Jodi Wilson - A Brain That Breathes

Tune in today as I sit down with Jodi Wilson @practisingsimplicity, Australian author, yoga teacher, health journalist and mother of four, to discuss her newest release, A Brain That Breathes, essential habits for an overwhelming world. 

Follow Jodi on social media - https://www.instagram.com/practisingsimplicity/?hl=en

Jodi's Substack - https://practisingsimplicity.substack.com/

Where to buy the book - https://www.murdochbooks.com/browse/book/Jodi-Wilson-A-Brain-That-Breathes-9781761500800

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

And the one thing I kept questioning is if it's so simple, why are we not hearing anything about it? And it's because no one can make any money when we rest and do less.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hi, I'm Sophie. Welcome to Big Things Little Things. A podcast series where I sit down with inspiring change makers to discuss the big things they're doing, the little things that make them who they are. And together we vision pathways towards a better future. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which I'm recording, the gethable people of the Bungelung Nation, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Welcome back to the podcast. My name's Sophie, and I'm your host. Today I'm speaking with the wonderful Jodie Wilson. Jodi is an Australian author, yoga teacher, health journalist, and mother of four based in Tasmania, Australia. So I was inspired to interview Jodi after reading her most recent release, A Brain That Breathes. Essential Habits for an Overwhelming World, which I think is an incredibly helpful and useful read for any modern human living in our incredibly technologically driven society today. So Jodi is also well known for her previous work. She has a number of other books. She also has two other books in the works right now, which we didn't talk about on um in the actual recorded interview, but we talked about it outside, and they sound so great. So stay tuned for that. So I have been uh loving following Jodi on social media for some years now, and I get weekly inspiration for how to slow down and simplify from her Sunday evening post. Five ways to practice simplicity this week. So that is actually what we're discussing when we launch into the conversation, which we will do in one moment. But before I do, I will just say if you enjoy this conversation, I would love if you could leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And even better, if you love it, if you could just tell a friend, like tell somebody you trust who you think would enjoy it to get them to tune in as well. Because I make these stories uh from a place of passion, wanting to share information and knowledge and other people's stories that are inspirational and going to help us move towards a more positive way of being in the world. So thank you so much for your support, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

SPEAKER_03 2:55

Yeah, I've been actually writing those five ways to practice simplicity posts since 2022. So there's about a backlog of four years on there, and I did them because after my first book was published, which was called Practicing Simplicity, um, and is currently out of print but will be coming into paperback again soon, which is um a nice bonus of having a recent bestseller, is that the old older books get brought back. Um people were really kind of wanting a practical application for simplicity in their lives. And I feel like that really at the time spoke to the fact that you know, simplicity was very much um part of the zeitgeist, you know, it was it was on trend, but it was very much focused on aesthetics, and people wanted to know how that they could actually practice simplicity because it is a practice, like it's not an end goal. Um, and so I started writing these lists based on what I was kind of doing in my life and also what I needed in my week. You know, it was really about pairing it back to like the week. And so I started sharing them, and I really thought that it would be a short-lived social media, you know, thing that I did. Um, but people love them. I get messages if I don't post. Occasionally I'll take a few weeks off and then I get messages, and it was really interesting because last night someone who has been following me for years said, Oh, for goodness sake, Jody, you just always get it right. And I took that at first I thought I was in trouble, but then I took it as such a compliment because we're all just going through the same shit, you know, in our lives. And the normal stuff is actually quite hard because of the culture we're living in. You know, it's an optimization culture, and we're constantly thinking we should be doing more and we should be doing better, and to actually step away from that and practice the simple things that actually mean that we're taking care of ourselves in very meaningful ways is actually very challenging in our lives. And so when I put these posts up and like I nod to I nod to people's weariness or a particularly hard season, or the fact that of course we're going to be feeling you know unmotivated because it's winter. People are like, oh yeah, and they really um respond quite positively in the moment to that. And it's been lovely to know that people check in on a Sunday evening as a an almost ritual to prepare for the week ahead. That is quite a beautiful thing. Um, and yeah, so that's the story.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

I read that lady's comment actually, because I was, you know, stalking before before I interviewed her. And I thought she must have needed a raincoat. I think that's what it would have been.

