You're listening to How to Be a Better Human.
I am your host, Chris Duffy, and this week we are still on our holiday break between seasons, but we will be back with new episodes in mid -January.
So stay tuned. In the meantime though, today we have an episode from our very first season, and this interview was recorded in the midst of pandemic lockdowns and economic and political unrest.
And in many ways, the issues that we were dealing with front and center when this episode was recorded are still ongoing today, but I do just want to give you the context so you know when this interview took place.
And I also want to say that over the years of hosting this show, this conversation with Lucy Hone, an expert on wellbeing and resilience, this is the single episode that listeners have brought up to me the most.
I know that what Lucy has to say here has really spoken to people and it's stuck with me too because Lucy's research and her work, they're all about how do you get through tough times?
How do you survive when it feels like your world is falling apart?
And those are questions that we're all going to have to face at some point in our lives.
They're some of the biggest challenges that come with being human.
In Lucy's talk, which was recorded at TEDxChristchurch, she shares her research on coping with sorrow and tragedy, and also her own journey back to hope and strength and life after the unthinkable happened to her.
Here's a clip. I finished my studies in America and I returned home here to Christchurch to start my doctoral research.
I just begun that study when the Christchurch earthquakes hit.
So I put my research on hold and I started working with my home community to help them through that terrible post -quake period.
I worked with all sorts of organisations from government departments to building companies and all sorts of community groups, teaching them the ways of thinking and acting that we know boost resilience.
I thought that was my calling, my moment to put all of that research to good use, but sadly I was wrong.
For my own true test came in 2014 on Queen's birthday weekend.
We and two other families had decided to go down to Lake O 'How and bike the ouster ocean.
At the last minute, my beautiful 12 -year -old daughter Abby decided to hop in the car with her best friend Ella, also 12, and Ella's pulled through a car on Thompson's track, a car sped through a stop sign, crashing into them and killing all three of them instantly.
In the blink of an eye, I find myself flung to the other side of the equation, waking up with a whole new identity.
Instead of being the resilience expert, suddenly I'm the grieving mother, waking up not knowing who I am, trying to wrap my head around unthinkable news.
My world smashed to smithereens.
If you're listening and you are struggling, I hear you.
I feel you. Lucy hears you and she feels you too.
You are not alone. And as Lucy is about to tell us, there is a path through.
I'm Chris Duffy and this is How to be a Better Human.
We'll be right back.
When the energy is high and the music is right, pushing past your limits becomes that much easier.
Take a reggaeton run or strength class on the Peloton Tread, and you'll quickly see why these are the workouts you've been searching for.
Every day brings new challenges from expert coaches who train and speak the same language as you do.
Level up your workouts with Peloton Tread.
Find your push. Find your power.
Peloton. Visit onepeloton .com.
The holidays are all about sharing with family.
Meals, couches, stories, grandma, secret pecan pie recipe.
And now you can also share a cart with Instacart's family carts.
Everyone can add what they want to one group cart from wherever they are.
So you don't have to go from room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce or whether you should get mini marshmallows for the yams or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread.
Just share a cart and then share the meals and the moments.
Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes.
Plus enjoy free delivery on your first three orders, service fees and terms apply.
Does your AI model really know code?
Its specific syntax, its structure, its logic.
IBM's Granite code models do.
They're purpose built for code and trained on 116 different programming languages to help you generate, translate, and explain code quickly.
Because the more your AI model knows about code, the more it can help you do.
Get started now at ibm .com slash granite.
IBM, let's create. We're back.
Today we're talking with Dr.
Lucy Hone, an expert on resilience and wellbeing.
Kia ora, as we say down here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, I am Dr.
Lucy Hone. I'm a co -founder and co -director at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience.
I think maybe we should start by just talking about the word resilience for a moment.
You study it both academically, but also you do a lot of work with the practical implications of resilience.
But I think it's also one of those words that people really throw around a lot and mean a lot of different things with.
So when you say resilience, what do you mean by that?
Such a good point. And it drives me nuts that people just band this word around without really understanding that there are some real kind of myths here.
So we define resilience as a person or an organization's ability to adapt and flex and steer through some form of adversity and challenge so that they can continue to function reasonably well or get back to functioning reasonably well, and also learning from it.
