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Hey, it's Marielle.
One of my favorite podcasts is 10 % Happier with Dan Harris and he recently had me on as part of a month -long series they're doing on fitness.
Basically, it's about how to take care of your body without losing your mind.
We talked for an hour, which is a long episode for us here at LifeKit, but we wanted to share it with you because it's packed with tips we've learned from lots of different episodes, specifically about movement, sleep and play.
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This is the 10 % happier podcast, I'm Dan Harris.
Mariel Segata, welcome to the show!
yeah, thanks for having me pleasure before we dive into your principle takeaways from covering health and wellness for many many years I'd be curious to hear a little bit of your backstory you know how and why did you get interested in this stuff in the first place I you know how to cocaine fueled panic attack on live television then that so I have a pretty clear trajectory narratively between my old life and my new life but I'd be curious it doesn't have to be as ridiculous as mine, but I'd be curious to hear about your trajectory.
Well, I guess I have two answers for that.
There's the personal and the professional.
I feel like they married really well here, because this feels like the show that I should be hosting that I'm supposed to be hosting.
But I didn't even I wouldn't have known that it existed before it existed, like I wouldn't have pitched it necessarily life It existed for years before I started and then they decided to hire a full time host. And at the time I was a financial reporter at Marketplace, the public radio outlet.
And I covered finance and economics for a number of years.
A lot of news coverage and then a lot of consumer psychology.
So I know that was attractive to them when they were hiring me, but I think the thing that really connected for my boss when we had one of our initial calls, I was actually talking to her about I had applied for a different host job at NPR.
It was kind of like a screening call.
and I mentioned that I was gathering a lot of my ancestors' stuff, like anything I could find that belonged to them, like a little prayer book that was my grandmother's, and then a little address book that was my abuela's, and different little things, and also items to represent them, basically creating like an ancestral altar on my bedside table that I was on the having this kind spiritual journey that way.
And I just happened to mention that to her and she was like, that would be a great LifeKit episode.
Did you know we're hiring for LifeKit?
You could consider applying for that.
And yeah, I did. And it just, it made so much sense.
Once I connected to what LifeKit does, I was like, oh, I am this person, like I'm the person who likes to be really practical about whatever I'm dealing with in my life.
We did an episode the other day on car safety.
And I was like, oh, every time I drive over a bridge, I have that intrusive thought of if I'm going to, you know, end up in the water, what would I do?
And then what would be the next step?
So I was like, can we do an episode on this?
Can we just find out what actually I'm supposed to do?
That'll make me feel better.
So there's that and then there's like, when people tell me their problems, I want to try to help them and give them like, specific practical advice.
That's not always wanted in real life.
But I find that when you do like at life kit, people are seeking it.
So it's a good outlet for that impulse of mine where I wanna try to fix people's problems. My friend Gretchen Rubin calls herself a happiness bully.
She can pull it off and most of us can't.
Most people don't want unsolicited advice.
But if you're hosting a show and people are clicking on it, then it's very much solicited.
Alright so this conversation is part of the series that we do on our show about how to get fit sanely and I know that overlaps with so many of the themes that you cover on life kit.
So we're going to talk about your top 10 takeaways like stuff that you personally are using from all of the things you've learned about various aspects of fitness including exercise and sleep and even play, which I think is an undervalued part of fitness and and mental health generally.
Yeah. So if you're cool, I thought we'd start with exercise I'm cool.
I'll chime in throughout with like stuff I've learned in my in my own life.
But your number one takeaway after having covered exercise for a while is to incorporate small pockets of exercise throughout the day.
Yeah, like what does that look like?
For me, sometimes it looks like doing calf raises when I brush my teeth.
A lot of it happens when I'm watching TV.
I recently binge severance went back to rewatch season one and then watch season two.
And I do a lot of, because I've been to physical therapy over the last year or so for some stuff, and I do a lot of the exercises they give me during that, even stuff like you're sitting on the floor, it's a shoulder stretch, it's like I'm sitting back against my couch and just kind of stretching my arms out like that.
It's a simple thing.
Also like lunges, squats, anything like that that's stationary or I have an exercise bike that faces the TV.
So these are all very helpful.
But you could also do it, like if you have kids and you're waiting in the pickup line to get your kids, you could take that moment and pair it with movement, right?
Like, if you're parked and it's everybody's just waiting, you get out of the car, and you do a couple of squats, or, you know, you reach up and move your body in a different way than you've been moving it all day.
The reason for that is like you want to pair movement with some activity that you're already doing routinely because that'll help you remember to do it.
And it's time that's already accounted for.
Like we brush our teeth every day, you know, ideally.
And so if you do that, or you do it when you're taking your pills, or you do it when you're making your smoothie, then you find a way to work it in and you don't have as many excuses, like I just can't make time for a whole hour to go to the gym.
Is the idea there that you'll start seeing benefits and then want to go to the gym?
Or is this just as good as going to the gym?
It's not necessarily the former.
You can still get a lot of benefits from breaking up movement into these exercise snacks, is what some people call them, throughout the day.