SPEAKER_03 6:03

Yes. No such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. But honestly, a good quality. I live in in Lichawida in Tasmania, and the last few weeks have been so wild, and you know, the chance of you going for a walk and getting rained on has been like almost 95% every day. Um, and I bought, I buy most of my clothes pre-loved. It's actually very hard to find a pre-loved quality raincoat, but I found one and it's um it's by an Irish company um or an English company, and and so it's a serious raincoat, and it just means that I can still go on my beautiful long walks, and it is quite um invigorating to walk in the rain. Um, and I'm on the coast here, and yeah, it's the salty air is just a bit uh more potent in the rain. So it yeah, it's really lovely, and I just feel like we're so concerned with dressing our children very practically and warm and in layers, and then we grow up and we forget about how life-changing a raincoat can be.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

It's true. I mean, I live in Queensland and it's sunny most of the time, and so we're really only set up for sunny weather, and then with obviously with out of the normal sort of seasonal things that happen nowadays, where you know you'll have these periods with heaps more rain. And I I recently said to my husband, um, we just need to get raincoats and we need to get gum boots, so that when the weather is bad, yeah, you can just be outside because I mean, we'll talk about this more, and this is a big part of your book, these kind of really practical things about get like getting outside. Um, but it just makes such a difference in my mood and my children's mood and behavior, just being outside. And you really notice it when you cannot be outside. So I really agree that that was a very good suggestion that you made in that post. So when I was reading the book, I think it was really timely, which I mean, you probably just hear from everybody when they read the book. They're like, it was so strange that I read it during this time when I really need to read it. Because I all really need to read it. And I just particularly have felt a little bit fragile and a little bit kind of overwhelmed and crazy, probably the last sort of month or so. Like, and in your book, you in a few paragraphs, I think, just described how you, through your research and through your own experiences, you discussed and painted a picture of what the modern brain kind of looks like in terms of how it feels. And I was wondering if you could just start the conversation just describing how maybe your brain felt when you were in this stage of overwhelm.

SPEAKER_03 8:55

The brain felt heavy and I felt stuck, and I had overwhelm and decision fatigue, and I didn't feel like I could ever get to that kind of the ease of clarity that felt very far away. Um, and in my research, I discovered there's a really big gap between the life our brain was designed for, which was essentially life 10,000 years ago, and our normal everyday reality. And it's that gap that's informing our overwhelm, our exhaustion, our decision fatigue, our burnout, which you know, we're in a burnout epidemic. And we're seeing those words everywhere. You know, those words are just prolific on social media, in the media, in conversations between mums at the park, um, in conversations between partners and friends and family. And what we're not talking about anymore is leisure time and spare time and free time. It's like those words have completely been removed from our lexicon. And when we're not talking about them, we're not thinking about them. And we've actually forgotten that that used to be a very normal and real part of everyday life, even 10 years ago and definitely 20 years ago. And the difference to our lives now is that we've got phones, and so as soon as that space opens up in our day, whether it's five minutes from we're standing in line waiting for a coffee, or we're waiting for the kids at the end of the school day, or we're just kind of we've made a cup of tea and we're kind of sitting down to enjoy it. Instead of in those moments looking around us and letting the mind wander and having a bit of a think, we're actually scrolling on our phones. And because our brain is a magnet for clutter, it's a little bit like the kitchen bench. Like it basically holds on to every little bit of miscellany that we feed it. And there's a word in the Zeitgeist at the moment called infobesity. So we're essentially gorging on information and entertainment because our phones make that really easy. And what that's doing to our brain is like feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. So it's really heavy and it's overwhelmed with stuff, but it wants to hold on to it all because it thinks I better get this now because it might not be there later. It's an organ of instinct, not logic. And that instinct had a primal purpose 10,000 years ago, like it kept us looking for warmth and food and shelter, and it kept us alive. And in an age of abundance, it just means we're gorging and we're we're stuck, essentially. We're mentally and psychologically stuck. And alongside that that weight of and heaviness of that excess, uh, we're also living in a culture that expects us to do more and be more and stay on that that treadmill until we reach the top, which is a big fat, capitalist lie. Like we're never going to reach the top. We'll that will never happen. Um, but it's a very lucrative treadmill for the world. It's how everyone is making money. Um, and so what I really wanted to come back to was how I can fix that gap between our biology and our reality. And I discovered that it's in really small moments of downtime, often, which I refer to as breathing space. Um, and I started I started implementing it in my life at the very start of you know this research project that then became the book. Um, and it changed my life. Like I I know, I now know exactly what my brain and my body needs for well-being, and for me to feel uh not so overwhelmed. I'm a I'm a naturally overwhelmed person, yeah. I'm a naturally anxious person. But I now know what works, and it's not striving more, it's actually taking my foot off the pedal a bit and really listening to what my body needs, which is a very certain amount of hours of sleep a night and movement first thing in the morning, and really good food. And my brain needs lots of downtime, and it's really informed how I write. You know, I'm a full-time writer, um, and I I know that's an incredibly privileged position to be in. Um, on the flip side, I live quite frugally to make that a possibility. Um, but it's really changed how I approach my writing practice, my process, and it's it's really informed the decisions I make every single week for how I'm spending my time.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

