SHE Asked Podcast
Welcome to The SHE Asked Podcast with Anna McBride—a space where the stories we tell ourselves are challenged, reimagined, and rewritten to unlock personal transformation.
Hosted by former therapist, storyteller, and lifelong seeker Anna McBride, this podcast dives deep into the power of narrative. Through personal stories and intimate conversations with guests, we explore how shifting our internal dialogue can change not just how we see our lives—but how we live them.
Each episode offers what Anna calls “practical hope”—real tools, lived experience, and emotional honesty for anyone feeling stuck, lost, or ready for change. Whether you’re navigating divorce, grief, reinvention, or simply trying to understand your past, The SHE Asked Podcast invites you to become the author of your own story—and the hero in it, too.
Follow along for weekly episodes filled with compassion, perspective, and the courage to ask yourself:
What story am I telling—and is it still serving me?
SHE Asked Podcast
Choosing Happiness At Any Age
In this solo episode of She Asked: Tools for Practical Hope, Anna McBride reflects on turning 62 and the single question that has followed her throughout her life:
“Are you happy?”
Drawing on research from Harvard’s longevity studies and the Blue Zones, Anna breaks down why connection, purpose, and inner joy directly impact health and aging. She guides listeners through breathwork, reflection, and four transformative questions to help uncover where happiness already exists and where it’s waiting to be reclaimed.
✨ In this episode, Anna shares:
• Why happiness is a spiritual, emotional, and biological necessity
• How generational wounds & people-pleasing block joy
• The fears that arise when we finally admit we’re unhappy
• How aging can become a teacher, not a threat
• Why balance, boundaries, and self-connection matter more than ever
• Practical tools to cultivate happiness today
🌿 AFFIRMATIONS
“I honor the wisdom that aging brings.”
“I allow happiness to find me in simple sacred moments.”
“My joy is my strength, my longevity, my gift.”
“I am both the teacher and the student of my own happiness.”
🌿 This conversation is a powerful invitation to claim happiness as a spiritual practice, especially for women navigating aging, healing, relationships, and the desire for a more meaningful life.
🌿 Set up your FREE DISCOVERY CALL
When you’re ready to stop performing “fine” and start living truthfully
Book your session at annamcbride.com
#SheAskedPodcast #Happiness #AgingGracefully #WomenOver50 #EmotionalHealing #SpiritualGrowth #SelfWorth #Longevity #HealingJourney #AnnaMcBride
Welcome back to She Asked. Tools for Practical Hope. I'm your host, Anna McBride, and I am so excited that you're here. I just recently celebrated my 62nd birthday. I can't even believe I'm getting that old. I want to center in today on the importance of choosing happiness as a spiritual practice and what that means, what that's meant to me, and how that can be something that I can offer to you, my audience. I want to start with a question. Are you happy? At this time, I'm not asking you that just to fill in an answer like, how are you? I want you to really take a moment, take a breath, and consider if you are truly happy. This episode is an invitation for you to claim happiness as a spiritual practice. We're going to talk about why it's important, what I've learned about that question, and have grown to appreciate it, as well as giving you some tools to help you work towards becoming happier in your life. So today I'm going to share with you my story about this because this question, are you happy? has followed me for decades. It came to me from someone that I wasn't expecting it from. My mother-in-law. I got married when I was 20 years old, and my mother-in-law was amazing. She was beautiful. She was, by the time I met her on her own, a divorce day, also a widower. And over the years of being married to her son, she saw me become a mother, she saw me become a business owner, she saw me in various stages of my life. She was with us until she passed away about 10 years ago. And so I knew her for a good part of my life. Three plus decades. She would often ask me at times when I least expected, are you happy? We'd be folding laundry, we'd be putting away dishes, we'd be cleaning up, we'd be cooking. And she would ask me, Are you happy? At first I thought it was a judgment, an accusation. Like, am I really happy with her son? And now, at this stage of life, I've come to appreciate maybe what she was offering was a suggestion on something that she could see that I didn't know, that I couldn't see in me, or that she had gained through her life an understanding of just how important happiness is. I didn't understand the question at the time. In fact, I thought she was only asking me. And she has five children, and four of them were married. Turns out she asked everyone this question. And now that I'm of this certain age, I realize that there's been a big part of my life where I wasn't happy. I've shared already in previous episodes how for a good part of my marriage I wasn't happy. But it wasn't my ex-husband's fault. This unhappiness began way before I met him. Unresolved childhood things that led to me becoming an adult who didn't even understand the value of happiness or why we have to heal in order to start to grow happiness within us. So I'm really grateful that my mother-in-law asked me that question, as uncomfortable as it made me, because it's really stuck in my memory. It's probably one of the most important questions that anyone has ever asked me. So as I ask you that question, I want you to take first a deep breath with me. Know that you are in the right place at the right time, nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, but to contemplate that question along with me. Are you happy? What are the things maybe going on in your life that might be an obstacle to you being happier? Is it a relationship? Is it a situationship? Is it a work thing? Is it a financial