty in any capacity not just when it comes to the big ticket items about 20s is so uncomfortable for us as a species to firstly really state the obvious our brains they are wired to seek out stability and clarity because when something is known and and familiar, there are, of course, less opportunities for danger and threats.
Now, the part of our brain that controls this primal urge, there's two specific regions, actually.
It's the prefrontal cortex, so right up here at the front, and the limbic system, which is really deep inside our brain.
It's part of what we call the alt brain.
A series of studies done in the early 2000s basically found that when we are exposed to ambiguous things like an ambiguous image or ambiguous scenery, the limbic system, particularly the amygdala, light up.
Even when these participants were in a laboratory setting where there is no immediate danger, your brain is always going to respond over cautiously and over zealously to something it doesn't understand, such as the unknowns of the future.
But that feeling is also something that we can't suppress.
It's automatic. And for good reason.
We want that part of us that assesses danger to not be reliant on our judgment and to be able to act quick.
And the reason that we have such an aversion to uncertainty is primarily rooted in the fact that we needed to in order to survive.
When you face an unknown, your brain will immediately seek out as much much information as it can, real or imagined, to fill the gaps.
Our brain is wired to do this.
You might know this by another term, which is catastrophizing.
Your brain is trying to figure out what's every possible thing that's going to happen here.
It's going to simulate outcomes.
It's going to generate predictions.
The problem is, it actually has no idea what's going to happen.
So it serves up all these situations, some of them completely impossible, some of them maybe be more likely we can't always discern or tell the difference between what is more likely and what is less likely we are just receiving information from this very old ancient part of our brain and we're experiencing it as it comes we're experiencing all the fear as it comes without being able to interrupt that and say wait how do I why do I think this how do I know this this is going to happen.
Oh wait, I actually don't.
So this brings me to a next point.
A lot of our anxiety and our fears don't actually emerge from necessarily something having gone wrong in actuality, but from the question of what if?
What if this happens?
What if this even worse thing happens?
What if the worst thing happens?
This is because our brain will stay in this loop scope of providing us with potential outcomes until it has some kind of resolution or closure.
It doesn't want to switch off the alarm system until the reason for the alarm has been given meaning or it's identified what the problem was.
And like I said, in the past that was useful, now it's just plain old annoying.
It's annoying. And your uncertainty is meant to feel that way.
It's meant to feel annoying and awful and frustrating because, again, it wants to keep you alert.
It wants to grab your attention.
Like a big shiny billboard or a big red stop sign, it wants you to be looking straight at it.
It wants you to be directing its focus onto the thing you don't understand and that you're unsure about so that you can provide it with a sense of closure.
The thing is, if you give your anxiety and your fear of the unknown an answer, if you give yourself a reason for the uncertainty more specifically you give it a purpose it will actually go away we are going to discuss that more in a second so just bear with me but it's also important as well before we move on to understand that how you experience uncertainty in your 20s is not the same as how everyone else is going to experience this feeling so you can't beat yourself up if you feel like you are struggling with it more than others psychologists in the early 90s they identified what they called
an intolerance for uncertainty spectrum.
Basically, they found that where you sit in terms of your tolerance or intolerance for uncertainty will determine how much information you think you need before you make a decision.
They discovered this spectrum almost by accident.
They were actually trying to determine what personality traits caused anxiety.
society. And in that research, what they kept realizing was that a number of their participants all reported the same experience, the sense that they weren't necessarily scared about what was going to happen.
They just really wanted to know what was going to happen.
And these same people were the ones who would read ahead in books, even if they were excited by the plotline.
They would read spoilers in the papers of movies that they were really eager to see, even though they knew it was going to kind of ruin the enjoyment.
they would also at times make more impulsive decisions in their relationships when they felt something was fading or feeling off not because they necessarily wanted the relationship to end but because to them and this kept coming up over and over again a known bad outcome was better than an unknown good outcome these same individuals were also surprise surprise more likely to have have a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder.
Most people in society and in our world will score in the middle of this spectrum for an intolerance for uncertainty.
But people who score higher, probably like you and I, tend to spend a lot more time ruminating on the future than being in the present moment.
And they just can't help it.
Someone with a high intolerance for uncertainty, They might make lists repeatedly.
They plan out conversations in their head.
They look at food menus well before they're going to a restaurant just to make sure that they know that there's something they're going to like and they know what they're going to order.