With some of the descriptions that you had, like in the beginning of the book, I it just really summed up how I felt in terms of my current state of my brain, like pre-implementing anything that you suggest, right? So you said, I think it was like you sort of have racing thoughts and you just feel like your brain is full and there is no space for any more information, and you're constantly on this treadmill of trying to get things done, and you never feel like you can get everything done, and you never feel like there's enough time, no matter how much more time you get, and you never feel like you can have a rest because every time you have a rest, you feel like you need to do something to catch up, and that just really resonated with how like how I'm feeling. And I think the inclination, like I know that a lot of my friends feel the same as I describe right now, and um, everyone's seeking a path to get out of that. And um a lot of people in our current society just look to you know the big solution. Like I kept when I was reading your book, like I kept waiting for this big intervention, being like, okay, you know, you just need to drop the kids at your parents for two weeks, get on the plane, like go, you know, or like the big interventions. And I think that's what we're accustomed to and what we kind of expect. And so what you do is countercultural. Um, what did the research say about? Because I know you mentioned before about our brains didn't evolve to exist in a world like today. Like, what did the research say? Like, how have our brains evolved? Like, what are our brains like? And why is that so troublesome with how we are living right now?

SPEAKER_03 16:05

So I'll touch first on the fact that everyone thinks that the solution is really complicated. And that's because we are so um we're so overwhelmed that we can't possibly believe that the solution is simple and accessible and actionable right now in the moment. And the one thing I kept questioning is if it's so simple, why are we not hearing anything about it? And it's because no one can make any money when we rest and do less. Like, I mean, I'm I'll make a tiny bit of money if you buy my book. But beyond that, no one can capitalize on telling you to lie with your legs up the wall every afternoon for 10 minutes or to drink your cup of tea, or having a bit of a wander barefoot in your garden. Like no one can turn that into money, and so that's why we're not hearing about it. But it's um, and I think it's really important to point out here that there's a really big distinction between wellness, which is an industry, and well-being, which is a basic human right. And the self-care industry in itself is a multi-trillion dollar global industry, and that's where I think a lot of people have become confused because they associate exhaustion and tiredness and immediately think that the remedy is self-care. And so they then go through a process of thinking, well, what will my self-care of choice be? Will it be two weeks away from the kids and I'll have to organize that? And and then they they think, oh, well, that's just an impossibility, that's not realistic at all. Um, and everyone immediately thinks that that self-care is the solution, and it's always removed from normal life, it's always separate from. And I really wanted to figure out how we could care for ourselves in meaningful ways without leaving what's normal and necessary. Because so many of the people in our society that are experiencing this overwhelm and burnout are predominantly people that are in a in caring roles. They're people that are neurodivergent, they're people that are parenting, they're people that are that maybe you know navigating life with a disability or chronic illness. They're people that are in incredibly important roles in our society: doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, psychologists, counsellors. And my DMs have been full of all of those professions coming to me. Um, and you know, in a few weeks' time, I'm speaking to frontline healthcare workers at one of Melbourne's biggest hospitals.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_03 19:04

