1065: Harvard’s Stress Expert Shares Top Resilience Tools with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar

Pete Mockaitis
Aditi, welcome!

Aditi Nerurkar
Thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure to join you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s a pleasure to be chatting. I listened to your entire book and I loved it. And there are so many fun alleys we can go down. But, first, I want to hear your hot take. You are a stress expert, doctor, looked at it closely for many years. Tell us, what is something you understand about stress that you think the vast majority of us just have wrong?

Aditi Nerurkar
I think the biggest misconception about stress is that all stress is bad. When you and I say, “Oh, it’s been a stressful week,” or stressful month, or, for many people, the past five years have been incredibly stressful. We use stress interchangeably with the quality of it being bad or difficult. When, in fact, there are two kinds of stress, there’s good stress and bad stress. And they’re not created equal and they affect your brain and body differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, how do I know what’s good and what’s bad?

Aditi Nerurkar
Good stress moves your life forward. It’s productive. It’s motivating. And it’s actually a driver for everything good in your life because everything good in your life was created because of a little bit of healthy stress. So, what is good, healthy stress? Scientifically, we call it adaptive stress. And this is like rooting for your favorite sports team, planning a beach vacation, falling in love, getting a promotion, a new job or a new home, things that move your life forward. And that is positive. This is good, healthy, productive stress.

But the other kind of stress, bad stress, unhealthy stress, that’s what we talk about, Pete, when we say, “Oh, it’s been a stressful week,” or a year or five years. That, in scientific terms, is called maladaptive stress. It’s dysfunctional and gets in the way of your everyday life. Bad stress is what causes all of the mental and physical health manifestations that you may be familiar with when you say that, you know, when you’re talking about stress, like anxiety, depression, insomnia, brain fog, irritability.

And so, the goal of life is not zero stress. It’s actually biologically impossible to do that. The goal of life is healthy, manageable stress that serves you rather than harms you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s handy there. And I’m thinking about, can I have too much good stress in terms of, “I am having awesome gains at the gym, and awesome opportunities at work, and an awesome newborn?” Somehow all those stress components are good, and yet I might end up in a bad spot. Is that a possibility as well?

Aditi Nerurkar
Good or bad stress is less about the actual event, but more about how it affects you and how you react to that event. So, some people with those three things that you mentioned might be okay, and others may not. I don’t actually think there is such a thing as too much good stress, meaning that when you experience a certain level of stress, we all have a threshold of when stress becomes healthy, productive, and then goes past that threshold to bad.

And when you’re giving me those examples, and it’s happening all at once to someone, you have to think about this idea of the rule of two, which is how your brain responds to change. So, even all of these positive things happening in your life can, in fact, cause you to have a lot of stress, which then veers into the bad unhealthy stress, because even positive experiences in your life can cause a lot of stress.

So, I think when you have a lot of stress in your life, you may think it’s good but, in fact, it’s causing some of the mental and physical health manifestations that bad stress causes.

And so, therefore, it’s less about the thing that is causing you stress and more about your response to it.

Pete Mockaitis
I see, yes. So, our interpretation or frame or reaction, I suppose, do we just know it when we see it in terms of, “I’m stoked and excited and growing,” versus, “Ahh!” and that’s how I know? And so, it sounds like it might be partially just the nature of the thing itself and how it jives with me. And it might partially just be the sheer quantity and my threshold for it.

Aditi Nerurkar
Exactly. It’s the actual event in your life. It is also the intensity that you are experiencing, whatever it is that you’re experiencing, and the frequency, how often is it happening. If you think about your baseline and then when this event is happening, how it makes you feel, is it getting in the way of your everyday functioning? Is it getting in the way of your sleep or your motivation or your day-to-day life? And if it is causing any bad results.

So, a classic example, having a baby, a newborn at home, right? It’s a very wonderful experience in many people’s lives, but it’s also incredibly challenging. And so that one event can be good stress because it’s moving your life forward. A baby is a blessing in the home, but it also brings about a whole host of challenges and mental and physical health manifestations for the parents.

And so, it’s less about the event and more about your experience of it bringing into account. There’s many factors to this. It’s not just like you feel happy and, therefore, it’s good stress, or you feel unhappy and, therefore, it’s bad stress. It’s nuanced and it’s on a spectrum.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, is there means of quantifying, measuring this stuff?