I think those are all the important parts of it.
You've got to think about it.
It's about managing to kind of keep the show on the road despite what's happening to you so that you continue to function in a pretty reasonable fashion despite what's going on.
But I also truly believe that it is about adaptation.
It's about a process of learning and flexing and changing and growing as we go.
Personally, I think many, many people have been dealing with these ways in which life has thrown us unexpected curveballs.
And I think that the way that you talk about practical ways in which we can make ourselves more resilient rather than just feeling like we either are or are not, it really resonates with me and I think it will really resonate with many people right now, if not every single person.
So can we talk about that for a moment?
Some people just handle bad things better.
They're able to do them.
But you really don't feel like that.
You feel like it's a learned skill.
Well, yes and no. That is true that some people have a greater inbuilt capacity to cope with whatever seems to happen to them.
Not quite whatever happens to them because there is research that shows that if you continually bombarded with adverse events, then of course, that is more likely to erode your capacity to get back.
So I do think that adversity doesn't discriminate.
It happens to us all.
Shit, things happen to us all.
And yet, we do have an incredible inherent ability to cope using very ordinary processes.
And my job and my absolute mission is to get more people to understand.
Firstly, to give them some hope that they can get through tough times and then give them some practical ways of thinking and acting to help them navigate those tough times.
To give them some choices and to give them what we would call in psychology, some agency.
Some active ingredients rather than just being passive recipients.
And I feel so strongly about this work, Chris, because I don't think, particularly when it comes to grief, there isn't sufficient knowledge about our ability just to be able to cope.
Even grief has been pathologized.
It's been made of kind of like there's something wrong with you.
Yeah, I'm on a new mission now to help people understand a bit more about coping with loss.
And I feel like one of the hard parts of dealing with the things that you would need to be resilient about, whether it's illness or injury or loss or heartbreak or assault, anything that is one of these really big, challenging things.
It feels like, as a society, we often don't address them.
And so we don't really have the context for what is normal and what is not normal and what is okay and what is not okay.
It's just like these are things that we'd rather not think about at all.
Yeah, and I think this is really important point to make that we need to step away from the happyology and the Instagram world that lives all kind of la -la and pretty and beautiful and happiness is all that counts.
And we're pretty much, I think Covid has taught us that no one's immune to bad things happening.
And so it is really important that we enter a much more open dialogue about what that is.
Let's learn how to sit with them and live in that uncomfortableness alongside starting to piece our lives back together.
That has been the most incredible discovery for me is that you can grieve and live at the same time.
People have got out of the habit of talking about death.
There's a lot of people who are just killed.
She died. And I'm happy to talk about that.
It's a fact of life.
Sugarcoating it doesn't make it any better, but being able to talk about it does.
It's interesting thinking about how you were just saying how we are so uncomfortable.
As a North American, I do feel, I feel like it's challenging to talk about this stuff.
And even knowing that I'm going to be interviewing you about this, it feels almost rude or unacceptable to bring up things that have happened in your life, like losing your daughter because it feels so personal.
But I hear what you're saying, which is that like not talking about it doesn't change it and creating space to talk about it and allowing you to be acknowledged and to be for that to be real.
That actually can be much more helpful than this polite quote unquote politeness that I, think a lot of people feel when we talk about difficult things.
Yeah, totally. So actually, you'll be amused to hear that I almost Trump you with the North American, not wanting to talk about it, because I'm actually was born in London.
So I've got the stiff upper lip thing going on in my jeans.
And actually, moving to New Zealand 20 years ago, has made a difference to my experience of grief, which began when I was still in England in the year 2000.
And my dear mum died.
It feels like in a traumatic time, we have to not rush past it or ignore it or try to feel better right away, but actually acknowledge it and sit with it and be okay with it not being okay.
But then we have to also figure out how to not drown in that and still be able to anchor ourselves to something outside of pain and sadness.
And that is a really hard balance to strike.
Yeah, so true. So actually, what you're speaking to theoretically, there are those two things of a bit about trauma and a bit about grief.
So on the grief side, one of the things I've learned most about about bereavement since Abby died is that you know how people when they've lost someone, they do sometimes really want to tell their story.
