2%.
That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to 2%.
That's T-W-O percent on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court.
Today we have a little best friend compatibility test.
Okay, how long have we been best friends?
Since the day we met.
As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in.
You'll hear unfiltered analysis behind the scenes, stories and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport.
Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game, Serving Pancakes brings you closer to the action and the people shaping the future of volleyball.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Serving Pancakes and listen now.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.
In 2023.
Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms.
Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ready for a different take on Formula One?
Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series.
Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the story of the woman who last participated in a Formula One race weekend, the recent uptick in F1 romance novels and plenty of mishap scandals and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years.
Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Speck and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode of the show.
Today, I am finally doing it.
I am doing a much requested topic or episode which is my guide to romanticizing our 20s, even when they suck.
I think we've all seen videos or posts online about the importance of romanticizing your life, of like romanticizing your nine to five, romanticizing your commute, your morning routine, whatever it is.
But why does this actually work?
What does the psychology and the science say about these practices?
And the biggest question of them all, is there any evidence?
Is there any evidence that buying yourself the flowers, pretending you're the main character, using the good cutlery, the good candle work?
The answer, I'm going to give it to you straight away, is yes.
There is so much evidence honestly so much evidence I could make this a two-parter that romanticizing your life does things to your mind, does things to your brain, does things to your body that improve your quality of life.
So today we are going to talk about that, what romanticizing your 20s should actually look like.
Of course, the neuroscience and the psychology behind why and how this practice will quite literally change your reality and change the timeline you are on.
But also my five personal favorite things.
You know, romanticizing techniques and tips that you probably are not doing or you may not have even heard of.
So without further ado, let's get into the episode.
When people talk about romanticizing, it often gets confused with sugarcoating or even toxic positivity.
Like, Kind of like, you're supposed to spin everything into a lesson and you are immediately meant to treat your pain like it.
Is this gift.
It's this amazing thing.
Everything happens for a reason.
Everything is how it should be.
Everything is redirection.
We have to be careful with this because it can turn into what we call, in psychology, emotional bypassing.
Basically not actually letting yourself feel the full spectrum of emotions and therefore emotionally depriving yourself of a big part of your human experience.
We don't want to be doing that.
Instead, romanticizing our 20s.
As I see it personally, is choosing to experience your life as something you are actually experiencing, not just something that is happening to you or against you or with you as a victim.
This is a mindset that honestly, really has its roots in the 1800s with a movement called the Romantic Movement.
To give you a history lesson.
The Romantics were a group of people who really believed in the purpose and the importance of feeling experiences, getting the full complexity of it all, feeling deeply as a way to truth and enlightenment, even if it was more painful and messy than rationality.
It is definitely a shift from this idea that your life is just a series of difficulties that you need to fix to acknowledging that your life is an unfolding story, despite whether this chapter is hard or not, ultimately there is a purpose and ultimately feeling is part of that purpose.
Just notice for a second what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying the hard chapter is fun.
I'm not saying you have to be grateful for it.
I'm saying it can be a chapter without being the whole story.
And this is such an important emotional skill to develop during this decade because guess what?
Bad things are going to happen to us in these years and the next.
It's just without a doubt.
It's the promise of life.
Breakups, job rejections, loneliness.
There is immediate pain there that has to be respected.
And then there is the second layer of meaning that we get to control.
And by doing so, that will actually shift your lived reality.
Romanticizing your 20s is any form of exercise practice, mindset shift that allows you to see your experiences as meaningful, even if they are actually terrible.
Before we get into some of the specific practices for doing this that I have for you guys.
How does this actually work?
I feel like I've been teasing this this whole episode.
But psychologically clinically scientifically whatever, what is the perspective?
What is the mechanism that makes this effective?
The biggest reason romanticizing your life or your 20s works and makes your life and your 20s better is because of the power of cognitive reappraisal.
So the theory behind cognitive reappraisal, which is one of the most famous theories in psychology, basically says you can change your emotional response by changing how you think about a situation, Even if the situation stays the same, because your thoughts are half of the reality you're experiencing.
