Listen to our latest podcast where Jayne is in conversation with Tanith Carey, a parenting & psychology author & journalist, who distills the latest in psychology and research for her readers so that complex concepts become super accessible. She's the author of 14 books published in 35 languages. Today, Tanith and I are going to discuss the topic of anhedonia, which is the focus of her recent title, Feeling Blah, Why Anhedonia Has Left You Joyless and How to Recapture Life's Highs.a physician, awe researcher, writer and teacher with 20 years' experience as a pain management specialist, and who has been a meditation practitioner for over 30 years.
Here's the full transcript:
Tanith: Hi, Jane. It's lovely to be back with you. So anhedonia is a word that is well known in psychiatry and psychology, but somehow the rest of us don't seem to, or most of the rest of us don't seem to have heard of it. And anhedonia is the loss of pleasure in things that you used to enjoy, and it also conveys a loss of motivation, it can also involve a numbness, an emotional flatlining, a kind of can't be arseness about life, and also sort of a loss of kind of forgetting how good you used to feel, so you stop trying to feel good almost.
Anhedonia to me also has a kind of loop feel to it. You get stuck in this loop where you can't quite get out of and you're kind of, you don't, you can't see beyond it really. You're sort of trapped in it. And I came across it because I basically I hadn't realised at the time, but I, looking back on it, there was a, there was a number of things that contributed to my anecdotal journey, but one of the main contributing factors was the fact I was extremely burnt out.
I went on the journey of curiosity about it. It was a few years ago and I got a phone call from my literary agent about a book deal that I'd been really looking forward and hoping that I'd get. And she told me the good news that the book deal was better than we expected, the money was better.
You know, all the work I'd put into it and the research and the proposals had come to fruition and we were going to do this book with this major publisher. So it was all fantastic. But as I heard myself on the phone to my literature agent, I could hear myself going, Oh, that's great.
That's fantastic. Oh, wonderful. But I also noticed that as I said, these words, I couldn't feel. the joy flowing through me. I felt numb. I just felt panicked. I felt, Oh my gosh, I've just added another giant task to my to do list, which was already heaving. Cause I was a freelance journalist at the time working for a lot of different national newspapers.
And I also had two quite young children and I didn't really have any family support. I had a husband who was in the office all day and just deadlines coming at me from every direction. And it took me a few years to work out what was going on. So I always say in my books that I write about what I need to learn.
My feeling blah book is absolutely one of these. And I remember I was writing also wrote a book called which was a book about how to find more time when you're a busy working mother. And I had to write a piece for the Times that I unwittingly described the symptoms of anhedonia. I talked about how I felt like a zombie. I felt like I talked about how after a day of work, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even speak to my husband. I would just lay on my bed, just watching mindless TV. It was all I could do. I couldn't cry. I couldn't really, I just felt completely flat and emotionless. And I was really worried about it because I thought, I can't, I'm not even enjoying my children, you know.
So, and then we scroll further a few years and there was COVID and we were told like how great it was when we were going to come out of lockdown and how fantastic. And again, I just didn't really feel it. I couldn't feel the joy. And then I started to go in search of this because I'm quite a curious person and I'm very interested in psychology and all this kind of stuff and bringing psychology out into the daylight where it can be sort of, you know, applied to people's lives.
One night when he was asleep beside me, I just felt like a guilty secret that I wasn't enjoying my life. I googled it and I just said, why aren't I enjoying my life? I scrolled through several hundred search results. And then finally I came across this word and it was anhedonia. And the fantastic thing about anhedonia is you can kind of tell what it means just by, by how it sounds.
So it's hedonia as in pleasure. It's from the Greek word and it's put kind of like loss of pleasure. And I realised that it'd been in the kind of psychology canons since about 1891. But it just hadn't been brought out into the open where people could identify and name it as something that they were feeling.
I quickly realised that actually, like, we talk about joy at one end of the mental health spectrum and depression at the other, but we don't really talk about the grey space in between where you're kind of neither, where you're kind of existing. And I just think that, you know, we know about psychology that you have to name it to tame it.
And if people didn't have a word for it that they could understand. And I mean, obviously we have words like blah and meh. But the fact that like anhedonia, there is a range of biological, environmental and psychological reasons for it. Then we can start, then each person who feels this way can start to identify their own reasons and look at ways to tackle it.
Instead of languishing, which so many people are because of modern life and the pressures and the stresses, they can start to flourish again. So this is what the book's about.
