Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 2

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. About a century ago, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was treating a young woman. He sat with his back to a window, listening to his patient. She told him about a dream she'd had. In it, she was given a piece of jewelry, modeled after a beetle, long considered sacred in Egyptian culture. The scarab beetle was associated in ancient Egypt with a divine force that moved the sun. Intricately carved scarab jewels were sometimes placed on the hearts of the dead to assist them in the afterlife. The young woman told the psychiatrist that in the dream, she was given a golden scarab. As Jung listened to the story, he heard a tapping behind him. He turned to see a flying insect knocking against the window pane. It was a beetle. In a monograph on what he called synchronicity, Carl Jung wrote, I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analog to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabeard beetle, which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. Scientists have debated Jung's theory for decades. Many have argued that what happened in that room was nothing more than an interesting coincidence. But for Carl Jung, the beetle at the window was not merely evidence that, in a complex world, unusual things sometimes happen by chance. Synchronicity was a tap on the shoulder, a sign, an invitation into deeper realms of meaning and understanding.

Last week on the show, we discussed the research of Columbia University psychologist Lisa Miller. Over several decades of brain imaging and other research, she's found that when we encourage our mental capacity for spiritual and transcendent thinking, it can have measurable effects on our brains and quantifiable benefits for our health. If you missed our earlier episode, you can find it in this podcast feed. It's titled, Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain, Part 1. This week on Hidden Brain, Lisa Miller takes us on a journey of synchronicity in her own life, and explains what it means to cultivate a mind that is open to the transcendent.

Columbia University psychologist Lisa Miller argues that we have two capacities in our minds. One is focused on goals and achievement. She calls this the Achieving Brain. The other is focused on meaning, connection and transcendence. She calls this the Awakened Brain. Lisa argues that when we cultivate our spiritual side, we activate three networks in the brain. These networks give us the feeling that we are loved, that we are being guided, and that we are not alone. The Achieving Brain might dismiss Carl Jung's synchronicities using the language of probability and coincidence. But to the Awakened Brain, which is open to seeing connections, these events can open the door to exploration and growth. Lisa told me of a time in her own life when she experienced powerful moments of synchronicity. She said that seeing these moments as signs, not just coincidences, changed her life.

Lisa Miller: Shankar, this was a journey of many, many years. It was perhaps one of the most excruciating journeys of my life, and certainly that of my husband as well. We were in our early 30s, and we decided we wanted to become parents, so we were going to so-called try. We took a vacation to Sedona, we took a vacation to the Caribbean, and eagerly awaited the good news. But in fact, there was no baby, no pregnancy, no child. As these failed attempts, month after month, started to add up, we got a very haunting sense that, wait a minute, maybe there's something wrong, maybe we can't conceive. And as we moved into year one and a half and year two, we saw a fertility doctor and I checked out, and he checked out my husband as being healthy. They said, oh, we can get you pregnant, not to worry. And we did some rounds of IUIs, and after that, not working, strangely, wasn't sure why, we did some rounds of IVF, thinking, well, now, we're going to the next phase. Surely, he's healthy, I'm healthy, with an IVF, we'll quickly conceive. And yet, still, no baby, no one came. The IVF process for us and our path was, with every failed, really non-pregnancy, it felt like a funeral. It felt like the death of our hopes and dreams. It felt like the death of that tiny little embryo that was the closest thing we had to a child. We were devastated. And this wore equally on both of us. The baby showers of our friends and the little pink onesies that we would find ourselves buying for other people. It was increasingly very, very depressing.

Shankar Vedantam: I understand that in some ways, this felt like a spiritual crisis to you. Can you explain why, Lisa?

