Dr. Elisha Goldstein on Tiny Shifts: How Emotional Health Transforms Stress, Relationships, and Longevity

Speaker 1 · 0:00Hi everyone. Thank you for listening to our Mindfulness Exercises podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. Today I'm really happy to speak with Dr. Elisha Goldstein. I've been aware of Elisha for 15 years-ish, maybe. His name is on some of the more popular mindfulness books out there that I'll share with you soon, but he has impacted millions of lives around the world with mindfulness and emotional intelligence. So it's an honor to have you on the show today. Elisha is a clinical psychologist, mindfulness teacher, speaker, author, longtime contributor to the field of mindfulness-based emotional healing. He's the founder of the Emotional Longevity Experience and the host of the Emotional Longevity Podcast, where he explores how emotional health shapes our stress, relationships, happiness, and long-term well-being. For many years, Elisha has helped bring mindfulness and psychotherapy together in a very practical and compassionate way. In speaking with him, I think you'll hear a lot of heart. He's helped people work with anxiety, depression, stress, reactivity, self-judgment, and the habitual patterns that keep us stuck. He's also co-founder of the Center for Mindful Living in Los Angeles. And his work has supported therapists and educators, parents, business professionals, and many others bring mindfulness into their daily lives. He's the author and co-author of several very important books in the mindfulness field, including a mindfulness-based stress reduction workbook, which I've recommended to maybe thousands of people in the Spirit Rock bookstore as well as through mindfulnessercises.com. He's the author of MBSR Everyday, The Now Effect, and Uncovering Happiness. And today we're going to be exploring his new book called Tiny Shifts How Emotional Health Transforms Stress, Relationships, and Longevity. In this new work, Elisha offers a grounded science-backed approach to emotional steadiness, showing how small internal shifts practiced in real life can help us calm the nervous system, interrupt stress cycles, respond more wisely in our relationships, and strengthen resilience over time. I really appreciate Elisha's work in that he doesn't ask us to become someone or something else. He invites us to relate to this moment with more awareness and compassion, courage and care. Elisha, thank you so much for being here. It's a true honor to welcome you to our podcast.

Speaker 2 · 3:08Thank you, Sean. That was really wonderful. And the Feelings Mutual. I've been aware of your work for quite a while too and the innovative way of putting out these mindfulness exercises early on. And also I just want to commend you on the ability to pronounce my name so correctly. And because that just doesn't happen all too often.

Speaker 1 · 3:27Well, it did take a little bit of practice, but once it's down, it's

Speaker 1 · 3:31down. Well, I'm delighted to have your book here with me called Tiny Shifts. And I am wondering why tiny shifts? The world is so volatile right now, and we need these big shifts. But why did you call it tiny shifts? And what can people expect from the book?

Speaker 2 · 3:53It comes back to in 2004. I was in graduate school and I came across this guy's works, Rero Bendo and the Mother's Soul. So this isn't exactly where tiny shifts come from, but it's a full circle story. As I was reading his work, I came across this concept of sacred moments. Moments in life, they're fleeting, they come and go. Our kids are young, they get old, we have experiences in our lives and they pass, both comfortable and uncomfortable and neutral ones. But the moments are precious because of their fleeting nature. And so I wanted to see if I could help people cultivate more sacred moments, more precious and special moments in their lives, more meaningful moments. As a graduate student in the doctoral program, you had to put together a study. So I supported people in putting together a five-minute practice of having something meaningful in their life and getting a sense of presence and then relating to this meaningful object. It could have been a religious object, it could have been a memory, it could have been something in nature. And I showed that in just small moments, we can statistically significantly change our stress, how we feel, feel more sense of meaning and purpose in the moments of our lives, generally feel a deeper level of psychological well-being and happiness. So fast forward 20 some odd years later, after doing a lot of work in the field of mindfulness and psychology, as you said, areas of emotional intelligence. I just felt as I talked to my family and my friends, my clients, different people I worked with, that everyone was feeling something similar. And there was this feeling of just general overwhelm that was there. It probably happened back in 2007 when the iPhone came out. I think that probably has added quite a bit to it. Um, there's just a lot we're juggling, and we have more inputs than we've ever had in our lives, and people are switching with this continuous fractured attention constantly. And congratulations, the trillions of dollars spent have gone to the base of our brains, and most of us are programmed to some degree or another. When you say base of our brain, are you referring to the amygdala? Yeah. There's the subcortical regions of our brain that are more involved with impulse and motivation and what we're paying attention to in any given moment, the emotional centers that are there, the amygdala, the whole limbic system that is telling us if we're fearful, we're going to interpret something one way. If we're feeling joyful, we're interpreting that same event a different way. So there are big changes maybe that need to be made. There's like a friend of mine who's moving his way through cancer treatment right now, and they gave him my book, and he said, Do you have anything called big shifts? I mean big shift right. But it's that all we have is these moments. And so if we're feeling stressed, we have a certain emotional loop, which I talk about in the book. We feel anxious, we feel stressed, we feel like frustrated, we feel outraged, we feel like, you know, not this again loop type of thing. These are practiced, patterned experiences that we learned early on in life and that have been reinforced culturally, like a self-worth loop type of example. And we may not have consciously created them, but with these moments of awareness, we can begin to interrupt them. We can somatically begin to shift our body back into a place of balance and shift the blood flow in our brain so we have a little bit more emotion regulation and impulse control and perspective, and then be able to shift where we're paying attention in ways that are healthier. I'll just say this before I close this part is everyone who's listening right now, they know what to do in moments. They've read the books, they've gone through the mindfulness exercises, they've gone to therapy off and on, potentially, they've done meditation off and on, potentially, they've listened to podcasts, they know they have the information. The issue isn't that we need more information, it's that we need access to it. So this ability to interrupt these loops in the moment, that's a tiny shift. The ability to correct our nervous system reaction in the moment or be able to kind of move back in the direction of calm and balance, that's a tiny shift. And the ability to refocus on things that are going to be more supportive for us, more different questions which lead to different answers, or things we know, pieces of wisdom that help us in the past, these are tiny shifts. And all these things take seconds to do. And with repetition, then the muscle of it gets stronger.

