🤯#23: Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Dr Julie Smith - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
Practical tools and strategies to manage our Motivation, Emotional Pain, Grief, Self-Doubt, Fear, Stress and ultimately live a life full of Meaning.
Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 23.
Firstly, an enormous THANK YOU to everyone who responded to last week’s edition and call out for opinions! I read each and every single one of them and I’m delighted to share with you that people do indeed seem keen for books on broader topics, just like The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker from last week. 🙏
This week, we are covering 📚 Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? 🖋 by Dr Julie Smith.
She is a viral TikTok star with 3.4 million followers, so it’s safe to say that Dr Julie knows what the people want - and her book delivered just how the label described. With the vast majority of her online content being delivered in 60 second chunks, this is the chance to go deeeeeep and really explore these concepts, all while keeping true to her entertaining and palatable style.
So let’s jump in. All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.
🖋 An Overview - Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?
This book is designed as a practical, easy to read guide that is split up into 8 chapters with the intention that you can flip to the specific section you need, when you need it.
In light of that, it felt like the best way to write this summary was to pass on to you the high level information from each chapter, that way you have a map to use if you want to dive deeper.
The chapters are:
🥺 Chapter 1: On Dark Places
💪 Chapter 2: On Motivation
💥 Chapter 3: On Emotional Pain
😩 Chapter 4: On Grief
😬 Chapter 5: On Self-Doubt
😳 Chapter 6: On Fear
😡 Chapter 7: On Stress
😌 Chapter 8: On A Meaningful Life
🥺 Chapter 1: On Dark Places
“When we experience low mood, it may have been influenced by several factors from our internal and external world, but when we understand what those influences are, we can use that knowledge to shift it in the direction we want it to go.” - page 10
One of the things that really stood out to me from the first chapter (and perhaps also irritated me 🙃) was the timely explanation and reminder on how our physical bodies affect our mood. That sometimes, when we believe we are doomed and that nothing can ever be good again, that there are actually very good, logical explanations for those feelings and also logical things I can do to help ourselves feel better.
This is an excerpt from How Feelings Get Created:
“Sleep is bliss. Then my alarm offends my ears. It’s too loud and I hate that tune. It sends a shockwave through my body that I am not ready for. I press snooze and lie back down. My head is aching and I feel irritated. I press snooze again. If we don’t get up soon the kids will be late for school. I need to get ready for my meeting. I close my eyes and see the to-do list lying on my desk in the office. Dread. Irritation. Exhaustion. I don’t want to do today.
Is this low mood? Did it come from my brain? How did I wake up like this? Let’s trace back.
Last night I stayed up late working. By the time I got into bed I was too tired to go back downstairs to grab a glass of water. Then my baby woke up twice in the night. I haven’t slept enough and I’m dehydrated. The loud alarm woke me from a deep sleep, sending stress hormones shooting through my body as I woke up. My heart started pounding and that felt something like stress.
Each of these signals sends information to my brain. We are not OK. So my brain goes on a hunt for reasons why. It searches, it finds. So my physical discomfort, brought about by lack of sleep and dehydration, helped to create low mood.
Not all low mood is unidentified dehydration, but when dealing with mood it is essential to remember that it’s not all in your head. It’s also in your body state, your relationships, your past and present, your living conditions and lifestyle. It’s in everything you do and don’t do, in your diet and your thoughts, your movements and memories. How you feel is not simply a product of your brain.
Your brain is constantly working to make sense of what is going on. But it only has a certain number of clues to work from. It takes information from your body (e.g. heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, hormones). It takes information from each of your senses – what you can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. It takes information from your actions and thoughts. It pieces all these clues together with memories of when you have felt similar in the past and makes a suggestion, a best guess about what is happening and what you do about it. That guess can sometimes be felt as an emotion or a mood. The meaning we make of that emotion and how we respond to it, in turn, sends information back to the body and the mind about what to do next (Feldman Barrett, 2017). So when it comes to changing your mood, the ingredients that go in will determine what comes out.” - page 11-13
Sound familiar to anyone else?
These types of compounding events then put us at risk of going into a downward spiral:
So then, how do we get the basics right when everything feels hard and impossible?