Aditi Nerurkar
A lot of my work, Pete, is focused on this idea that stress, we think of it as this vague nebulous entity, when, in fact, we do really need to think about stress as, you know, I would love one day for stress to be like blood pressure, something that we measure, monitor, and, therefore, can manage. And there is a stress quiz in my book, The Five Resets. You can also take the stress quiz for free on my website, DrAditi.com.

And it’s a way to measure and actually think about how to give yourself a stress number. You’ve got a personalized stress score at the end of the quiz. It’s five questions. And what you want to do when you’re measuring your stress is have a number and then do various strategies to rewire your brain for less stress, which we’ll talk about in this conversation.

And then you want to take that test again, the same test again in four weeks and see, “Is there a difference in your score?” And then four weeks again, “Is there a difference in your score?” Or you take the test every two months because it takes about eight weeks to build a habit for your brain and rewire your brain for less stress.

And so, what you want to do when you’re measuring stress is use the same, we call it a study instrument.Take the same test again and again. That’s one way.

The other way is, if you are thinking about a particular metric in your life, I call it the MOST goal, create some sort of metric in your life, the way to measure, maybe it’s your energy, maybe it’s your sleep, maybe it’s your feeling of being engaged in the world, something that you can tangibly measure every four weeks, every six weeks and see, “Hey, am I making progress in my stress?”

And so, what is your MOST goal? So, when you’re feeling a sense of stress, you often have that inner critic, that berating voice in your head saying, “What’s the matter with me?” You’re like you might not be feeling great. You might be asking yourself that question.

Instead, reframe and ask yourself, “What matters most to me?” And MOST is an acronym, M stands for motivating, O objective, S small enough to virtually guarantee your success, and T timely. Create a MOST goal using that framework. Give yourself a timeframe of two to three months ahead of time. In the next two to three months, you want to achieve this thing. Understand that it takes eight weeks to build a habit, falling off and getting back up is part of habit formation.

And then once you have your MOST goal, you try various strategies and techniques that we’ll talk about today, that can help you get towards your MOST goal. And then there’s that metric that you can use to say, “Oh, you know what? I am getting better sleep. I do have more energy. I feel more engaged with my life,” or whatever it is that you’ve created the MOST goal. And that is one way to really monitor and measure this big, huge, nebulous thing that we call stress.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. And I would also like your quick hot take, since we’re talking measurements, on heart rate variability for all of our wearable enthusiasts. Are you a believer? Is it useful? Is it counterproductive? Should that be a measure you recommend we keep our eye on as we quantify stress?

Aditi Nerurkar
There’s a question mark on heart rate variability. And when I look at a lot of the science on various wearables and different things that you can use, I’m not entirely convinced, though there’s some data that’s compelling and others. I don’t think you can use one particular biometric, like one particular thing that’s saying, “This is my stress response.”

So, I, personally, I don’t really recommend any specific wearables or biometrics, simply because all of my strategies are cost free.

Though, if you feel like you want to use heart rate variability and you have a device and you have the disposable income for the device, that’s great. But personally, I am not convinced yet to recommend that as, like, the gold standard of stress monitoring.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve got a great turn of a phrase. What is the resilience myth?

Aditi Nerurkar
The resilience myth is that resilient people don’t get burned out. And it’s something that I personally experienced. So, my stress story and my origin story is that I was a stressed patient before I became a doctor with an expertise in stress, and I was desperate for answers and really wanted a sense of change.  And I was living the resilience myth at the time.

And so, often you will hear people say, “I can’t be burned out. I can’t be stressed. I’m resilient.” Or, you hear people say that to you, “Oh, you’re not burned out. You’re resilient. You can’t have burnout. You’re resilient,” and that is the great resilience myth because we know, based on the science, that you, in fact, can be burned out and can experience stress, and also be resilient. They are not mutually exclusive.

Resilience is your innate biological ability to adapt, to recover, and grow in the face of life’s challenges. We all have an innate biological ability to be resilient. It’s part of us. It’s who we are as humans. But the resilience myth often will say that, “Oh, you can’t be burned out and stressed and also resilient.” That has been debunked.

In fact, the reason it has been debunked is because so many of us, again, this is not an individual failing, it’s a societal one, ascribed to the notion of toxic resilience, which is a warped definition of the true definition of resilience. And it’s this idea of mind over matter mindset, productivity at all costs, all systems go all the time.

