REAL Self-Care: Burnout Is Not Your Fault & the Way Out with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin (Best Of)

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Well, loves, welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

Today, we are going to prove to you

that

everything you know and we've been sold about self-care is horseshit okay we are going to figure out why

we have the wrong ideas about self-care what we can do to replace those wrong ideas and get some things in place that will really make us feel like we are caring for ourselves okay

The person who's going to help us do that, because we sure as hell know I am not going to lead us in that discussion

is Dr.

Pooja Lakshman, who is a board-certified psychiatrist, author, keynote speaker, contributor to the New York Times.

Her debut book, Real Self-Care, Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included.

So good.

Don't turn this off.

You get to keep your crystals, okay?

So just stay with us.

Real Self-Care is an NPR best book of 2023 and a national bestseller.

Pooja serves as a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine and maintains an active private practice where she treats women struggling with burnout, perfectionism, disillusionment, as well as clinical conditions like depression, anxiety, and ADHD.

You are in the right place.

Pooja, thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me, both of you.

I'm so excited to be here.

How would you like us to refer to you?

You know what?

Please call me Pooja.

I like to be Pooja.

Yes.

Okay.

Great.

Okay.

So Pooja, let me tell you how I found you.

My therapist

sent me an interview that you had done.

Okay.

Yes.

So I was on a therapy session and I had spent a lot of time complaining to my therapist.

I hold her responsible for all self-care problems because I feel like,

so

she,

I was talking to her about how I feel like self-care is like recycling.

There are these huge forces and companies that are destroying our planet.

And they could change

and our planet would not be destroyed.

But because they don't want to change, they instead create little programs for us, like a triangle about recycling.

And then I lay in bed feeling guilty that I didn't put my glass bottle in the right

bucket.

And that's why the planet is burning.

There are forces forces and industries that are profiting off the planet's demise, and the way they abdicate themselves of responsibility is by making it feel like it's an individual problem.

And I feel like that's what self-care is.

You know, they say most of the world has support systems, and America has women.

The fact that we're all exhausted maybe is not because we're not drinking enough green juice.

It's maybe because there are larger forces that are exhausting us.

Is self-care like recycling, Pooja?

Yes, 100%.

And I love that you were starting off this whole conversation with that metaphor because it's the perfect metaphor.

It's the way in which all of the structures that we live in have exonerated themselves.

from responsibility and put everything on to the individual.

Yes.

The perfect example is the patient that comes in to see me and she says, you know, Dr.

Lucksman, I'm stressed out.

I'm burnt out.

I'm not eating well.

I'm not sleeping well.

And I feel like it's my fault because I have the meditation app.

I have the meditation app that I know I'm supposed to be using.

But the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is meditate.

Like all I can do is just binge watch Netflix.

That's like all my brain is capable of.

And I kind of feel like I'm constantly screaming at my patients, like, it's not your fault.

It's not your fault.

One of the other things that I like to say is that you can't meditate your way out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare.

That's not how wellness is supposed to work.

And we live in a country where 30 million Americans don't have health insurance.

Good luck finding a therapist, right?

Oh my god.

Nobody's seeking new patients.

It's impossible, right?

We experienced that recently.

It's so hard if you're even lucky enough to have insurance that will reimburse you.

And one out of four workers can't even take a paid sick day, right?

Like it's, it's just outrageous.

We don't have paid parental leave.

And so the fact that we're kind of told, especially as women, oh, like they're there.

Here's some essential oils.

Like take a bath.

You're fine.

I mean, it's condescending at best.

Yes.

And at worst, it's manipulative and predatory.

Yes.

Thank you for saying that.

It is condescending at best.

You're a woman listening.

You're taking care of your parents.

You're taking care of your kids.

You don't have leave.

You are carrying the mental load of your family and you're laying in bed and you're like, why am I so tired?

And then you beat yourself up because, well, it's probably because I didn't make it to yoga today.

Because that's what you're being told.

And by the way, all of these things

that we're being told will make us feel better also cost money.

Yep.

So there's an industry created.

What really need most people need is some financial help.

Instead, they end up buying more things to

get the peace.

So tell us, what

is faux self-care?

Let's just frame it.

What are the things we have been told we have to do that will be called self-care when in fact, maybe we need to say not that?

Yes.

Before we go there, I want to make a pit stop though and just give a shout out to sort of the lineage of self-care and the lineage of what I'm calling real self-care.

When I was writing the book, I was doing research on this term and like trying to figure out what is the academic basis.

And it's actually really interesting because there's two lineages.

One is the social justice movement.

So, black queer thinkers like Audre Lorde, Belle Hooks, who in the 1950s and 1960s really put this on the map in particular for marginalized communities that were, Audrey Lorde said, self-care is self-preservation.

And that takes on a very specific meaning, especially if you're a Black person or a queer person living in a world that is like actively trying to kill you.

That means something different.

And this part was really fascinating to me.

The other lineage or place that self-care was used was actually in psychiatry, shockingly.

In the 1950s, psychiatrists started using the word unlocked inpatient units for the decisions that patients, involuntary patients could make

in their lives, like while they were on the unit.

So picking out your clothes, what are you going to eat?

what exercise are you going to do?

And I just thought that was so fascinating because on both sides, like if we get back to what is real self-care, it's about

even in this world that is terrible, that is like stacking so much against us where your choices are limited, what is the kernel of agency that you have?