They triple check driving routes.
They do all these things basically to calm this sense that if I don't know, well, then something's going to go wrong.
This cloud ahead of me, it can only be dangerous.
If this is you, your 20s are naturally, and I'm sorry to say it, they are going to feel a lot more stressful and they're going to feel harder than someone who can naturally go with the flow because you are constantly being bombarded with unknowns and it's not you, it's this decade.
I promise you I'm going to give you some good news and some solutions in just a second, but I do want to talk about what can happen if we let uncertainty force us into a corner or force us into a place of inaction because uncertainty is so uncomfortable it can be a very powerful maladaptive motivator i .e. something that motivates us to do things that are actually against our interests and it's really important that we are aware of that so that when we pause and are choosing whether to act whether not to act we can carefully examine whether this is in our best interest or just because we are scared of an outcome
that is no no more or less likely than any other outcome.
The ways this shows up in our 20s could be a very long list, but I'm going to keep it brief and I want to scare you.
I'm just going to touch on two of the big consequences of letting this feeling rule your life.
Firstly, you accept what you don't deserve and also less than what you're capable of and less than what you've actually worked for.
It's like what I said before, a known bad outcome over an unknown known good outcome is what you prefer.
And how that might look like is accepting the first grad offer because you're scared of not getting another even though you don't really want the job.
Accepting the first person who, I don't know, starts talking to you on Hinge because you're scared that no one else will talk to you and you're scared of what it will mean to be single after a certain age.
You choose the first apartment you see, the first car you try out, You go to the same places on the same trips over and over again because an uncertain outcome, even if there is a chance that it could be amazing, you don't want to take that risk.
Bear in mind, I have no judgment on this.
I have done this myself.
All of that is basically anecdotal.
All that is basically my lived experience because I am someone who is in the same boat with you.
The second consequence of a failure to embrace uncertainty in our 20s is that we actually don't act at all.
We don't choose any job.
We don't choose any partner, because what if it's not the right one?
In the first scenario, we chose the first thing.
In this scenario, we don't choose anything at all.
It probably won't surprise you that perfectionism and the fear of uncertainty are actually, in fact, sisters.
They are incredibly aligned.
In fact, I personally think that perfectionism is basically just the fear of uncertainty with a different name.
It's like a sub -genre of the feeling.
Perfectionism often disguises itself as ambition or high standards or great expectations for yourself.
But underneath, it's usually just fear.
It's just a fear of the unknown, the fear of what failure might bring, the fear of making the wrong move.
it is actually less about doing things perfectly and more about trying to eliminate the possibility of regret that's what makes it a close relative of uncertainty they both come from a deep discomfort with not knowing how things will turn out think of perfectionism in this case as kind of like an emotional armor if I just plan enough if I delayed the decision long enough if I do everything just right, then maybe, maybe I can avoid disappointment.
But what you're really doing is just trying to outrun uncertainty.
A 2022 study actually looked at a group of students to determine whether perfectionism meant people were less quick to act when it came to making a decision.
They asked these students to complete a questionnaire, which would essentially rank each student based on perfectionist tendencies.
So the most perfectionist down to the least perfectionist. and then they asked those students to consider a bunch of would you rather questions.
So would you rather I don't know this or that.
Would you rather x or y.
There was about I think 50 of them.
50 scenarios. And they measured how long it took them to complete these entire range of scenarios.
The top 25 percent of perfectionists took the same amount of time combined to complete the exercise as the remaining 75 % of students.
They took so much longer because they were sat there considering wanting to make the perfect choice.
The thing is, opportunities don't always wait for us to make up our minds.
Big decisions aren't always going to let you delay them.
them. They will find the next person or they will disappear.
A big part of our 20s is being able to say yes to that thing that feels really scary.
Yes, I'm going to try.
Yes, I don't know what's going to happen.
Let me just do it anyways.
But when you are battling the fear of all fears, the fear of the unknown, it's going to be a lot harder for you.
Finally, I'm here to give you you some good news.
This is actually something you can change.
And it's something that many people have proven to themselves that they are able to overcome.
So I want to explain exactly how you can do this, including something you could literally do in the next five minutes if you wanted to, that will allow you to better act on your dreams, on the opportunities, on the desires of our 20s.
So we're going to talk about all of that and so much more after this short break.