Jayne: Yeah, I see it so much this sort of people being stuck in that sort of cycle, the loop that you referred to.
And and it's, what I love about the book is that you provide sort of signposts to some of the things that might be sitting underneath the surface of that loop that they're stuck in. And from those different things that you sort of shine a light on, I, I feel people can then explore that more for themselves and start to connect the dots for themselves and, and recognize, okay, this is maybe where I need to make the change.
This is maybe what will shift that feeling that's become otherwise normalized for them of like, as you say, feeling meh, feeling that blurriness, that Strange grayness that, that otherwise they're not being able to articulate and they, and without even being able to articulate it, you can't get beneath it to find out what could they do that would make the difference.
Do you speak a little bit more about some of those things that you cover in the book? Cause you really go into so many different areas and some of them I found really quite insightful, especially around sort of inflammatory conditions, for example any of those sorts of things that people might be able to start thinking, "Oh yeah, this might be what's behind it for me".
If they're sitting there nodding and going, "yeah, she's describing exactly what I'm feeling right now".
Tanith: Yeah, exactly. Cause I mean, as you say, like blah, blah, and meh, it's like kind of a grey mass. Like we don't really know what it is. We don't know our way into it. So by basically deconstructing all the things that could be contributing.
Cause I mean, in most, For most people, I would imagine that it's going to be a mixture of different things. So for me, as I say, it was work burnout and it was also some childhood disassociation and fear of happiness, which I developed in earlier life. It was those two things mainly, but for other people, it will be different things.
And like, there are biological reasons for blah, for blah. And I think that it's really important to get this out because we tend to think if we're kind of no, we kind of like, like, as I say, feeling blah is like, feels like a guilty secret. But we feel. grateful, we feel spoiled, we feel like we should be like, more appreciative, we just feel like we're like, you know, we're women, we're just like miserable cows, or if we're men, we're miserable old gits, you know, it's just like, we just kind of blame ourselves.
But I think once we know there are all these contributing factors and that kind of make up the piece of the puzzle, then we can kind of dive in and start to tackle each one, one by one. So yes, I mean, it's really One of the pieces of the puzzle can be for some people, the, it can be illness. So we now know that, for example, like this was sort of shown now has not been very clearly with COVID, for example, that the body's response to the virus can also, obviously that's an immune response and obviously the body overreacts in an attempt to kill the virus. But that kind of inflammation can also reach the brain where it can affect the reward pathway. So this is why we're seeing an awful lot of lack of motivation and difficulties returning to work with people who have had long covid.
Jayne: Yeah.
Tanith: Because they may not realise that anhedonia is actually a symptom of long covid. It's actually been cited in research papers. And that is because we now know that that inflammation can interrupt the workings of the brain's meso limbic reward pathway.
So it's harder for the dopamine to circulate. And it's not just covid, it can be any inflammatory illness. So it can be things like diabetes, it can be things like obesity, which is also an inflammatory illness. It can be other autoimmune issues like lupus and also, it can also be related to antibiotic overuse, which is incredible because what happens with the antibiotics is if you take them beyond what you need to, or for a long period, it can also interrupt the gut microbiome.
And the gut microbiome is also important to produce, well it's critical actually, to produce serotonin, the feel good chemical serotonin in the brain. So it's, that kind of thing. We think about what we're eating what medicines we're taking, what illnesses we might've had in the last six months or year, which we haven't fully recovered from.
Then we can start to zone in and also feel more powerful unless at it's at the mercy of blood. You know what I mean? That we feel we can actually take steps towards sort of biologically kind of starting to, to disperse that big grey cloud.
Jayne: Yeah. And those sorts of steps that I'm thinking as well in the biological factors you also talk about menopause in women. And, you know, you just said about the sort of, or we feel like, oh, we're just turning into an old cow or, or for men, the, the drop in testosterone and that that say a similar period of life and, and then being referred to as an old git, you know the things we can do and the links with things, whether it's in our diet or whether it's in, in terms of moving or, or doing things that are going to change the way we feel that can help to short circuit that loop that we otherwise get stuck in.
Tanith: Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's any accident that I also really noticed anhedonia when I was going into menopause. And I had no idea that some of the reasons that my mood was lower was because that the drop in the oestrogen that I was experiencing also has a very direct knock on effect on the dopamine production in our brains. I mean, I didn't know that. I mean, I was, you know, I'm a fairly well informed person, but this was new to me.