That's what it is, agency.

Because when I read that in your book, I was like, okay, so I was in a mental hospital for a while.

And when people started talking about self-care in like the zeitgeist, I've told Abby, I know that.

I did that.

I was in a place where each morning they taught us: okay, let's decide what you want to eat.

Let's decide what you're going to put on your body.

Let's think about your feelings.

Point to this thing.

How do you feel?

What are we going to do about it?

It is how to human.

And in the real world, we're not taught to how to human.

We're taught how to adult.

They don't want us to human.

They don't want us to human.

If we humaned, we would slow down.

We would stop being so productive.

We would stop buying stuff.

We would stop buying stuff.

So it's not like it's just missing from the culture.

It's actually

purposefully purposefully not taught.

So, okay, the origins of self-care were psychiatry and then

Audre Lorde bell hooks, the idea of caring for myself is not self-indulgence.

It is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.

So these very

important self-preservation human ideas are then capitalism comes in.

So like, how would Audre Lorde feel now?

If Audre Lorde was like,

oh, don't worry.

Here, we figured out we have all these crystals and bubble baths.

She'd be like, what the?

How did that happen?

Right?

Okay.

So, then what happens?

So, now we're here, right?

Where it's like Instagram and it's like the juice cleanses and the essential oils and the bubble baths.

And so, I wanted to break this down into two buckets.

Okay.

And I call it faux self-care, which is the juice cleanses, the bubble baths, also the yoga and the meditation.

And before anybody like comes at me, like we're going to talk about it.

Those things are bad.

Right.

We're going to talk about it.

Yes.

But those, right?

I call those faux.

And I say faux because it's coming from the outside.

It's something that you have to do.

It's another thing on your to-do list.

Right.

So it's a product.

It's a service.

It's something that's prescribed.

You know, you listen to a podcast and they're like, hey, why don't you try this bullet journal?

And you kind of feel like, oh, okay, let me just do the bullet journal and then everything will feel okay.

Yes.

And the thing is with the faux self-care,

if you have the resources, right?

This all takes money, it works for a little bit.

It's not like it's nothing.

It does work for a little bit, but then once life gets busy or you kind of fall off and then it doesn't help anymore.

The other thing about faux self-care is that it doesn't do anything, not only to change the systems, like the larger structures, it also doesn't do anything to change the dynamics in your relationship, like with your partner or with your kids or the people that you take care of.

It keeps things static.

That's right.

Whereas what my thesis, what I'm saying real self-care is, is actually an internal decision-making process that's threaded through all of the decisions in your life, the little decisions and the big decisions.

And it comes from you.

Only you know what it is.

And we'll go through the principles, boundaries, compassion, values, and power.

It's not prescribed from the outside.

It has to come from you.

It's different for everybody.

It also changes in different seasons of your life.

What worked for you in your 20s is not going to work for you in your 40s and your 50s.

And it always shifts the dynamics of power in your relationships.

And then that has the potential, not always, but it does have the potential to be a seed that can shift larger systems like in your workplace and bigger structures.

There's one other piece here that I want to mention because this is, I know this is a little bit heady.

That's the other thing.

Like, this is harder.

This is is harder than doing.

Yes.

This is why everybody goes towards folk self-care is because this one is harder.

Yes.

So I want to kind of break it down from a psychological place as a psychiatrist.

We can think of faux self-care as tools, right?

A specific tool that helps you for a very specific problem.

Running helps me feel more energy.

Yoga helps me feel more flexible, right?

It's a very specific tool that you use for a circumscribed problem it's not bad right but it's a tool whereas real self-care is principles and principles are non-specific they're timeless they are a way of thinking and looking at the world so boundaries compassion values power that's what real self-care is and that's why we feel so bogged down not only because of all of the capitalism selling us more and more stuff at nausea but also because we keep trying to bandaid ourselves with these tools yeah and we're not doing that inner work to understand

what we actually need i'll give one more example here and i think hopefully this will like really kind of make it crystal clear so imagine the person that goes to a yoga class and i use yoga because i feel like when we think about wellness and self-care that's like everyone's like well just do some yoga

Somebody goes to yoga class and they spend the whole time in yoga, just like worried that they're not wearing the right Lululemon leggings.

They don't have the right mat.

The person next to them can hold a headstand and they like can't do crow pose.

And they're just like, oh my gosh.

They do yoga, but they feel worse at the end of the class than they did in the beginning.

This is me.

This is totally me.

No, no, Abby.

But imagine somebody else goes to yoga.

and they have had a hard conversation with their partner and they've said, hey, you know what, hon, Wednesday nights, I want you to do bedtime because I know that I'm just such a better parent if I go to yoga on Wednesday nights.

And they've talked about the mental load and they've been really kind of like having those hard conversations about the division of labor.

And they're compassionate with themselves in yoga.

They're not beating themselves up.

They're okay with where they are, where their body is.

They've named values.

They understand like, okay, what does that yoga actually do for me?

Yeah.

It makes me feel connected to my body.

Or maybe for them, it's like.

When I go to yoga, I feel like I'm part of a community.

It's different values for everybody.

And then they understand that this is you grabbing back power from these oppressive systems.

Yes.

That person actually takes in the medicine of yoga.