By controlling those thoughts, you can give yourself a better outlook and a better outcome.
Cognitive reappraisal.
It's basically just a reality regulation strategy that is so well documented in the research, because essentially we know this.
Two people could be experiencing the exact same thing, but the very fact that their past or their intentions make them think about it differently would change the experience of that moment for them.
And how you experience that single moment.
The moment that you are in is really all that reality is ever based on.
For example, a 2013 meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.
I don't even know how many they did hundreds.
It found that when people successfully reframed negative stimuli, so basically were able to say you know, this isn't all bad.
This is what this could actually mean for me.
I'm excited rather than anxious.
I'm excited to see this unfold.
The effect of this, of not just accepting negativity as it was, was visible in the brain.
Often, there was increased activity in the networks involved in cognitive control meaning-making and also reduced activity in brain regions associated with heightened emotional reactivity, such as the amygdala, which is very famous for that.
So when we employ this reframing strategy, again, we're not changing the physical event.
The physical event still sucks.
What is actually happening to us is that we are just tapping into a psychological mechanism that our brain already has.
Our brain already has this ability to think differently about a situation.
Sometimes it just forgets to use that because we are so emotionally overwhelmed by all of this stuff landing on at our doorstep at once that we just don't use it and we just find it easier just to accept things as they are.
Models in cognitive neuroscience will often describe the brain As a prediction machine.
It uses past experiences to generate expectations about what is going to happen and what will happen next, basically.
And then it updates those predictions based on incoming sensory data, like incoming environmental stimuli.
Part of that data it's using are your deliberate thoughts and how you choose to interpret something.
That is part of the data set.
So this means that what you expect therefore shapes what you notice.
When an event, life happens, it means that that perception will be different.
I feel like I'm going on a lot about this.
Why does this matter for your 20s?
Well, when you are experiencing a time full of ambiguous situations, the brain leans hardest on what it can predict and and what it can expect to overcome that uncertainty.
So if your internal model believes you're behind, if your internal model keeps telling you like nothing works out for me, I'm always going to fail.
It's easy to take that as a fact if you never question it.
And it's easy to apply that same narrative to entirely neutral situations.
You know, the quiet weekend becomes evidence that you lack friends.
The endless job hunt becomes evidence that you're just not smart enough.
That isn't always true.
People are busy.
The job market is tough right now.
Sometimes you have to take yourself out of that situation and view it differently, and view it objectively, whether that is through a romantic lens or something else entirely.
Romanticizing, though, it's basically choosing that deliberate pathway.
It's saying I'm going to reprogram how I am seeing this and give my brain a broader kinder, more realistic hypothesis for why things are happening to me.
Like this is a hard part of the story and I'm going to get over it.
This is my origin story.
This is what's going to make me more resilient in the future.
This is just part of life's ups and downs.
There are other reasons that these things are happening to me that may not just immediately be the reason that I understand, which is that nothing good happens to me.
Life sucks.
This is terrible.
I'm not going to be able to get through it.
That shift again That can change what your brain sees as evidence.
It also really comes down to the power of attention, right?
I feel like we talk about attention so much on this podcast because it is your most lucrative tool, your most lucrative resource when it comes to your mental well-being.
It is our way, attention is our way of basically allocating our mental resources.
Your brain is processing so much information, more than you could ever consciously experience.
If you listen to our conscious versus unconscious mind episode, you will know this very well.
There are sounds.
You don't notice facial expressions.
You don't register body sensations.
You tune out thoughts that flicker by too fast to catch.
So the brain has to be selective and it has to develop the systems to be selective.
Attention is that selection system.
It decides what gets priority processing, what gets amplified and what gets kind of pushed into the background or like basically just ignored.
We can understand this through what we call well, I guess it's like the idea, the idea of biased competition.
It's this model that was proposed by two American psychologists, or I guess neuroscientists, way back in the day, I think in like the 1990s, which is not way back in the day, but a couple of decades ago.
This model basically argues that stimuli compete for neural representation, basically brain space.
And what attention does is turn our biases towards whatever is currently relevant to our current mindset and our way of seeing the world.