And have you ever come across someone, Chris, who's gone into it in, in really kind of, you know, tiny detail and you kind of get to the point where you're almost embarrassed because they're telling it so much.
Yeah. And what that is about this is Bob Naimire's work about meaning making through loss, and that when our life path splits, and we are forced to go down a completely different unanticipated, unwanted road, it means that what happens is that our life schema, this kind of grand plan that we had for ourselves,
is smashed to smithereens.
And so what we are doing by talking to people and talking it out and telling our stories is we are slowly managing to start to piece together again, the new life story and make a new kind of meaningful concept come from what has happened to integrate it into your life.
So this is really important because it means that if you are, if you've got a friend or a family member or a colleague who has lost someone, one of the best, most supportive things that you can do to help them is to ask them about the bereaved, to ask them to, and give them time and space, endless time
and space to tell their story and even retell their story.
Because every time we do so, we are doing that really important processing of creating the new life narrative.
One of the other great advancements in bereavement research is that when someone dies, you don't have to sever your connection with the dead, and that actually what we are doing in the bereavement process is creating and cultivating a new ongoing relationship with those who we've lost.
So in doing this work for me, I am kind of keeping Abby's place in the world alive.
I'm building a legacy and making even her short life of just 12 years count for something more.
I'm kind of perpetuating her contribution to the world and that's really warming.
Yeah, I love that. I love the idea of continuing the relationship.
I think it's a really important part of learning to relearn to live in the world, to learn to live without those that we've lost is to work out how we can continue a relationship with them, to continue to talk about them in our lives, talk about them to other people, to have aspects of them build those
into your life. So in my workshops, I often talk to people about what is the legacy of the deceased?
What did they teach you and how have you changed because of them?
When you live in a way that recognizes the impact that the deceased has on you, then you are keeping them and their legacy alive.
We're going to hear Dr.
Lucy Hone strategies to tap into your resilience and get through tough times.
And we have so much more right after this.
So don't go anywhere.
Does your AI model really know code?
Its specific syntax, its structure, its logic?
IBM's Granite code models do.
They're purpose built for code and trained on 116 different programming languages to help you generate, translate and explain code quickly.
Because the more your AI model knows about code, the more it can help you do.
Get started now at ibm .com slash granite.
IBM, let's create. Support for the show comes from Lumen.
If you're curious what Lumen is, let me just tell you real quick.
It is the world's first handheld metabolic coach.
So it's a device that can measure your metabolism through your breath.
And then it has an app where you can learn if you're burning fat or carbs and it'll give you tailored guidance to improve all sorts of things like your nutrition and workouts and sleep.
And it can even help manage stress, which I know that we all need, especially as we get closer to the holiday season.
When I'm waking up in the morning, I just simply breathe into the device for a few seconds and it'll tell me instantly whether I am burning fat or carbs.
And then the app will give me a little guidance for the rest of the day.
So if you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to lumen .me slash better human to get 15 % off your Lumen.
That is L -U -M -E -N dot me slash better human for 15 % off your purchase.
Lumen makes a great gift too.
Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this episode.
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
I am a big fan of the holidays.
I love traditions. I love cozy meals.
I love spending time with friends and family, but it's also a time of year where I have to say there are a lot of pressures and expectations.
And this is a time of the year when I feel really grateful to be in therapy and to have that as a resource.
I personally have benefited so much from in -person therapy, but I also understand that in -person therapy can be hard for people to access either because of the cost or because it's hard to find someone who has availability or who you connect with.
And so if you are thinking about starting therapy, but you're not sure where to start, BetterHelp could be a great option for you.
It's entirely online.
It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your own schedule.
And you just fill out a questionnaire.
They match you with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge.
So find comfort this December with BetterHelp.
Visit betterhelp .com slash human today to get 10 % off your first month.
That's betterhelp, H -E -L -P dot com slash human.
And you gave that in August of 2019, which is not that far ago.
And yet I think at the time that you were giving it, most people would have only felt like this was relevant to them if they themselves had personally experienced loss or bereavement.
And yet now it kind of feels like this is the default state for the world.