Speaker 1 · 8:01Yeah, and even we just say to ourselves, well, I'll just do a little tiny shift now. That can create a new momentum for continuing lengthening the duration or adding more shifts back to back. That first shift is often the hardest shift.

Speaker 2 · 8:17We try to make it really simple. You're somebody who is feeling overwhelmed in the days of your life. You're someone who your cup runs over and you're snapping at the people that you care about. If you're somebody who emotionally shuts down in the face of feeling vulnerable, if you're somebody who tailgates somebody, if you have experiences like that, the very first shift we try to make it very simple. And by the way, this is something that's in all the world's wisdom traditions. This is in the field of neuroscience, the field of psychology. This is something you've heard of before, but we want to put it into practice and we want to make it this simple. In some ways, I wanted to write a book called Life Can Be This Simple, but we want to make it simple. We want to say, can I just recognize the experience when it's here? Can I just recognize either a thought that's happening, an emotional experience I'm having, or maybe it's a physical sensation? Oftentimes people have their shoulders to their ears. That's a signal that I'm caught in this emotional reaction, or maybe I'm sitting there scrolling for too long or overeating or overdrinking, or I snap at somebody. These are all signals. Can I just recognize the signal either when it happened or as it's about to happen? That's the first tiny shift. The first emotional pivot starts from there. And sometimes I tell people, just take a week, see if you can recognize, like reflect on like what are your moments where you're out of balance, basically? What's happening? What's the emotional loop? What are the thought, emotion, sensation, action that's connected to it? And just see if you can take a week. If you don't want to take a week, that's too long, a few days. I know Sean's got 136-day program you can take. So, but if you just take a few days and just say, I'm gonna be on the lookout for the signal of this particular what I call an emotional loop happening. And that's all you need to do. You don't need to do anything else for those three days, just that.

Speaker 1 · 10:04Yeah, you talk

Speaker 1 · 10:05about the four R's and recognize what you've been talking about is the first R. And you talk about the real power of naming. And I'm wondering, you know, I hear different teachers talk about how to name your experience. And it seems like each teacher has a little bit of a different take or a different style in using certain kinds of words to name our experience and how to recognize our experience. Do you have a recommendation on how people can name or recognize their experience in that moment?