Basically, our attention is guided by our goals, guided by our self-knowledge, guided by our expectations that we get to set deliberately.
So if you start to notice good, if you start to notice that everything goes right for me, if you start to believe that everything goes right for you, or whatever it is, your brain focuses on that more.
Basically, a big part of romanticizing your 20s is saying, let me recognize the ordinary.
Let me recognize the good.
Let me recognize what I'm grateful for.
Things that signify a life of abundance.
Things that signify... a plan to signify things are getting better.
If I focus on that, this fine-tunes my attentional system to basically search for that more meaning.
It becomes a larger, more meaningful part of my reality, meaning that my behavior and my reality continues to match my expectations because of how I choose to react in response.
When people say, like what you focus on expands.
This is the more scientific way of understanding that.
What you consistently attend to becomes more salient, more encoded, more retrievable and more likely to form the basis of your sense of self and more likely to form the basis of your sense of your 20s, basically.
There's one more psychological reason that romanticizing our 20s works beyond attention, beyond this resource allocation.
2%.
That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
I'll be speaking with writers, researchers and other health and fitness experts and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry.
We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.
We got it wrong.
Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress.
Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to 2 that's T-W-O percent on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court.
Today we have a little best friend compatibility test.
Okay, how long have we been best friends for?
Since the day we met.
As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in.
We really are like yin and yang, vodka and tequila.
You'll hear unfiltered analysis, behind-the-scenes stories and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport.
Today we have Logan Lednicki.
I feel like our fan base in general is very connected.
It's like a comforting feeling getting to play at home.
Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game, serving pancakes brings you closer to the action and the people shaping the future of volleyball.
Jordan Thompson had that microphone out.
God forbid we make mistakes or cuss at our coach.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Serving Pancakes and listen now.
This has been Serving Pancakes and we'll catch you on the flip side.
Okay.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.
Why hasn't a woman formally participated in a Formula One race weekend in over a decade?
Think about how many skills they have to develop at such a young age.
What can we learn from all of the new F1 romance novels suddenly popping up every year?
He still smelled of podium champagne and expensive frictions.
And how did a 2023 event called Wagageddon change the paddock forever?
That day is just seared into my memory.
I'm culture writer and F1 expert, Lily Herman, and these are just a few of the questions I'm tackling on No Grip, a Formula One culture podcast that dives into the underexplored pockets of the sport.
In each episode a different guest and I will go deeper into the wacky mishaps, scandals and sagas, both on the track and far away from it, that have made F1 a delightful decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years.
Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened at City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducked.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of blackmail.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
My latest episode is with Noah Kahn, the singer-songwriter behind the multi-platinum global hit Stick Season and one of the biggest voices in music today.
Noah opens up about the pressure that followed his rapid success, his struggles with mental health and body image, and the fear of starting again after such a defining moment in his career.
It's easy to look at somebody and be like, your life must be so sick.
Man, you have no clue.
Talking about the mental illness stuff, it used to be this thing that I was ashamed of.
I'm just now trying to unwind this idea that I have to be unhealthy physically or in pain in some emotional way in my life to create good music.
If someone says that I did a good job, I'm like, yeah, I'm good.
If someone says that I suck, I'm like, I suck.
Getting to talk about this is not common for me.
Right now, I need it more than ever.
Let me quickly return to that one final thing I said.
I kind of mentioned before, which is the role of the narrative, the role of having a story for your 20s and believing that there is this underlying current of things working out or things taking you in the right direction.
I think this is my most talked about matter on the podcast.
I'm sorry if you are a frequent listener because we are returning to it yet again.
It is just so essential to literally every single thing you choose to do in this 10-year period of your life.
Narrative psychology.
If I could have every 20-something know one time, it would be the idea of narrative psychology.
It's the idea that there is an objective story of what's happening in your life.
That objective story may be, I don't have as many friends as I want.
I don't like my job.
My job is not fulfilling.
I don't have the money I need to do the things I want.
And then there is the narrative that you tell yourself about that story, which is that you're.
It's what makes it meaningful.
What makes those objective experiences meaningful and sentimental.