Like so many people right now are just grieving a loss of what we thought our lives were going to be or someone that we have lost, or even if we haven't directly lost a person, we almost certainly know someone who has lost someone or who has lost a job or a relationship.
There's been this huge global trauma in so many ways.
Let's listen to what you had to say in your talk back in 2019.
These are my go -to strategies that I relied upon and saved me in my darkest days.
They're three strategies that underpin all of my work.
And they're pretty readily available to us all.
Anyone can learn them.
You can learn them right here today.
So number one, resilient people get that shit happens.
They know that suffering is part of life.
This doesn't mean they actually welcome it in.
They're not actually delusional.
Just that when the tough times come, they seem to know that suffering is part of every human existence.
And knowing this stops you from feeling discriminated against when the tough times come.
The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer.
We seem to live in an age where we're entitled to a perfect life where shiny happy photos on Instagram are the norm when actually, as you all demonstrated at the start of my talk, the very opposite is true.
Number two, resilient people are really good at choosing carefully where they select their attention.
They have a habit of realistically appraising situations and typically managing to focus on the things that they can change and somehow accept the things that they can't.
This is a vital, learnable skill for resilience.
As humans, we are really good at noticing threats and weaknesses.
Being wired in this way is actually really good for us and served us well from an evolutionary perspective.
The problem is we now live in an era where we are constantly bombarded by threats all day long, and our poor brains treat every single one of those threats as though they were a tiger.
Our threat focus, our stress response is permanently dialed up.
Resilient people don't diminish the negative, but they also have worked out a way of tuning into the good.
Number three, resilient people ask themselves, is what I'm doing helping or harming me?
This is a question that's used a lot in good therapy.
And boy, is it powerful.
This was my go -to question in the days after the girls died.
I would ask it again and again, should I go to the trial and see the driver?
Would that help me or would it harm me?
Well, that was a no -brainer for me.
I chose to stay away.
But Trevor, my husband, decided to meet with the driver at a later time.
Late at night, I'd find myself sometimes poring over old photos of Abby getting more and more upset.
I'd ask myself, really, is this helping you or is it harming you?
Put away the photos.
Go to bed for the night.
Be kind to yourself.
This question can be applied to so many different contexts.
Is the way I'm thinking and acting helping or harming you in your bid to get that promotion, to pass that exam, to recover from a heart attack?
Asking yourself whether what you're doing, the way you're thinking, the way you're acting, is helping or harming you puts you back in the driver's seat.
It gives you some control over your decision -making.
I wonder if there have been any new resilience strategies that you have seen or that you've experienced personally or in your work during this time that have come about.
That's such a good question.
You're right that I've been in this field for 11 years now, and Dr.
Denise Quinlan, who's my co -director at the Institute, she and I always laugh about the fact that we've been in this field for her 13 years, me 11 years, and that for most of that time, no one was ever interested in our work.
And then because I live here in Christchurch, we had some terrible earthquakes.
That woke up my local region to the fact that the ways that we think and act as individuals, as communities, and as societies have a huge impact on our resilience.
And then we also had that awful mosque shooting, do you remember, in March 2019.
And so that's woken us up to it again.
And now it feels like the world has also sadly gone through the same experience of just realizing how important it is to understand more about the way you think and act and how that helps or harms you.
And I think to be honest, for me, the same strategies seem to work.
Whatever the disaster, we've had a couple of earthquakes.
We had that mosque shooting, we've had COVID, I've lost my daughter and my mother.
And the same kind of strategy seemed to work for me.
But what COVID has really taught and reminded me is how much our resilience comes from our internal resources and our external environments.
And unless you are lucky enough to live in a supportive society and community and workplace, then it is so much more of a challenge to dig for your resilience and get through.
That makes me think too, whether there's a link between trauma and resilience.
I've always thought that one of the strangest expressions that we have, it's a common knowledge, but I don't think it's true is what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
Because, at least in my experience, and also I think you can just observe, plenty of things that don't kill you don't make you stronger.
They can often leave you weaker and vulnerable and broken.
So I think there's in some ways this valorization of it's great to be injured, it's great to have trauma, it's great to have bad things happen because that makes you stronger.
And I'm not sure that that's really true at all.
