Dr. Samantha Boardman

It was, I think, Muhammad Ali who had said, it's not the mountains that wear us out, it's the pebbles in our shoe. And there's a lot of evidence that having many hassles in your everyday life really can take an even bigger toll on our health than major life events.

Hi, thanks for having me.

You know, it was, I think Muhammad Ali who had said, it's not the mountains that wear us out. It's the pebbles in our shoe. And it's, there's a lot of evidence to support, you know, the idea that having many hassles in your everyday life really can add up.

And not only like in the moment, it affects you psychologically and physically, but they also stay with you and they accumulate and they add up over time and they can take an even bigger toll on our health than major life events.

And I think some people, by temperament, they're maybe born that way. They're more maybe Teflon than they are Velcro. And for some of us, I'd say certainly myself, I tend to be a little bit more Velcro. And that stuff really sticks with me. I think most react by then... assuming that this is going to be a horrible day.

And as these accumulate over the course of the day that you sort of just double down and we end up like our coping strategies are often the exact opposite of the thing that would make us feel strong. It's when we sort of think, I deserve to order a fried egg and cheese right now for lunch or spend the afternoon or the evenings eating watching TV until late at night.

And we end up with what they call a guilty couch potato syndrome. And we end up sort of choosing activities that are further depleting and that make us feel even worse.

Well, vitality is that positive feeling of aliveness and energy that I think is at the very heart of wellbeing. And it's something that we don't really talk about enough. It's a physical and psychological experience.

And why I think it's so important is because it helps us manage everyday hassles and just those annoying irritations, those micro stressors that are embodied in the fabric of everyday life.

Well, 100%. And I think our expectations shape so much of what we experience. When we are sort of overwhelmed and we're feeling that accumulation of hassles, and the hassles themselves aren't really problematic. It's how we perceive them. Is this really going to pummel me? Are these pebbles in my shoe really adding up? And what we need to counter them is uplifts. And uplifts, I mean...

being sort of experiences that create positive emotion. And there's a lot of uplift imposters. And I think that are ultimately vampires of vitality. And that is, you know, when we reach for our phones and we fall into that hole, or when we end up canceling our plans or doing the sort of those unhealthier behaviors, but really uplifts, they don't happen in your head.

They're really embodied actions and what we do. And I think we create these uplifts that buffer these hassles and

it's in our having positive interactions and communications with other people when we feel like we're connecting well with others and it could be with our loved ones with a stranger it could be an uber driver it just is having some kind of connections and i think those fortify us the second thing that really helps uh

I think us manage those hassles by creating uplifts is when we feel like we're contributing to something beyond ourselves, that we're sort of doing something somehow for someone else. And it's not that you have to go away and join the Peace Corps, but just in some small ways that you're doing things for others and that your day feels purposeful.

And then in the third way is that when you feel like you're challenging yourself in a You're learning something. You are stretching yourself in some way that sort of thinks like, wow, I have some form of self-efficacy in me. These are really actions that we can take.

They don't cost anything, but we really need to prioritize them and be deliberate about creating uplifts, I think, in our everyday lives to manage these hassles and so that they don't take such a toll on us.

you know, I think it was Chekhov who said, any idiot can handle a crisis. It's a day-to-day living that wears us out. And I think it's, you know, it depends on the, you know, for one person, you know, on that day, it might be like two things that go wrong or five things. And we're not, I don't think we're accountants. We're not keeping score.

But what often happens is, you know, we just end up with this overall feeling of unhappiness, of just irritation or aggravation. And that that really does shape how we're approaching everything else and how other hassles are affecting us.

Yeah. No. So here's like a really concrete example of that. And it would be, first of all, it's not doing the things that are depleting a vitality and engaging in those vampires of vitality, which is, okay, I'm just going to cancel my plan, stay home, get lost in a social media rant or something like that. But what can make me feel good? A classic uplift would be

I'm going to go for a walk outside. I'm going to leave my phone at home. And I'm going to look around me. And I'm not going to have earphones in or earbuds in. Look deliberately for something that delights you in some way. And what's interesting is you start looking for something that will delight you. You end up building that delight muscle.