Lisa Miller: Shankar, as we went further down this road of trials, of no child coming, right as we really were in a season of tremendous pain, I started to notice helpers along the path, and increasing synchronicities that were buoyant and guiding along the path. There started to be more and more light in this tunnel of pure occlusion. For instance, I was on the bus once coming in late to work. I was very depressed. I'd had another failed in vitro. I couldn't even pull it out of bed. I ended up getting on the bus up to Columbia at 11 in the morning. The bus was entirely empty. I was sitting way in the back, and suddenly a somewhat unusual gentleman gets on, and I think, no, you're kidding me. He's walking all the way through the empty bus to the very back row to sit one seat away from me, plopped down right next to me. Here I was quite depressed. I wanted to be polite, and I sat up and he said, do you know what, lady? You look like just that type of awfully nice lady that would go all around the world adopting kids. And Shankar, he got off at the next stop. Who rides a bus one stop? One stop. My husband and I were so determined to get pregnant that we upped the ante. We went from one clinic to the next because the next clinic had slightly higher rates of conception. And after that, we went to one of the teams that had discovered in vitro, working with cellular animals. And we kept going up and up and up, you will, the ladder of more sophisticated, higher rates of conception. And yet there was always a sense in my heart that for us, in our journey, on our path, we were in the wrong office.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering, as you were experiencing this, Lisa, as you were going from office to office, as you were experiencing failed attempt after failed attempt, it must have been demoralizing, it must have been depressing, but just talk a little bit about the effect this had on you and your husband. You must have asked yourself, why is this being denied to us, this thing that so many people have around the world? There are billions of human beings. Why is this gift being denied to us?

Lisa Miller: Shankar, this was truly depressing, and it didn't make sense. A plus B plus C, he was healthy, I was healthy. Of course, I searched my life. Was there something physically or perhaps morally that I'd done wrong? But there was no horrible hard stop. It started to become clear to us through the synchronicities that kept landing in our path that maybe we were on a guided journey, as tough and as painful and without light to see. We started to feel that we were held. For instance, after an in vitro, which was by the team of all teams who had invented in vitro, we were at a very top hospital in solidarity, my husband by my side on bed rest. Because it was only one night, we'd splurged for a very nice hotel. My husband clicks the remote and only one channel, only one channel will show on this TV in our overpriced hotel. He bangs the remote, he goes and fiddles with the TV. One documentary on an orphan, a little boy who lives in a garbage dump in Central America. Through the translator, the little boy says, I don't care that I live in the trash dump. I don't care that I don't go to school. But it hurts so much to not be loved that I sniff glue to make the pain go away. I've looked at my husband and he looked at me and he said at first, there's a child out there for us. There is an undeniable synchronicity. What life are you showing me now? We sensed very deeply. In fact, in that moment, we knew that we were on a guided journey. And synchronicities once we acknowledged being on this journey just deepened and became more vivid and more abundant guiding us. My mother called and said, listen, I just want you to know my neighbor, Margaret. She just adopted the most beautiful little boy from Russia. His name is John Joseph. Well, I just wanted you to know, honey. Bye.

Shankar Vedantam: I mean, in some ways, Lisa, the model that you had in your head was that parenting is conception, and really what these signals were telling you is that no, parenting is not about conception, parenting is about love.