Like, again, that story of, yeah, everything... This is actually important.
This...
This suffering is important.
I am getting closer to what I want.
I am learning important skills.
That's why I'm going through this.
This is the story about the story.
In the early 2000s, researchers based in Germany wrote this fantastic, this huge, fantastic paper talking about this and talking about the idea of life story coherence.
And it basically means that you are able to organize events in a way that makes sense over time, especially through casual coherence basically how your experiences are shaping you, and thematic coherence, like recurring themes that you carry with you.
That coherence develops over your 20s.
And actually a 2014 study published in the Journal of Personality looked at the autobiographical narratives of personally significant events from all these people, like 103 students, I think.
And what they did was they looked at the story people were telling themselves about their lives and they coded these stories based on whether they were coherent, based on whether they contained content about their identity, based on whether they were inherently optimistic.
And what the researchers found was that participants who constructed a more coherent narrative of events like this thing had to happen to lead into this thing, and this thing had to happen to lead into this thing.
And failure was redirection, and this all makes sense.
In the flow of my life, they had improved psychological well-being.
If you are able to take moments of failure as lessons, if you are able to think that your story was building to something greater, if you are able to see that everything in life is connected, even the hard parts, like even the hard parts, are still fascinating and still worthwhile in some way, because they capture a part of the human condition, because they are necessary stepping stones that will make you happier.
That made these people happier.
This is why it is so important to reflect or create a story for your life, to explain your experiences, even the ones that suck.
That is so protective.
So with that in mind...
Let's jump into some of my actual tips for romanticizing your life, actual tips for connecting to a story about your life.
Number one, every good story, every good movie needs a good soundtrack.
So, if you want to, Music is one of the most widely and most historically used emotional regulation tools across cultures, across age groups, whether that's for comfort distraction, for I don't know processing anger.
It provides catharsis.
And I think music also provides a bit of beauty to hard emotions, because it allows you to feel it all so deeply which again, is part of the blessing of being alive, whether we want to acknowledge that or not.
Secondly, A playlist has the potential to do something really quite amazing when you think about it.
It creates a container for where you are able to fully feel your emotions and then return to that later.
It contains a feeling based on our associations with those songs.
Because of our psychological attachment to music, the memories created with that music last and are able to be revisited and thought about.
When you're heartbroken, I think, when you're moving, when you're homesick, whatever your feelings, can feel very endless, very shapeless.
So a playlist gives you emotional boundaries.
It helps you move through your emotions.
And it means that in 10 years time, 15 years time, maybe even less, two years time, you'll be able to listen back to that music.
Feel the feeling you felt then and appreciate it differently.
Appreciate it as kind of like, as part of the story, so that you gain that coherence.
Make sure that you try to use music to categorize and appreciate your life.
If there's a song that makes you feel really ethereal and beautiful, a song that makes you feel really nostalgic, a song that makes you feel heartbroken, use those songs to bookmark moments in your experience.
Think of it Think of how impactful a film soundtrack is.
It can literally change how you interpret a scene and it makes you associate certain songs with certain moments.
Do that with your life.
I want you to make yourself a movie soundtrack to all the different moments in the near past future as a way to romanticize them and feel them even more deeply, and then to be able to return to them when you're feeling differently, to understand that those emotions pass.
Playlist for the first week of 2026 winter for the dinner party with your friends, for your first breakup.
For processing rejection
Have those playlists, make these playlists as I don't know little companions to the moments in your life, so that you can feel it deeply.
Tip number two make your alone time romantic and make it really, just make it really really special.
Make it incredibly special to you to spend time with yourself.
I honestly blame film and TV and social media for this insidious idea that being alone means you're automatically lonely, especially when we constantly see these people, these images of others, with like their big friendship groups and like their perfect relationships and like They're interesting Saturday night plans.
Like they're at the bar, then they're at the restaurant, then they're like at a show and everybody's having a great time.
We want that.
But actually a lot of us in our 20s are alone, more than we ever expected to be and more than other people realize we are.
Not always physically alone.
Sometimes it's more like a feeling like you have people around you but no one really knows what's going on inside you.