Speaker 2 · 10:42Almost any way that you do it is what the purpose of it is for. So, in other words, in chapter two of Tiny Shifts, I talk about the emotional loop, which I just mentioned. The emotional loop has thoughts, emotions, sensations, and actions. Those are four things that are happening in our experience in any given moment. That's like the whole idea. And you can name, recognize, label, note any one of those. So there's no one size fits all. You don't have to just notice what's happening in your body. You don't have to just notice what you're thinking. You don't have to just notice what you're doing or what you're feeling, which different teachers might promote or support more of one versus the other. But in our everyday lives, all of that's happening. And I might be somebody who notices my activity more than I do how I'm feeling, because maybe, you know, as a man, as an example, maybe I grew up in this world and I was told culturally that my feelings didn't really matter. And so I didn't really pay attention to them. So I don't really have the skill, the emotional intelligence quite yet. It can completely be built for that to be the thing that I'm going to pay attention to. And in fact, when I do try and pay attention to my emotions, I only prove that I just don't have a very good handle on them. And so that only eats away at my self-worth or the idea that I can't do this. Maybe what I do notice is my activity. Maybe I notice my eating. Maybe I notice my snapping. Maybe I notice my scrolling. Maybe I notice them driving a little too fast. Or maybe I'm someone that notices my body more. Maybe I do notice that my shoulders are tense off and on throughout the day, or that I hold a lot of stress on my face because my face kind of contorts, or maybe I notice that my stomach really hurts quite a bit throughout the day. Maybe I'm a person that notices my body more. Maybe I do have a lot of emotional awareness. I'm good at naming, I'm skilled at naming that there's stress here, there's frustration or irritation in chapter four of Tiny Shifts, and I'm a big fan. Your audience probably has a good amount of emotional awareness, but we can all continue to get better and better at it. I'm a huge fan of just relieving all of us and believing we should have at this point a good amount of emotional awareness, no matter how much meditation practice you've done, because typically growing up, most of us didn't learn, and especially boys even more than girls, but we really didn't learn a lot of emotional vocabulary. And in nonviolent communication, Marshall Rosenberg's work, he did a fantastic job. I would say a pioneering job in a lot of ways of helping us understand that there's a whole emotional world out there, and we can study a vocabulary. It really helped me in my life understand what anger was, understanding that frustration, irritation, and annoyance are like derivatives of anger that helped me understand when I was feeling angry. So I could begin to label that feeling more when it's happening. So just give ourselves a little break and give yourself a chance to study different feelings, and we can get better at naming our emotions. But for most of us, that might not be the first place that we go. Or our thoughts. For most of us, thoughts are a little bit more intangible. We might not go there. So any of those ways are ways to do that recognize piece. And because the purpose of recognize is to step us into that space, as we're all aware of, and to bring more blood flow to the prefrontal region of the brain and just allow us to get a tiny sliver of perspective or the opportunity of perspective anyway, to begin to shift from the conditioned and pattern loop that we've fallen into.

Speaker 1 · 14:02Beautiful. One of maybe the biggest benefit that AI has brought to my life was helping me to synthesize my emotional world and how I want to communicate with the principles of Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication. And helping me to reframe what I was thinking and how I wanted to communicate into a more safe, responsible, and clear way of communicating what's really happening. And I've used AI for helping me to communicate nonviolently so much, and it's really helped reinforce the principles of NVC the more I do it. So I just wanted to share that as a little aside that AI has been really useful.

Speaker 2 · 14:57Call that AI augmented communication.

Speaker 1 · 14:59Yeah.

Speaker 1 · 15:00Sometimes I'll print out a script and use that sometimes when I want to communicate something in a difficult conversation.

Speaker 2 · 15:07You know, I remember when I was first learning to lead meditation, and I would print out scripts and I would kind of read out the script initially, and I would do that, and then I would get better and better and just not need it and be then become very dynamic with it or whatever. But I think that if people can have the courage for a moment to admit, like, hey, I really don't know how to communicate very well. When I'm really stressed or when emotions are high, I really lose access to that part of my brain anyway. Some scaffolding would be enormously helpful. If I can just hold this page and read off of it and the person I'm talking to is okay with that understanding of it, we could get a lot further. I think that's kind of brilliant.

Speaker 1 · 15:46Yeah, it's a great analogy around guiding meditations and teaching mindfulness. A lot of our community uses scripts or bullet points and yeah, it's kind of like training wheels and helps us to go from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence.

Speaker 2 · 16:04When you've moved to conscious competence, and you've really arrived.

Speaker 1 · 16:08I want to talk about something that I wonder about from time to time, which is even just the phrase emotional health. The subtitle of Tiny Shifts is how emotional health transforms stress, relationships, and longevity. And I really want to talk about the longevity piece soon, but I'm curious, what is emotional health to you? I think a lot of people, it seems obvious, like what is physical health? Well, it's lean and strong and free of disease, etc. For emotional health, what does that mean? Because as human beings, yeah, there's stress and grief and depression and all these different emotions that could come through, but does it just mean that we feel that more fluidly, like we witness them and we let them pass, or does it mean that they're less often? What does emotional health mean to you?

Speaker 2 · 17:03It's all tied in. So it's not just awareness of emotions and how we relate to them. It has to do with our relationships as well and communication, like you were talking about. That's also tied into emotional health. And I also think it also is tied into our biology ultimately, because emotions are biology. When anyone's feeling an emotion, I guarantee if you pay attention to your body, you're gonna have a sensation somewhere. That means that your heart rate is going up or your muscles are tensing and it's all connected. So emotions are biology. But emotional health to me is saying like I'm aware of my emotions and I can be appreciative of the comfortable emotions while they're here. And with the uncomfortable emotions while they're here, I can be more graceful with them during the inevitable uncomfortable emotions that come our way. And I have this feeling that no matter what comes my way, I can handle it. I'm gonna be okay. To me, that's a foundation and a bedrock of emotional health. And then to be able to, in our relationship, because before we got on, we had mentioned different people and different names of different mentors and friends and things like that. And Dan Siegel came up and like this idea, or that's who he's got this whole MUI thing, but there's this delusion of separateness, Albert Einstein said. And so we have this kind of connection with each other. So we have this feeling that we're feeling, and it's impacting the people that are around us. So we need to be able to communicate. And so that's part of our emotional health too, is being able to recognize how our emotions are impacting other people, to be able to communicate with people too and have the strength of communication. So