Lisa Miller: Love and commitment, forever commitment and forever love is parenting. I had thought, okay, if we can see of a child then perhaps they'll have my husband's humor and they'll have this quality that I so valued from my side of the family. And I sort of pieced together in my mind the notion that parenting really was conception. But what our road of trials revealed through the bright and supportive moments of synchronicity was that parenting is love and commitment. And even more, what the journey showed us, was that to be someone ready to inherit parenthood, I needed to let go of a certain level of ego and control. I'll share with you that one night, I was deep in sleep. When suddenly, just I sat up, wide and alert, sat up straight up in bed, I felt coming a very profound, very sacred presence moving towards me. Space opened up, but there was a numinous opening, and a very clear question was asked. If you were pregnant now, would you adopt? In front of a presence so holy and so profound, not somber, but very serious, one would only come clean. With a full heart, I said, no, no. If I were pregnant now, I would not. And the presence was not judgmental, it just started to withdraw. Time and space closed in. It was an extraordinary experience. I looked over and my husband was still out cold, totally asleep. Shankar, this presence let me know that there was something in our journey towards parenthood that had to do with becoming the type of person who was really a spiritual parent. We continued further down our path, more guidance, more synchronicities, guiding us towards adoption, confirming that the doctor's office was not for us, the place to become parents, when after several more months, the presence came back. If you were pregnant now, would you adopt? I said, you know, I'm closer to the person who would say yes, but no. Well, around that time, we started to take measures to find the child that we knew was out there for us. We had visited an adoption agency in Pittsburgh, where a clergyman's daughter, a rabbi's daughter had found hundreds of babies, their families. She'd helped bring families together. Her walls were lined with beautiful photos, children who were eight years old holding their violin, little babies with their new parents. The walls were full of joyful families, and I wanted to be like them. So she sat us down, the clergyman's daughter, and she said, let's be honest here. What do you care about in a child? What do you want? I said, well, I don't care if this is a boy or a girl. I certainly don't care what race the child is, but please a child who can love. This is our first child, and please a child who can love. My husband leans forward, covers my shoulder a bit with his shoulder and says, yes, all that, but kind of a girl. Then I lean over his shoulder, but both of us voicing our point of view, and I said, yes, but really foremost, a child who can love. We left her office with a sense of joy and hope. We'd seen these beautiful children from all over the world who joined their parents, all of the families who had been formed through the clergyman's daughter. Well, around that time, I was working in my office at Columbia a couple of weeks past, and I got a call from my older cousin, my name is Lisa Jane Miller, and Big Jane, my older cousin of about a decade, called to say, you know what, little cuz? I know you're sitting there in your office, running your numbers, studying spirituality, but if you really want to know spirituality, I think you need to get out of your office, get on a plane, and come out here to South Dakota to attend a healing ceremony. My good colleague, the chief of the Lakota has said, I can bring you, and I know you've been looking for your child. I think this is another approach. I think you should come out here. I canceled all my appointments at Columbia. I got on a plane. I went out to South Dakota. There in the healing ceremony, the men moved into one Anipi, the women into another. In the women's Anipi, the leader who identified herself as the medicine man's wife, led us through a series of prayers. At one point, she asked us to go around the circle inside the Anipi, each of us in turn to say why we had come to the healing ceremony. The first woman spoke. She said, I am here because my son is 14. He's starting to smoke and use drugs and I really worry about him. The next woman spoke, my son is 40. He's not coming home. I worry for the family. Around the circle, each woman had come that day to pray for her son. Until we got to my immediate left, Big Jane, my cousin, who spoke for me, which as a full-time talker, as a professor, was actually most welcome. This is my cousin, little Jane. She has come looking for her child. I'm wondering if we could help her find her child. All of the women looked me in the eye. For the first time, I knew I was in the right place. We then were led in a prayer that was to hold all of the prayers of the women and was sent up through the top of the anipi. And at Shankar, we received a call that night. That night that the prayer had been sent up through the anipi, that night we received a call to my phone machine in New York from the other side of the world. We have found the Miller's child. We know Mr. Miller had wanted a girl, and there's many wonderful girls. We can get you a girl, but this is the Miller's child. This is the Miller's child and it is a son. Five years of struggle and sorrow and weeping and infertility. I couldn't wait to see his photo. I couldn't wait to see his video. I was home in a couple of days, the video came. I opened my eyes to see the most joyful da, da, da, little boy with his arm around the nurse glowing with joy, glowing with energy, da, da, da. I fell in love, Shankar. In that moment, I became a parent. Profound love, a soaring love like I'd never felt before, a tidal wave of soaring love. And I was sure, deeply committed in my heart, that this is my spiritual child. That very night that I saw the video and made the commitment in my heart, and loved like I'd never loved before, the presence came back a third time. If you were pregnant now, would you adopt? Absolutely, absolutely, this is my spiritual child. Time and space closed in, and I looked over once again, my husband was out cold, but I poked him, I woke him up. And that very night, Shankar, after five years of the best clinics in the United States, the very night that we had committed to adopt our boy from the other side of the world, a girl came to us through natural conception, spiritual twins.

Shankar Vedantam: That's extraordinary, Lisa.