I think this causes a huge amount of disappointment in us.
You know, as if being single or staying in on a Saturday night or not having a big friend group means you're doing this wrong.
And we don't always realize like solitude is important. and psychologically protective.
Of course, community support networks add years to your life.
They're so important.
I'm not saying spend all your time alone, but I think making your alone time romantic and special is so important if you want to feel happy.
There's a really interesting paper from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that explores solitude as a really important aspect of self-regulation.
Basically being able to bring yourself back into yourself.
That's the best way I can put it.
The research has found that solitude actually helps reduce the intensity of negative emotions, when it is something that we deliberately choose to practice.
The key here is actively choosing rather than feeling like we are passively being thrown into an alone state we don't want to be in.
A further study from researchers at the University of Reading called this process of choosing and deliberately cultivating your solitude as crafting solitude.
And they talk about the importance of being intentional and making your alone time meaningful and full.
Like consciously thinking of a concert or a play or a game you really want to go to and then deciding.
I'm going to do that by myself, instead of waiting to be disappointed and feel like I don't have a choice in being alone.
Taking yourself out for a cute date.
Having no plans on a Sunday.
So choosing to make it really special for yourself by cooking your favorite meal, cooking like a beautiful, beautiful breakfast, or going for a long hike by yourself, getting your room really, really cozy, getting your skincare lined up for the night.
Like Those small shifts of like.
I have a choice here, I have agency.
I love doing this changes the emotional charge around solitude to make it something you're excited about and you can really gain psychological insight from.
I also think for those of us who want kids like, want to get married, want families, there will be a time in your life when you will look back at these solitary moments with envy and with like, a deep desire to have one more night in your own bed, one more night alone, one more day where you didn't have to follow an itinerary or tell people what to do.
One more day where you had like no plan.
Here is that chance.
You know, do it for your future self.
Do it for the future you.
Part of that is, again, really appreciating every chapter you're in for what you may miss one day.
Really appreciating.
You know yeah, I'm lonely and that sucks, but one day I'm going to miss being lonely.
Or yeah, I'm heartbroken and whatever, but like one day I'm going to be in love and miss this feeling.
In the same vein, I think one of the easiest ways to romanticize your 20s is is just to create any kind of ritual.
Yeah, rituals around being alone, but rituals for when you get your first paycheck and a new job.
Rituals for getting ghosted.
Rituals for every job rejection.
Rituals for every single first date.
These are essential.
Rituals sound very spiritual, like prayer, like something like that, but there's a lot of research actually showing that having sacred sentimental practices for key life events or even really minor events helps people cope with uncertainty by creating something you can control, that you find cleansing, that you find calming or romantic and you can keep returning to it because again, it's something that you control.
There's one specific study from 2014 from researchers at Harvard that actually found how rituals can be particularly healing for people going through really hard things like specifically, people who are grieving.
That's why visiting grave sites is so important.
That's why lighting candles, continuing to celebrate the birthdays of those who have passed, can be so powerful, because it continues to keep a part of them alive and keep a certainty and a sense of control over things that feel uncontrollable.
It allows us to feel safe.
Again, control, but also there is some magic.
There's some peace.
There's stability to moments that are really hard.
Everything around you could fall apart and you could still light that incense at the end of the night.
You could still make sure that you walked outside for 20 minutes every day.
I also think rituals in our 20s make the ordinary feel important and significant, which we sometimes lose by being in such a rush to get places and like tick things off a list and be successful and blah blah blah blah blah.
And they help us mark points in time.
They help us like maybe even mentally close certain chapters or open certain chapters.
So we're like, cool, I'm here.
I'm in this moment.
I'm not in that moment anymore.
Let me give you some examples so that you can Kind of see what I'm saying here.
The biggest one I think of is like I have a ritual when I start a new job.
I always use a small part of my paycheck to buy myself something really nice that I know will last.
Like a gift to myself, like a nice pair of earrings, a handbag.
I think I did that one once.
Something that I know I'm going to have for years that signifies this new chapter.
This literally started like when I was, how old was I when I got my first job?