You can still get the benefits, for instance, of strength training or cardio, as long as you're getting your heart rate up for cardio to like the target zone, which you can achieve by walking.
It's okay to break it up.
You don't have to do it all at once.
So you don't have to have the gym that you go to unless you like that, which I do not.
I find gyms depressing a lot of the time.
Unless it's the rock climbing gym because then it's like a fun little puzzle for me to do, and it's like of competing against yourself.
But the lighting in gyms usually, the smell, all the clanking of weights and things, like, I hate it, I won't go.
I'm sure for many people who feel the same way you do, either because they hate gyms or because they can't find the time to go, to know that you can just weave it into your life as it is is liberating.
It is. I think it's a relief for a lot of people that they don't have to work out in the way that they were told they have to work out and that also exercise can be fun and you can find the way that works for you.
At this moment, you might be really into biking around your neighborhood or something or biking on the road right now and then you decide not so much anymore.
Now I want to start jogging or start swimming or something.
It's also okay to just change it up, as you get bored of one thing, or what suits your needs.
I like to lately, especially as the weather has gotten nicer, I'm like, Oh, let me start biking again to get places in Brooklyn.
Then I don't have to take the subway, and I also get some exercise in.
I've been doing that with walking, taking meetings.
If I've got a meeting that would have otherwise been a zoom but I can make it a phone call, I can just walk through my neighborhood or instead of taking a cab to actually just carve out a little extra time and walk to a place, I found that to be really helpful.
I think if you take meetings when you're walking too, it can foster creativity.
It can help you come up with better ideas.
I have definitely felt stuck before on a story that I was working on and then I go for a walk and I talk to my editor or a producer or someone.
and I'm able to think outside of the box that my apartment creates, you know?
When you're looking at the same things all the time, I don't know, it's like your brain doesn't go there, but then you're suddenly among the trees and the park or whatever, and you're like, you're newly inspired.
There's an evolutionary case for this.
I'm not an expert in this.
I'm repeating things I've heard from experts, but we evolved to think while moving through nature, And that makes a ton of sense because we were hunting and gathering, migrating lots of things on the go.
And so deep in our molecules, there is a good reason why taking a walk can not only be good for your physical fitness, but also for your creativity and larger mental health.
I love that. Yeah. I think it can also be really helpful to know you might get these benefits, but to let go of outcomes.
So, it's like I'm pretty sure if I go for a walk, it's gonna shake me loose a little bit, but I don't necessarily know in what direction or towards what productive outcome.
And sometimes it'll just be the joy of that experience, the joy of being in the park and seeing a little kid on their bike, like learning how to bike with their parent or a cute dog that I smile at or I was on the beach in Puerto Rico last week and I just watched a little crab dig a hole for 20 minutes.
He'd had his little claw and he would go and scoop up the sand and then come out of the hole, dump the sand, come back in.
He had these like really cute eyes, you know, like a cartoon character.
As I got closer to him, he got a little more wary of me like, is this girl going to eat me?
And I was like, no, no, no, it's okay.
I just want to take a picture." So he started dumping the sand like real quick and then running back in.
I loved it. It was one of the best moments of my trip.
Just sitting there and watching this crab do his thing over and over.
And then I was also like, oh, there's a metaphor here for my own life, which is something we learned when we did the forest bathing episode.
You can find metaphor in nature for pretty much anything you're going through.
Whether it's the way that trees, when they die and they fall, they decompose and they become part of the forest floor and they become a different part of the ecosystem, where mushrooms can grow and maybe like little birds can live in there.
It can be a metaphor for death and grief.
I find there's just a lot of wisdom in nature when you sit and watch. And so you don't always, you could go for that walk and say like this is gonna help me think about the next chapter of my book or whatever this is gonna help me come up with my business plan or you could go into it with a little less attachment to the outcome and just see.
I love that. In my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, often says that meditation actually can be a good way to problem -solve but not in an obvious way.
You're not supposed to sit down and think about the problem because that's normally what we do.
Instead, you can seed your mind with the problem and then go into a mindful state where you're just watching your breath or noticing whatever's coming up in your body and mind.
And then when you get distracted, you start again and again.
And when you let the unconscious mind go to work in this way, connections that you might not have been able to make with your everyday discursive mind can get made.
You know, this is why we get ideas in the shower.
So yeah, I see a lot of resonance there.
You can work with your dream self, your sleeping self to do the same thing.
We did an episode about dreaming and we interviewed a researcher at Harvard about this and she has studied dreaming for a long time and she would have her students basically, there was some problem they were working through with a project and they would I think it was that they would think about it right before bed, or they would ask.
It was like one question they would ask themselves, not like poring over it before bed, but I believe it was like, they would ask themselves, okay, how might I approach this or like, what should I do about x or whatever right before bed and in a lot of cases, they would end up eventually dreaming about it and coming to some sort of solution that might show up in the form of a metaphor or, like, visual imagery, our sleeping minds are really good at that, and they're kind of amazing.