Hey it's Gemma and I have something really special to share I'm hosting my first ever virtual live video podcast not a pre -recorded episode not a highlight reel but a real -time face -to -face moment where we get to connect laugh reflect and honestly just kind of be in it together no matter where you are in the world if you've ever hit play on an episode of the psychology of your 20s or mantra and thought, I really wish I could just talk to Gemma about this right now.
This is your chance.
We're diving into the messy, beautiful chaos of your 20s, your 30s of life and beyond.
And yes, you get to be right there with me.
There's a live chat so we can talk in real time.
And afterwards, I'm hosting a private VIP party, my inner circle, we would call it, where I'll be answering your questions and getting even more personal.
It's happening August 12th at 7pm Pacific time or August 13th at 12pm if you're in Sydney or Australia.
So mark your calendar, tell your friends, grab your ticket now at pave .live.
I can't wait to see you there.
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This is Jon Fry from OK Storytime.
Are you an aspiring singer -songwriter?
Let me ask you a question.
What do Cardi B, Mozart, and you, yes, you listening right now, all have in common?
I would like to see all of their music performed live, but why am I saying this?
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okay so we are back talking about uncertainty in our 20s and luckily for us we are actually not the first generation to feel this way nor will we be the last and that's good news because it means that there are a lot of people who have come up with some really amazing approaches to this feeling that helped get them through this period of discomfort and which will hopefully help you as well.
The biggest thing we can do for our uncertainty in our 20s, and I've been hinting at this for the entire episode, is to basically assign it a purpose, because that satisfies our deeper desire for a reason, a meeting, and kind of just a sense of why.
Why is this happening?
The purpose you assign to your uncertainty, it could be that you see this as a learning opportunity.
It could be that you view uncertainty as a rite of passage.
It could be that uncertainty is a sign that you're opening yourself up to new things, which is scary.
It could be a call to surrender and just to accept life as it is.
It could be a real spiritual thing.
It could be that uncertainty just makes for a really good story.
And you value a good story and you can't have one without uncertainty.
Whatever it is, whatever makes uncertainty feel meaningful to you, hone in on that.
Anytime you feel overwhelmed by the feeling, remind yourself, okay, but this has a purpose.
This has a meaning.
For me, I personally think of uncertainty as a sign that I am about to really grow as a person and, for lack of a better word, I'm about to level up.
Every time I have have ever felt scared, lost, uncertain, it has always been the beginning of something just over the horizon that I haven't been able to see yet.
Like it always signals to me that like something really big is about to come.
That way now, now that I know that's its purpose, I actually almost get excited when I'm feeling that way.
I feel like I get kind of giddy.
I'm like ready to be surprised.
And I really feel like I'm in preparation mode for whatever is about to happen next.
The reason this worked is because when we assign a role to our uncertainty, this actually gives us a cognitive framework through which we can accept it, through which we can just let it exist and actually focus on what we need to focus on.
We give the annoying voice a job.
It's like when a toddler, I don't know if you've been around kids a lot, but when like a toddler or a child is being really annoying, so you tell them they have to rearrange all the pens or they have to divide up all their dolls or pick up something like rice, I don't know, you give them a job so you can get to work.
You give the annoying voice somewhere, someone else to talk to or something else to do.
The second way to really confront your uncertainty is also to look for stories of people who didn't have it all figured out or whom dealt with supreme uncertainty and came out the other side, rather than just looking for people who seem like a natural A to B success story.
The natural success stories are all we seem to see these days.
So you would think that most people who you admire have never struggled the way that you do and that you have. That's false.
It's a huge lie. It's a big myth.
When you start collecting these stories you will find that almost every single person who has made something of themselves has an uncertainty story.
Doci, for example, that's one I've recently added to my list, the woman of the hour.
She posted a YouTube video back in 2020, only like five years ago about how she got fired from her job.
And in it, she's like, tomorrow, I'm just gonna door knock at a bunch of studios and just see if they will give me an internship.
She just won a Grammy.
Five years ago, she was completely unsure of where she was going to end up.
And she ended up in the right place, because she lent into it.
The founder of Spanx, she's another one on my list. She used to sell fax machines like door to door.
Now she runs a billion dollar industry.
Stephen King, he's another one.
His draft for his book Carrie, which is now a cult classic, a favorite of so many.
He literally threw that manuscript in the trash after it was rejected 30 times.
And that book is is a cultural icon.