14, nine months, like 15.
And I got my first paycheck.
It was $200, which is actually quite a lot of money, but I think I'd worked like a lot of shifts.
And I bought myself a pair of ripped denim jeans, no shorts from One Teaspoon.
I don't know if you guys remember that brand.
Those shorts did not last.
They were so ripped.
It was almost inappropriate.
But the practice is still there.
I've done that for every job, every contract since.
I actually didn't do anything for my Netflix deal, which I still feel like I need to do.
So I'm breaking my own ritual.
It's just been very busy.
But yeah, I have one item from every past job I've started.
Another ritual is having a specific first date outfit or a first date perfume.
And, on the other end of the spectrum, obviously like different life experience, but having a breakup ritual.
After you break up, go get a bad haircut, rearrange your bedroom, take everything they gave you, box it all up, burn it, bury it, store it that sort of thing as a cleansing thing to be like cool, that chapter is done.
I'm ready to psychologically move forward.
I physically closed the door.
Another ritual, something I actually started doing last year, was that I started to walk the number of kilometers as the same.
The age I was turning, I took that age and did that number of kilometers as a walk.
That is the most complicated way of describing this, but basically, turn 26, walk 26 kilometers.
Turn 29, walk 29 kilometers.
Start at 9am, dawdle along, invite some friends.
And it kind of signifies a new year.
Like I'm doing this hard thing.
I'm seeing new things and I'm doing something that marks that this is what I did on this birthday, instead of doing nothing.
I think rituals around birthdays and aging are amazing to symbolize the privilege of getting older.
And just, again, make your birthday feel special so that time feels marked by these moments.
Same for the start of a new year.
Same for the start of a new season, new cities, new life, like that sort of thing.
It marks things in time.
It says that that everything in life, every experience is still important.
And during transitional times it also stops us from keeping things like open-ended that can kind of I don't know kind of cast a shadow over us.
Okay, we're going to take one final short break with this episode before I dive into my final two tips for romanticizing our 20s.
And when we maybe shouldn't romanticize hard things and we should just let ourselves feel a little bit crap.
2%.
That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
I'll be speaking with writers, researchers and other health and fitness experts and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry.
We really believed that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.
We got it wrong.
Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress.
Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to 2 that's T-W-O percent on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court.
Today we have a little best friend compatibility test.
Okay, how long have we been best friends for?
Since the day we met.
As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in.
We really are like yin and yang, vodka and tequila.
You'll hear unfiltered analysis, behind-the-scenes stories and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport.
Today we have Logan Lednicki.
I feel like our fan base in general is very connected.
It's like a comforting feeling getting to play at home.
Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game, serving pancakes brings you closer to the action and the people shaping the future of volleyball.
Jordan Thompson had that microphone out.
God forbid we make mistakes or cuss at our coach.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Serving Pancakes and listen now.
This has been Serving Pancakes and we'll catch you on the flip side.
Okay.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.
Why hasn't a woman formally participated in a Formula One race weekend in over a decade?
Think about how many skills they have to develop at such a young age.
What can we learn from all of the new F1 romance novels suddenly popping up every year?
He still smelled of podium champagne and expensive frictions.
And how did a 2023 event called Wagageddon change the paddock forever?
That day is just seared into my memory.
I'm culture writer and F1 expert, Lily Herman, and these are just a few of the questions I'm tackling on No Grip, a Formula One culture podcast that dives into the underexplored pockets of the sport.
In each episode a different guest and I will go deeper into the wacky mishaps, scandals and sagas, both on the track and far away from it, that have made F1 a delightful decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years.
Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened at City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons, and in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducked.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of blackmail.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
My latest episode is with Noah Kahn, the singer-songwriter behind the multi-platinum global hit Stick Season and one of the biggest voices in music today.
Noah opens up about the pressure that followed his rapid success, his struggles with mental health and body image, and the fear of starting again after such a defining moment in his career.
It's easy to look at somebody and be like, your life must be so sick.
Man, you have no clue.
Talking about the mental illness stuff, it used to be this thing that I was ashamed of.