Like, if you dream, if you remember your dreams, I'm sometimes like, wow, my brain is so creative the way it's showing me this problem in my life, but just in a different way through a movie that it's creating, this vivid movie.
And it's showing me that, oh, what I'm feeling about this thing is guilt.
I had a dream once, I remember that, okay, I dreamt that I was, like, I had drawn tic -tac -toe boards on a public wall for some reason, I was, like, bored waiting in a train station or something and then I got arrested and I was going to be sent to prison for, like, 10 years.
And I had drawn this in pencil, you know?
Like, it was not a high crime, but I was in the courtroom and I was, like, you need to, like, apologize for what you've done and they were, like, talking about how I was so unrepentant and I was like, I woke up.
I was like, I'm going to be sentenced.
But I didn't even know what I'd done wrong.
And I woke up and I was like, oh, the guilt is heavy.
Like, what am I feeling guilty about?
And I realized it was someone that I was seeing at the time who kind of used guilt as a manipulative tactic, but I didn't really recognize this about him consciously.
I was like a new person I was seeing.
But Then, after I had that dream I was like, Oh this is the state that I'm living in.
Like I'm feeling guilty all the time.
I don't like this. I don't wanna see this person anymore.
I'm hoping my wife doesn't have dreams for me anytime soon.
I mean, I do think your dreams can help you work through whatever.
It doesn't mean you have to end relationships but it can help you understand something that you're dealing with day to day.
That you're like, Ooh, what does that symbol represent to me?
There's a lion in your dream.
okay, what do lions mean to me?
What does that represent?
And what were they doing in the dream?
That's what we talked to that researcher about.
I love we've gone a little bit far afield, but in a great way.
I'm gonna bring us back, but not with any kind of feelings about it.
Just to number two, in your list of three exercise tips that you as the host of LifeKit have actually incorporated into your own life.
And number two is bundling your temptations with your exercise.
Sometimes researchers call this temptation bundling.
But say more if you will.
This is sort of what I was talking about before with the workout while you're watching TV.
TV is a good example because a lot of us have shows that we really like, and they might come in bite sized chunks.
So I really love the show Abbott Elementary.
I think it's like half an hour, maybe a little less without ads.
You could save that and only watch it when you're working out.
So I could say, I'm going to just only watch Abbott Elementary when I'm on my exercise bike.
And then that's like 20 something minutes on the bike.
I imagine this is sort of like a Pavlovian response, right?
You're telling yourself I'm going to get a treat when I do this other thing that's also good for me." And that's an idea that Katie Milkman at Wharton, she's a behavioral scientist, she shared with us.
This idea of temptation bundling.
You know, the idea is like, you will start craving trips to the gym or you'll start craving about on the exercise bike if you know that it's paired with, for instance, your favorite show.
Yeah, Katie's amazing, she's been on this show.
I'll drop a link to that in the show notes and also a link to your conversation with her as well.
So temptation bundling a lot of evidence behind that.
And the third tip that you've incorporated into your own life, I think is maybe based on my understanding of the science of behavior change among if not the most powerful, and that is finding an exercise accountability buddy or buddies plural.
Yeah, people have been doing this forever, you know, my mom and our neighbor would go for walks around the neighborhood.
And it's basically like when you say to a friend, the simple version is, we both want to start walking around.
We both want to be more active.
Let's meet up once a week.
Let's meet up every morning, whatever the cadence is.
And because you know that this other person is relying on you, you're less likely to flake on it than you would be to flake on yourself.
A lot of us are people pleasers.
So we need that impetus to please another person to actually meet our own goals or, in this case, health goals.
There are lots of ways of doing this.
You don't necessarily have to do it with just one person and do exactly the same thing.
I like the idea of parallel play in a way, but like doing slightly different things.
You know, you could be on your exercise bike while your friend is doing yoga, you know, in the same living room, or you could both do your own exercise and then just say, we're going to meet up for a coffee after, and this will be like before work or something that works for you.
I would never do that because I'm not a morning person.
So I might be like a post -work kind of situation, but it can work really well for exercise.
It also works for other pursuits like creative pursuits.
And we can get into that.
I know that that's an area interest to, just like pursuing fun and joy and play.
I went to a woodworking group last night where we meet up once a month we make wooden spoons.
I say we, I'm new to this my second time but I really liked it and I was working away on my spoon and it's that idea of like I'm not gonna work on the spoon the rest of the month I'm just gonna go for a couple hours and we're gonna do the spoons together, you know?
Is there anything more Brooklyn than that?
Yes. No. Probably a lot of what I say is going to sound very, very Brooklyn.
Yeah. Then we have a drum circle in the park.
No. It is kind of great though.
People are really nice and I feel like you meet like -minded folks, and someone will stop you.
If you're using the knife the wrong way, someone will be like, no, no, no. Don't do that.
You're going to cut your finger off.
It's not a class, but it's a community, which I love.
And The goal is not like oh, I need to make this many spoons.
You know, it's not anybody's job.
It's more just like I want to learn this skill.
I want to work with my hands.
I think that feels good.
It again gets me thinking in a different way.
Yeah, no, I buy it.