Lisa Miller: I feel profoundly grateful for every bit, foremost, of course, for Isaiah and Leah, the spiritual twins, and one more came down the road, Lila. I also feel grateful for the Road of Trials that wore away the illusions of ego and outcome and radical control and opened the gateway to awakened awareness, that opened a dialogue that is how I now live my life, and I have realized, through three decades now of science, we all are equipped to live in dialogue. Had I simply said, my what a coincidence, the orphan in the garbage dump, my what a striking synchronicity, but we'll leave it at that, the fellow on the bus. Wow, I wonder if this mystical experience is real. Hmm, interesting, but tucked it in the back drawer of my mind. Had I only treated awakened awareness as a spectator sport, I might have missed the opportunity of our lifetimes. Had I only treated the synchronicities, the mystical experiences as interesting or, wow, wonderful, but set them aside, tucked them into a back drawer in my mind. It would not have been enough. Isaiah would have still been in an orphanage. In time, he would have been adopted into the military, and we would not be a family. Our family, the most important center of my life, our family was born out of a dialogue with the deeper force of all life.

Shankar Vedantam: Lisa says that people with well-developed spiritual lives are healthier, happier and more connected to others. But how do we go about exploring this dimension of existence? When we come back, how to cultivate an awakened brain? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Lisa Miller is a psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia University. She's the author of The Awakened Brain, The New Science of Spirituality, and Our Quest for an Inspired Life. Lisa, you say that one way we can strengthen our awakened awareness is by engaging regularly in spiritual disciplines. What are some of these disciplines, and how do they affect us?

Lisa Miller: Prayer, meditation, right action. Our spiritual practices can be held within the embrace of our faith tradition, or held by multiple faith traditions. Or our spiritual life can be outside of religion. But whether or not we are religious, spiritual practice literally builds the muscle, if you will, and strengthens the cortex of the awakened brain.

Shankar Vedantam: You argue that in order to do this, you actually have to build a regular practice. So this is a little bit like going to the gym. You can't just do it a day or two and say, okay, I've checked the box now.

Lisa Miller: When we looked at people who said, yes, yes, I'm spiritual, but only said it on one day, we happened to have only asked them one day, we did not see neural correlates. We did not see a stronger cortex in people who, on any given day, raise their hand and say, yes, yes, spirituality is important to me. It's when people day after day over, in our study, eight years, said, yes, spirituality is important to me day in and day out, that we saw a thicker cortex processing power across the regions of the awakened brain. In other words, it is sustained spiritual life that seems to go hand in hand with the deepening of our awakened awareness. It becomes a new normal through prayer, through meditation. We access the deeper nature of life and our capacity to perceive into the sacred reality becomes a new normal, becomes a new set point. In fact, Shankar, together with my colleagues in the medical school, Murda Weissman and her team, we looked at people who struggled with severe depression and those who did not, and all of their children and grandchildren over 40 years. Murda Weissman generously shared her 40 year longitudinal three generation data set, through which we could follow people over the course of their life, those who weren't high risk for depression, and those who were at low risk for depression. And what we found was that in the course of life, many of us face periods of despair, suffering, major depression. If in these moments of great despair, we start to ask the deep existential questions, what is the meaning of my life? What will be my spiritual footprint? What is the nature of reality? So not just what is meaning and purpose, but ultimate meaning, sacred purpose. Who am I and what is the world in the relationship to the source itself of life? It can even be the case that depression potentiates spiritual growth. Our brain is built so that in moments of despair, we are potentiated to widen the aperture and let in more light and start to awaken spiritually. In my collaboration with Myrna Weissman and her team, we found that those people who have a very strong spirituality today are two and a half times more likely to have gotten there through the road of trials, through a major depression. In other words, people who say, yes, I turned to God for guidance. I have a very strong relationship, a lived, felt relationship with my higher power, the universe, are 250% more likely in the past 10 years to have come through a major depression. A spiritual response to suffering once formed becomes the new way to lean into life. It becomes the go-to way to look into the deeper nature of life, betrayal, disappointment, loss. What life are you showing me now? How can I love more deeply? A spiritual response to suffering, the red door I wanted so much is stuck, it's slammed shut and I can't go where I've always wanted to go, where I wanted my child to go. But hey, look over there, there is a wide open, I didn't even know they existed, yellow door. A yellow door that has a new career, a new community, a new partner, beyond what I even knew existed. This is a dialogue, a lived dialogue with life that takes us out of the finite achieving mind and into the awakened mind.