That person is actually there receiving

the self-care in that class.

But on paper, both of those people went to yoga, right?

Yes.

So it's not about the thing.

It's actually about all of this internal stuff that you do to get to the thing.

Because if that person, if her principle was, I need alone time, I need to pass off responsibility i need an hour of the day to whatever it wouldn't matter what was happening in that hour as long as whatever she felt like doing in that hour honored that principle so it's not about the yoga it's about the principle that drives you to yoga yeah and is it also like

we use these things

we use these tools as breaks from our life from our shitty lives and like what real self-care is making the actual life less shitty so that you don't need these constant escapes

yes and the caveat that i would say or like the reframe that i would have is that we all need breaks we all need the escape right so it's not that it's bad or wrong it's that what i'm asking folks to do

is like take a step back and reflect on the things and reflect on what it's bringing to your life i don't know if you know but i used to play soccer and um no no i didn't know

and so i've kind of gone through this really interesting process over the last seven or eight years since I've retired, where I went from, there was principles around why I was playing, but as an athlete ages, you start to lose a little bit like, what am I doing?

Why am I doing this over

thousands and thousands of practice?

So it became this external force kind of pushing me to do these things that felt out of alignment with my values, right?

And so then I retire and I had to completely rewrite and figure out how to have this come from inside of me.

The first couple of years, I didn't do any self-care, actually, because I just needed a full reset.

And then the last couple of years, I've been learning this exact idea of figuring out what really I want.

So I was the kind of person that just used all the methods.

Give me every tool.

And I will do it.

I'm very disciplined when it comes to stuff and I will do it to a fault,

but I wasn't reaping the kind of rewards that I thought I was supposed to.

And so now I think, okay, there are things that I do on a daily basis that I don't feel motivated to do, but it's in line with my values.

And doing that, it becomes self-care.

So going to the gym five days a week, really, it's hard for me, but it really is about maintaining my health, all of the things that come from working out.

So you're not doing it in a punishing way.

And that

when we say, and I believe you about the

no bubble baths, no crystals included, what I would say about that is,

because my therapist was afraid to send me this interview because she was like, just keep going.

I know you love your baths.

I know you love your baths and your yoga.

Okay.

Is it possible that the bath, the

quiet time, the candles, all those things

are some people's only time where where they

give themselves the moment to excuse themselves from the chaos of their families, of the world, and just sit quietly?

Because in order to figure out what we need, what boundaries do we need?

Where do we need to have self-compassion?

We actually need the stopping moments.

Most of us are morning to night going, going, going, especially women, that are those things maybe women know, it's not really about the freaking candle.

Like, I don't need this $27 candle, but maybe it's the signal to myself and to my family or to whomever that this is my quiet time with myself.

And that is a value.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's why I don't think that it's either or necessarily,

because

especially when you're a caregiver,

the demands are so high and loud that even to set that boundary to take the bath or to go on a walk or whatever it is, that is you pushing back.

I guess what I'm saying is that

if you don't do

that inner work of the boundaries, the compassion, the values, the power, and understand

what it means for you, then it's just a band-aid.

Yes.

Because we all know that person that kind of just stays in that loop, right?

And they do the bath, but then they're still just.

rageful at their partner and cranky with their kids and right and but that they're stuck in that cycle and the thing is that that in order to see that, in order to do this real self-care work, you have to be able to remove yourself from the chaos and the fight or flight that you're living in currently.

Because really, it's about decision making and how you spend your time.

And when you're in it,

you can't see because you can't really feel, right?

Because you're, you're just like that.

And so you need to use those moments of escape.

They are escape, yes.

And what do you do with that escape?

Are you just kind of like scrolling Instagram?

And I say this with full disclosure: Yeah, I have plenty of nights where I sit on the couch and I'm just scrolling Instagram.

That's all I can bring myself to do.

And that's okay, right?

This isn't meant to be punitive or

shaming.

It's more like to start a new type of conversation with yourself so you can get to the next place.

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Let's go to the next place because, and also, I just want to say to everyone listening that I think that we can all be forgiven for bowing to the God of wellness because it's hard to buy all this shit and add all these things to our day, but it's not as hard as actually looking at our lives.

So, as someone who is extremely cult-susceptible, that's one of my major traits,

I am constantly looking outside of myself for somebody to tell me how the hell to make any of this, how to feel better, how to make any of this easier, how to do life right.

And so it does not surprise me about myself that I would accidentally now find myself in a wellness cult.

Okay.

So if that is you and you're just realizing right now, maybe I'm not going to green juice my way to peace.

And so maybe we have to do the impossible thing, which is be really still and look at how we're living our lives,

even in the midst of this shit show world, and where we can find some agency.

So let's start talking about the four principles of real self-care.

What's the first one?

Yes.

So the first principle is boundaries.

Oh, God.

Is there an easier one to start with?

I know.

I'm so sorry.

Stay with me because my take on boundaries is a little bit different than what folks might have heard before.

So I had this aha moment.

This was back in 2016.

I just graduated my psychiatry residency and got my dream job on the faculty at GW and George Washington University in DC.

And my mentor, she took me out for lunch and she was like, Pooja, I have a piece of advice for you.

And I was like bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and thought she was going to give me some magic secret about dosing SSRIs.

And instead, she was like, Pooja, you don't need to answer your phone.