I'm just now trying to unwind this idea that I have to be unhealthy physically or in pain in some emotional way in my life to create good music.
If someone says that I did a good job, I'm like, yeah, I'm good.
If someone says that I suck, I'm like, I suck.
Getting to talk about this is not common for me.
Right now, I need it more than ever.
I did this episode on whimsy like a month or two ago now, and it kind of blew up.
You guys loved it.
It like strangely went viral on Instagram, which side note, the comments are honestly quite funny.
I had no idea whimsy could be so controversial.
Like people were up in arms.
Like people were angry in those comments, but that's besides the point.
Something I spoke about in that episode, if you haven't listened to it, it's amazing.
Please go listen to it, which not to toot my own horn, but it's a great episode.
Something I spoke about is the importance of collecting and representing your memories through trinkets, small souvenirs, through junk.
During your 20s, we are constantly shedding the skin of the person we used to be and shedding the life of the people we used to be.
And sometimes we look back on a year and we wonder like, where the heck did all the time go?
I have nothing to remember this time by.
And we struggle to actually think and appreciate what we've done.
By collecting trinkets, by collecting postcards notes, whatever it is.
These act as cues for our memories.
It's one way to kind of prevent that evaporation of time that a lot of us experience.
A 2021 study in Australia found that possessions like souvenirs, like photographs, really any object that is meaningfully attached to a time or moment can actually preserve that experience for us and make the moment feel more vibrant and feel more important in hindsight and, of course, feel more romantic with a capital R Feel more deep.
Think about when you were a child.
I know, I used to collect shells from the beach.
And when I was a kid, which apparently you're not meant to do anymore.
So I'm very sorry.
But I was a kid back then.
Nobody knew anything.
I used to collect beanie babies.
I used to, I don't know, collect little figurines.
And I still have so many of them.
And it physically is very grounding.
And it physically feels like I'm carrying moments of my life with me.
I'm carrying memories with me that maybe don't have a physical representation, but I'm like in my mind, but I'm making that physical representation for myself.
Think some ways to do this is like junk journaling, but try doing a junk box this year.
Cinema tickets, receipts from a date, a note from somebody, a concert wristband, a postcard, a menu, a chocolate wrapper.
It doesn't have to be neat.
Nobody's going to put this in a museum.
Maybe they will.
I don't think they will.
It's a time capsule for yourself.
Or do one scrapbook page per month.
Just one.
One photo, one sentence, that's it.
Something like March was hot.
I did X Y, Z.
Here was a photo that I took on my iPhone, but you know, I spent some really nice time in nature and now I have that and I remember that and I can come back to that.
On this note, my final tip.
Half of romanticizing your 20s is providing ways again for you to really experience hindsight and for you to really reflect on the past and how far you've come and how meaningful past experiences were to the story that you are creating.
So, with that in mind, I think the biggest thing you can do for your 20s and romanticizing them is to make vlogs for yourself and yourself only.
Let me explain this.
When I broke up with my first proper boyfriend when I was at university, I remember feeling so deeply sad and so unhappy.
And so what I started doing was vlogging myself crying.
And I know that sounds ridiculous, but I would talk to myself on the camera and be like I just am having such a hard time.
I miss this about him.
I miss that about him.
And I would keep doing that until I felt like I didn't need to do it anymore.
And only recently did I find those videos again.
I found like 20 of them.
And I was like, wow, I feel so happy that I documented that.
I feel so happy I now have the privilege of getting to sit back with hindsight and be like we really did get better and everything really turned out the way it was meant to be.
And we didn't want to end up with him anyways.
That is such a privilege.
I genuinely feel so lucky that I had that opportunity.
Again, it's this hindsight.
It's this part of you that only gets to find experiences like romantic in the future.
And if you don't give yourself the opportunity to fully like, re-submerge in those moments, obviously you can do it in other ways, but like, sometimes you miss that.
You miss how heartbreak rejection pain, terrible things, losing your job, going broke, like Forget that it's all going to be okay and that it's all taking you somewhere else.