I also didn't realise, and one of the things I also noticed, which I think contributed to my, well, I know contributed to my anhedonia, was I, I felt I couldn't cope. You know, I was, I'd been a very capable person, you know, I'd been the New York correspondent for a national newspaper. I've done a lot of high powered roles and all the rest of it, but suddenly as I moved towards menopause, I suddenly, as I felt, didn't feel as capable or able, as able to cope with all the deadlines as I had previously.
So for example, I mean, even silly things like suddenly I, not suddenly, but gradually I became more nervous of, driving on motorways. I mean, it was, it was insane. I mean, it was just so kind of not me, you know, I was, you know, go out and get it done and no, you know, just get on with it. And suddenly I was really questioning myself, questioning how many deadlines I could take on, just feeling that I couldn't get it all done.
So that just sort of fed back into my feelings of just of overwhelm really, which I was which I think was a big factor in my personal blah. And you know, deciding to take steps to push back, you know, because, you know, life, modern life is stressful. And I think that, I think that what we tend to forget is that our brains were, the human brain has really been sculpted for a life of sort of hunter gathering, which is really what we've been doing for millennia and millennia and millennia. It's only recently that we've developed this really highly stressful capitalist structure, which we're now all caught up in the last sort of hundred years. But really our brains are they're not really happiness generators.
That's what we've been told. That's what we're to be told by kind of like, you know, advertising and everyone's supposed to be happy when they have everything, but actually they are survival machines. So I think the first step to kind of feeling happier. is to really understand that there is a bit of a mismatch between the modern world and what our brains were designed for.
And the good news is that we now know more about how our brains work than at any other time in human history. We can actually see, thanks to MRI scanners, how emotions are formed, how the reward pathways work. So we need to harness that new neuroscience that we know about happiness in the brain and then apply it and use it in our own lives.
Because at the moment there is a massive kind of gap between, as I say, what our brains were designed for and what we're using them for. So we need to kind of bring those two sides together so that as a human race, that we can start being happier again, because at the moment we're in a mental health freefall.
And a lot of that is about the stresses, which are constant. You know, the human brain is designed to deal with stress very well, but it's designed to deal with stress in very short bursts. So it's, you know, when a saber tooth tiger, you know, was in the area or when a rival tribe was maybe kind of coming to the area and you didn't know what kind of hostility is going to break out, but it wasn't designed to the way we use it now, which is just constant, constant hits of cortisol.
And, you know, the thing about cortisol, the stress hormone cortisol is that to protect us cortisol, when a threat is up, cortisol floods our system and it stays in our system for an hour to make sure that the threat is passed. But feel good chemicals like dopamine, once they're triggered, they disperse in the body very quickly.
So even if we feel good, the dopamine falls back down again after five minutes. So what we've had, and cortisol also suppresses the action of dopamine. So we're pretty much dopamine flooded most of the time. And I, as I say in the book, one of the main enemies of joy is stress. And we're stressed pretty much all the time.
So we need to sort of understand in a kind of just a basic way, what's going on in our brains, what modern life is doing to our brains and what we can do to mitigate that. To feel better again and get kind of recalibrate all those chemicals and get it back, get our brains back on side again.
Jayne: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
And you talk about how that the effect of all of that cortisol, it's like drowning out love, drowning out joy, drowning out calm. So how we can reduce the stresses, reduce the cortisol, increase the things that bring that dopamine into our system, and then that helps to counterbalance some of the biological factors that may be going on alongside the normalisation of our stressful way of, of living.
I know you've written several books about parenting and know a lot about child development and psychology, but from reading the book as a parent myself and coming across you referring to parents as being emotional shock absorbers and something about us only being able to be as happy as our saddest child and that really, really struck a chord with me.
You know sometimes it's, it's also recognising the bigger picture in terms of, I guess, of what else is going on in our life and affecting how happy we're actually able to be. And so, quite often, parenting being behind the scenes is something that can lead to us feeling overwhelmed or incompetent or, you know, unable to make the positive difference perhaps in, even for our child in our life can, can all play its part in this, can't it?
Tanith: I absolutely agree with that. And one of the things that really occurred to me as I wrote the book was that I know as a parenting author that levels of child happiness in the UK, for example, have fallen consistently for the last 15 years and we really need to turn that around. But it's very difficult and I don't want to put too much pressure on parents, but it, I think, I think it's inescapable. You know, emotions are contagious. We set the emotional temperature in our homes because we're the provider of all the love and the care. And we're essential for our children's survival.