Speaker 2 · 18:36you practicing emotional health by having that piece of paper and using it as a way for effective communication or the intention of effective communication anyway. We never know how it's gonna turn out exactly. Yeah, that's all part of emotional help to me. Thank you for elaborating on that. I mean, I just to say, I asked people, what would the days, weeks, and months ahead be like if you had a little bit more of that? If you had this feeling inside you that no matter what comes my way, I can handle it, I'm gonna be okay. Or to be able to recognize when uncomfortable experiences are there and be able to really appreciate them while they're there because all things are fleeting, of course, we know that. And to be able to meet the uncomfortable with more grace. I'm like, what would life be like? What would be different for you? And that feels very healthy.

Speaker 1 · 19:21I love that style of question because it's an invitation to just even consider what it might be like, even just a little bit, and can overcome resistance to taking action because we're already sensing into the positive benefit.

Speaker 2 · 19:37Another benefit of emotional health is a lot of us struggle with self-worth, this feeling of feeling defective or deficient or that something's wrong with me. I mean, that's reinforced culturally in a huge way. Certainly, many of us have it from growing up, and then it's reinforced culturally. I always make this joke when I lived up in Northern California, coming down to Los Angeles and seeing all the billboards that would always tell me what's wrong with me until I have their thing or I'm more like that person. Now we get it everywhere all over the internet. But self-worth grows as we begin to feel more safe with our emotions. So every time you notice self-criticism in your mind and you kind of notice that hook and you are able to recognize that I'm in this self-critical loop, and you're able to pause and you take a breath and you release a little bit. You kind of lower your shoulders slightly or whatever, softening your body. And then from that place, you have a little bit more emotional capacity to choose a kinder response, or to even ask yourself, can I even be kinder to myself right now? It's moving in a healthier direction because if you think about it, what happens? Your heart rate starts to go down, you're contracting all around your body, the squeezing and tensing all around your body begins to loosen up. You start to move into a place that is easier on your body, conserves more energy that your body had been expending so much because it had been like frozen in that fight-flight response. And so we save a whole lot when we begin to support our emotional health and support our self-worth. And it just sends us a clear message whenever we do anything for ourselves that we're worth caring for.

Speaker 1 · 21:05Oh, thank you for your kind words when we started after my introduction. You said some kind words to me and I kind of evaded it. Just wanted to say thank you for your kind words and take that in and not ignore that. It's practice to feel comfort with more emotions and more intense emotions. And I think you're right, that does increase my feeling of self-worth when I'm able to be with more of myself and more of these emotions that are here.

Speaker 2 · 21:38There's a lot of resonance, just to interrupt for a second, only because before you move on, I wanted to piggyback on that. I have this story in tiny shifts about this exact thing. I led a retreat. It was the end of the retreat. Everyone's in a circle saying something that they are taking away from the retreat. And this woman who works with me, her name Susan, she said to me, and I just want to really thank you. Elisha for all your leadership and everything you've given to us this weekend and pouring your heart into this anyway, these kind things. She said that, and I said, Oh, hey, thanks. Okay. So hold on a second. I did exactly that. And there were these kind of compliments or these kind words that were coming my way. And I sort of kind of just deflected a little bit because it was uncomfortable for me to let in that love. It was uncomfortable for me. And so I moved on to another thing. And it became this sort of joke. As you read tiny shifts, you see this thread of like, why was that uncomfortable for me? And where did that come from exactly? Like you said, I think a lot of us, it's probably so prevalent. I mean, how hard is it for so many people to take a compliment? This is like a common thing. Some people say, I have no problem with taking compliments. But like a lot of people have an issue with it. We feel uncomfortable with it. And there's a reason for that. And to get in touch with that feeling is emotional awareness. Whether we want to let it in and let it be, or whether we want to choose Rumi's words and welcome and entertain them all, or whatever way we want to do that

Speaker 2 · 23:02can help us feel more confident and bring the good of that love into us. It's nourishing when we allow it to be there.

Speaker 1 · 23:11This being human is a guest house. Every morning, a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness. Welcome and entertain them all. That poem from Rumi called The Guest House is at the beginning of your book, and I think is very emblematic of these shifts that you're inviting people to take. And ultimately I think these are shifts of love. Self-compassion has been central to a lot of your work. And some may say that compassion and self-compassion are the same as mindfulness, or at least overlapping a great deal. You can distinguish them and talk about them as being separate and make a valid case for that. And I think as people like Jack Cornfield and Ram Das will often say that mindfulness is this loving awareness.