Shankar Vedantam: You talk about helping a patient named Bev in your therapy practice develop what you call heart knowing, going beyond the rational, the intellectual knowing, to heart knowing. Paint me a picture of Bev's story.

Lisa Miller: So, Bev came in tormented by a decision she had to make, so much so that it weighed on her heart, it was making her anxious. Bev had raised three of her four children. Her youngest child, her daughter, was still at home. And right at the time where she had wanted to try to connect with her daughter, she'd felt a certain distance between her and her fourth child that she'd not felt towards the other. She described a blended feeling that she felt with the oldest three, and the fourth seemed more distant, disconnected. Bev had hoped that now that her fourth child was in high school, she could clear time to really just focus on her, and that a bond might form, that they could be in this intimate way, just the two of them for this passage. But right at that time, she was given a very unexpected offer of promotion. A promotion that would have required 15 more hours of work a week, a promotion that she felt honored her abilities. She was proud to receive the promotion, but tremendously concerned that it was going to cut into this chapter that she had so anticipated of bonding with her daughter. And then so, you know, it was very common at that time to use therapy as a way of ferreting out the pros, the cons, maybe the automatic thoughts behind the pros and cons, distill the relationships. But I saw in Bev that she was looking into life itself, looking for guidance in the universe, looking for some sort of connection in her relationship to who she called God, to guide her. And so in the case of Bev, it occurred to me that awakened awareness would be very helpful, supporting her natural capacity for awakened awareness, allowing her to authorize her own whisper of a hunch, authorize her own inner knowing. And Bev, within a matter of weeks, took to the notion that she could trust her inner wisdom, that there was an inner spiritual compass. I didn't tell her which way the compass pointed, I didn't offer her the proof. She started listening to her own inner wisdom. She started following her own spiritual compass and finding answers and solutions, synchronicities, pointing her on the path where in her life she could make her own choice. This was a guided, spiritually grounded decision.

Shankar Vedantam: You say that in addition to personal practices, we can also engage in shared rituals and community practices. Why would engaging in these disciplines with other people make a difference, do you think, Lisa?

Lisa Miller: Shankar, there's marvelous research that shows that when we pray or meditate in a community, we effectively, as an antenna, help hold presence for one another. So certainly, we can pray or meditate alone and have a deep transcendent connection. And yet still, when we meditate together, we hold presence for one another, we augment the intensity and the fluidity through which we connect to the transcendent. My very wonderful colleague, Dr. Andy Newberg, showed that if nine people are in a state of prayer, and the 10th person walks in the door and sits down, they more rapidly move into a state of transcendence as measured by the rapidity with which their mirror neurons come up on line, which means we literally hold presence for one another. We are not creating presence, we are not creating God, we are not creating consciousness, we are holding an intensified presence of the sacred into which others can move more quickly, which is very optimistic for society.

Shankar Vedantam: So most of us turn to the language of pathology to describe the effects of crises and setbacks in our lives. We talk about trauma and depression or anxiety or dysregulation. You think it's possible for us to change this framing, to think of crises and struggles as portals for growth?

Lisa Miller: When we look at the data, whether it's long-term clinical course studies, epidemiological, high-risk studies, MRI studies, through multiple lenses, Shankar, we see the same laser beam of truth, which is depression potentiates spiritual growth. We still have to do the work and engage the journey. But at least two-thirds of the time, depression is not only a medical illness, it is in fact more of a developmental process we might call a developmental depression that beckons us into a deepening and opening a growth. When we look at longitudinal twin studies, we see that there is an increasing amount of heritable inborn contribution to spiritual awareness, starting with puberty, biological puberty. From middle to late adolescence into emerging adulthood is a surge, a biological clock from the inside out. Bring what is my purpose? I mean, ultimate purpose. What is the meaning of life? I mean, sacred purpose. In fact, the most important work we do in late adolescence emerging adulthood is to engage the ultimate questions and the hunger of the heart for spiritual connection. Developmental Depression Becomes Us Developmental depression beckons us. It is a knock at the door to spiritual awakening. Developmental depression comes back. It is not only once that we are hardwired to suffer and then grow. At midlife, we of course have cultural names, sophomore slump, midlife crisis. At midlife, we again have an expansion in our spiritual capacity. And in fact, long-term clinical course studies showed us that those people who were the most spiritually engaged at midlife actually hunger and struggle the most. Because as our spiritual capacity once again grows at midlife, the more spiritually engaged we are, the more we feel the existential longing. Perhaps no longer what is my meaning and purpose, but now, am I living? Am I walking the walk of my meaning and purpose? The third developmental bridge is that of the Ascension to Elderhood. Developmental depression, once again, that can open into an expanded spiritual awareness. Emerging adulthood, midlife and the Ascension to Elderhood are three hardwired bridges of spiritual growth, which usually kick off with existential struggle, developmental depression. This means that I'm not against medication, but medication alone is insufficient to do the profound, foundational work of spiritual growth that is a setup for a much more inspired life of dialogue.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering whether fellow clinicians and researchers worry that a focus on spirituality can take people away from biomedical interventions, cures and treatments. That in some ways, someone comes in with depression and you say, well, the way out of your depression is to start a spiritual practice. And the person says, I'm just overwhelmed dealing with what I have right now. I can't change something that important in my life.