So they look to us for how to live in the world, how to be in the world. And unless we have a little bit more understanding of how our brains work and how we can start to enjoy life more, because I mean, we really need to be role modeling this for our children, for future generations because I mean, the world is stressful, but I think that, you know, within the haven of the home, we can build emotional resilience, we can have happy moments. I mean, it's a bit of a cliche now, but children spell love as T. I. M. E. I think it's really important that we put boundaries around our work. I think there's a fantastic new idea, which people are circulating now, which is to turn off your phones at home, at least once a day.
Because, you know, when we don't look up from our screens when our children walk in the room, they process that busyness, not as us trying to, to earn a living, which we are, we're trying to provide for them. Of course, of course, that's the logical reason that we're doing it most of the time, but like, they process that as rejection.
You know, and I, I think they need to know how beautiful and wonderful the world is. And they need to be in touch with the outside world and how to enjoy nature, how to have an awe walk, how to know how good exercise feels you know, how to love you know, whole foods, how to cook, you know, how to be with parents when they're not distracted when they're not stressed.
So yeah, there is a bigger picture here definitely. Yeah.
Jayne: So I wonder if we, can move into that, then how do we stop being sort of in, in it and, and step out from it so we can be the observer of what's going on, take stock of all the different elements and then take these steps that you're talking about towards creating some sort of change, some sort of small daily incremental things that can cumulatively start to actually shift us out of the feeling of of anhedonia.
You know, what, what is it that we can do to feed our brains? . You know what do you recommend? Because there's so much in there.
Tanith: Yeah. I mean, the first step with everything is awareness. So just the fact that like maybe anyone's listening to this podcast knows about the word anhedonia, or blah, and knows it's a thing and knows it's something that could be tackled.
There we are. We already named it in order to tame it. The next thing is to, is to have a growth mindset towards feeling good. And the studies show that people who do have a growth mindset about happiness are a third more likely to, to actually feel better quite soon after they develop that growth mindset.
So there's a really direct link. It's also to kind of realise that we are in charge ultimately of the inputs we have into our brain I mean, unless you're deeply depressed, of course, or you have a severe mental illness. Of course, I'm not talking about those people.
Those people need to be under the care of a professional, but if you are just feeling blah, you're not enjoying life and you can still like decide how you live your life to a certain extent because we all can. I know it sounds trite in some ways but like we all have the same number of hours in the day okay okay we might have different demands we might have different levels of work but we do have the power to put some boundaries around those different sectors of our life or to recalibrate or to reorganise.
Generally our to do lists are very, very long. I mean, the first thing to do is to make more time. So go to your to do list. How much are you doing every week? How much do you still need to be doing on that list? How much could you delegate? How much could you cross off? And it's then about making time like regular kind of islands of time.
Where you can connect with others, connect with yourself, and also reduce those cortisol levels because, you know, I think it, as I say, it takes an hour for cortisol just to dispel in the body. I know that for some people this even sounds like a tall order, but if you can set it about, around an hour a day where you can do something for yourself that you enjoy that maybe involves your spark. I'm a big believer in spark. Spark is the one thing that you probably did as a child that you were drawn to, that you found naturally easier that you just lose yourself in. So it could be anything. It could be like, I don't know, like it could be just, it could be reading fiction.
It could be sewing. It could be drawing. It could be painting. It could be playing a guitar. It could be, it could be birdwatching, it could be activism, it could be anything. But if you spend that one hour to fill your own cup up and reduce your cortisol levels, then you'll be in a better kind of position to see what else needs to be done.
And then, you know, one of the big things that has helped me is knowing that dopamine is not the molecule of reward. It's actually the molecule of anticipation. So What I've done with myself and with my family and with my partner is we always have something to look forward to that we anticipate and that we can really kind of do together as a family.
So like once a week, you know, Lily and I, who's my older daughter, we all go to a gallery or we'll go pottery painting or something. And that just gives us such a kind of a lift. And then we do it together with our screens off. And it's just having those little rituals in the family have made a massive difference.
Also with my husband and I, we, we, we go down to to the seaside probably once a month as well. So we always have something in the diary and not to make it feel like this is a luxury, but it's actually an essential to have something to look forward to. And joy is not just one thing.
What I learned from the neuroscience of joy is that actually it's three things. It's the anticipation that we've just talked about. It's the appreciation, the ability to be in the here and now in the moment when the opioids and the dopamine really kind of, you've got to the place you want to be and you're really enjoying it and you're in the flow, but it's also memorising what you did afterwards. So that's kind of recording it or writing about it in a gratitude journal so that you want to do it again. So just understanding that joy is these three things and you can separate them out and purposefully be kind of intentional about splitting up those three things. It will make joy a much more regular part of your life.