thing? Happiness does matter, so we need to look at all areas of our life and really consider the happiness level we are experiencing in those areas. So close your eyes, take another deep breath, and instead of just saying a standard answer, just keep asking yourself that question and see what comes up. When you think of your life in different areas, relationships, work that you do, your physical body, your spiritual part of your life, how happy are you? Are there things that you could let go of? Are there relationships that need to, maybe you might need to have a conversation there? Or maybe they need to end. Maybe there's an imbalance, whether it's a work thing or a personal thing. Balance matters. So maybe something you might want to take a look at yourself in the mirror as you say the answer. Because I want you to pay attention to how it really feels as you answer it. I don't want you to answer it for yourself the way you might if someone were to ask you, how are you? We know in America, the standard answer is we're fine. But are we? So when I ask you if you're happy, I want you to really be honest as you answer that question for yourself. So not the first answer. I want you to have the honest answer and write it down. And then take a deep breath and just notice as you consider the answers in the different areas of your life how it feels. I can tell you from my experience, when I wasn't happy, when I was aware I wasn't happy, it actually triggered fear in me. Because I knew that there was a part of me that wasn't ready to do something about it. So I find that often we'll avoid questions might imply a need for action. Yet I can tell you that until you become aware of your level of happiness, you really aren't in a position to do anything about it. And just because you become aware of it today doesn't mean you have to take any action on it. Awareness is key. And then we'll see what needs to be done. But let's take a moment and talk about why happiness matters. There's been a lot of science research to support this, that our degree of happiness is directly related to longevity and health. Harvard has been doing a very long study, decades long, and what they focused on is what is the strongest predictor of longevity in a life. It's really not about wealth or status, it's about connection and how happy we are in our connections. In other words, our relationships. Now, by this age in my life, I've been blessed with a lot of quality relationships. I've also been blessed to learn that in a lot of relationships I was performing. I was acting as if I was happy because I wanted to please people. Now that I've done some healing work, I remove the performance and I've worked on the parts of me that needed to become happier so that when I relate to people that I care about, people that I'm getting to know, that I don't make it about pleasing them in order for me to be happy. I worry and focus only on pleasing myself. And so I've created areas of my life where that's possible, where connection matters, where the work I do matters, because I have to connect with myself in order for me to connect with others. So as I connect with myself, I tune in to ask myself, how happy am I? And I make a practice of connecting with things that make me happy every day. For me, some basics include physical fitness, doing some exercise, getting out in nature, even in the city here, taking a bath, having hot tea, certainly connecting with my children. These are all things that make me happy. And I do my best to fill my weeks with those actions. So connection matters, according to Harvard. One of the other studies that is Dan Budner's study on the blue zones of the world, where we have the populations that live the longest. This includes Okinawa, Sardinia, and Costa Rica. And some of the longest living populations on Earth are in those areas. That's why they're called blue zones. And they share three things in common: a sense of purpose, a rhythm of community, and belonging. And happiness is really about not only our connection, but are we having a meaningful life? This is why I believe happiness is a spiritual practice. Because it adds to the quality and the meaning and the depth of our life. I have spent a lot of my life not being happy. And that may come as a shock to a lot of people who know me. Because what I've had to learn was happiness is an inside job. It's not a performance. There are a lot of parts of me within me that I neglected as I was attending to other people, doing things that I thought were right to do, to be of service, to be helpful, to really take care of the people I love. All of that sounds great. But was it making me happy? How could it, if I wasn't taking care of myself? I've shared in previous episodes how I took care of myself through disordered eating, through other addictions. And I thought that as long as I had those actions, I was okay. I wasn't happy, I was okay. In other words, I was surviving. Happiness isn't about surviving. Happiness is about thriving. And in order for us to thrive, we really do need to heal and attend to the parts of us that we may have neglected. It's important to understand that science is finally proving that happiness matters, that it adds to our health, it adds to our longevity, and it certainly adds to our quality of connection with other people. So let's think about this. If happiness contributes to longevity, to how long and how well we live, how are you cultivating it for yourself? Where does happiness already exist in your life, even in small, quiet ways? And what are you postponing because you believe you need to earn your happiness first? I think it's something that we have to consider is that our society tells us that we have to earn the right to be happy. We have to earn the right for joy. It's not true. I think joy, happiness are a birthright that many of us forget because of societal messaging. Or, like me, you were raised in a dysfunctional family where addiction took over and distorted the way we experience the world. We might not