Speaker 2 · 24:08I love that meditation, by the way, by Ram Das, where you just sit there and you just repeat back, I am loving awareness. I am loving. I encourage anyone, well, you can search that on Google or something like that, or whatever your wherever you're searching goes. But playing with that a little bit, there is something about that. And I think that's also a tiny shift. If you are being really self-critical and you pause for a moment, you notice that old story, you notice that patterning, and you're like, okay, well, hold on a second. I noticed that. Take a breath and you release. That's really the second step of this process. That recognition of the emotional loop is typically not enough. We are too wound up from the emotional reaction we're experiencing. They may be chronic low-grade stress of overwhelm or whatever. Could have been a high grade moment with somebody. And we need to release a little bit. That opens up a space. So if you said then in that space, now you are a little bit more grounded, not fully, but a little bit more ease around you. And then you said, hold on a second. Tried this on, you repeated it three times. I'm loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I'm loving awareness. I would say play with it. I don't know what would happen, but see what you notice as you do that. I remember practicing that meditation more in its full essence for a while because I really appreciated it when I first heard about it. But you can make it a tiny shift.

Speaker 1 · 25:26I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. You were segueing from recognize into what you call release. And then the third is refocus, fourth is reinforce. There's something about these four R's that kind of remind me a little bit of the cross between what the Buddha called sati sampa janya, the sati being mindfulness, sampajana being clear knowing and often tied to like a clear knowing of how to proceed. The Buddha talked a lot about mindfulness, but usually paired with sampa janya, you know, mindfulness alone is usually not enough. And so you talk about what is enough? What else can we do here? So there's recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. Rick Hansen has well, a lot of teachers have like a similar sequence or a different take, but for people who are focusing on mindfulness, people who go to my website or read books about mindfulness, that there are skillful ways of responding to the world once we recognize what's happening, once we're aware of what's here. So can you talk about some of these skillful means of release? What does that mean? Because I think a lot of people might sense it, even just subconsciously, as maybe a suppression or a getting rid of, as opposed to say like a letting go skillfully. And then how do you refocus? What do you refocus on? And then how do you reinforce that?

Speaker 2 · 27:12It's funny. He said, This book is deceptively simple. And he goes, but I don't want to write that in my endorsement because people might not understand what that means. There's a simplicity to recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. It's deceptively simple because there's a level of depth to it in our experience that can radically change the moment for you. So we talked about recognize. The recognize is if you create a foundation of understanding what emotional loops are, patterns that we are conditioned with over time, and you're able to just map out for yourself, like what does that mean for me? I do this or I

Speaker 2 · 27:50think this way or I feel this way, or my body does this thing. You'll become more familiar with it pretty quickly for yourself, personally. You want to personalize this. This isn't to be generalized, it's it's generalizable, but you can personalize it. And that's the important piece. So once we're able to do that, and again, very simple. I'm just noting that I'm scrolling again, whatever. Could be everyday stuff, or it could be more intense things. I shouted at my kid again. What I said before, which was emotions are biology. Release is recognizing that when I'm caught in a certain loop, whether it's feeling overwhelmed or frustrated, that's why getting an emotional vocabulary is helpful. There's a variety of ways to do that, by the way. We you and I talked about Marshall Rosenberg's feelings inventory, which I give away for free as part of this tiny shifts bundle that's on my website, or you can just find it online. Or there's this woman who has the feelings wheel. I mean, there's different ways of coming to feelings, but the release piece is saying that as I have this emotion when I'm feeling overwhelmed, as an example, like this guy who walked into my office. And as he walked into my office, you could see his shoulders were up to his ears and his face. We could see like the pain, the scrunching in his face, his body was hunching over like this. And he had told me on the phone that he had a lot going on, taking care of a parent with Alzheimer's disease, he had issues in his marriage, and his business wasn't going too well. And so the release piece is basically saying your body's having a reaction. We can sum it up as some form of fight-flight-freeze response. That means your muscles are having an experience, your heart rate is going up, your breathing is maybe a bit more shallow or a bit more rapid. There's a physiological correlate with what's happening with you right now. We want to balance that out a little bit. So all we're needing to do in that moment is something simple of saying, like, let's release the physiology. That's what release is. Let's release the constriction that's happening with the physiology. That's the main part of it. So it's literally putting your shoulders down. It's literally taking a little bit longer exhale. It's literally massaging your jaw for a second. It's literally shaking out your arms. That's what the release is. If it's around emotions and something is chronic that's there, you can't release the emotion, but can we soften around it? That's a form of releasing. Another form of releasing that's a little bit different is I have these negative thoughts, I have these self-critical thoughts. They're constantly intrusive and haunting. I'm gonna write them down on a piece of paper or I'm gonna communicate them with somebody. That's another form of releasing. Again, this all doesn't need to take very long. Recognize, release, 10 seconds, 15 seconds. It actually could feel like quite a long time because you're not used to doing it. That doesn't just step us into that space between stimulus and response, which people have when they experience a moment of mindfulness. Now what we're doing is we're widening that space and then just bring blood flow to the prefrontal region. Now we're kind of bringing more there. We're getting more capacity that's there than it's in the past. So before we refocus on a different story or a new narrative or something action that's going to be better for us or healthier for us, we need more capacity. And that's what release gives us. It gives us greater emotional capacity, or we might say it fertilizes the soil so that when we plant in the refocus, it's more likely to grow roots and take hold. That's the purpose of the release.