And, you know, understanding joy means that you can just bring it into your life more. It doesn't just happen. And we talk a lot about, Oh, things that make you happy, but we forget that It's within our power to make happiness, you know and I think it's just an important shift to just see that, you know, good feelings don't just happen. We can make those good feelings once we understand how to recalibrate the levels a bit.
Jayne: Yeah. That sort of feeling of self empowerment feels really important in all of this. People really remembering that they have a capacity within them to generate this and it's not dependent on external circumstances changing. I love how you combine that sense of doing something for yourself with bonding with others as well. So doing something for yourself doesn't necessarily mean doing it on your own either, does it? So when you suggest about, you know, going to the gallery with your daughter, I'm imagining that's as nourishing for you as it is for her, plus you get to experience it together.
There's a sense of the togetherness too, because I think, especially for parents, it can feel as though finding any time on our own is so hard. But if we find time where we could do something we would enjoy and then invite our children to enjoy it with us. And of course we need time on our own too I'm not suggesting it completely in place of that, but sometimes I think can make it that little bit easier.
Tanith: That's such a good point, Jayne, actually. Yeah, that is, you're right. Cause it's very difficult for parents to even imagine that. So I think, you know, often sparks do tend to run in families. So, you know, like, Lily loves pottery painting, I love pottery painting, we've got a lot in common, you know, she and I love art, so like, we go down to the art gallery together, we have something to eat together, she sketches, I go and take pictures.
So what is that convergence where you can both get into the flow, like she's completely in the flow when she's sketching, I mean I'm not that brave yet but like, and I'm completely in the flow when I'm looking at all the details of the sort of the funny medieval rabbits and the pictures and all the rest of it.
I'm also a trainee Gestalt psychotherapist. So that's very much about being in the here and now, you know, like you can't change the past and you can't anticipate the future. So you might as well just kind of notice your internal state in this second that you're in, because that is something that you, you do have some control on.
And we're so beset by anxiety in this present society, like anxiety about the future, like climate change, economic uncertainty, political uncertainty. But, you know, unless we actually calm ourselves in the moment, unless we allow ourselves time to feel good, it's going to be much harder to face those challenges.
Tanith: Those challenges are inevitable, but we also have to look after ourselves so that we are ready to meet those challenges. And so that our children are also ready to meet those challenges.
Jayne: Yeah. I love what you said about the the power of when we're modeling to our children, the sort of, almost like the thermostat, like the setting for the home, you know through what they see of us, what they feel of us, what they know of us, I guess, as well.
And the more that we're pausing for a moment and, and being present and maybe sharing the fact that we're in that state with them. So I've noticed if I'm outside, I'll be noticing the sunlight shining through the trees and maybe noticing something and I've started sharing that with my children and so that they're aware that I'm noticing these things and then it's like an invitation for them to notice it too.
And one day I went for a walk with my children in the woods and I hadn't noticed the birds singing. It was like, it was obviously happening all around me, but I had been in the conversation we were having, just not noticing the birds at all. And, and one of our daughters said, "Mum listen to the birds." I all of a sudden, like shifted my focus on it, became aware of the birds.
And I was like, I felt so, amazed, I guess that she had noticed that and I thought, yes, something magical is happening here that they're starting to notice the things that evoke kind of curiosity, wonderment, and use the word awe, and in one of our podcast interviews recently I interviewed the author of a book with that title awe and Michael shared how these moments, and I know you talk about awe in your book as well, how these awe moments can be so impactful for us in our lives.
Because it's almost in bringing awe into our awareness, we then can consciously choose to notice things. And there can be very everyday little things that we just choose to focus on. And that has such a calming effect on our nervous system, doesn't it? So because you speak about other things that people can, can do to bring in little shifts.
I wonder if you could speak a little bit to some of those.
Tanith: Yeah, well, I totally agree with everything you've said there. I mean, birdsong, you know, just the research shows the amount of well being that that can bring. And it's so beautiful that your daughter is already sort of noticing that. And I also love your point about that word noticing.
I mean, that in Gestalt therapy is a very big thing. 'I noticed that I noticed this', and also noticing our own internal states. And just briefly to go back to parenting, I think the single word that could absolutely transform parenting in this country, and you know, I've written a lot of parenting books, but this word to me is everything.