You can let it go to voicemail, listen to what they want, decide, and then call them back.

And that

was mind-boggling to me at the time, because I had just gone through medical school and residency when in those days you had like pagers where the pager would go off and you would have this like PTSD response and call back right away.

And I was like, oh, the boundary is the pause.

And then you can say yes, you can say no, or you can negotiate.

Yes.

Pause is the boundary.

Yes, no, or negotiate.

Because the truth is that no always has a cost.

It always has a cost, whether it's emotional, financial, interpersonal, it always has a cost.

And so, no is not always accessible.

But the pause, you can do the pause.

And so, for me, it was like, oh, maybe it's the front desk and they have some paperwork for me to sign.

And I can say, oh, I'll come around at the end of the day.

But maybe it's a patient and I know that her ADHD is so bad that if she misses her Adderall for one day, like she literally might get fired or she might get into a car accident.

Okay, I'm going to call that in for her, right?

You get to decide and respond.

and let's say in the situation that you're in you can't say no for whatever reason maybe it's financial or maybe you do the calculus you can't say no then you bookmark for yourself you say

okay one year from now i want to be able to be closer to saying no

and i really like this because one we don't pretend that no is free right

It's not free.

But you know, you're actually looking at the cost.

You're taking back your agency.

The pause is the agency.

I love this.

I'm like so bad at setting strong, serious boundaries with relationships and people that, like, when you just said you might not be able to say no because it has a cost, and then you can bookmark it for a year later to be like, I want to be closer to being able to say no next time.

That is fucking incredible.

Like, that just alleviated so much in my body.

Whoa.

Okay.

Cause you don't have to be the best boundary setter right the second.

You can be working towards it, Abby.

Okay.

So when we respond quickly, when we respond immediately, first of all, there's a power dynamic.

The other person has just made a request.

We are in a powerless position.

We are just trying to, so then all of our conditioning kicks in, our people pleasing, our fear, all of our, we have no agency.

We are knee-jerk responding.

That's why later we get off the phone and we're like, why did I say that?

Because there's a pause.

There's always a pause.

It's just often after we've responded the way we don't want to.

We're just moving the pause into the middle.

And then you can gather what you're, you can remember your values in that pause.

You can, creativity enters into that pause because you can think of different ways to respond to honor both of you.

So good.

Can you talk to us a little bit about the cognitive diffusion?

Yeah, yeah.

That to me, that's just happened to me.

I just want you to explain that a little bit before I tell you my story around it.

Yes, yes.

So usually for most of my patients, once you pause, you immediately afterwards, after you hang up the phone, you start to feel guilty.

So cognitive diffusion is a technique from acceptance and commitment therapy, ACT for short, that is

a tool to work with your mind, right?

To help you deal with hard feelings, feelings that feel bad.

So whether it's like guilt, sadness, anger, and the whole concept is that we are not our thoughts,

that your thoughts exist in your mind, but that your mind is actually separate from your thoughts.

So there's two kind of ways that I explain this to patients and I talk about this.

One metaphor is the sushi train metaphor.

This isn't mine.

This comes from acceptance and commitment therapy.

So it's sort of like, imagine you're at one of those sushi restaurants, the type where the sushi comes off the conveyor belt and it's kind of going around in a circle.

So there's the chef in the middle.

So in this metaphor, the chef is your brain.

And the plates of sushi are your thoughts, your feelings, your memories, your desires, your ideas.

And they're just rolling around.

They're rolling through your mind.

And we all know with sushi, right?

Like there's some things that are really appetizing.

Like for me, it's like spicy tuna roll.

I love spicy tuna rolls.

Every time I see, I'm like, yes, please.

And then other things that are like kind of gross or scary, like I really don't like shrimp that have the head on.

And so like naturally as humans, we want to push away from the hard, aversive things and the things that look appetizing.

We want to gobble them up.

And so, cognitive diffusion says, no,

don't push it away.

Don't gobble it up.

Just let it

move.

Just let it move.

Just let it go.

And again, it creates distance.

You are not your thoughts.

It's just your thoughts are moving through.

The place that I see this come up so often is with feelings like guilt and anger.

And the other way that I like to talk about it is, especially with guilt, because

my kind of conceptualization about guilt is that it's not actually ours.

It's coming from the toxic systems.

All the things we talked about, capitalism, white supremacy, you know, colonialism.

So the guilt lives outside of us, or it's coming from outside because we're all sold to these completely contradictory expectations, but we internalize it and make ourselves the bad guy.

So whenever you feel guilt, imagine it as

a faulty check engine light on your car dashboard.

So you know how like you take your car to get service and the oil chains, like everything's good.

And then all of a sudden there's like the light that's flashing.

I hate that light so much.

It doesn't really give you any meaningful information.

It doesn't tell you anything.

It's just there.

It's going off.

So

you can just let it be in the background.

Guilt doesn't need to be your moral compass.

Yes.

Okay.

So we talked about this recently about there's two kinds of guilt.

And one of them is you did something wrong and something against your values.

That's a good kind of guilt.

You're like, oh, this feels bad because it went, it went against my values.

There's another kind of guilt where you went with your values, but you went against the cultural value.

So I said no to that PTA meeting.

Actually, that's with my values.

I know I need quiet time tonight.

I know I don't want to be involved in all of the things.

I know I blah, blah.