So from a, even from a, you know, the system is recognition starting to recognize as well that burnout is detrimental to so many facets of our society. Um, and so yeah, I really wanted to figure out how we could care for our brain without leaving what's normal and necessary. And I think that begins with really understanding that our brain and our body and our biology is never ever, ever, ever, ever going to evolve to where we are now and to what life looks like now. Like the technology is like streaming ahead so quickly that our biology has absolutely zero chance of catching up. And essentially, and it's really hard to find the concrete evidence on this, but the neuroscientists and psychologists I spoke to said that our brain really hasn't evolved very much since 10,000 years ago, which is dumbfounding. Um, but it explains so much about our behavior. And I think the most important thing to note in regards to our phones is that the people that have engineered the phones understand our brain better than we do, better than the average person does. And so, you know, as soon as we start scrolling, we enter a ludic loop, which is a repeated cycle of uncertainty, um, and and you know, uncertainty and just enough feedback to keep us there. So it's, you know, we're in this anxious, uncertain nervous space, which is terrible for our nervous system whenever we're scrolling. But again, the brain is thinking, I better get this now because it might not be there later. Yeah, and so that's what that's what keeps us there. Um, and as I said before, it is an organ of instinct, not logic. So it may not make sense that we're doing it, but instinctually, it definitely does make sense.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

And I think you use the term like that. We have uh our brains are wired for scarcity because obviously we never had so much abundance uh historically. And so um the way that uh our brains work when we see social media or um, you know, a huge amount of information, maybe um incoming in one of the various ways that we absorb it these days, that we just absorb everything and it it clutters up our brain because our brains are wired to when we come across like the tree covered in berries, pick all the berries because they might not be there later. So we accumulate all this information whenever we see it, because that's just the natural way that our brains are wired. And then um we get these really cluttered brains, and that's when we start. Start to get on that overwhelm kind of uh cycle. Um and so I guess in terms of decluttering, I was interested to um talk to you a little bit about um well, it's decluttering, but also implementing some of those um suggestions that you have to give our brains breathing space. So they work they both work in tandem, I guess. Could you talk a little bit about what are some of the really practical things that you came across when writing the book to give our brains breathing space and to declutter the mind?

SPEAKER_03 22:33

Yeah, so I think it's really important there to note that we're we're doing so much filling of the brain. And because we've removed all these moments of downtime in our lives, I call them mellow states. So when we're pottering or pondering or walking or wandering or just you know observing, in those moments, that's when our brain will naturally declutter, and it's when the default mode kind of kind of gets switched on. And so the brain does the good work of sorting and decluttering in those in those moments, and that's when the the default mode or the the subconscious can really bubble up with bright ideas, and so it's when after you've kind of maybe spent 30 minutes in the garden weeding and and doing all that kind of stuff, and you come back inside and you experience a bit of that mental lightness, and that is the you know, the declutters, the decluttering has happened while you're doing the weeding because you're using your hands, um, especially. So it happens when we're when we're kind of using our hands and engaged in something that doesn't require our complete attention and awareness, so washing dishes, folding, washing. Um, and a psychologist um from the US actually explained to me that it's called soft fascination mode, which was one of the most charming concepts I'd ever heard of. And as soon as I heard it, I thought, right, this is really going to be one of the when you when we're when you're writing a book, Jonathan Franzen used the term um to follow the heat, and I think it's a really great um thing for any creative person to keep in mind. Like as soon as I heard that word soft fascination, the two words soft fascination, I thought, oh, there's a lot of heat in that. Like that sounds beautiful, and the concept of it is really intriguing and it makes me more curious. And I was like, okay, I know that's going to be one of the main pillars of the book. Um, and so I explain it as mindfulness without the meditation. And basically, when we're on a screen, our awareness is in hard fascination mode. So it's a bit like sirens in the street, you can't really look away. Whereas when you walk into your garden or any green space, or even when you're in the shower and watching the water droplets kind of run down the shower screen, your awareness is just lightly focused. And especially when we're outside, our awareness moves from the sky to the cloud to the tree to the leaves to the petal. And I'm looking up our window now, and I'm just letting it kind of, you know, it just meanders really from one thing to another. And that is when that really good decluttering happens. And studies show that if we can do 20 minutes of soft fascination three times a week, we're much better off. We have more clarity, we're more creative. Um, but the caveat is that you can't have your phone on you, right? You cannot have it with you. Because if it's on you, part of your brain is thinking about it. Um, so yeah, we need more soft fascination in our lives. And I feel like that softness, we all need more softness in our lives because optimization culture and late-stage capitalism is hard, hard, hard, fast, fast, fast now, now, now. And we're not designed for that. We're designed for hunting and gathering and chilling, you know. Yeah, life back then, and I, you know, I really don't, you know, I don't I don't want to come across as someone that you know is constantly idolizing that era, but we can learn a lot from evolutionary biology. And I say that as a journalist who has spent five years heavily researching the perinatal period, which is the period from conception, you know, right through to early, late postpartum for new mothers. And you know, one reason that motherhood is so hard, and all of the perinatal specialists I spoke to agree that it's actually never been harder to be a mother, is because there is a massive gap between what our newborns need from us, biologically need from us, and our normal everyday reality. Like our babies do really do are designed to want to be held a lot of the time. But where when we're really busy and when we're juggling parenthood and returning to paid work because of cost of living, because of a housing crisis, when we're also anxious about a climate crisis, those things are not a supportive environment for new motherhood and new parenthood. And it's why we're seeing increased rates of um mental illness. It's why we're seeing increased rates of overwhelm and stress. And you know, new mothers are the most psychologically and physiologically vulnerable people in our society, and this gap between biology and reality is hitting them the hardest. But it's actually affecting all of us, you know, um, all of us in our lives because of that gap between biology and and reality. And and so understanding our biology is so empowering because we can then choose things in our day-to-day life that really benefit our brain and our nervous system.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