It’s the Energizer bunny mentality, just keep going.  Or, in the UK, keep calm and carry on. And that is toxic resilience. And when you hear the word resilience, if you bristle, if you have a visceral response, I do when I hear the word resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
“Just be resilient.”

Aditi Nerurkar
“Just be more resilient.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, okay. Just like that, huh?”

Aditi Nerurkar
Or, “You must not be that resilient.” You hear it all the time. The reason you have that visceral response is because what that person is describing is toxic resilience. True resilience honors your boundaries, understands your human limitations, and leans into this idea of self-compassion, also recognizing that your human need for rest and recovery is paramount.

And so, in many ways, you want to lean into this idea of true resilience and reject the performative aspect of toxic resilience. Toxic resilience is a manifestation of hustle culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think it almost feels a little bit like a fixed characteristic the way people describe it, it’s like, “Oh, she’s resilient, he’s not that resilient, you know?” And that gets me fired up because, in my own life, I have seen that my degree of resilience, which I’ll loosely define as the amount of bull crap that could be heaped on me before I freak out, really does fluctuate, and largely based on how well am I able to meet just basic needs.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, I mean, your ability to be resilient fluctuates as does everything. And giving yourself a sense of grace and self-compassion is really important. And it’s also a part of true resilience, knowing your boundaries, knowing your limitations. And if you are continually just on the go, on the move, trying to be productive, trying to achieve, we know that that has its limitations.

So, based on the data, Pete, right now, 70% of people have at least one feature of stress and burnout. Now, of course, that figure varies across industry, but anywhere from 70 to 74% of people are struggling with some, one aspect of stress or burnout.

That’s not to say they’re not resilient. People are resilient. It’s the systems that burn us out: impossible demands of parenting, the expectations of work, and not as not as many resources but lots of time and energy spent to achieve the same or more at work. I mean, we see this all the time. So many examples of toxic resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to dig into that a little bit. We had Dr. Tessa West on the show, sharing some perhaps lesser-known symptoms of stress and a delayed stress response. So, if there’s anyone listening and saying, “Oh, well, I’m fine and I’m resilient, and I don’t think I have any of these burnout things,” can you share perhaps some hidden or overlooked stress symptoms that might surprise folks like, “Oh, wait, that’s stress?”

Aditi Nerurkar
Right. In fact, one particular study, you know, stress and burnout are at unprecedented rates, and particularly when it comes to burnout, Pete, we’re seeing a new picture of burnout.

In one study, 60% of people with burnout had an inability to disconnect from work as their main feature.  So, when you think about classic typical features of burnout – apathy, feeling disengaged, unmotivated – you may not have any of those and say, “I’m not burned out. I don’t have any of those.” But you may be displaying atypical features of burnout, like an inability to disconnect from work.

So, this modern-day burnout is becoming very difficult to identify in ourselves and each other. The reason so many people are experiencing burnout is because of the way the human brain is designed.

The brain is expertly designed to handle short bursts of stress. And when you are feeling a sense of stress, you know, so let’s back up. Under normal circumstances, when you are calm, let’s say back in like 2018, right, like before everything started, the onslaught of stress and the tsunami of stress began with the pandemic and now clearly in the post pandemic era.

Back in 2018, you were living in resilient mode. You were governed by an area called the prefrontal cortex, which is right here. If you put your hand on your forehead, it’s the area right behind your forehead. It governs things like memory, planning, organization, complex problem-solving, strategic thinking. It’s what most of us are masters of. It’s adulting in pop culture terms.

But during periods of stress, your brain isn’t governed by the prefrontal cortex. It’s governed by your amygdala, which is a small almond-shaped structure deep in your brain whose sole purpose is survival and self-preservation. It’s cave person mode. Now, your brain can function for short periods of time in cave person mode.

The challenge is that, over the past several years, probably since 2019, maybe 2020 to today, we are not really coming back to baseline. It’s one onslaught after the other. So we went through the pandemic, then we had a racial reckoning, then we had climate disasters, and various humanitarian crises, and lots of political upheaval.

And there’s so much stuff happening in the world and we can access it all in the palm of our hand using our phones and just one onslaught after the other. By the way, your brain, your amygdala doesn’t know the difference between something happening in your backyard or something happening 5,000 miles away. It triggers your stress response no matter what.