But I feel

that check, that light anyway, because I have gone against the cultural expectation that I will be everything, be everywhere, do everything.

It's a good guilt, but it comes from

the discomfort of rejecting a cultural idea that's been placed on me.

So it's like a growing pain kind of guilt.

Yes.

Right?

It's a good guilt.

I love that.

It's a growing pain kind of guilt.

Yes.

And if you've never done it before, it will be really loud.

It'll make you feel nauseous.

You'll want to throw up.

You'll hate it.

Yes.

Yes.

So you talk about this kind, though, because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like there was a place in the book where you were talking about boundaries in a brand new way that I hadn't heard of before, where you said, if you say no, okay, I'm making this example up.

Your mother-in-law calls, come over.

You

did not answer the phone.

You're listening to this voicemail.

Okay.

Yes is a tool, no is a tool.

But a value is, I actually take a pause in between.

So it's not, I always say yes or I always say no.

My value is, I take a minute, I take a pause.

So you have taken a pause.

You call back and you say, I can't come.

Great.

You did your boundary.

What if you think about it all night and you feel so guilty, but also you're mad at your mother-in-law in your brain for even putting you in this situation and you don't actually pay attention to your life for the whole night because you're gone in this guilt spiral.

Is that a good holding of a boundary, Poocha?

So, a couple thoughts, couple thoughts there.

The first thing that I will say is: when you set boundaries, there's two processes going on.

There's the very tactical, operational, communicating the boundary and figuring out for you: is it better with this person over text message?

Maybe it shouldn't be a phone call, maybe it needs to be in person or email, right?

All of that.

But then, the other process that's going on is the feelings part.

And that's what you're describing, the feelings of guilt, of frustration, of anger.

And the thing is, the person that you're setting the boundary with

cannot take care of your feelings about setting the boundary.

Yes.

You need a third party, whether it's, you know, a friend, a coach, a therapist, you need to take those feelings somewhere else.

A journal, right?

Journal.

You can't expect the person that you've told no to to then come back and make you feel better.

And when you find yourself in that place where you're kind of obsessing and ruminating, and if it's really impacting your quality of life or your ability to function, that's one of the places where in the book, I say when to seek professional help, when to talk to a professional, right?

Those are the types of things.

that therapy can be really helpful for to untangle all those pieces.

Cool.

But I would say that for most folks, if you haven't set these boundaries before, we can't sugarcoat it.

It's hard.

But I like what you said, Glennon, about growing pain because it's the type of work, it's the type of hard that is worth doing.

You know, I just was speaking to a group of students in grad school and I was like, you know, learning to set boundaries actually is just as important.

as the next board exam or the grades that you get in the next class.

It's actually, it's a life skill that should be taught.

And again, going back to what we were talking about in the beginning of the conversation, capitalism, it's not taught.

Why would they want to teach that?

Yeah, why the hell would they want to teach boundaries to a bunch of women?

That's the last thing.

Also, if you are someone who's just starting this, it might be an interesting thing.

You know, you said working out after the boundary because the feelings come.

The hard part about boundaries is not setting them.

It's the withstanding the discomfort after the boundary is set.

That's what I have found.

You could

deal with those feelings by writing down those feelings and trying to figure out whether they are

a result of having abandoned yourself and your own value or having abandoned a cultural mandate that you are trying to abandon.

I mean, you could figure that out for yourself in a journal and then try to grow that muscle.

that is the one that is

withstanding withstanding the discomfort of abandoning a cultural idea.

Like you really could figure out what the guilt is coming from, A or B, right?

Correct.

And I think with that, I love making little notes on my phone, like using the notes app and kind of keeping a log of these types of situations so that you remember because our brains always forget, right?

We're just moving from the next 100%.

So if you write down in your notes app, oh, that time when I said no to making cupcakes for my kids' school, I felt like this.

And then two days later, I felt like that, right?

That's a nice reminder for yourself for the next time something else comes up and you're wanting to push back against the social expectations.

You can remember, hey, I've done this before, and it felt bad that last time, but then after a couple of days, it felt a little bit better.

Yeah.

And that's how you train yourself, right?

Because it really is, it's a type of training, it's a type of working out.

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Do we make our boundaries boundaries before we decide what our values are, though?

Because don't you have to figure out what your values are before you

know what boundaries go with your values?

Yeah, let's dive into values.

Perfect.

Because I think values actually is the hardest one.

And that's why it's in the middle.

Because first, you have to do the boundaries to kind of pull back space.

Then you have to work on compassion so that you talk to yourself a little bit better.

And then it's the values.

Okay.

So one of the things that I've found is the way that people talk about values actually isn't totally accurate.

Because when I ask people or patients, you know, what are your values?

Well, sometimes people just get really mad at me because they're just like, Pooja, like, I don't have time.

I have to figure out what's for dinner.

Like, who has time to sit around and think about their values, right?

Like, good point.

That's why you have to have boundaries first.

You need

space to think about your values.

Exactly.

The other thing that happens, if you ask someone, what are your values?

And they say, well, I value my family.

Well, I value my kids.

You know, I value my parents.

And it's like, that's actually not helpful.

We all value our kids.

We all value our families.

Like,

we're actually trying to go somewhere sort of

different and deeper.

And so I've found that actually you have to come to values indirectly.