I'm smiling just because I used to have a colleague back when I had a meditation app.
My colleague Eva once unironically told me that she was in an artisanal yogurt Lisserve and I was like, there is nothing more, Okay that is super, that is over the top.
Well, maybe the spoon making club is also kind of ridiculous.
It's, you know, I don't know, maybe it's a notch below the artisanal yogurt.
Having said that though, there's something deep here around the power, not only of having accountability buddies while you're doing exercise, but just to, connecting to other humans, in pretty much any context as long as it's voluntary, is incredibly powerful.
I don't have trouble getting to the gym, I actually like it.
I'm a bit of a mutant in that way, and I have been recently doing some group workouts on the weekends, and it's so much more fun to do it with other people.
It's the same vibe where my form is often bad, and so like the other people in the room are helping me with my form, and so that's really helpful.
Let's talk about another area of fitness that I think, often when we talk about fitness people go right to exercise or food, but sleep I've often referred to as the apex predator of healthy habits, like nothing can happen if you're not sleeping.
You very kindly let me know in advance about the three sleep tips that you've heard about in the course of hosting your show that you've actually incorporated into your own life.
And one of them is, and I'd be curious to hear you explained this, find your sleep sweet spot in 15 minute increments.
What does that mean?
Yeah, sleep sweet spot is very hard to say.
I'm impressed that you got that out.
30 years of being an anchorman.
So this was, we talked to Rebecca Robin.
She's a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
And she was saying, basically, you want to get seven to nine hours of sleep in a night.
That is the ideal range.
A lot of people will say that they can do with less, but often they're taking naps throughout the day or they're reaching for a lot of coffee or they're drinking 24 hour energy from those little bottles.
That would probably give me heart palpitations, but I know some people rely on them.
And so Are you on the 7 hour part of the range?
Are you in the 9 hour part of the range?
It's possible you fall outside of the range also, but you can sort of figure that out, figure out your personal sleep needs in 15 -minute increments, like work your way back and be like, okay, do I feel more well rested if I try basically sleeping for 15 minutes earlier than you normally go to sleep.
So like 15 minutes earlier than normal you start doing all of the sleep hygiene stuff that we talk about which is like, put your phone away.
Ideally stop watching TV, especially stop watching it on a laptop, start turning the lights off the same as you would for a baby.
When you're trying to teach them to go to sleep and this is your routine, you got to do it for yourself too.
Maybe part of your sleep routine is you take a bath or whatever it is that cues you, reading your little book in bed, dim lighting, you start that routine 15 minutes earlier and then you just keep inching it back and you're looking for whether you're able to wake up and feel refreshed and have enough energy throughout the day and not really be like, have to reach for the coffee and the energy drinks.
You can do that over the course of time because often we know too if you try to be like, you know what, I'm going to bed earlier, I'm going be so much better about this." You do it one day because you try to do it all at once.
You're like, I'm going to sleep ten hours tonight and then it doesn't happen again.
You got to do it in small bits.
First of all, my dad worked at Brigham and Women's for about 30 years as the head of radiation oncology so I'm quite familiar with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
It's an intense job, radiation oncology.
Yes, it was. So this next to another of your takeaways.
It is really something I see in my own life too.
There's this concept, this is one of my favorite terms, Revenge Nighttime Procrastination, or Revenge Bedtime Procrastination.
Just last night, in fact, I got home from dinner, I went out to dinner with some friends, and I got home at 10.
I have learned recently, actually, that 10 is actually the right time for me to start my sleep routine.
you get in your footy pajamas and Exactly my footy pajamas and my chamomile tea.
No, actually my bedtime routine is walking meditation okay, because my big sleep obstacle really is like a restlessness and so if I can do like a Amble around the house for 10 15 sometimes 20 minutes before bed while I'm you know trying to be mindful it really gets my body ready to go to sleep.
And then I read a little bit.
But I've found that if I push it too late, it screws me up.
And so last night, that's exactly what I did.
I pushed it too late and I had trouble sleeping.
And this I think is a very common issue and it's on your list of things you've learned.
So what have you learned about revenge, nighttime, procrastination and how to deal with it?
Well, okay, I'm wondering what did you do when you got home?
What did you want to do?
Oh, I watch TV. You watch TV.
Okay. Yeah. So I think revenge bedtime procrastination is really about you go all day, you're maybe being very productive, whatever it is, you go to work, you get this done, you get your errands done, you drop your kids off at school, and then maybe you socialize, and that's important to you, too, or you go to the gym, and that's important to you, too, but then you get home and you want some quiet time or you want some creative time or you want some time with your partner and you can't squeeze it all in into one day.
And so you're like, but I don't want the productive stuff to be my whole life, like my whole day, I can't have my whole day.
And so, you try to carve out this extra time.
And you're like, I can steal from sleep me, because that's really what it is.
You're like stealing from your sleeping self.
And you're stealing from yourself tomorrow, but you're sort of like, I need to do this right now.