No, I don't think it's true.
And it's certainly not true when you've got a lot of layers of hardship.
With poverty, if you've got no job, nowhere to go, you can't get out of the house.
Certainly, it's much, much harder to be resilient.
And it's just, it's possible.
But boy, is it hard work, you know, every day to get up and try and make the best of what you've got.
That's tough. You said that the kind of three crucial things that regardless of what you're going through, that you've really found work for you and work in general.
And I use it all the time.
Back in March, when the world was truly spinning on its axis, I remember thinking to myself, okay, quickly, I need to get out of all my news notifications, because it felt like we all had that moment, didn't we?
It was all just way too massive for our poor brains to cope with.
So, you know, are they helping or harming me?
That's a no brainer.
I've actually recently taken myself off Instagram because my 29 -year -old niece said she had.
And I thought, oh, that's so good.
She kind of gave me permission because she's young and cool.
And I thought, okay, if she has, then I can.
It's been so good because I know that trawling through Instagram while watching Netflix at night isn't really helping me.
And it's been good.
So, whether it is, you know, the extra glass of wine, not patching up an argument with a friend, whatever it is, it's a great question to really put yourself in the driver's seat to say, is this helping or harming me in my quest to get through this?
Yeah, it's so interesting because I think there's some, especially with social media, right?
There's so many people who are like, oh, it's all good.
It's all bad. Or, you know, is it helpful?
Should I be on? Should I not be on at all?
And I feel like you've actually framed it in a way that makes so much more sense, which is just like, well, is it helping you or is it harming you?
And if it's harming, how can you not do it in that way?
And if there's not a way that you can use it and help you, then don't do it at all.
And you don't have to, I didn't actually have to take myself off Instagram.
I just took it off my phone.
So, if I really want to go and look at Instagram, and if I want to post something, I still can use my laptop to do that.
But it has to be much more determined and intentional.
So, that yeah, in that way, that's worked for me.
I've actually done the exact same thing, which I will say is probably not what anyone would recommend for my entertainment and comedy career, but certainly has been good for my mental health and for just not feeling this constant draw of having to do something that I know doesn't make me feel good.
Okay, so you've kind of referenced some of these a little bit in this interview, and you've referenced them in several other interviews and talks that I've heard you give.
What are some of the pieces of advice that you had heard before or that people often believe about resilience or getting through tough things that you've heard and you want to debunk, or that you felt like, oh, this was totally not useful for me.
In fact, it was the opposite.
Yeah. So, the fact that when our daughter was killed, we were told that we were prime candidates for divorce, mental illness, and family estrangement.
I was like, wow, seriously, thanks for that.
Life was already pretty gloomy and dim.
Thanks. It's almost like they were trying to sell them to you.
Yeah. And I could laugh about it now.
You're a prime candidate for our new products.
Yeah. Great. Yeah. And I can laugh about it now, but at the time I was pretty furious because, and I've subsequently discovered that that is not true.
Most of us just do get through somehow and we actually get back to pretty normal functioning surprisingly quickly.
And that's okay. So, I want people to know that that is normal and that's okay.
And don't let anybody make you feel like you're somehow not grieving properly because you want to go back to work or you want to go out socially.
That's okay. That's normal.
I'm curious with, you're obviously an expert, you're a professional in this, but you've also done a lot of research on how resilience and the strength to get through these moments can be taught.
So, what are some ways in which we can pass techniques or mindsets on to others who are in a bad place if we're the support system right now?
Such a good question.
So, number one is to give them hope that they will get through it and belief that they will get through it.
So, just saying to them, Hey, we're here for you.
You're going to be okay.
We're going to get through this together.
Take all the time you need and I'm here to talk to you anytime you want.
Tell me what you need because I'm really here.
And I think it's really important that we offer more than just emotional help or listening help, but also instrumental help.
So, that's another way you can help with anything from cutting the grass, to picking the kids up, to anything, any practical help, sorting out their IT, all of those things.
And there are all sorts of different ways that you can offer what we would call instrumental help.
I just know in my personal life, one of the things that has been so helpful is that in the worst of times being like, okay, we just need to get through one hour.
Can we just get one good hour?