Otherwise, your brain automatically goes to like the shoulds and the social kind of answers that you're supposed to do.

Yeah, yeah.

Family first.

Family first.

I have a toddler and I love him

in case he ever listens to this.

A value is,

it's something to embody.

It's a verb or an adverb.

It's not a noun.

So it's like a value is courage, boldness, risk taking, curiosity, learning.

Those are values.

I go through this exercise in real self-care.

It's called the dinner party exercise.

Can we do it?

Please.

Okay, awesome.

So imagine that you have $200

and you're going to throw a dinner party.

What is that dinner party going to look like?

Who are you going to invite?

What's the food going to be like?

Where is it going to be?

It's going to be in your house.

Is it going to be outside?

Pretty immediately, you understand with that example that

every single person on the planet is going to have a different dinner party.

And there's no best dinner party either.

Is it going to be a potluck where you have your friends bring over food from the last country they visited?

Or do you have a friend that's in a band and you're going to have him come play or does your mind immediately go to i want it to be outside and i want everybody to be dancing or playing a game or are you thinking about like the place settings and the aesthetics so you kind of just like let your mind percolate on that and i know that this sounds silly but it's silly for a reason because again we have to get away from like the social conditioning So you let that percolate and then you just pull out the verbs and the adverbs, like what comes out.

Some of the other things that are helpful here is like thinking about, do you care more about the people or the food?

Do you care more about what people are doing or what they're eating or where they are, right?

There's just so many different ways that you can take this and nothing is right or wrong.

So you pull out the verbs and then maybe a verb that comes out is like silliness, humor.

You want to look around and see everybody laughing.

That's one of your values.

And then the real self-care work is to take that value and to thread it into your life.

So you could apply that to your wellness tool.

Like maybe you're somebody who's really into running, but your running has turned to be kind of competitive and to achievement oriented because you have your spreadsheet.

So maybe you want to inject more silliness and fun, or maybe you want to inject more community into your running.

Maybe you want to find a running partner.

But then you can do the same thing also with really big life decisions, like decisions around what do you want to do for work.

Where do you want to live?

Who do you want your life partner to be?

One of the things with real self-care is that so much of this is kind of open-ended because as we'll talk about, there isn't just one answer.

It can't come from your therapist.

It can't come from, you know, an exercise program.

Like it needs to actually come from you.

And so pulling those values out is

the way to kind of make the map.

The last thing I'll say on this is I almost wish that there was another word that we could use besides values because I think values is like too serious.

You'd say values and you you think of the Bible, you think of like religion.

And I couldn't figure out another word, but maybe it's like we say values with a little V

because there's no best.

And like the blueprint for Glennon's top three values and then Abby's top three values are going to be totally different.

And they're also going to always be in movement.

They're going to be changing every week too.

And certainly like every season of your life.

So this, there's going to be some that stay the same, but then there's going to be some that are always moving around.

And that's okay.

That's great.

Like, I kind of think we don't need to to be so serious about it.

I think people get this because I'm when you're talking, I'm thinking about the 7 million things that went around that was like, look at this word search and the first four words you see are your vibe for 2024.

So I probably did eight of those.

I love those.

But it's interesting, right?

Because

We understand what is my word of 2024.

It's like, that is what we're getting at.

We're getting at this, what do I want to embody

that is a vibe that is like, instead of saying, what do I want to do each day?

It's how do I want to feel each day?

It's an embodied way of being.

And it's easier to say, well, I value my children.

I value my family, but those are things outside of ourselves.

You can value your children the most and suck them dry.

If your vibe is love, freedom, understanding, compassion, and I bring that to any person I'm with, then that would be great for my kids.

But

what you keep coming back to is that real self-care is something that comes from inside of us as opposed to something outside that we are clinging to, whether it's a person or an ideology or a system.

I want to think about those.

I want to think about what are our

verbs and values.

Okay.

What are yours, Pooja?

And do they change?

Yeah, they change.

They change.

So one one that's really stayed consistent has been creativity.

Creativity.

I love to create, like put things together and understand what they mean.

I mean, I became a psychiatrist, so I love to like see what's going on.

Self-expression.

And since becoming a mom, I think that it's interesting because a lot of those things, normally you think of those as like solitary values.

And I've been learning how to incorporate them into parenting, which I'll say parenting a toddler, you know, not easy.

I remember.

Do you have any values you can that come off on the top of your head?

I mean, I also creativity, self-expression.

I also think the whole crystal world, that that is what people are kind of getting at too.

It's like a reminder of magic.

Adulting world is so

just

the real life and real world is so unmagic sometimes.

And so these little reminders of magic, that's what creativity feels to be.

It's like this place that I can go to that feels just like this other realm.

And I think allowing is a very important one for me right now.

The word allowing, I would say, as I try to undo all the control that has kind of gotten me in trouble in my personal life.

and raising older kids.

I think just allowing and seeing them for who they are and not projecting and not controlling and allowing people to be who they are is super hard for me.

That's so interesting.

I'm just like having like kind of an epiphany right now that one of my values is,

I don't know if this is the correct way that you would categorize it, but like one of the things that I value is creating and helping our children grow up, parenting as a verb, you know, like it's a value of mine.

And so as they've gotten older and they need us less or in different ways,

I do actually think that my feelings get hurt because I feel like my values aren't being utilized.