And sometimes it can be bad if you're like, you can get into a pit because you're like, I want to feel creative or something, but you don't have a creative project you're really working on, so instead, you go online and you start online browsing and shopping and that's like fake creativity.
It's just giving you a little bit of like a buzz.
It's thing that you seek but you actually are not and you might end up just buying something, then you look up and it's midnight or it's 1230 or something like that or 1 a .m. and so that's also really common among people who have high -stress jobs and they're like I need that break.
If you are going to do those things, like if you do want to stay up and be browsing or whatever, you should not do it in bed.
You should make your bedroom a space that you can actually relax, a space that's just for sleeping and I would say like to be reasonable also for sex. I mean that's what most people do in their beds and that's like a healthy thing but those two things and not online shopping, not working, not watching TV can help you a lot and if you are up and you're like thinking about something, you're stressing about something she says, get out of bed and just deal with it or write a note to yourself or whatever and then get back into bed and try to sleep.
Yeah, we've had experts on the show talk about this and it seems like it just comes down to teaching your brain that the bed is a place to sleep.
And if you're teaching it that it's for anything else, I was having a conversation the other day with a therapist for my own stuff.
I've been suffering with claustrophobia and she in the process of the conversation said our brains are really dumb and It will panic even though you're rationally know there's nothing to fear and the same I think applies to a certain extent with sleep if you're training the brain that oh, yeah this is a place where I Shop on my laptop.
Then you're in a state.
That's not congenial necessarily to sleep.
Mm -hmm Have you talked about the claustrophobia thing on the show?
Yeah. Yes. I have although I'm in a whole new realm because I've been dealing with this for about three years now and I'm now kicking it up a notch and getting serious about it because my family is getting very tired of me needing to take Klonopin to get on a plane because it makes me annoying in the moment and grumpy later when I'm hungover.
I've had some experiences with claustrophobia too so I'd be curious to listen to any episodes that are specific to it it's a not uncommon phobia for me it's like I got locked in bathrooms a couple times and so now I'm like public bathrooms I'm like terrified to lock the door unless it's a lock mechanism that I can like yes see and you know know that yes I completely relate to that yeah nightmare fuel but I know what you mean that's what I was gonna say like I know why you're talking about where your brain is like okay but I'm fine Someone is going to come and eventually, and they will be able
to get the door open, but I'm like, I'm gonna die in here.
It's just your brain goes to like a million, you know.
Yeah, I get it. Yeah, so the dumb brain of ours, it's an amazing, it's not dumb, but in this way, it can be kind of dumb, and it needs to be trained in very kind of obvious ways, and so if you're teaching it that the bed is a place to get activated or inquisitive or inquisitive or productive for many of us, it will make sleep harder.
Another thing, by the way, that we learned was that it's very important to keep your bedroom at a cool temperature.
I like to sleep a little more on the warm side, but Robbins was telling me, you want to make sure it's under 70 degrees, ideally.
Even in the winter when you're trying to be all cozy, you know, under your sheets, because they have done studies on this and they have data to show that when they increase the temperature from that people's sleep was more fragmented.
So they were tossing and turning more, they were more disrupted, they were having more nightmares.
So that's another thing we can do to set ourselves up to be successful is like, keep it cool in your bedroom.
That was the third, just a flag for folks, that was the third tip for sleep that you've found to be helpful in your own life, keeping it cool in the room.
I was interested to hear that you're a warm sleeper because I use air conditioning in the winter to keep the room cold.
I have a lot of trouble sleeping unless the room is pretty frigid.
I mean, I will say this has been a rollercoaster over the past year because I did treatment for breast cancer and I had went through chemo and had hot flashes, like really terrible hot flashes.
So I dealt with that for a long time and that's shifted now.
So then I was all about the air conditioner in the winter.
I was like, this is no problem for me.
I don't even need the heat on.
But my base level, yeah, I feel like my little like my hands and feet get cold and I just want to be tucked up.
Now I understand why you reacted the way you did to my saying the thing about my dad being a radiation oncologist. He was actually a specialist in breast cancer before he retired.
So, I'm sorry to hear that you went through that.
Are you doing all right now?
Yeah. I am doing as well as I possibly could be.
So, my scans have been clear basically since surgery.
But they did all the other things as a just in case.
You know? That's how complicated it is with cancer.
It's like, they don't know for sure that like a little bit of it didn't get out.
A little micro metastases could be somewhere in your body.
So I had to do chemo and that's why they do radiation.
But I get checked regularly.
It's hard to know what to say because people who haven't gone through cancer or like haven't maybe had a family member go through it, they ask or are you in remission or are you cancer free and it's like a little hard to answer those questions like as far as I know, but I feel good.
I feel healthy. It's just one of those things that is going to be with you.
It's just going to be a thing that you have to be careful about and check on.
And I was already interested in living a healthy life, but now I also know what a big role people, these kinds of practices play in preventing a recurrence of breast cancer specifically because breast cancer is hormone -mediated and so sleep plays a big role.
What you eat plays a big role and also exercise does.