I even think of my mom, like my mom is the one that often comes to mind for me.
You know, she was kicked out of university because she got such poorly bad grades.
They basically expelled her.
And then she took a year off to travel.
She didn't really know what she wanted to do.
She came back, she did something different and she graduated with a top job.
And now she's like this incredibly powerful, successful girl boss.
All these people and you you have something very important in common. In their journey to success and to wherever they ended up, there were moments when they had absolutely no idea what was next and they just had to bet on themselves and they just had to trust that they were capable.
And once you start searching for these stories, you will see them everywhere.
You will see them constantly until Until one day you'll have your own version of this story, your own version of how you overcame uncertainty, how in hindsight, the path was actually so clear the entire time.
Another small thing you can do, and it's going to sound so minuscule and silly, you might be tempted to skip it.
Please don't. I want you to make a playlist that you feel represents yourself and play it whenever you feel uncomfortable or confused as a way to really just bring yourself back and center to yourself.
Even if it doesn't necessarily help you feel less uncertain, it can just help you with the general feelings of discomfort and strangeness that you may be having.
And just as like a fun thing to do, a fun thing to do to remind yourself of who you are, of who you want to be, of what your core values are, all through music.
These songs reflect how you see yourself back at you.
And that is a very special, familiar, beautiful feeling.
There's actually this brilliant 2014 paper from a researcher in Texas that talks about how music contributes to the formation of our identity and can help us trust ourselves more because it acts as a touchstone when we feel challenged.
It represents all the times we have previously overcome challenges, all the times we previously experienced joy.
And the music we choose really does reflect our values and says something about how we see ourselves.
And so when you're kind of externally lost and don't really know who you are and can't really find your way back, music is just like beautiful anchor.
you know I have a playlist like this the playlist is called if Gemma was a playlist and I was listening to it literally the other day and it has songs from 2016 all the way up to last week and it's really a beautiful way to see how I have transformed to be able to categorically see different chapters in my life and what was happening during them like and the music brings back all those memories and also just to see how far I've come and so it's something you can take five minutes do for yourself right now it's a fun exercise i promise you it will help you ground yourself during this like crazy
chaotic period on a much larger scale the biggest antidote for uncertainty is really just this just try something try anything choose something that interests you to get good at.
And when that thing stops serving you, choose something else.
We have to let go of this idea that every decision you make in life has to naturally flow into the next and the next and the next, and that you have to have some step -by -step plan that you can follow for your life.
Your life is not a recipe.
You're not making a cake.
You're not cooking sourdough.
It's a series of experiments that take you to different places that you You didn't even know you were going to get to.
And when you give yourself permission to just try, you really break this cycle of needing to know.
You break this cycle of needing to have all the answers.
And you move as well from that rumination spiral of, am I doing the right thing?
Is this the best choice?
To just knowing that if you're taking action and if you're doing something, you are making the right choice.
even imperfect action even the wrong choice is still a better choice than not doing anything at all and it also gives you data it gives you experience it gives you stories a question to really ask yourself as well if you're kind of thinking okay that's great but which direction should i choose especially if you're someone who has a lot of hobbies and interests and passions and ambitions.
The question to ask yourself is just, what would make me most disappointed if I didn't do this?
What would I be most regretful around not doing in 20 years time?
This mentally makes you kind of compute how much you have to lose by not acting rather than getting you stuck in this spiral of how much you have to lose by acting.
It reminds me of this quote, you could could take a million detours to your destination and still get there faster than someone who never got in the car.
And that's the idea I really want to leave you with today.
Uncertainty in our 20s is inevitable, but it's actually a really profound sign that you're expanding and you are growing and you are reaching new spaces you haven't yet experienced.
That's a good thing.
Congratulations congratulations if you're feeling uncertain that is such a beautiful sign and i wish i could give you all the applause for just trying and pushing yourself into new places and spaces i know it feels uncomfortable but i promise you that this discomfort has a purpose that you cannot yet see lean into it assign it a purpose while you're waiting and just act do anything even if it's small things I think that that's a great solution for avoiding a worse discomfort of looking back at your life and realizing that you never did anything because you were scared of the unknown when the unknown
is something that we always have to exist side by side with and the only way to escape the unknown is to create a known is to create a reality that you do really enjoy and that works for you and the only way you can do that is through action so that's a rather simple simple message, but also deeply complex message if you think about it to end the episode with.