It's interesting the comment that you made about yeah, that's the most important thing, you know, for babies is just being held by the mother. And um, like I have three children. I have a two-year-old, a five-year-old, and a seven-year-old. And I always I had babies that always wanted to be on me all the time, and they still do. And um it was actually really hard, more so with my first child, because it was my ex like first time in the experience. And I think when you're a first-time mother, you're learning at the same time as you, you know, to be a mother, and everyone else is bombarding you with advice. And I mean, my child just wanted to be like she just wanted to be on me all the time. And I just remember I got given like a kind of hard time about that. Um, you know, oh, maybe your babies would be less clinging if you just gave them to other people more often, and you were you just stopped being so anxious about them all the time and just like let someone else take them. And they just didn't want it, and I knew that they didn't want it, but it was really hard to go with my gut. And I think there's so many instances like that as a mum where it's hard to it's hard to go with your instincts because it's totally countercultural to what we're told to do. And unless you're listening to these kinds of conversations or really educating yourself outside of the mainstream, it's hard to know what to do. So that's that's very challenging.

SPEAKER_03 29:48

And it's really hard if you want to do that, but you because of financial pressure, are having to return to paid work earlier than you than you want to. There is so much that's hard in that early season of motherhood. Um and you know, we have dwindling social support and an increase in what idealized motherhood looks like on socials. And there's pockets of there's pockets of honest conversations there. Um, but oh my gosh, when I became a mother, um I was, you know, my eldest is almost 19, 19 years ago, it was so different, you know, from a socioeconomic perspective, we could easily live off one small income. Our rent was $240 a week. I could fill a trolley for $150. Like that is vastly different to the reality today. And so, you know, early motherhood is so challenging. And I feel like there's not enough talk about how inherently challenging that is. Um, but it also the most empowering thing that new mothers can do is understand their baby's biology. Um that's not nearly as much a part of the conversation as it should be, and that's because evolutionary biology informs very little of perinatal health. So it's a big, it's a big gap in the perinatal health space. Um, and there are more and more um GPs kind of doing what's known as neuroprotective development uh care training, where they're really kind of looking at normal infant biology, but it's not the mainstream. And so um, yeah, I mean it's a really tricky space to even talk about, and it and the two books that I wrote really kind of led me into that space, that stage of almost burnout because I had to be so vigilant with my research and so vigilant with the language I was using because I knew that I was writing books for for women um in the most vulnerable stage of their life, and I never ever ever wanted anything that I was writing to feel like a judgment. Yeah, and so I took I took that on as a huge responsibility, but also when you're discussing things like infant feeding and sleep, they are such contentious issues, and the lack of evidence is astounding, it's absolutely astounding if you really get into it and go, well, where is this advice coming from? Because there really is no evidence behind it. Um, yeah, so it's I've I've kind of stepped away from that space now because I'm working on on other nonfiction books, but also because if you're talking about those things online, it's interesting, you know, talking about instinct and intuition because intuitively I knew that as soon as I started discussing motherhood or talking about that postpartum space online, my nervous system would go into overdrive. Because I knew I knew who was reading it, and I also knew that there was to every post that I wrote as an established mother and as a health journalist, you know, I've got four kids, so I've had I've done my I've done my postpartum time. Um as a health journalist and as a postpartum dueler and as someone that has really looked at the evidence. There is like 10 times more posts out there from people that are sharing advice that is not evidence-based, you know, that's coming from a a place of extreme privilege.