And so starting that practice now of genuinely filming yourself when you feel the need to talk, when you feel like this is a moment or a memory that you're going to want to return to, is a fantastic way to romanticize what you're going through.
It's a fantastic way to just, yeah, I feel like I've said it enough times.
It's a fantastic way to create the story and to have parts of the story that you can reflect back on and then project forward with, to see that things are going to get better in the future.
Now to drill one final point home before we conclude this episode.
Contrary to all the nice sentimental tips I've given so far to like vlog yourself crying, keep junk in a box, whatever sometimes the most romantic, loving thing you can do for yourself is just let yourself fall apart, to just let yourself feel like crap about a situation.
Our 20s are a hard decade.
This is hard.
You're a baby adult.
You are in your infancy of adulthood.
And as you mature, there is so much to learn.
And part of that learning is through pain, which really sucks, but I think we all learn that the older we get.
Practice emotional acceptance.
Basically, allow negative emotions to pass through you rather than fighting them.
Lean back into them.
This has been found to actually predict better psychological outcomes, fewer depressive symptoms, less anxiety over time, compared to constantly trying to put a positive spin on absolutely everything.
I know that sounds contradictory, but you are allowed to be messy and you're allowed to be sad.
And you're allowed to feel lost and not necessarily know that you're going to feel better, but just hope.
Like you're allowed to feel sorry for yourself sometimes.
I feel like we need to say that.
It's actually a good thing.
You don't need to fix it.
You don't need to rush through it.
Just name the emotion accurately.
Care for your body in the most basic sense, movement, food, sleep, water.
And when you're ready, you can maybe look for the silver lining.
You can maybe add the narrative back in if you want to do that.
Sometimes, honestly, the hard feelings are where you feel most alive.
Because it hurts so much it almost feels good.
Do you know what I mean?
Do you know what I mean by that?
The pain almost feels satisfying and gratifying, because it reminds you that you're alive and it reminds you that you are here.
And as bad as that is and as much you're like this is just ripping me to shreds there's always a parallel happy experience that's going to balance things out.
Well, I at least believe that.
I really do believe in the balance of the universe.
When you experience bad, good will return.
So, to summarize, romanticizing your 20s isn't a trick to make bad things always feel good and magical all the time.
That is impossible.
You cannot act against the physics of life.
It's not a way to stop bad things from happening.
It's just a way of stopping bad things from becoming the only narrative you tell yourself about your life.
We know this works because psychologically we have evidence for methods like cognitive reappraisal.
We have evidence for attention bias theory.
We have evidence that our beliefs about a situation do allow us to better control the outcome.
And it matters to us.
I think this whole process matters to us because in a time as turbulent and ever-changing as our 20s, having that stable, coherent story of like this is all linked.
There is an invisible string that runs through this all.
It stops us from discarding or just wanting to push through hard things and lets us just feel them and just be like cool, I'm here.
I'm in the belly of life.
If it's not going to go well, at least I'm going to feel it as deeply as I can.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you have made it this far and you were listening on Spotify, leave a little comment down below.
How are you planning to romanticize your 20s?
Is there something that you do that I didn't mention that you think is important?
As always, huge thank you to our researcher, Libby Colbert, for her contributions and her help on this episode.
She is truly amazing.
Know the drill by now, but until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself.
We're going to talk very, very soon.
2%.
That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to 2%.
That's T-W-O percent on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court.
Today we have a little best friend compatibility test.
Okay, how long have we been best friends?
Since the day we met.
As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in.
You'll hear unfiltered analysis behind the scenes, stories and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport.
Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game, Serving Pancakes brings you closer to the action and the people shaping the future of volleyball.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Serving Pancakes, and listen now.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This was one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ready for a different take on Formula One?
Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series.
Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the story of the woman who last participated in a Formula One race weekend, the recent uptick in F1 romance novels and plenty of mishap scandals and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years.
Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
My latest episode is with Noah Khan, the singer-songwriter behind the multi-platinum global hit Stick Season and one of the biggest voices in music today.
Talking about the mental illness stuff, it used to be this thing that I was ashamed of.
Getting to talk about this is not common for me.
Right now, I need it more than ever.
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