I just hope that it brings you a sense of comfort that you're not the only one going through it.
And then I totally know it's going to work out for you.
It's totally going to work out for you.
I know that. I can give you that promise right now.
So thank you so much for listening.
If you have made it this far, let's leave a little emoji in the comments below that represents how you're feeling about your life, how uncertainty feels in your body right now, Now, just so I know if you've made it this far, if you're one of the loyal listeners, make sure that you are following along or subscribed wherever you are listening on YouTube, on Spotify, Apple, whatever one, and give us a five -star review if you feel called to do so.
It really does help the show grow and reach new audiences and new, fantastic, wonderful 20 -somethings and older.
Also, make sure you're following us on Instagram at thatpsychologypodcast if you want to be part of future episodes if you want to dm me episode suggestions if you have questions dilemmas you may even be able to be featured in an episode just like this one so follow me over there and until next time stay safe be kind be gentle to yourself especially in the face of uncertainty we will talk very very soon for period protection you can put on and forget about nothing beats nick's leakproof underwear North America's number one leak -proof underwear brand.
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Hello, my lovely listeners.
By now you know the more knowledge we have about ourselves and the way our bodies work, the more empowered and in control we are.
And this is also true when it comes to our sexual health and what to do after unprotected sex. That's where Plan B comes in.
It's emergency contraception with no age requirement that helps prevent pregnancy before it starts.
And because it works by only temporarily delaying ovulation, it won't impact your ability to get pregnant in the future we love a backup plan that puts us in control because the more we know the more power we have learn more at planbonestep .com users directed let's talk about something that most people in their 20s overlook or just straight up are confused by health insurance many people don't realize that health insurance wasn't designed to cover everything, which can leave gaps that you end up having to pay out of pocket.
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this is john fry from okay story time are you an aspiring singer songwriter let me ask you a question what do cardi b mozart and you yes you listening right now all have in common i would like to see all of their music performed live but why am i saying this because if you are a music artist you have the chance to perform at the legendary i heart theater this fall because tiktok live and i heart radio are teaming up to present next up live music a nationwide search for the next wave of original music artists all you need to do is go live on tiktok and post a video performance of your own original
song using the hashtag next up live music auditions are open now through august 11th so don't wait y 'all i want to see you get this opportunity you can perform on stage at the iheart theater in los angeles this fall and even get your track heard on radio and if you win you'll be nominated for live creator of the year at the tiktok awards so go on tiktok right now and post with the hashtag next up live music before august 11th again Again, that's hashtag next up live music only on TikTok.
My life has been chaotic recently to say the least. And with so many events going on at the moment, my friends weddings, my book tour, I'm also moving house.
The last thing I have time for is shaving.
That is where Nair's shower cream comes in because it saves me so much time and bonus, it also smells delicious.
delicious Nair is the number one hair removal brand so you know their stuff works and their hair removal shower cream uses natural extracts for its scents so things like coconut oil almond oil lavender they smell delicious it's fast like the length of your shower fast maybe even quicker and it's super easy to use as well it's also and this is a big thing for me free of dyes parabens phthalates sulfates and dermatologist tested which is probably why it leaves my skin feeling so insanely silky here's the other reason i've been really over shaving i hate when i end up like cutting or nicking my skin and i
also feel like i end up missing spots anyway so i'm kind of like what's the whole point of this but with nars shower cream i have never had that problem I just need you to try it out for yourself.
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Hello, my lovely listeners.
By now, you know, the more knowledge we have about ourselves and and the way our bodies work, the more empowered and in control we are.
And this is also true when it comes to our sexual health and what to do after unprotected sex. That's where Plan B comes in.
It's emergency contraception with no age requirement that helps prevent pregnancy before it starts.
And because it works by only temporarily delaying ovulation, it won't impact your ability to get pregnant in the future.
We love a backup plan that puts us in control because the more we know the more power we have. Learn more at planb1step .com, users directed.
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Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, hey, Hey, we came to play.
Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially?
Step up like a boss and save the day?
Or see what life's like under the tree of life?
Did you? If you could.
Would you? When we come through, it's true magic.
Because we came to play.
Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.
Hey, it's me, your heart.
Mind if I pick the next song?
Listen, even though we're eating better, people who've had one heart attack are at higher risk of another.
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It's time for a summer grilling adventure with Dietz and Watson.
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This is an iHeart Podcast.