know how to heal or what to do to feel happy. In fact, you might even be someone who struggles with mental health and feels like happiness is maybe good for other people, but not for you. I'm here to tell you it matters. And there's a biochemical component that some mental health challenges need to be addressed disally. However, there's also a part of healing that is really about asking yourself questions and noticing and listening to the answers. I realized recently that there was a part of me that took a lot of pleasure out of helping people. I think it began for me when I was about, I don't know, six or seven, when I could see my mother struggling. And I just wanted to be helpful. So I helped her translate English into her language and back again. I helped clean, I helped cook, if she'd let me. I would follow her and help her with her errands, and all of this to say, like, as long as I could make her happy, I'd be happy. As I grew up, I took care of siblings, then I got married and took care of my then husband and then our children. And again, this can be confusing because our society tells us that this is really important, that we play these roles to make other people happy. I just realized that all of that doing for others was costing me because I wasn't slowing down to consider what would make me happy. What would I want to do in my life to be happy? Never thought about it. And then it became too easy to blame other people for not asking me that question. And then my mother-in-law just kept asking it, are you happy? Felt annoying. But man, is it important? Now that I think about it, maybe she was the universe's messenger to attempt to wake me up to the value of being happy. If you think about the ways in which you cultivate happiness, and you take the time to consider what do you do? What is uniquely yours that makes you happy? And are you doing it? There were decades where I wasn't doing what made me happy. Used to be I loved to ride my bike, and then I just parked it and forgot about it. And then there was a time when hiking was really important to me. I've gone on some really big epic hikes. But I told myself before I gave myself permission to do that, that if I don't go with somebody, it's not the same. Sometimes you don't need anybody to be happy. I didn't realize that until I did. Happiness matters. And how you cultivate it for yourself matters. And then you need to look at your day. On the daily, how are you cultivating your happiness? Are you factoring that into your schedule? Because if you're someone like me who was a mom of young kids working, attending to her spouse, I didn't really factor in much time for happiness. Much less to ask myself that. So if you ask yourself gently, in case you're too busy, like what could you release from your schedule to free up more time so that you could do the things that make you happy? I don't know if you can feel a little bit of tension, like, oh my gosh, what would I let go of? Sometimes it's hard to know that in order to create something, you have to let something go. There was a lot that I had to let go of in order to arrive at happiness. But let me tell you something. That since happiness matters, letting things fall away that take up time away from happiness is a necessary step. But for right now, I just want you to consider that question. What could you release right now? Maybe it's a belief, maybe it's an expectation, a regret. What could you release to make space for more joy? It's a good question. You might not have to fix anything. You may just need to shift your mindset. For the longest time, I thought that if I didn't please other people, there's no way I could be happy. I didn't realize that all the people pleasing was robbing me of my happiness. I thought I had to do a lot of service to be happy because that's what my mother did. I have sisters that have done a lot of service. And I've worked a lot and I've given a lot of service in the recovery world. And I told myself I did it because I wanted to attend to that part of me that was grieving and the loss of her sisters to addiction. And that is true. However, when you give it to the level that I was giving it, it was taking away from my happiness. And I didn't understand that. So balance is important. And balance is something that we don't always consider until we get older. Because we lose our balance where our life feels out of balance. So maybe think about this next question. Where are you out of balance in your life? Is it in your body? Is it in your work life? Is it in your work-to-home life balance? Is it in your interpersonal relationships, maybe with your children or with your partner? Think about that. Where are you feeling out of balance? If you're not aware where you're out of balance, it's going to be difficult to get back to it. And balance matters for happiness. If you do too much of one thing, it might be costing you something in another area. So at 62 years old, I'm finally understanding what my mother-in-law was meaning when she was asking that question. What was she really asking? She wasn't testing me. She wasn't judging me. She was reminding me. She knew that happiness isn't a finish line. It's not something that you arrive at. It's a rhythm, it's a balance between your commitments to others and the commitments to yourself. The way we greet ourselves in the mirror, for example, like what's your self-talk really like when you see yourself in the mirror? I can tell you that's where I've made the most improvement. I've shared in previous episodes that I had an eating disorder for over three decades, and the way I talked to myself for those decades was nothing short of mean. I did not like the way my body looked. I didn't think I was attractive at all. I didn't talk nicely to myself at all for decades. So where I've healed the most is the way I talk to myself. And the way that when I look in the mirror, I communicate love to myself, to my body, and gratitude. This has been a hard transformation so that I can have more happiness in my