I know that that sounds a little bit wonky, but like

I feel a little like my feelings get hurt more than they probably should because I might need to have that conversation with myself.

Maybe my values need to shift a little around what the parenting means.

Yeah, allowing means and parenting is a whole thing, right?

It's a tool.

All we can do is do what Pooja's saying and embody the values that

we hope eventually they'll take on.

Right.

But

that's even a better argument for just doing that, right?

Because they're just watching what we do.

Oh, God.

Well, you know what?

I was just thinking.

Can I just rest for a second?

I was just thinking what I heard from both of you actually was some version of being with.

Yes.

Being with either yourself or being with your kids and sort of witnessing, right?

Not trying to put the control on, not trying to put your agenda, but just being with.

That to me sounds like a value.

Abby, I would also say that I don't know that your value is wrong.

It might just be that you're in a transition where it's like uncomfortable, like you don't have the homeostasis yet, right?

Like you're just trying to get your feet.

And so, of course, when we're like wobbly,

we feel crappy because we don't have mastery.

I value homeostasis.

I think

that I swear to you, when you were talking, I was thinking, what do you value?

And I value like normal sameness.

Yeah.

Balance.

Yeah.

Balance.

Just like

really.

I love that.

I'm going to think so much about that.

Okay.

So we're going to figure out our values.

Then we're going to create our boundaries around those values.

And boundaries are really, we think about boundaries as things I'm not going to let other people do, but boundaries are what we're going to do and not do.

So it's not like a boundary would be, I'm always going to wait to respond to someone who asks something for me.

It's like what, it's rules for yourself, right?

Correct.

Okay.

Because you actually can't control the other person's reaction

in reality.

I'm slowly trying to believe that.

Okay.

So self-compassion.

How does this fit in?

Yeah.

So self-compassion is, it's the way that you talk to yourself, right?

It's that voice that's with you all the time, the narrative.

And for some people, it's a voice, some people, it's like images or associations, right?

And I include a statistic in the book, it was from Weight Watchers, ironically, where they looked at 2,000 women and found that nearly half started criticizing themselves even before 9.30 in the morning.

So as women, like we're just so crappy to ourselves.

So self-compassion is

essentially talking to yourself right.

And the cognitive diffusion helps there, right?

Where we're recognizing that we are not our thoughts, we are not our bad feelings, and we can let them pass.

I like to

really call attention to martyr mode, you know, because I think especially for caretakers, you are so busy kind of pouring into everybody else that you really neglect yourself.

And I think that martyr kind of imagery is so interesting because it's often the woman who is

taking care of everybody else but just like is seething with anger and waiting for somebody else to come save her and to come tell her that she can rest so for me martyr mode is when you feel like you need to earn your compassion yes when you believe that only somebody else can bestow compassion onto you that you have to get it from the outside

and it's just so toxic and you know and i also say that with like i totally find myself in martyr mode all the time and you know i found myself in martyr mode quite frankly, with my book tour, you know, of just, you know, going, going, going, and then feeling sort of like, oh my gosh, there's nothing left.

And you're waiting for somebody else to tell you, okay, Pooja, you can stop.

But the reality is we have to give that to ourselves.

We have to give it to ourselves.

I think of martyr mode as literal.

It's like a martyr is someone who dies for an ideology.

So whenever I think about or see people in martyr mode, I always think, what ideology are they dying for right now?

Womanhood being just serve and smile and smile through the gaslighting and just don't require partnership, true partnership, just suck it up, just do all the things.

Like it is a true ideology that like has been passed down to us.

And there are a lot of people that are actively dying from it.

So it makes me think of when you're talking about self-compassion, it makes me think of Bell Hooks actually, because

I think I remember reading that Bell Hooks said that self-love or self-care,

if you don't know where to start, you think about what you're dying for somebody to give you.

You think about what you are daydreaming or imagining that someone will show up and love you that way.

What would they do?

Would they feed you?

Would they take all your work away and let you rest?

Would they hold you?

And then you find a way, come hell or high water, to give some of that to yourself.

That's good.

And that is what I hear you saying.

Do you have any like IRL examples of how somebody would do that?

Like if you were sitting with someone, it was like, okay, all right, I trust Pooja and Bell hooks.

No pressure.

Two trustworthy people, okay?

We're going to trust anybody.

Do you have any like stories of people who actually made that work in their life?

Yes.

In little or big ways.

So I have one story of somebody who didn't, and it's kind of outrageous.

So I want to share that first.

And then I'll also share the ways to make it work.

So a couple of years ago, I had a conversation with a woman who she had a couple kids, very busy life, but had a lot of privilege, upper middle class, fortunate.

One day her neighbor, who was a chef,

offered to drop off a steak dinner for the whole family.

He was like, oh, I have this new recipe.

I really want to try it out.

I would love to bring it over for you guys and literally her mouth was watering as she said no it's like as she was like no we couldn't no no no

and to me that was just such a powerful example of how

because we are so

conditioned

to

view

asking for help as a weakness this woman she actually turned away a bid for connection

from her neighbor.

That was a bid from her neighbor to create community.

Yes.

He would have gained so much from doing that and being generous and kind of knowing that he got to help.

And in turning that away, she was actually, she was rejecting that community.

And I kind of share this as my answer to how do we do it is you actually do it when you don't really need it.