There have been studies that show it can decrease the risk of a recurrence significantly if people, women, exercise regularly, like get like the recommended amount that the government recommends every week, and so seeing those numbers, I was like, okay, I really need to be consistent about this, this is gonna help me maybe as much as taking this pill is helping me, you know?
Yeah, motivation to get even more serious about the things we've been talking about, but also perhaps even and enhanced and broadened perspective on the whole business of being alive.
Yeah, I definitely don't take it for granted.
I never did. To be honest, I lost a few family members when I was pretty young.
An aunt and an uncle who both died young.
My uncle was, I think he was like 52, died from a heart attack.
And my aunt, Mythea, she died from colon cancer in her 50s.
And I was like, under 10 years old, very close to both of them.
And so I think I always had this idea that that can happen, you know, when you're pretty young.
And I've always lived in a way that's very like, seize the day kind of.
Nothing is promised.
And I was always pretty careful.
That's the thing, like a lot of people who get cancer young are like, wait, I did all the right things.
I thought I was doing all the right things.
And then you realize there are more things you could do.
there is more like ways to avoid environmental toxins or try to.
But there's this feeling of like, maybe I've realized that you can do all the right things, and bad things can still happen.
It's not your fault.
But also very much, like, I said this to some friends and family at the time, people were asking me if I was feeling like, why me?
Why did this happen to me?
And I was like, You know, not really, because it's a little like why not me?
I think it's one in two people get cancer in their lifetimes and one in eight women get breast cancer.
So I was like, well those aren't great odds.
It has to happen to somebody, but if it's why not me that this could happen, then also why not me?
Why can't I have amazing experiences after I'm done with treatment?
I just wanna have a beautiful, brilliant life.
I wanna still be able to have a kid.
I wanna find the partner who's the right fit for me.
I wanna have a great community and learn how to carve wooden spoons on Monday nights in Brooklyn.
Why not me? Flipping that has helped me.
I could get you into an artisanal yogurt lisserve if you want.
You know I'm lactose intolerant, so I can't take you up on that.
I'm sure they have vegan variants.
Knowing this group.
Okay. I'm curious because when we went to my team, went to you and said, Hey, we'd love to have you on talk about fitness.
What have you learned?
You came back with three things that have really hit home for you on the exercise front, and three things that have really hit home for you on the sleep front.
And then instead of talking about diet, or something sort of obvious on the nose when it comes to fitness, you wanted to talk about play.
Why play and how does that link to fitness in your view?
Yeah, we've done some episodes on this and they confirmed what I think I felt intuitively, which is that play is a basic human need.
We interviewed someone named Stuart Brown who has been studying play for his entire career.
And he talks about, first of all, that like humans aren't the only animals that play.
Lots of animals do it.
Bears, leopards, bison, ravens, dolphins.
From an evolutionary perspective, it might not seem to make sense at first, like because it could often, it could be risky, it could be costly, like why do we do this thing?
But animal play scholars and biologists argue that it actually serves an important role.
It can help us adapt to difficult circumstances.
It can help us practice skills we need to survive and help us problem -solve and collaborate.
And there are studies on this, mostly, there are some in animals, and I think it might be a little harder to study play in adult humans and see the outcomes, but just based on the data that they have, they believe that play plays a really important role in our lives.
And then I think we can also feel this when we do it and we just kind of intuitively see the benefits of it.
So play, I think, can be lots of different things though.
It's not necessarily like let's go fly a kite or games that hopscotch or things that you did as a kid on the playground, though, if you're into that, cool.
But for me, a lot of it, a lot of it is about creativity.
A lot of it is about storytelling.
thing, I find my play through fashion through nature.
Like I was saying I like to watch a watch little hermit crab building a digging a hole and I find that playful almost like talking to the hermit crab.
That's an element of play or even sometimes you can be playful with yourself.
You're in the kitchen and you do something stupid.
I have this like water filter that takes a long time.
It's a reverse osmosis filter.
It takes a long time to fill up my jug of water, so I'll just like leave it going.
And then on the countertop, as the thing is filtering.
And I forget about it every other time.
I forget, and it starts flooding.
Like it starts flooding the countertop, and then onto the floor.
And I'm like, Oh my god.
You did it again. Instead of being like, Ugh, I'm so stupid.
Sometimes I'm just kind of laugh at myself like I'm my own bad roommate.
You can just sort of be like ahh you goon and sort of like have a moment of play with yourself.
Or you could do it with a little bird that lands on your window sill.
You'll find these moments throughout your day.
Just like we talked about with exercise snacks.
Yeah, it's not just a practice, it's an orientation to life, I like that.
One of the things you mentioned in the little memo your team sent me about takeaways that have been important to you vis -a -vis play.
One of the things that you talk about is that for many of us we don't even know where to start.
We hear that play is good for us and then we look at our lives and we're like yeah well I haven't thought about this in a long time.
I don't see how to fit it in, et cetera, et cetera.
And one of the experts on your show advised that if you want to get a sense of what your play style is, cast back to interpolate back to your childhood and what were the things you enjoyed doing then?
Can you say more about that?