And so, this constant onslaught over the past several years without a return to baseline, that stress response, your flight or flight response, stays on in the background. When it stays on in the background, it increases your risk of developing burnout, and that unhealthy stress, that runaway stress, maladaptive stress is that driver of what’s causing people to feel a sense of burnout.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Thank you. You mentioned the rule of two. What is that?

Aditi Nerurkar
The rule of two is really how your brain makes change possible, Pete. So, think back to New Year’s. You may have had a list of 10 things you want to achieve for this year. And now, several months past New Year’s, you’re probably doing one or maybe zero of those, the New Year’s Resolutions, right?

The reason it’s so difficult to do everything all at once when you’re talking about making changes, even positive change, is because change is a stress on your brain. And so, you could really only manage two small changes at a time if you want those changes to stick. Anything more in your system gets overloaded.

That is why New Year’s Resolutions don’t work. That is why I said, when you gave that question or that example of, like, “Can you have too much good stress?” stress, even if it’s good, if it’s too much, it starts veering towards the negative, unhealthy kind of stress because of the rule of two.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I like that’s really handy and it feels good in terms of it’s the right number. And I don’t think I realized it until I read your book that it feels so right. What is the underlying scientific evidence that says the number is two, not six, not nine?

Aditi Nerurkar
The basis of the rule of two is in science. It is a study done ages ago in the 1960s by two psychiatrists, Doctors Holmes and Rahe. And they did a study of 47 of the most common life conditions that can happen to people, both positive and negative. So, things like falling in love, having a child, graduating, a huge personal accomplishment, all these wonderful positive things.

Equally so, testing people for divorce, bereavement, tragedy, all sorts of things like that. So, they found that, as people move through life and experienced and accrued many active events, so both positive and negative, it had a predilection for worsening stress and worse health outcomes, like a greater likelihood of chronic medical conditions.

And so, the Holmes and Rahe study is the kind of scientific basis for the rule of two. But we, in clinical medicine, have been using the rule of two forever because that is how change happens. You focus on two things at a time.

So, when you go to see your doctor, and if you have a long list of things that you want to focus on, you’ll often hear your doctor say, “Okay, let’s pick two of these that I want you to work on.” And then you work on those and you come back in three months, and then you focus on the next two. And that’s really how your brain works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. We’ve got so much goodness within your five resets and, as you said, they’re science-based, they’re free, they’re actionable, simple. Cool. Cool. So, within that, we got get clear on what matters most, find quiet in a noisy world, sync your brain and your body, come up for air, and bring your best self forward, and then 15 techniques within those.

So, we can’t cover all 15, though that’d be fun. So, I want to share a couple that stuck out to me and then hear your hot take. One was about exercise and the all-or-nothing fallacy of exercise. I thought you nailed that so well, because I’ve fallen for this. And I was even in a UFC gym recently, and I was appalled, because I was listening to you maybe at the same time.

And there’s this giant poster which says, “If you’re not willing to go all the way, you won’t go anywhere.” And I was like, “I think that is exactly the wrong mindset for exercise that has kind of been problematic for me.” Aditi, what’s your hot take here?

Aditi Nerurkar
I agree with you. So often, we have this all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to exercise. Like, either “I have to be ripped and have a six pack and eat a hundred grams of protein, and do all the things, or I should just be a couch potato and do nothing.” And we know that that’s not true. You would never have an all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to sleep, right?

Like, sleep is an intervention that we do every day for our brains and our bodies and our health. And, yeah, some nights you don’t get great sleep. Some nights you sleep really well, but you go to sleep. You’re not like, “Eh, if you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep. What’s the point anyway?” And so, we have this all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to exercise. And it’s something that we need to really shift away from.

Because often, when it comes to stress, burnout, when it comes to your mental health, it’s not about the physical promise. That’s very aspirational. When you see those taut bellies and all those muscles. Unfortunately, our society has really bulked up, pun intended, the promise of exercise to be a physical promise. When, really, there’s the mental promise of exercise.

I’ve had so many patients who have done wonderfully with their mental health while engaging in some sort of exercise program. And the benefits are the physical aspects. Yeah, it’s a nice by-product, but that’s not why people engage in it.