SPEAKER_00 33:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:52

Um, and it really feeds into that vulnerable new mother's mindset of I'm not doing good enough. I'm not enough for my baby. And that is really, really detrimental.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Yeah, I I think it also I agree with you about just the level of contention around yeah, those topics and yeah, that hesitancy to to dive into certain ones. Even like I, you know, am just witnessing in the sort of the birth arena the the same polarization that that happens in every um part of society. Like I really appreciate it. I think it was in this book. You made just a passing comment that you know things don't make you a good or bad person. For example, how you gave birth, right? Because like that's huge. And I mean, I've definitely caught myself, you know, I s just going between one sort of one idea and then the other idea and being like, well, this one's better or that one's better. And then coming after having my third baby and just recognizing that there's actually you cannot just blanket statements say this is better. It's all about how does the mother feel and her own internal safety as to the choices that are best for her to make, and that you can't tell anybody anything. It's very personal. So yeah, I can really see uh where you're coming from with that. Um, I had some questions um about creativity because um I'm pretty fascinated like in you and your career and how you've done what you've done and just like how the steps of how how you do things, like just to kind of start the creativity questions, like um when you look back at your childhood, do you see any common threads between the maybe things that you love doing or the games you would play um and then where you've ended up now? Like, could you have picked when you're a child any any aspect of what you're doing now? Is there a link or is it totally different?

SPEAKER_03 36:02

No, there is a link. I and I recently my partner found a DVD um that had been transferred to DVD from a video player of my seventh birthday. And it was great for my partner and I have been together 20 years, and it was so great for him to see it because it was like, oh my gosh, um your tenacity is so evident on your seventh birthday because I was talking to camera and there were people interrupting me, and I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and I spoke very eloquently and you know, without stopping, and I was just talking about the presents I'd received from my birthday party, but it was like I was essentially reading the news, um and so I can see that connection now, and it's interesting because I don't really think of myself as a as particularly successful. Um and I actually had this very successful. Thank you. Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because we all have like I I recognize that what I'm doing is has been a dream of mine to write books, and it was actually a dream that I as a young mother I really thought had flown out the window. Um but I've also worked really, really hard, and I've done a lot of you know, I've been writing online since 2007. So when people say to me, Oh, like you know, you've you've written well now. I'm currently writing my fifth and sixth book simultaneously, but my first book was published in 2022, so it's been a very um quick publishing journey. But everything that came before that was you know, writing online every single week, doing the work, no payment, you know, and just showing up. And I wasn't really showing up for anyone else but myself. Um, and I think that's where that tenacity is, that you know, that that strong sense of discipline. Because, you know, you can say that I'm gonna start writing next week, but unless you're writing today, you're not writing.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:26

Not writing is stopping you from doing the writing, you know, any not doing the creative pursuit is stopping you from doing the creativity. That's the only thing in your way. And I say that as someone that, you know, this industry is incredibly precarious. My main source of income is my newsletter, and there's immediate unsubscribes when there's an interest rate rise or when there's particular global uncertainty.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:54

And living with that, living with that financial precarity is something that I've always kind of lived with because I've always worked freelance. But you know, if I write an if I write an op-ed now for The Guardian, I get paid the same that I was getting paid 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

Oh, that's so depressing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 39:16