It’s not about being perfect, every little bit counts and helps
Exercise by focussing on starting small and doing something you enjoy, eg. dancing in your bedroom to a 3 minute song
Prioritize sleep
Eat well
Make time for human connection
Maybe you feel frustrated like I did when reading this list and hearing the recommendations (all expanded on in the book of course), but it all comes back to the fact that these are the building blocks of our ability to feel happy and safe. When we feel like things are falling apart, it’s worth returning to the basics.
Every. Single. Day.
💪 Chapter 2: On Motivation
“As we build up the psychological toolkit with skills that help us manage through life, it’s easy to imagine that motivation is one of those tools. But motivation is not a skill.” - page 67
Why can’t Motivation be considered a skill?
Because we cannot rely on it to always be there. Instead, Dr Julie encourages us to think of motivation as:
“Mastering motivation is building the capacity to do what matters most to you, even when a part of you does not feel like it.” - page 71
😳 - whoa.
“When we’re dealing with that ‘can’t be bothered’ feeling there are two main prongs of attack:
Learning how to cultivate that feeling of motivation and energy to increase the chances of it appearing more often.
Learning how to act in line with your best interests even when motivation is absent. Developing the capacity to do what you need to do, even when a part of you doesn’t feel like it. - page 68
There are a number of strategies we can use to help us do this:
Moving our bodies.
Indeed the literal movement helps us to feel more motivated and cultivate our energy to do other tasks!Staying connected with the goal
Keep it small and keep it focussed.
If it’s too big, we feel defeated from the very beginning.Change our relationship with failure
Sometimes we think that self-criticism is motivating us, when in reality the research shows that it has the opposite effect more often than not.
There are also really helpful tools like building our identity as a “certain type of person” which can help us to better effect change:
[So many of the strategies in the section on motivation remind me of Atomic Habits by James Clear which I have reread a number of times over the past few years. Perhaps this would be a great book and topic for a future newsletter 🤔 as a deep dive on successful behaviour change.]
💥 Chapter 3: On Emotional Pain
Emotions - the positive ones and the painful ones - are simply a part of our human experience. No matter how much we want to avoid pain in our lives, it simply isn’t possible.
Sigh.
So instead of trying to avoid negative emotions and get rid of them entirely, this section of the book instead offers us a reframe of 2 great recommendations of what not to do with emotions:
1️⃣ “Push them away.
Imagine you are at the beach. You walk into the sea up to your chest. The waves need to pass over you to get to the shore. If you try to hold the waves back and prevent them reaching the shore, you learn how powerful those waves are. They push you back and you quickly get engulfed and overwhelmed. But you don’t have to tumble and struggle against the waves. Those waves are coming no matter what. When you accept that, you can focus on keeping your head above the water as it passes. You still feel the effects. Might even get lifted off your feet for a moment. But you move with the water and brace yourself ready to land back on your feet.
2️⃣ Believe they are facts.
Emotions are real and valid, but they are not facts. They are a guess. A perspective that we try on for size. An emotion is the brain’s attempt to make sense of the world so that you can meet your needs and survive. Given that what you feel is not a factual statement, neither are thoughts. That is partly why therapies like CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) can be so helpful to many people. It gives us practice at being able to step back from thoughts and feelings and see them for what they are – just one possible perspective.” - page 101-102
So then, what do we do with our emotions?
We can put a name to them and use them exactly how they were intended - to tell us what we need.
“The more new words you can build up to differentiate between feelings, the more options your brain has for making sense of various sensations and emotions.” - page 115
The better grasp we have on how we are feeling, the better we are able to self-soothe.
😩 Chapter 4: On Grief
We usually associate grief with the loss of a loved one, but we can also experience grief reactions to anything which causes us significant loss.
There are stages of grief, but contrary to popular belief these stages do not happen in a certain order. There is no right or wrong way to grieve.