Lisa Miller: You know, Shankar, very often people are relieved when you ask them about their spiritual life. We asked hundreds of high school students to tell us about a spiritual experience. And nearly half of our high school students said, wow, I always thought something was going on, but no one ever talked about it. In a clinical setting, people are often tremendously hopeful and relieved and curious that you would open the door, give name, and authorize. Yes, we talk about that here. Here in treatment, here at this hospital, at this clinic, in my practice, we talk about spirituality here. Now, of course, as clinicians, our goal is to keep a client-centered, patient-centered journey of spiritual exploration. So it doesn't matter what faith tradition I may be or not be, it is a client, patient-centered process that can be opened through three simple questions. Is spirituality or religion important to you? Do you sense it has something to do with what's going on right now? Would you like to explore or have support around your spiritual exploration, your spiritual life? Those are questions. The patient, in a loving alliance with good boundaries, is free to say, no, that's not important to me, I don't want to talk about that, or maybe they'll come back and want to talk about it another time. But the vast majority of the time, well over 70 percent of the time, patients say yes, yes and yes to all three.

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, I ask Lisa about the role of spirituality in schools. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Columbia University, Lisa Miller studies the science of spirituality. She argues that we are paying short shrift to one of the most important interventions in our psychological and physical lives. Lisa, you've written and spoken about the importance of bringing spirituality into public life and our institutions. Does that include our schools?

Lisa Miller: Oh, yes. So right now, there is a conversation that we are trying to help support between universities and K-12 schools. K-12 schools work very hard to prepare a student to enter the university, to pitch them through college admissions and have them find the right home in a college. And colleges are receiving students thinking, oh my, how strung out, how without a core, we're finding the culture to have not prepared the students. So trying to bring what is effectively a spiritual crisis in the university, back propagated all the way back down into kindergarten and support the whole child development starting in kindergarten. By strengthening the spiritual core of the whole child. There's an abundant science that shows that children with a strong personal spirituality are less addicted, less depressed, protected against suicide. Children with a strong spiritual life have greater grit, optimism, greater character, more able to endure difficult times, form relationships of commitment. There is nothing in the clinical or social sciences is profoundly important to child formation as a strong spiritual core. So then we might ask the question, can our schools, can our K-12 schools, which have come such a long way in whole child education, now go the next step to support, based on science, the spiritual core of the whole child? And the answer is yes. We conducted a three-year grant funded study, during which time we went to very diverse schools that did support the spiritual core of the whole child. We went to Sufi schools, yeshivas, Catholic schools, we went to Waldorf schools, we went to public schools in Oakland and Virginia, we went to independent schools, magnet schools, we went everywhere. It doesn't matter what geographical location, cultural niche or religion might be present or not present in the school. No matter where we visited for three years, there is an intentional pedagogical culture in spiritually supportive schools. There was nothing that landed on the desk, no curriculum, no special workbook, no practice in the classroom that was found amongst all spiritually supportive schools. But what was common to all spiritually supportive schools was a deliberately designed, deeply intentional relational culture that supported the spiritual core of the child. And we were able to systematically distill the common DNA of a spiritually supportive pedagogical culture, which would apply to any school. Put that in a teachable form, and we now offer that as Awakened Schools, Awakened School Institute, for free.