So it's really like that's that's the state of the media. Um on the flip side, I have written books that have been successful enough to give me another book deal. And so that's all I really want from a book is to be out for my publishers to say, what's your next idea? Here's a contract for you to sign. So I know that that that money is coming in. Um I remember you I'm getting back to your question now. Um, I wasn't really much of a like I didn't play, like I don't remember playing a lot as a child, which would surprise no one, especially not my partner, because I'm just not, you know, I'm as a mother, I'm not someone that plays either. Um but I was always doing a lot of there was always stickers and notepads, there was always books, there was always library visits. And I remember for my seventh birthday, I got these beautiful hardcover books that I took in to show my school librarian, Mrs. McGuinness, and she covered them for me in that really um that like thick plastic just to protect them. Um yeah, and so there's strong connections there. I am a big advocate for libraries, I'm a big advocate for reading, and I feel like reading is the one thing that is the antidote to this skimming and scrolling that we're doing. Because essentially, when we're when we're just reading bits and pieces on screens, we're just taking the tiny little bits, and it's no good for our brain. In order to kind of for our brain to be able to mull and digest and consider and and be curious, we need to be reading books every single day. And there's amazing studies in the Queen's Reading Room in London with neuroscientists that show that five minutes of reading in the morning improves our focus and attention for the rest of the day, and that six minutes of reading in the evening um relaxes so much, like it slows our breathing, it slows our heart rate, and it essentially like sends us off to sleep, which is why people say I can never finish a book because I'm I always fall asleep, and it's like, well, aha, there you go. Um, yeah, so that is my connection between childhood and where I am now. Um, but I am only here now because I know that I'm very disciplined, I do the work, and and writing a brain that breathes has really helped me better understand what my brain needs to be creative, and my whole day is very much focused around that. So that you know, I get up and walk without headphones first thing in the morning with my dog. I'm home by like 20 past six, cup of tea, and then that time from 20 past six to about 10 past seven is where I'm just writing. Like I'm not on socials, I'm not answering emails, I'm not doing the admin stuff. That is my creative time where they're my best hours, so my best hour, and I really protect them. And my day, you know, during school term is very quite regimented in terms of when I'm working, when I'm resting, when I'm eating, when I'm exercising, um, because I know when my brain works best. It often works best in 25 minute segments, which is not a you know, it's not a spontaneous thing, like that's a known um thing for our brain. Um, and so I often, you know, will sit there undistracted for 25 minutes. I don't have my phone in my writing space. Um I try to leave emails to the afternoon. Sometimes that doesn't happen, but mostly it does. And so understanding that about my brain has mean meant that I do write more efficiently. Um, and I am more productive. Productivity isn't a bad word, like we it's good for us to be productive. We get a real, you know, a lot of good feeling out of it, and it motivates us and inspires us. Um, but thinking that we always need to be productive is what's detrimental. So I know that in order to be productive, I need to rest.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

Yeah, and I think that that's that's a really important thing to know, like as a creative person, because I definitely have sometimes the inclination to just hustle and continue hustling because. If I don't keep creating, keep sharing things that I've made that somehow like I'll lose relevancy, or you know, you'll lose followers or won't gain followers, or um you'll just be unable to regain traction with where you're up to. I was interested, I mean, you just sort of touched on it in the previous question about how writing the book has made you understand uh more about how um, especially like soft fascination, like I really grasped that from the book, like soft fascination and not having um scrolling social media or watching Netflix, how having those periods of quiet is really, really important for generating creative ideas, like actually letting yourself be bored. And I was sort of interested too, like, have you noticed this link between like I see a lot of mothers, like new mothers, um, and they have this like huge creativity burst, like after they've had children. And I was wondering, like, have you noticed that? And do you think that that's perhaps because like I noticed through motherhood there's these natural periods where you're forced to engage in soft fascination because perhaps you're feeding and like you just don't have your phone with you, or you have to go for a walk with the baby. Uh, yeah, I was just wondering if you saw that connection there at all.

SPEAKER_03 45:22

Well, there's nothing more creative than creating a baby.

unknown 45:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:28

Um, and so it makes complete sense to me that mothers um have this burst of creativity, and it's also strongly connected to that seismic shift in identity. And so creativity is often how we understand ourselves. Um, and I think that there's a really there's a really strong link there, that immatrescence, that becoming of the mother, we figure out who we are becoming through our creative work. The the challenge is that there's not much time and space to do that creative work, and I think that's where a lot of mothers can really get quite frustrated and resentful because they have all these ideas, there's all this mellow space in motherhood, and that's when our ideas can come bubbling up, but there is no time or capacity to put those ideas into practice, and so I refer to it as the thinking and feeling season. Um, and I feel like if someone had told me that in my own postpartums, I would have kind of exhaled and shoulder dropped and gone, oh yeah, like this is just my season for thinking and feeling. And the season for doing and creating will come later.