You start doing it before

you're crumpled up in a ball

of mess on the floor.

You start doing it when the stakes are low.

So,

you know, a patient,

this is kind of an example for my practice of a patient who had a young child.

Her partner was going to be going on a business trip.

It was only going to be a night.

Her sister lives in town.

Her sister was like, Let me come over.

I'll come over and help with bedtime and bath.

And she's like, no, no, no, it's fine.

It's just one night.

And I was like, no, let's stop.

Let's stop.

Let's say yes.

And that exercising, that receiving, you know, in real self-care, I call it micro-dosing your capacity to receive.

Like, because you have to practice, it's the same as boundaries.

You have to practice being able to receive.

And it also really fits in with the conversation you all had with Amanda about the dinner with her lost girlfriends, you know, where it's like

to create community.

Because really, like what every single piece of data shows is that having

authentic relationships

is what makes a good life.

Pooja, right?

That is the thing.

And so, to do that, you need to make time for it and you need to be willing to receive help and ask for help.

Okay, but that, what you're saying right now, it's like creating boundaries.

Great.

A lot of us are okay at that, actually.

But the loosening of boundaries is also part of this.

And okay, here's what I think.

Is it whiteness?

Is it white, like, because what when bell hooks and Audre Lorde and and all of the self-care was like a ferocious determination of your own dignity in relation to others.

All of these examples you're giving is

allowing community, a togetherness, a we.

But wellness

is all individual.

Like I can go through every single wellness strategy that I've been sold, Pooja, and do it all the time and never leave my house and never speak to another human being.

It's, oh, yes, oh, yes, I can do my cold lunch.

I can do my green juice.

I can do my whatever.

They're so crazy individual.

I never have to ask for help.

I never have to meet another human being.

I never have to enter into the struggle for social justice outside this four walls.

Is it like, did whiteness get in and just teach us how to be so individual and disconnected from each other?

Yeah, we're going to go there.

I guess we're going to go there.

You know,

my thesis is, and I will say, I'm not a sociologist.

I'm a psychiatrist for a reason.

I'm not an economist.

I'm not a historian, but I do, I think it is

white supremacy and capitalism, which are intertwined, right?

And in the United States, like our whole, everything is built on slavery and the commodification of a group of people who were deemed to be less than and this caste system, right?

So

it's absolutely structural.

It's absolutely economic.

I think that's why we need to

go back and look at ways of being that center humanity and also do it in a way that is respectful.

It certainly is an effective way of keeping classes separate, of keeping white women away from everyone else, of keeping whatever the however it's happened, it's an effective way of making us feel like we can better ourselves and perfect ourselves as individual perfection projects, as opposed to entering into the struggle for all to

make the world more equal.

Correct.

And it allows the the person who is higher up to stay sort of pristine.

Yes.

To not get messy.

Pure.

Purity.

Right.

Pure.

Yes.

When the reality is that the things that again and again make a life worth living are the human things, the human bits.

But in order to be able to do that, you actually have to trust yourself.

to

make room for it.

Because it all, it takes time, yeah.

Right?

It takes time.

It's not, you can't just check it off the list, like the juice cleanse.

Pooja, it's so good.

You know what I want to do?

My poor sister, who was so excited to talk to you, is so I was so excited to talk to her too.

We might have to beg you to come back again and dig in this more, but also she is so sick right now and she wanted to come.

And I was like, if you show up for Dr.

Pooja, sick, and she's teaching us about self-care, it'll be humiliating to me.

She's just wanted me to tell you that your book meant so much to her.

And I think either we will do a follow-up with this or we will figure out our values and do one with just the three of us.

But I think it's so important what you're doing.

You all listening, if it's just a little place to start, just find some quiet time.

Think about your values.

Just think about a couple words maybe or a couple ways of being that we could embody and maybe send them to us.

And you can bookmark a year from now and work on being a little bit closer to saying no easier or yes easier whatever it is self-compassion so good i love this conversation thank you so much and by the way pod squad i just want to tell you this if you're wondering if you can trust this lady here with us i asked her to come on this podcast in december i think

and i got a message back from Pooja's people saying she's actually in self-care mode right now or or she's taking her break and so she can't do it.

And I thought,

wow.

I mean, Pooja, I'm going to tell you,

I don't think anyone has said no

to the podcast yet.

And I was like, yeah, but you were so

believe her.

I was amazed.

Yeah.

And also it gave you a new way of saying no.

I know.

I was so, I was actually really deeply moved by it.

I know.

We talked about it.

She's like, this was so important.

And what a beautiful exercise and modeling for Glenn and for me on like a beautiful way of saying no.

But it was like, not now.

The pods.

It was so great.

But like, know, pod squatters, that when you do say no,

there is a ripple effect.

Like people watch and think, oh my God, you can do that.

Yes.

Wait, what?

No's can be freaking inspiring.

Yes.

Is all

I'm saying.

For sure.

Thank you, Pooja.

Oh, well, thank you for that.

And just know that I was, my heart was beating out of my chest when I said that.

That was an edge for me, certainly.

And I'm proud of myself.

You should be.

I'm proud of myself for it.

So thank you.

Well, the vibration taught us a very valuable lesson.

So it's really great.

All right, pod squad, go forth and say no.

Go forth and say no.

See you next time.

Bye.

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While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful.

We appreciate you very much.

We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.