Speaker 1 · 31:05Would the release part be most connected with lengthening our longevity?

Speaker 2 · 31:15It's not the most connected. Well, we can segue into that in a moment, but certainly you can imagine, just to take a second with that, that if you're walking around with a low-grade chronic stress, which I think a lot of us are nowadays, we don't even notice it. It's kind of the water we swim in. It's the humorous parable of the two fish swimming in a body water and it's two young fish, and this older fish comes up to them and says, Hey boys, how's the water? And they look at each other a little confused. They continue on and say, What the hell is water? So here we are, we're swimming in this low-grade chronic stress of being pinged and prodded by our minds anyway. What's stress? Huh? What's stress?

Speaker 1 · 31:51Is that a joke? Yeah, just the what's water and what's stress?

Speaker 2 · 31:55Okay.

Speaker 1 · 31:56What do you mean, stress?

Speaker 2 · 31:57Right, yeah, what exactly? A lot of us are feeling this way, and we just feel kind of exhausted at the end of the day, and we wonder why. So we're wired to conserve energy. We need energy to live and survive. And our body is like a car, so in a lot of ways. And if you imagine that you got a car and you park it in the driveway, and you're just putting your foot on the gas, just halfway, but you just don't really lift it very much. It's just going just constantly revving your engine. If you do that, you're gonna wear and tear your car down faster than the guy or girl who can take his or her foot off the pedal at times. And maybe they go fast at other times, but they take it off the pedal at times, and they go get it repaired when they need to, and you know, whatever. So the release is lowering your heart rate so your body doesn't have to work so hard. It's taking the tension away from your body again, conserving more energy so you're not getting that same wear and tear on your body, you're not aging as fast. I mean, it's not anything that's just in my book that shows that chronic stress over time actually literally ages our bodies. That's a very well-known thing. So if we're learning how to have that emotional awareness and release the energy that's being poured to battle the stress that's there to hold the stress, yeah, we're gonna save some minutes and hours and years of our lives doing that. That's just the release piece. The refocus is also a way to support our health, longevity, and happiness. Because once we recognize and we release, now we can choose a response that's gonna take a hold. That might not be that bag of potato chips that's there, that might not be that extra Netflix show, that might not be another sleepless night because my mind won't shut off. That might not be that choice to I'm just kind of tired. I don't think I'm just not gonna exercise again today. It might not be those choices that are most connected with our health and longevity. I mean, that's our sleep, nutrition, and exercise are like the three pillars that most money goes into to study health and longevity. And the one that gets the least amount is our emotional health. I mean, stress gets a lot of attention, but our our emotional reactivity is how we get a hold of our stress, to have that awareness of it. Literally, when we choose to make connection with people versus disconnection with them, that's biological protection. We know that feeling connected is connected with health and longevity. That's Robert Waldinger's work at a Harvard. And yeah, we make choices. We make choices that support the length of living longer or healthier longer.

Speaker 1 · 34:30Do you know that Arby's came out with a half-pound roast beef sandwich recently? It's like really big.

Speaker 2 · 34:38Big out there. Yeah. I don't even know how many miles from where we live.

Speaker 1 · 34:42There's, but we have a lot of other things that are it's really good at helping people cope with life. Unhealthy, but very effective for the short term.

Speaker 1 · 34:53I want to dive into your podcast a little bit. It's called the Emotional Longevity Podcast. Discover the Secret to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier. You have interviews with a lot of the who's who of the wellness world and some teachings. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the purpose of that podcast, what you cover, and I just want to dive into a little bit more about that phrase emotional longevity. So I think that it's a juicy concept that marries things together in a really fascinating way.