And that is the word interoception. Interoception is the ability to sort of notice your own internal emotional state, take notice of it, name it. And if necessarily sort of regulate it or shift it well process it as well. So, you know, the thing is, is that in the modern world, we tend to suppress or we tell our children what they should be thinking or what they should be feeling.
And they lose contact with that emotional state, which means that they then seek other ways of trying to make themselves feel better rather than sort of feeling that they have control over it themselves. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I just think it's so much about awareness and noticing of one's self and one's environment.
Going back to all walks, the research is fantastic on that. It's like, you know, if you go for a walk that's intentional, in which you look for the details of nature, you will always, always be delighted by something small that you notice, whether it's kind of two squirrels, just sort of frolicking up a tree or kind of a certain type of bird pattern or, you know, bird formation in the sky, you know, and it puts your world in perspective, you know, it shrinks your own problems down to size, incredibly.
One of the things my husband and I love to do, we live quite near Hampstead Heath in North London sometimes we do dusk walks and he has an app which if he holds his iPhone up, he can see the constellations.
Jayne: Oh, yeah.
Tanith: Oh, it's just incredible in terms, I mean, if there's anything that makes it sort of puts your life in context, it's seeing the stars and their places in the heavens above you.
It's just incredible. And one of the things that's really made a massive difference to my life is just taking on that idea is the idea of glimmers. And glimmers is this idea that like, you know, even if you're having a tough day and we're all having tough days all the time, within those days, there will be little micro moments of loveliness and joy that if you actually just take the time to stop and notice them they can calm your nervous system. You know, they can sort of increase your feel good chemicals, reduce your cortisol. And this could be anything, it could be like, you know, the fact that you've actually noticed, you know, a cat lying on a wall on your way to the tube station and having a moment with it and stroking it. Or it can be, you know, smelling some flowers on your kitchen table as you, as you go past, or it could be just a smile with a stranger on a tube. Oh, I don't know why I keep talking about the tube.
Sorry, I've obviously got something on my mind. Smiling at a stranger on the bus or kind of moments of connection. It can be any of those little things that just make you feel good. But the point is in modern life, we're kind of trained out of noticing them and seeing their importance. So once you start to look for glimmers, you know, they start to become much easier , they just kind of pop up everywhere.
Also you know, happiness is quite a rare state, but what we can do is bit by bit, like the little moments that we find in the day, they add up gradually. And we shouldn't expect to be happy all the time because that's not possible, but I think what we can aim to do is kind of to notice our feelings, feel that we can regulate ourselves if necessary. And if we don't feel great, that we can pivot into things that will make ourselves feel better.
In the book, I've compiled a list of things that people say makes them feel good. And it's everything from kind of slipping into a bed with sort of freshly made sheets to kind of put your hand out the window when you're driving on the motorway to your favourite song. All these things are just quite small.
You know, if you take time to do them, you know, little by little things will feel better. So yeah, a lot, I love your word noticing, cause that's one of my favorite words as well. So like, I noticed that I noticed this, you know, noticing. You know, our brains tend to have a negativity bias because that's the way they're wired for our survival.
So that means that we can kind of take steps though to counterbalance that really.
Jayne: Yeah. I think that list you have is, is a really fabulous way for people to kind of scan and see what they notice in terms of their physical response to the different things that are on that list because like you say, for one person it could be fresh sheets for someone else, it could be something different, you know? But there will definitely be something on there that I'm sure everybody who would look at it would find inspiring or, Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Oh, I haven't done that since I was a child.
It's reviving the things that we naturally did find joy in when we were children and, and there's something when you were talking there I was noticing about all of the senses are, are being involved. So it's, it's things that we might smell, taste, touch, listen to. There's an enlivening in that.
I think it's quite contagious, even just listening to you speaking about it makes me feel like something's woken up and stirred in me that was, I wouldn't say it wasn't there at the beginning of the call, but it wasn't as active as it maybe is now. So, so thank you for that.
Tanith: That's such a good point, Jayne, that like they usually involve one of the five senses.
You know, and, and using our five senses is also what brings us into the here and now again. And which grounds us, you know. We direct our attention and actually notice. Because I mean, our senses are what's feeding inputs into our brain, isn't it?
So like once we control what we're sensing, then we can sort of adjust that message, you know, how our brains receiving it. Yeah. So it's incredible really.
Jayne: It's been incredible speaking with you. I've really thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here today and to share all those insights and little nuggets of wisdom and all the things that, that you've so generously brought into the call today.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
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