Yeah. So one of our experts, he was saying, what were your favorite ways to play as a kid?
Were you super into Legos or erector sets, you know?
Did you like finger painting, did you like make believe or catching fireflies or seeing how far you could catapult yourself off of the swing set.
I really liked playing with Barbies and telling stories with them and dressing them up and little dramas and love triangles and things.
We added on to that with what we learned from Stuart.
Stuart Brown worked as a psychiatrist for many years and he would ask patients about their early experiences with play.
He and his colleagues would review the notes and they noticed certain types and they came up with basically a list to play personalities.
I think there are eight of them.
You can be more than one of these, but maybe you know, you see kind of where your clusters are.
You might be the Joker who loves to laugh and make other people laugh.
Practical jokes, physical comedy, word play, like could be a lot of things.
You might be the artist creator, which resonates for me.
You might be the kinesthete who finds joy and movement.
So like swimming, running, stretching, whatever it is, archery.
There's the director who loves to call the shots and to plan parties, stuff like that.
There's a storyteller, which also resonates with me maybe obviously, and for a lot of journalists.
You could refer to his list, Stuart Brown's list, to see which of those personalities resonate for you, or maybe you'll come up with a category of your own.
Coming up, Marielle talks about how to assess how much play you're getting in your daily life and how to get more.
I'm curious like when I was preparing for this interview and I was thinking about you know what how much play do I have in my life I mean I do play the drums but not as much as I would like I do exercise a lot but doesn't feel super playful unless I'm doing it with other people then I was thinking about socializing I really like to see my friends and I so several nights a week I probably could do it every night honestly will go to dinner with friends.
I really, really like that.
And so like I did last night, I'm doing it again tonight.
That seems to incorporate both storytelling, and joking for me in my experience.
But I don't know, does that make sense to you?
I think your dinners could be playful or they could not be depending on what's going on with them.
I think we've all been to dinners that feel more like a funeral.
And then we've been to dinners that feel super playful and have those elements.
so if it's good vibes, if you can joke around with your friends and lean into that.
I went to a dinner party recently and we did Esther Perel's game.
I think it's called Where Should We Begin, and it has the prompts on it.
That led to some really playful conversations.
Some people like to get together with their friends and literally play games like board games and things, which I do not like.
I don't need to learn new rules to anything ever again.
I don't like it either.
I'm like, I am going to want to do this really well.
And you've been practicing this because you own this game.
You've been practicing this thing at your house for years with every person who comes through and there's no chance I'm ever going to win so we're not playing this.
Maybe we can play Candyland but we're not playing like a strategy game.
You learn what you like and what you don't like.
You learn what feels like play to you.
And it's going to be different for every person.
And yes, you can go back to childhood and think about what felt like play then because sometimes that's like a more pure vision of ourselves.
Or it's like when we had less maybe distracting us and we just kind of gravitated towards what we liked.
I'm curious for you as a kid, what were your favorite forms of play?
Music, my parents were really into what we would now call classic rock.
Although at that time I don't think they called it classic rock.
So just current rock them, the Beatles, the Stones, Green's Clear Water, I was born in 1971, the band.
So that definitely scaled up to me learning the drums as a kid and still, you know, my son who's 10 plays the drums and so there's that, definitely joking around.
It's a huge part of my life.
Storytelling. I keyed in on the thing you mentioned before about like being on the swing and then jumping off.
I don't do enough of this but there's something about that we feeling that biking, skiing, rollerblading, skateboarding all have that to them.
And I can see it a little bit.
Yeah, I was on a beach vacation with my son recently and we were boogie boarding.
That sensation is, I think, really powerful.
I love that. So this is reminding me, as I was thinking about this this morning, I remembered a C .S.
Lewis quote that I wrote out and had taped on my bedroom wall when I was in high school, and it gets at this and I wanted to read some of it to you.
So, he says, You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread.
You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words.
But most of your friends don't see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that.
And I'm fast forwarding here.
Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction of something not to be identified with but always on the verge of breaking through?
you, the smell of cut wood in the workshop, or the clap -clap of water against the boat's side.
Are not all life -long friendships borne at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling but faint and uncertain even in the best of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
Hmm. I like that a lot.
Yeah. And I think for me, it would be something around humor.
Humor. And the we - I love the we thing like that is a common - Yeah, the we thing, too.
that's a common thread.
And you can think about what else might get you there?
Is it a physical thing?
Like roller coasters, you sort of in the air?
Or is there like a mental thing that it's like, it's a loss of control, but like a controlled loss of control?
Yeah, these are really interesting things to think about.
Let's just close on this.
This is another tip for play.
And this comes from Catherine Price, who has been on this show and is a friend of mine and ran wrote a book about play and gave a great TED Talk on on the subject.
And she Catherine has this acronym that stuck out to you Spark S -P -A -R -K can you walk us through it and why it stuck in your mind?
This is from an episode that was reported by Julia Forlan.
She's a journalist here in New York.
And I really liked this bit of it because I don't know acronyms, they just they help you remember stuff, you know, so I love an acronym, that says spark the S is make space in your life for fun, it's like we fill up our lives with all kinds of things and some of them aren't actually nurturing us.