And so, I wish, you know, we need a rebrand for exercise first. The dreaded E word, and I think when people hear that word, if you’re not a regular exerciser, like it’s cringe worthy. And so, movement, some form of daily movement. So, the science shows that even a five-minute walk every day could make a difference.

And the all-or-nothing fallacy states that, like, “Oh, why bother walking for five minutes? It’s going to do nothing. I’m just going to sit home and I’m not going to exercise.” No, just go out for five minutes and walk. And what will happen is, over time, you’ll want to walk for 10 minutes. Then over time, you’ll say, “Oh, you know what? I want to walk every day for 15 minutes.”

There’s something called your sense of agency, meaning, “Can you do it?” It’s like your belief in yourself that you can actually make change happen. And when you’re feeling a sense of stress and you’re burnt out, it’s like wading through molasses when you’re making a new change. And so, if you were to tell yourself, “You know what, I’m going to just go to the gym.”

You may say to yourself, “I’m going to go to the gym three days a week. Every week, three days a week, this is the class I want to do. It’s going to be an hour.” The barrier to entry to actually do that, going from a sedentary lifestyle, like most people, again, this is not a gap in knowledge or information. We all know that exercise is good for us, but so few people actually engage in regular exercise.

It’s like 25%, I think the statistic is, of those who actually engage. So, this is not about a gap in knowledge or information. It’s about a gap in action. And so, how do you close that gap from where you are to where you want to be? Instead of telling yourself, “I’m going to go to the gym three days a week for an hour,” when you’re a non-exerciser, instead say to yourself, “I’m going to walk for five minutes a day.”

When you’re starting a new habit, it’s more important to do something every day rather than once in a while because you avoid decision fatigue. There was a time that I was a non-exerciser and I had lots of lofty dreams and goals of going to the gym, but then work took over, so I didn’t go that day.

Next day there’s a childcare conflict, you can’t make it. The next day, something happens, there’s an emergency. So, by the end of the week, you’ve gone maybe one time, possibly zero times. Then you feel like a failure. Instead, set the bar low and just say, “I’m going to walk every day for five minutes.” And then once you do that, you are essentially creating a habit. You’re rewiring your brain and you’re creating a habit for movement, for daily movement.

Over time, what happens, when you create a daily habit, is that you feel like, “Oh, I want to do it again tomorrow. I did five minutes. That felt good.” You remember the reward. You remember the mental benefits. You feel them. And so, you want to go again. And then you want to go again. And, over time, you start building daily movement into your life.

And then, once you are like, “Yeah, I created a habit of movement using the rule of two,” then you can start going to the gym and get that six pack that you’ve been looking for.

But often, we are lured by the physical benefits of exercise because we don’t see the mental benefits of exercise, right? Like, it’s normal. Of course, we’re all going to be lured by the physical promise of what exercise can do. But there is so much good data that shows that the mental promise of what daily physical activity can do, because your brain is a muscle just like your biceps, and what’s good for your body is good for your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And you were sharing research that even one or two minutes of moving is helpful on those dimensions.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yes, it’s called ultrashort bursts of exercise. So, if you’re going to go for a walk, just think about what it would feel like to catch a bus. When you’re late for something, you’re trying to catch the bus, how quickly you walk. Yeah, studies show that even just ultrashort bursts of exercise can have a profound effect on your body, on lots of organ systems, decrease your risk of chronic disease, like cancer and stroke and heart disease and diabetes, all sorts of things.

So, a little bit of movement is better than no movement at all. And bringing that into your everyday can make, truly make all the difference for your brain and your body when it comes to stress, burnout, and also the physical benefits of doing that. By the way, there are studies that show that you don’t even have to lose any weight to feel, for exercise to benefit you, for your heart, your lungs, your brain, all these vital organs.

Pete Mockaitis
And sleep apnea, I’ve read those studies. Exercise with no weight change still improves sleep apnea scores.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, it improves so many things. And so, I think so many of us, and I’m guilty of this as well, like standing on the scale, and you’re exercising every day, and you’re doing all the right things, and you’re like, “How come this, how come that, you know, the scale isn’t budging?” or, “How come I don’t have a six pack yet?”

There are so many invisible benefits to daily movement. Just keep going. Those benefits and those things will come, but you just have to keep going because you’re doing this for your body, for your brain, for your vital organs.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And even if all you’re moving is a pen on a journal, how’s that for segue, Aditi?