And then when you have one good hour, then the next day it's like, can we get three good hours?
Can we get two good hours?
And then amazingly, at a certain point, I'm like, oh, it's been two good weeks.
And also, grief doesn't go away, to understand that at some point, this COVID lockdown pandemic will end and other people are going to require help once it's ended, going back to normal life without those that they have loved.
And so, developing any kind of rituals and habits, there's really great research around the importance of rituals, of kind of, what do we call them?
Sort of unofficial ways of remembering and memorializing those that have died.
So, whether it's lighting a candle or wearing the color nail varnish that your mother wore, or whether it's in one of my workshops, I once came across a man who went to the same barbers to have his hair cut every month that his father had always been to.
So, just nice ways of drawing them into your life and bumping into them in your life.
Well, I'm curious, so you seem to me like a very optimistic and fun person.
Is that how you self -identify as well?
I think, yes, I am basically what we would call realistically optimistic.
So, I hope for the best and I plan for the worst.
Okay, I like that. That's like, I want the glass to be half full, but I also know exactly how full this glass is.
Well, how do you cope then when optimism doesn't always seem realistic?
And actually, the research, maybe I am like this because the research suggests that it's really important to be pragmatic and really ruthlessly realistic about what we're up against.
And that the people who have runaway optimism, that polyana optimism of just going, everything will be fine, we'll all be out of...
It just does set you up for disappointment.
So, I do definitely operate, as I say, and I know we'll get through this.
I know it's going to take time.
And I know that five or six years from now and 20 years from now, we're going to look back on this and just go, wow, what a crazy experience that was.
So, I try and put things in perspective and I try really hard to focus my attention on the here and now and what I can control.
I know that I'm a little bit guilty of, oh, well, I'm more than a little bit guilty of this.
I'm totally guilty of this.
And I think that there's a real generosity in the fact that you're willing to do it.
But it must also be tough that so much of what people want to talk to you about and what people want to focus on is the hardest things that have happened in your life.
It is. Like I said to you earlier on, Chris, it does make something good come out of the bad.
And that works for me.
I guess I just have to moderate it and I'm pretty careful to look after myself, too.
So when we have someone on like you who's such an expert in how to be a better human, I'm also always curious, like what are you doing?
How are you trying to be a better human?
Well, thank you for asking me that my husband and I have been to stay overnight on a Marie Mirai on a traditional meeting house, because in all of our work at the Institute and with another group I work for called Leadership Lab, we are intentionally deliberately striving to increase our cultural competency
to understand more about the Indigenous people of New Zealand, the Mari, and working with them and understanding their tikanga, their practices, their history, the intergenerational impact of colonization on them and what we as Pākehā, which is their word for outsiders, white people, what we can do
to dismantle the impact of colonization.
So we're working really hard on our te reo, our language, and our practices.
And that's going to be the rest of my lifelong journey, I think.
Well, thank you so much, Lucy Hon.
That was an absolute pleasure.
No, me, thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of How to Be a Better Human.
That is our show for today.
Thank you so much to our guest, Dr.
Lucy Hon. I'm your host, Chris Duffy.
This show is produced by Abhimanyu Das, Daniella Balarrizzo, Frederica Elizabeth Josefov and Cara Newman at TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and Sandra Lopez -Mansalve from PRX Productions.
For more on How to Be a Better Human, visit ideas .ted .com.
We'll see you next week.
When the energy is high and the music is right, pushing past your limits becomes that much easier.
Take a reggaeton run or strength class on the Peloton tread, and you'll quickly see why these are the workouts you've been searching for.
Every day brings new challenges from expert coaches who train and speak the same language as you do.
Level up your workouts with Peloton tread.
Find your push. Find your power.
Peloton. Visit onepeloton .com.
Every idea starts with a problem.
Morby Parker's was simple.
Glasses are too expensive.
So, they set out to change that.
By designing glasses in -house and selling directly to customers, they're able to offer prescription eyewear that's expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable.
Morby Parker glasses are made from premium materials like impact -resistant polycarbonate and custom acetate.
And they start at just $95, including prescription lenses.
Get glasses made from the good stuff.
Stop by a Morby Parker store near you.