For me, that's social media is often not nurturing me and it's taking too much of my time.
A lot of the things that go on in my phone, online shopping, and just even activities that feel obligatory but actually aren't.
The people that you don't really vibe with that much but like you keep going to that Meetup or you keep hanging out and you're like, actually don't have to do this, I don't have to invest in this connection.
I can say no to that, to leave space for other things to grow.
I think that's really important.
And not always rush in to fill the space.
Like let it happen.
P is for pursuing your passions.
So, again, what is that look for that common thread that we were talking about?
The smell of cut wood in the workshop, that we feeling when you're jumping off the swings, those things that for some reason it resonates for you in here, the things you're really passionate about and you don't have to try to become expert level at them necessarily.
Like you're just doing them for the joy of doing them and maintaining that passion.
You don't have to monetize them either.
The A is attract for attracting, attracting fun.
And that's really about developing an attitude that's open to it.
Again, I think it's that playful mindset.
I try to live in that playful mindset and one that's very, like, I meet new people.
I ask them what they've got going on in their lives, I make connections.
I'm trying to learn the drums, but a different kind of drumming.
I love bamba music in Puerto Rico.
My dad is Puerto Rican, so I just went and saw a group of female bamba drummers and I say that because traditionally it's the who play and the women dance.
But yeah, so it was all women playing the drums and I got the number from a guy there of his daughter who lives in New York and teaches Bomba.
So it's like, whatever it is about percussion, I'm really feeling it, it feels right to me, it aligns with some other things that I like.
And when I show up in that space, I had an open attitude.
I talked to this woman who was dancing, because I thought she was beautiful.
And I thought her dance was like, It was really incredible, and then she introduced me to this guy who had the daughter who teaches the drums. So you got to come at it with like not knowing exactly why you're saying hello to this person or whatever.
You just like it, you like what you see, you like what you saw them do.
You're curious about them.
And then R in the Spark is for a little gentle rebellion.
So like it's doing something that might feel kind of rebellious, like you'd get in trouble for it if you were in high school.
so going roller skating in the middle of the night or jumping into the pool with your clothes on or something like that.
I know our sleep is very important to us, but we could spare one night for some shenanigans, some wholesome shenanigans.
And then the K is about keeping at it.
And I guess it's not a job.
We don't want to make it into a job, but having fun as something that you should consider a basic human need and work it into your day -to -day life.
Just to pick up on the K.
Clay, you don't wanna make it into another thing on your to -do list, but you also don't want your whole life to be your to -do list. And so that's the balance.
Yeah, totally. I try to leave space now, too, especially when I travel, to not really program it, to just be like, yep, I know I'm going to this place, I'm gonna stay in this one space, and I'm gonna bop around.
I'm gonna go to the beach this day, I'm gonna go to the beach that day.
I don't wanna have another list of things to do, and it lets me, it lets me follow the breadcrumbs a little bit.
Yeah, yes. Marielle, it was a huge pleasure to get some time with you.
Yeah, I love this. Just before I let you go, can you remind everybody of the name of your show and where we can find it, how often it comes out, the types of things you cover?
Just, I know this makes some people uncomfortable, but plug away, please.
Okay. Let me do it.
Yeah. So the show is called Life Kit.
It's from NPR. We're a service journalism show, which means we talk to experts and then give you research -backed advice.
We do a lot of different kinds of stories base on health and money and life skills.
So some of my favorite episodes are the ones that could potentially save a life the ones about breast cancer screening or how to do CPR or how to prevent kids from drowning like the things you can do ahead of time to make it safer.
The money stuff we love saving people money how to negotiate down a medical bill for instance, was a really helpful one, I think.
And then we do stuff on life skills like relationships.
We're about to do one on how to ask people out in real life because everybody's tired of these dating apps, fun stuff like that, or even like how to make a turkey for Thanksgiving, things that people can take home and use that day.
You can find us across platforms. So the podcast, you can hear wherever you get your podcast, or as Alexi Horwizgazi said yesterday, wherever the pods are cast. I thought that was cute.
He's one of the hosts of Planet Money.
And then we also have a radio show, which you can hear on your local public radio station on the weekends.
And we have an Instagram, which we post all kinds of lovely videos on.
It's at NPR Lifekit and then we have, you go to npr .org slash lifekit and we have written up versions of stories, digital versions that have beautiful art alongside them.
And I'm Marielle Segatta.
Marielle, thank you very much for doing this.
I appreciate it. Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
This was really fun.
Thanks again to Marielle Segatta.
Awesome to talk to her.
I also want to remind you to visit dannharris .com for information on how to get all of the bespoke Get Fit Sanely Meditations from Cara Ly in your inbox.
As mentioned, we're doing tailored meditations for every episode this month, all of the Get Fit Sanely episodes.
And if you're a subscriber over on dannharris .com, they come to you in your podcast feed and in your inbox.
Finally, just want to thank everybody who works so hard on this show.
Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasile.
Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at PodPeople.
Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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