Speaker 2 · 35:30I started getting really into the longevity space, interested in it anyway, probably when I was like turning the quarter of 50. And how old are you now? 51, so probably like 49, like 48, something like that. And I started listening and reading more works around health and longevity. And that's when I started to understand that a lot of it was focused mostly on exercise, nutrition, and sleep. And there was a physician out there who's now been messed up in the Epstein files. And so his name's been taken out. But anyway, he had this book called Cult Out Live that did like very, very well, sold probably millions of copies. And he has this whole story in there of how getting into the meat of what's real and what's not real with all this health and longevity research out there and what you should believe and not believe and what really matters. And it came down to what really matters was your exercise more than anything else. But then about two-thirds of the way through the book, and this is a spoiler alert, he talks about how his life was such a mess. He would like turn tables over in his house, he would have this huge anger outburst issue, he would like yell at his colleagues and he had just he was just like massively stressed, and he found himself going inpatient somewhere as a result of it. And he got like many therapists on the way, Esther Perrell and others. And it was there that he realized that here's the guy that's like one of the most advanced physicians in that field of health and longevity. And he basically said, like, at the end of the day, the cornerstone is emotional health. Because if you're doing all this stuff and you're miserable, what's the point? And then also your stress is wrecking all of the work that you're doing with your sleep, nutrition, and exercise. That was a really powerful aha for me. And actually, it was a sort of an inspiration story that led to tiny shifts, um, the connection between emotional health and longevity. And so emotional longevity, it means two things. It means having emotional health for the long run. And then it also means the connection between emotional health and longevity. That's the very definition of that term. So my podcast, we kind of explore ways to bring more inner strength into our emotional world, greater emotional awareness, things that we're doing that are harming us on our own. I bring on, like you, I bring on different people that help us better understand the connection between our emotional world and our happiness and our health, and hopefully just kind of practical ways to integrate it. And I use that term very intentionally because probably in my mid-20s, I just had this moment where I realized like I'm just not gonna do anything anymore unless I see the tangible reason to do it. I'm not gonna do it just because someone told me to do it. And I have to see how it translates. And I think ultimately that's how I began to practice more, and that's how I began to teach from that place.

Speaker 1 · 38:13You've been writing about emotions and emotional health for so long. And by the way, I want to just put a plug out there for increasing your emotional vocabulary, like you talked about earlier. And there's like lists of emotions and maps of emotions and wheels of emotions online. You can go on Google images or just Google and search for all these different lists and maps and print them out and share them with people and randomly at different parts of the day. Like, what emotion am I feeling now or now or now? And how nuanced can I get instead of just recycling the same four emotions of fine and sad or good over and over, but trying to get as nuanced as possible. So you've been writing about emotions and practicing emotional awareness and emotional regulation and emotional intelligence for so long. I liked what you said earlier about how you wanted to call this book Life Can Be This Simple, and that Rick Hansen read the book and said, you know, this is deceptively simple. A lot of the practice is simple. Recognizing, releasing, refocusing, reinforcing. I'm wondering though, like the Buddha talked about happiness, levels of happiness and said that the highest happiness is peace. The sense of peace. And we've been talking about emotional health and emotional awareness and simplicity.

Speaker 1 · 39:57Can you maybe talk about your own experience of what peace uh feels like when you feel most peaceful and what those ingredients of peace are for you in your life?

Speaker 2 · 40:12It reminds me of a technology peace in yourself, peace in the world. For me, being with and being curious about what's here within me is a path towards feeling that sense of equanimity, which feels like peace to me, because there's no battling going on in that moment. There's nothing to do. I'm not needing to solve any problems. I'm just allowing whatever is here, whatever feeling is here in my body, whether it's attention or sadness or whatever thoughts, be they comfortable or uncomfortable, demonic or fantasizing or whatever they might be. There's just this experience of just being. And I think being is peace. I think when you settle into being, there's this sense of peace because there's no battle. To me, I think that's it. So it's in my practice. So here would be a tiny shift. This is how we would do this. We would kind of like doesn't mean you get somewhere. You're just more in the driver's seat of moving in the direction you want to go. So if I was feeling however I was feeling in the day and it was kind of uncomfortable or edgy or whatever, I'd say I might recognize that and might take a breath, recognize and say edginess and notice it and wherever it is in my body. And I might release by lowering my shoulders or taking a breath or just softening my body slightly, feeling my feet on the floor. And then I might ask myself a question. This would be the refocus. What would be something that I could do that would enhance my sense of peace in the next few minutes? That might be putting my phone down. I might be laying on the couch and just putting my hands on my heart. That might be just seeing if I can sit down and close my eyes and let the sunshine splash on my face. I could be choosing in this relationship that I'm in in the moment not to get in the argument.

Speaker 1 · 42:04Or to fight with reality.