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Grief psychotherapist Julia Samuel set out 8 key structures to support us to rebuild out lives through grief, calling them The Pillars Of Strength. Each of them take work and persistence to build, and slowly build a stable structure to help us through:
Relationship with the person who has died
When we lose a loved one, our relationship and love for that person does not end. Adapting to the loss involves finding new ways to feel close to the loved one.Relationship with the self
In understanding our own coping mechanisms, finding ways to get support and look after our health and wellbeing throughout, we must listen to our own needs as best we can along the way.Expressing grief
There is no correct way to express grief.Time
Putting an expectation on how much time you should need for grief adds pain and distress.Mind and body
Our physical state, emotions, thoughts and actions are like weaves in a basket. We cannot change one without influencing the other.Limits
When loved ones around us may be full of advice about how we should be managing and when we should be getting back into everyday life, remembering our capacity for holding boundaries becomes an essential tool to act in our best interests.Structure
It makes sense to offer a degree of flexibility that allows for grieving, while also maintaining some level of structure that helps prevent deterioration from the absence of healthy behaviours such as exercise and social contact.Focusing
When there are not enough words to describe the sensations that we feel, focusing our attention to simply observing our internal world and visualizing those sensations can help to build our awareness of our own shifts in emotional and physical state.” - page 146-148
😬 Chapter 5: On Self-Doubt
“Confidence cannot grow if we are never willing to be without it.
To build confidence, go where you have none. Repeat every day and watch your confidence develop.” - page 172
Building our self-confidence and overcoming our self-doubt are muscles which can be built with specific conditioning and activity.
Along the way, while we are stretching ourselves we need to have a safe haven - a coach or a perfect nurturer - to return to:
“Create an image in your mind of the perfect nurturer or coach (this could be a real or imagined person). Imagine you are sharing with them what you are currently facing, how you feel about it and what you want to work on.
Take some time to imagine in detail how that perfect nurturer or coach might respond, and write it down. This sets the tone for the words you can start using to respond to yourself as you work on building your own confidence and inevitably face vulnerability along the way.” - page 171
😳 Chapter 6: On Fear
“Fear is a part of our survival response. It is supposed to be intensely uncomfortable, and the urges to escape and then avoid the feared situation are supposed to be strong.” - page 192
However, sometimes our fear responses kick in when we are not in life threatening situations, but the urge is still the same. For example:
“You’re asked to speak in a meeting and your heart starts pounding. Your heart may be getting your body ready to be alert and perform. But if you interpret that as fear and make your excuses to leave the room, then avoid those meetings in the future, you never get to experience talking in meetings and having it go well.
The things that give us immediate relief from our fear tend to feed that fear in the long term. Every time we say no to something because of fear, we reconfirm our belief that it wasn’t safe or that we couldn’t handle it. Every time we cut something out of our lives because of fear, life shrinks a little. So our efforts to get rid of fear today mean that fear gets to take over our life choices in the long term.” - page 192-193
🤯 Whoa.
So when we are in that moment of acutely experiencing those waves of fear and anxiety, what can we do? Is there something easy to learn that will have an instant effect? Luckily - yes.
“When anxiety is triggered, you start breathing more quickly. This is your body’s way of getting in extra oxygen to fuel the survival response. You feel as though you cannot catch your breath. So you breathe faster with rapid, shallow breaths, then you have an excess of oxygen in your system. But if you can extend the outbreath so that it is longer or more vigorous than the inbreath, this helps to slow your heart rate down. When the pounding heart comes down, so does the anxiety response.
One of my favourites is square breathing.
Step 1. Focus your gaze on something square: a nearby window, door, picture frame or computer screen.
Step 2. Focus your eyes on the bottom left-hand corner and as you breathe in, count to 4 and trace your eyes up to the top corner.
Step 3. Hold your breath for 4 seconds as you trace your eyes across the top to the other corner.
Step 4. As you breathe out, trace your eyes down to the bottom corner, counting to 4 once again.
Step 5. Hold for 4 seconds as you move back to the bottom left corner to start again. So, you breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, out for 4 seconds and hold for 4 seconds.” - page 200-202
If you are looking for more specific thinking re-training techniques to overcome fear and anxiety, there is an entire sub-chapter that was far too in depth to feature here in the newsletter which covered techniques including: how to get distance from your thoughts, identifying biased thoughts, catastrophizing, persolalizing, using a mental filter, overgeneralizing, labelling and fact checking.
😡 Chapter 7: On Stress
“The communication between brain and body goes both ways. This means that when your body is under stress for extended periods, the persistent messages about this make changes to your very adaptable brain that is trying to regulate your body. This is why stress is so very damaging to both physical and mental health. It affects all aspects and every part of you.