Aditi Nerurkar
Beautiful.

Pete Mockaitis
You say there’s some excellent science associated with gratitude and expressive writing practices. Can you share just what are the benefits of doing this and how do I do it?

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, so I love that segue, and so there’s the gratitude practice is very simple. This is not your teenagers’ journal. All it means is that you take a piece of paper, a notebook, and a pen, keep it by your bedside, and at night or first thing in morning, write down five things you’re grateful for and why.

You can put a date on it. This is like 60 seconds, 90 seconds of an exercise. And you want to do this every day. The studies have demonstrated benefits for mood, anxiety, depression, all sorts of things, when you practice daily gratitude. The reason you want to write it down, so one of the first questions I’m asked is like, “Can you type it? Can I just type in my note section?” There’s lots of apps also, right, for gratitude.

Whatever works for you, you do. But based on the science, the reason you want to write versus type is because your brain uses a different neural circuitry when you write than when you type. Like, when you go to the grocery store, and you write all the things that you need on a Post-it but you lose the Post-it, you’re more inclined to remember what was on the list versus when you’re typing something, it’s harder to remember just a different neural circuitry, different way your brain is wired.

And so, try to write down five things you’re grateful for every day. Some days you’ll think of three things. Some days you’ll have 10 things, but just keep writing down five things. If you’re feeling a sense of deep stress and burnout, you may say like, “I don’t really have much to be grateful for.” Well, do you have two arms and two legs? Can you breathe? Is your heart beating? Do you have food in the pantry? Do you have a roof over your head?

These may seem like basic to you but, in fact, there are many people who can’t say this, right? And so, being able to be grateful for things can actually change your brain for less stress through a process called cognitive retraining. It means that same amount of good and bad is happening to you at all times, but when you’re feeling a sense of stress, you start focusing on the negative experiences because when you’re feeling a sense of stress, the amygdala is acting up, the cave person mode, you’re scanning for danger, you’re wondering, “Am I safe? Is everything okay?” It’s self-preservation.

And so, these negative experiences, you’re more primed to notice them and you forget about the positives. And so, when you practice gratitude again and again, through this forum of five things every day and why, what you’re doing is you’re rewiring your brain. You’re training your brain to start focusing on the positive things, and it’s called cognitive retraining. So, you’re shifting that attention away from the negative back to the positive. And that, of course, has an effect on your amygdala, has an effect on your stress response. So that’s gratitude.

Pete Mockaitis
And if I may, so if this sort of practice is rewiring our brain in the gratitude direction, can we do the same thing for other emotional states? Like, gratitude practice sounds lofty. It’s, like, what if I wanted a hilarity practice? I’m going to write the most hilarious things that occur today. And in so doing, can I rewire my brain to find the humor in more stuff?

Aditi Nerurkar
Oh, I love that. I don’t know about the research to find humor and what that, you know, I’m sure that that releases all sorts of feel-good chemicals in the brain. We need a study on that. And there might be a study that I’m not aware of, but I love that, to find more humor in life and a sense of levity. We know that that’s so important, you know, a sense of joy and levity.

And so, if you were to write down five funny things that happen to you every day and find the humor in it, that sounds like a great practice. I’m going to try that. I like that. I’m going to look up whether there’s science behind it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So, we don’t know if it’s been studied, but it would, is it fair to say from your professional opinion in neuroscience, like that seems like the kind of thing that might probably work perhaps.

Aditi Nerurkar
Well, I think it could potentially improve your well-being because laughter, levity, finding joy, that sense of lightheartedness, can be helpful in promoting well-being. And that we know based on the science, but I like this, you know, combining this hilarity practice is absolutely adorable, and I will get right on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate it. The service here is wonderful. Okay, so then expressive writing, what’s that?

Aditi Nerurkar
Expressive writing is a technique coined by a psychologist named James Pennebaker at Vanderbilt, I believe. And so, if there’s something that’s bothering you.

So, if there’s like an event that’s happened in the past or an emotional event that’s currently happening, and you’re trying to work it out and it’s causing you a lot of stress and burnout, it works well for a discrete event or a discrete emotional state, like you’re angry about something, or you’re frustrated, or something’s happening, or you feel like someone wronged you, or there’s some actual thing. And if it’s intangible and you can’t pinpoint it, that’s okay, too.