Speaker 2 · 42:06Yeah, or to fight with reality. That could be being in traffic and choosing to put on something that feels with a more peaceful vibe. These could be small choices, these little emotional pivots that happen because you were able to interrupt the loop that was happening through that recognition. You were able to adjust the reactivity that was happening, the physiological reactivity that was happening in your body to balance out a little bit more, so that you can ask a different question. Our mind, I speaking of AI, I have this little kind of joke in here in the book that's like we have artificial intelligence and there's ways to access our natural intelligence, the NI of it all. And that's the same way. We ask artificial intelligence a question, gives us an answer. We can ask our brain a question, it's going to give us an answer, you know, consciously or unconsciously. And so that question of like, what would be something I could do in the next few minutes that would enhance my sense of peace? You're instantly redirecting your mind, but you're not doing it from a tense place. You've created a little bit more space in the release just for 10 seconds. So you can ask that question so you can get a little bit more strength towards whatever that answer is. Then I'll say this if you do feel a little bit more peace, a little bit more, we're not looking again. We'll totally borrow. Dan Harris is 10% happier for a second. And so if you get a little bit more, then here's what most people miss. So I'll say this, Sean. Most people miss in their practice of trying to work on themselves and get better. They're actually not bad at the recognizing the refocus because that's pretty common. They don't maybe know all the different ways of refocusing, these asking questions, these different ways of doing things that can help with the refocus. But the release piece and the reinforce piece. So the release piece is critical because it allows for the refocus to actually happen better. But the reinforce is like after we feel that piece, we want to lock it into our memory. We want our brain to remember it so that it can bring it up naturally the next time. And the more repetition we have with that, the more naturally it's going to happen. That's just implicit memory or procedural. Memory. And so one way of doing that is by taking a moment to acknowledge the shift. So you take a moment and you say, like, I do feel a little bit more ease in my body, a little bit more peace. Where do I feel? How do I know that? I feel it on my shoulders. Okay, so you might take a moment and to spot that feeling, to acknowledge the feeling, to take a breath in, realize that's part of your experience too. You are somebody who can also feel more peace. And that's a way of reinforcing it. You can close your eyes and take a snapshot, like a picture in your mind. And that's a way of committing it to memory. So you can either do that somatically with your body, like I just said, or you can take a snapshot in your mind, or you can just verbally acknowledge it to yourself. All these are different ways of committing it to memory. You can write it down if you want to for a moment. But that reinforce is to do one of these things that help commit it to memory a little bit more so that your brain will more naturally remember it the next time, strengthening the experience.

Speaker 1 · 44:54I get your emails.

Speaker 1 · 44:56I know you have a daily practice that you're inviting people on. And you have a free starter bundle for people to download online at elisha goldstein.com.

Speaker 2 · 45:11From time to time, I run a program that's like a 21-day program. And then I kind of switch out the things that I give to people and just to keep some novelty kind of around it and variety. So there's been a tiny shift bundle, which when you get tiny shifts, the book, this is like a support in some way. If people want it, it has the whole feelings inventory in there, has the whole needs inventory from nonviolent communication. I have three different meditations in there, shorter meditations that support different areas of the book. If people want to do that kind of thing, I have a values word bank, which is about getting becoming more aware of your values and just like naming emotions. It's important to be able to have a better vocabulary of values so you understand what you value. Because when we walk alongside our values, this is work we do in this is all part of the chapter 12 within the book. We go a bit deeper into that around purpose and the work that we do in our lives. But it's important to be able to name that too. So we have all these things in that tiny shift bundle, but there's also times I can give a three-day practice to getting back to yourself. These will be like um audio voice notes that I send people every day for a few days. Yeah, bring them through ways of making these tiny shifts that help them come back to themselves. Yeah, different things at different times. Check it out. We'll see what's there.

Speaker 1 · 46:27Yeah. Well, you have a nice voice. So I think having a little voice note from Elisha would be a nice addition to my day. Great. Well, I encourage people to check out elisha goldstein.com to look at different offerings and to buy the book, Tiny Shifts. Elisha, what else would you like our community to know? And what's next for you? And I believe you're offering different programs. How can they work with you? And what would you like for them to know?

Speaker 2 · 46:58I guess anyone who's worked with me in the past knows that it's been sort of a passion of mine to unpack how you create a program that actually moves the needle and makes the shifts that people want to make in their lives with their emotional health and their relationships, with their feeling of confidence in their day-to-day. I have something that I've been working on for quite a while. It's a 90-day program called the Emotional Longevity Lab. And there it's going to be a cohort of people that move through a program over the course of 90 days. It's a live program. So there'll be live calls with me where I'm working, where I'm training a little bit, and then we're doing spot coaching with people. And then we have these more embodied integration labs that happen during the week too. And I have a digital companion that I'm creating directly for this program so people can work in real time with the work that they're doing and other things. And so this is my best way to work with me and do this work. And it all starts with an interview with me. I interview everyone directly to make sure it's a good fit for them. And you can find that on my website as well.

Speaker 1 · 47:58For those listening and watching, I really do encourage you to check that out. Elisha has been a pioneer and a leading voice in this work. And so I highly recommend working with him. Elisha, thank you again for being here. Thank you for your work over the years. You've helped so many people, and I just really grateful for your practice and the way that you communicate. For everyone listening, please check out Tiny Shifts, the book. You can find it on Amazon or wherever you get your books. Listen to the Emotional Longevity Podcast and check out his website. The links will be in the show notes. Alaisha, thanks again for being here.

Speaker 2 · 48:43Thank you, Sean. Thanks so much.