In the balancing act of managing stress and using it to our advantage while remaining healthy, we need to balance incoming demands with replenishment. The more demands on us, the more replenishment we need. The more stress pouring into the bucket, the more release valves we need to process it and make room for the ongoing demands.” - page 248-249
The good news is it is possible to decrease the effects of stress on our bodies, many of them being strategies already mentioned in one way or another:
mindfulness
meditation
exercise
deep breathing
But what about in those situations where we can’t remove ourselves to undertake those activities? Like when our stress surges as we walk into an exam or a job interview or a high pressure meeting?
The first is Mindset - changing your relationship with stress:
“Research shows that how we think about our stress affects how we perform under pressure. A shift from perceiving the stress response as a problem to viewing it as an asset that will help frees up those individuals to focus on meeting whatever demands they face.
This mindset shift can be the subtle difference between ‘Despite how stressful it is, try your best’ to ‘When you feel the signs of stress channel that energy and enhanced focus to do your best.” - page 265
The next is altering our Language by using affirmations. Now these aren’t the toxic positivity type of affirmations that can feel impossible and inauthentic, but instead coming up with very genuine, real and applicable affirmations:
“Dr Dave Alred is an elite performance coach who works with many of the world’s top athletes, helping them to perform at their highest level under extreme and very public pressure. When he puts together affirmations for his athletes he makes sure those affirmations steer away from sweeping absolutes and remain concrete and factual – something the player believes. They clearly identify the key to the necessary mindset and remind them that keeping to the process will lead to improvement.” - page 267
Another is adjusting our Focus. In high-stress situations we get tunnel vision:
“Ongoing research into this suggests that choosing to shift from that tunnel vision back to a more panoramic view calms the mind. This does not mean moving your head to look all around you but just allowing your gaze to widen and take in more of your surroundings. The visual system is part of the autonomic nervous system and so dilating your gaze in this way accesses circuits in the brain associated with stress and levels of alertness.” - page 268
Re-framing and improving our Shame Resilience are also covered in detail in this section on Stress as coping strategies.
😌 Chapter 8: On A Meaningful Life
“In therapy when we start to shine a light on the way forward and think about what we want, it’s not uncommon to hear ‘I just want to be happy.’
But the idea of happiness has been hijacked over the years by an elusive fairytale of constant pleasure and satisfaction with life.
[..] We are given the impression that happiness is the norm and anything outside of that could be a mental health problem. We are also sold the idea that if we can achieve material wealth, happiness will arrive and stick around.” - page 277
Sound familiar? Yeah.
So here’s what we should be focussing on instead of finding this elusive, impossible, perpetual happiness:
Living a Meaningful Life.
How do we work out what that looks like for us?
There are various exercises you can do, but here is one with a fantastic visual called the values star (I’ve also done a similar activity before and it was called the Life Pizza):
Basically you rate each area of your life on a scale of 0 to 10. If every single area is a 10, you would end up with an even star the same shape as the one in the image, or (much more likely) you’ll end up with some areas which aren’t where you want them to be.
Once you know what areas of our lives we need to work on, and realise what areas we aren’t living in line with our values, how do we go about making change?
By asking ourselves what we could do today to improve that area, and then doing it. We need to resist the urge and temptation to make some giant outlandish goal.
All great things are achieved just a little at a time, after all.
So there we have it, another incredible book chock full of helpful tools, reframes and explanations to help us live a little easier and a little happier (or should I say, more meaningfully 😉) every single day.
I know I will be revisiting this book more than once and have gained an immense amount of value from reading it - and I hope you have gained some tools for your toolkit from this summary as well.
Until next week my friends,
Eleanor ❤️🙏
🧠 Resources & Links
🤝 Human Rights list of Mental Health Support Services
📸 Follow Dr Julie Smith on Instagram - 871k followers
🎥 Subscribe to Dr Julie Smith on Youtube - 446k subscribers
📕 Next week’s book
Coming out next Friday 8th July 2022 is #24:
📚 The Year Of Yes
🖋 by Shonda Rhimes
“In this poignant, hilarious and deeply intimate call to arms, Hollywood's most powerful woman, the mega-talented creator of Grey's Anatomy and Scandal and executive producer of How to Get Away with Murder, reveals how saying YES changed - and saved - her life, and how it can change yours too.”