You want to spend 20 to 25 minutes free-handwriting, again, writing, pen and paper, and you want to set a timer for 20 to 25 minutes and you want to write, and you want to do that for four consecutive days, 20 to 25 minutes. What happens is, on day three, you might notice an uptick in some negative emotions, and then by day four, you kind of work it out.

So, this has been studied, this technique called expressive writing, therapeutic writing, has been studied in countless populations. So, it’s been studied with college students and people who engage in expressive writing have demonstrated a higher GPA. It’s been studied in patients, and there’s been decreased readmission rates at the hospital.

There’s been data on expressive writing being helpful for anxiety and for depression, stress, burnout, bereavement, grief. I mean, the list of studies that have looked into expressive writing for various groups, it is so vast. And so, this is a really great technique to use for yourself when you’re going through something and you’re trying to work it out. And I use it all the time.

When I’m going through a difficult experience or some things going on that I’m trying to, that I have, it has to be something that’s emotionally charged. That’s when it works well. Like, when there’s a lot of emotions around something. And then the other thing to remember, when you do expressive writing is, you write on a piece of paper and then you throw it out. It’s not for anyone else to read.

It’s just you’re getting it out. You’re getting your thoughts out. It’s freehand, 20 to 25 minutes, consecutively for four days. And then you stop.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s as wild as 20 to 25 minutes consecutively for four days. And yet, as I peeked at some of these human random control trials, the impact for just that, like 100 minutes max, was substantial and lasting in follow-ups occurring weeks later.

Aditi Nerurkar
Isn’t it wild? And in some studies, months later? It’s unbelievable.

Pete Mockaitis
So, can you share with us, what are a prompt or two if folks are like, “Wow, that’s awesome. I want to do that now”? Like, what is the prompt that I should have in mind as I put pen to paper?

Aditi Nerurkar
Think of a particular idea or think about a particular event or a person or something where you feel emotional about, and this is a negative emotion. So, what are you feeling angry about? Who are you feeling angry about? Do you feel like someone wronged you? Do you feel like there was an experience that was traumatic in some capacity or someone causing you a sense of trauma?

Or, it might not even be directly something that happened to you, but we’re in a very charged climate in the state of the world right now. And so, is there something happening in the world that is really bothering you?

So, whatever it may be, sit down, set a timer, 20 to 25 minutes, and just write freehand. And then you rip it up. This is just for you, uninterrupted time, and then you do it for four consecutive days.

And what happens by the end, and I’ve done these many times, for lots of things, personal issues, professional issues. And then it, like, just, I don’t know, the charge that like negative charge and those emotions, it’s just like the volume just comes down, and you work it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Do we think the ripping up is an essential step in terms of the cathartic action or just for giving us license to really go wild? Or, we don’t know?

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, I don’t really know. I think the reason I say to rip it up is because ripping something up and throwing it away, it will help you become as true and authentic as you can during the act of writing. So, if you’re writing something, and you’re thinking, “Oh, my God, is anyone going to read this?” or, “I hope no one reads this,” that just makes you more inhibited in your writing.

And what you’re really trying to do is like, you want the writing to feel cathartic. You want to get out your deepest emotions and thoughts and feelings. You might not even know what they are right now. Chances are you don’t. And when you’re doing this practice, it just starts flowing out of you. You don’t even know where it’s coming from. And that’s the point.

And so, the reason you rip it up is simply because you want to be free in that 20 to 25 minutes. And you don’t want to think about like, “Who’s going to read it? And what is it going to mean?” Some people want to save the papers, they’re like, “I want to keep this and I want to know what I went through.” You can, if you wish, and if you feel safe, like psychologically safe, and you want to keep it, but chances are you’ll look back on it, and it really won’t make any sense.

It’s stream of consciousness, so you’re not necessarily like writing an essay. You are freehand writing, thoughts and emotions, expressions, and you’re just writing. You can write sentences. You cannot write sentences. But it’s not about what happens afterwards in terms of like what happens with the tangible paper. The important piece is the actual writing and getting all of that stuff out. It’s excavating all of those emotions, feelings, and thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Aditi, thank you.

Aditi Nerurkar
It was such a pleasure to join you, truly.