body at this stage of my life. I've really grown in what's known as radical acceptance of who I am, what I am, and my life to this point. So how happy are you with your body? How happy are you with the way you talk to yourself and your body? Do you think about it? It matters. How happy are you with where you are in your life? Do you think you've done enough? Been to enough places? Had enough adventures? It matters. I'll tell you that I've had a very interesting life. The things that were challenging me, my family of origin, the addiction, my marriage, and my relationship with my husband at that time, and all the other people in my life related to him. People I work with, clients, all of these things. I went on, I've gone around the world practically and hyped. I've had a lot of great adventures. I've studied with some great teachers. And I gotta tell you that for most of it, I wasn't happy. Yeah, I wasn't. Sounds selfish, maybe reckless, yet I don't think I ever really considered that in order for me to really embrace everything that I really had to consider being happy first. As I sit here recording this episode, I reflect back on just how blessed I've been to have all of these examples of things I've got to do. Yet doing them is one thing. Really appreciating them and being happy to have been able to do them is another. That's where I've really grown. I've grown in appreciation of my life. I'm so happy with my life. One of the areas that has also been interesting for me to grow into is to really appreciate and embrace my looks as I age. There's a lot of us that are women, and I know that men do too. Most of my listeners are women. As we age, we get concerned about how we look and how aging feels in our body and looks in our faces. Right? Aging is real. And how we feel about it. How happy are we about it? I'm laughing because it hasn't always been easy. I haven't always been happy with the way I look. I can tell you that if my ex-husband were here right now, he would tell you that I spent a long time prepping myself before I would ever leave the house. I was never happy with the way my hair looked, with the clothes as they fit me, with the way I was putting makeup on. I was never happy with it. I always thought that I had to do more. Or it was too much. Now, the only makeup I wear is lip gloss. And I let my hair grow out. And I let the gray settle in. And it's not a ding for anybody who does anything more than that. It's just, for me, this is what I have to do in order to be happy. Because it was really the process of getting ready to go out, that performance, that I wasn't happy with. And I was never really happy with just myself. There's so many difficult ways in which we contribute to our unhappiness that when we remove them, it might make us happier. I know it did for me. When I stopped coloring my hair, when I stopped trying to put makeup on, when I just stopped, and just to consider, am I happy? And start there. Because from there I can look at my life and consider that every scar on my body, every gray hair in my head, every line on my face, is a story of things that have happened to me in my life, that I've grown through, that I'm here to tell you about, and I get to help people with. That makes me happy. I want to offer you some questions as tools to help you consider this bigger question of happiness. One of them is, what does happiness look like for you now? Not ten years ago, not someday, but today. What does happiness look like for you today? Second question, where am I already living in alignment with joy? Even if it's quiet? Thirdly, what old story about aging or happiness am I ready to release? Maybe it's about doing things for others or earning your happiness. Think about it. And then lastly, what would it feel like to wake up tomorrow and choose happiness? Really choose it. Not as a mood, but as a spiritual practice. How would your day be? What would you do? What would you choose to do if happiness was your outlook for the day? So I invite you to consider those questions. Arrive at your answers honestly, and then see this as a beginning of a new way of looking at your life, at living your life, at becoming the version of you who can embody happiness. And so I want us to consider some other tools, known as affirmations, that could help really help us embrace happiness. I want you to close your eyes, and we're going to put these affirmations in our notes. You don't have to worry about writing them down, obviously. So with your eyes closed, take a breath and let it go. And listen as I say these affirmations. I honor the wisdom that aging brings. I honor the wisdom that aging brings. I allow happiness to find me in simple sacred moments. I allow happiness to find me in simple sacred moments. My joy is my strength. My longevity, my gift. My joy is my strength. My longevity, my gift. I am both the teacher and the student of my own happiness. I am both the teacher and the student of my own happiness. So as those affirmations land on you, just notice how you feel. To know that happiness is an inside job that we have to choose, that we have to practice, that we have to really hold as a spiritual principle. I know that I have. That I now get to be able to say, finally, I get it. Happiness matters. And what I choose to do to make myself happy is the first step in really aging in a peaceful way. Thank you for joining me in the episode today, the special birthday reflection, the gift of aging. If this session opened something for you, some curiosity, some reflection, something to think about, I want you to share it with someone. Invite them into a conversation about happiness and about how that you can learn to become happier as you age. Invite them in. And if you'd like to explore this work more deeply, I'm here. Just reach out. I've been your host for this episode, but I am here to help you in ways that we can because happiness matters. This is Anna McBride. I want to thank you for joining us on She Ask, where practical hope meets healing. And until soon, be well.