SPEAKER_00 46:56

Yeah, it's it's hard to navigate that space, I guess, when you don't have that understanding, which I I probably haven't really had it and have probably been quite resentful. Um just but also I guess in some ways, I have friends around me who did constantly um provide reassurance about the fact that your creativity is still there, and this is just a phase, and sometimes you know you just have to be patient to sort of get back into it creatively. Um, and so last night I saw in your newsletter um you were discussing that recently you had like a profound realization about how important it is as a creative person to champion yourself, and I think that's a really important message. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you realized and um yeah, how that sort of experience has been and how that's impacted how you approach creativity.

SPEAKER_03 47:50

Hmm. I feel like we're constantly bombarded with other people's ideas and their promotion of work, and women especially and mothers especially can feel really vulnerable stepping into that space where we are sharing what we've made, or where we are even giving ourselves the time to do the making in the first place. And the realization came to me because it was it was last year I was in this lull phase between projects. I didn't have much work coming in, freelance work, the book had gone off to print, and I wasn't yet ready to publicize it. You know, the inbox was quiet, um, there were no meeting schedules, no deadlines. And in that quiet, it was quite disconcerting because I realized that my creativity won't exist unless I'm the one turning up and doing the work, even that when that work is really hard. And you know, a lot of creativity, writing especially, is quite lonely. You know, you're not talking to other people, you're not bouncing off ideas. And you know, I'm writing my debut novel at the moment, and novel writing is very different to non-fiction writing, and it's very um introspective, and it's a process that really requires you to sink into it, you know, to and I say that quite physically, you know, physically sink into it. Um, and it's kind of like you're on a different plane altogether, which sounds very esoteric, but that has been my experience. Um, and I realize that the only thing that was kind of preventing me from doing that work was doubt and fear, and my ego, my ego, because when I wrote something that was really shit, I'd be like, God, I'm so shit, and I just had to like tell myself to get over it. And I feel like that's something that's just always going to come up in your creative life, and and that's like a um, it's just a given, really. Um, but I also believe that no one is ever going to champion you like you can champion yourself, and you do have to cheer yourself along because it is hard work, creativity is not easy, and it it's not supposed to be easy, and that's why the threat of AI is so kind of gross, really, because it takes the work and the tussle and you know, the slowness out of the creativity, but that's where the joy is as well.

SPEAKER_00 50:36

I don't know if it's just in the creative nature of like a lot of people who are artistic uh feel deeply, and that's why they're able to share such beautiful work is because they have that real depth of emotion, um, so they can sink into the feelings and then sort of create this amazing vision and share it with the world, but that also comes like hand in hand with those periods of like profound uh self-doubt. And yeah. Have you had a lot of have you have you had a lot of like, do you ever have imposter syndrome still? Does that still crop up or is that gone now that you've got to do it?

SPEAKER_03 51:16

It's not it, uh it's not imposter. I just call it doubt, really, and it's doubt and fear. Um and I don't think that you would speak to any creative and have them tell you that that doesn't exist for them. Like my confidence has grown because I've done the work and I've created these things, but there is always going to be fear and doubt because every time you start writing a book, you're writing a new book, and just because you've written a book beforehand doesn't mean you know how to write this one. And every book requires something different from you, and um every book, if you listen carefully enough, will tell you how to write it, has been my experience. Um, I'm kind of quoting Charlotte Wood there, who is um a prolific author, she's one of Australia's best, and she's also been an incredibly beautiful, generous teacher to me. Um and she has written a book called The Luminous Solution, which is lessons in the creative life, and I highly recommend anyone read it. It's very, very good.

SPEAKER_00 52:27

When I look at your work and when I look at you on social media, you don't align yourself with any, like it's nice, like you have a very gentle presence and it's a very welcoming presence, and it's not polarizing. You don't really align yourself with a particular movement or thing. But I do I've listened to quite a few of your interviews, and you do seem to be very conscious of like the world's sort of predicaments that we're in. And so would you say that you're driven by like, is your work activism? Because I feel like your work is activism, but it's just stealthy activism. What do you think?

SPEAKER_03 53:09

I think I'm advocating for people to get to know themselves and to not be led blindly through the world, which is what we're all doing if we're not aware of it. Um, but I also just want people to just be so much more gentle with themselves because I feel like um life is hard enough as it is, really.

SPEAKER_00 53:36

Awesome. Thanks so much, Jodie. That was so nice to to chat to you, and I really enjoyed reading your book, and I I always love hearing your takes on life and the world. So I'm sure the audience will love to hear from you. So thank you so much for coming on. Thanks so much, Sophie.