Shankar Vedantam: Lisa, you told me about a time when you and your husband felt that the conversation at your social gatherings were unbearably superficial. You had dinner recently with a couple you were meeting for the first time, and the inevitable question came up, what do you do? Paint a picture of the scene for me and tell me what happened.

Lisa Miller: I was at a dinner party with some very, very interesting people who I knew had lived very adventurous, inspired lives. But once again, the weighty culture of achieving awareness beset our dinner party. What do you do? Where do you live? What does your partner do? The multivariable equation through which we predict someone's outcome, their achieving awareness. It seemed to me like a real missed opportunity. This time, I sat up and I hit the bull by the horns, and I said to some pretty prominent people, can you tell me about the most glorious day of your life? Two of them were intrigued and one was a little taken aback, but everybody played. One man said, I felt very distanced from my childhood faith tradition. This gentleman was gay, he said, I'd felt sort of cast out. But I was on a trip in Italy, and there in the Piazza I heard beautiful music from the choir, the poor through the Piazza. I went into the cathedral and I felt God's presence in the most abundant way I've ever felt. The next person spoke and she said, you know, yes, I'd have to say, I was out sailing. And I felt the wind in my hair and the sun in my face. We have the opportunity of our lifetime to really know each other. It takes only our choice to say, do I want to have an achieving conversation or do I really want to have an awakened conversation? Do I want this relationship to open up so that I'm not keeping up with the Joneses, but I'm walking with the Joneses. I want to know you. I want to know your greatest challenges. I want to know the most beautiful moments. I want to know about the crossing of your ancestors, the birth of your children and grandchildren. I want to know the most high-pixel glorious part of your life. Shankar, I think we have a choice to engage one another to have relationships which are narrowly two-dimensional achieving transactional relationships or we can open the aperture and know each other and know life itself through an awakened heart.

Shankar Vedantam: What Lisa is challenging us to do is not easy.

Lisa Miller: Widening the aperture, getting beyond traditional benchmarks of achievement, deeply connecting with others, all of this can feel a bit daunting, especially if you've been singularly focused on achieving an important goal in your career or personal life.

Shankar Vedantam: We recently heard from a listener named Jean-Charles. He's been grappling with a challenge like this. Jean-Charles says that growing up, he always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Jean-Charles: What I was attracted to was the freedom of being my own boss, the learning curve of being into this environment, the belief that I could actually build something that mattered. Entrepreneurship became my north star for many years, and I spent years searching after university for the right idea, the right project. And in the meantime, I was stuck in jobs that felt meaningless.

Shankar Vedantam: But then, when he was 30, things finally fell into place. I met a business partner with whom we got along very well, and we built a fintech company together. And for seven years, that was my entire world. It was brutal, but it was a beautiful roller coaster. Like, I felt completely alive.

Shankar Vedantam: In 2020, Jean Chal and his partner sold their business. On paper, the sale seemed like the culmination of everything he'd ever wanted.

Jean-Charles: The financial freedom it would provide me with was the dream. But the moment I let go of the business, I also let go of the thing that made me feel like me. And all of a sudden, I had lost my purpose, and I had zero plan B. I'm 42 years old now, so we sold the company five and a half years ago. And what I struggle to describe, what I find really hard to put into words, is what it actually feels like to be lost in this way. It's not sadness that I feel on a dully basis, it's more like watching my own life from behind a glass. I feel like time is passing, that things are happening around me, and I'm not quite in it. I feel like I'm wasting my life, really. I just have this unsettling question that follows me every day, it's what is the point of all this?

Shankar Vedantam: What is the point of all this? It's a question people have been grappling with for thousands of years. Various schools of thought have shaped how we answer it. A nihilist might say, there is no point, nothing matters. A biologist would argue that our point is to survive and reproduce. An existentialist might say, the point is whatever we make of it. But at Stanford University, Dave Evans argues that the question misses the point. When we come back, Dave grapples with life's big questions. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When we feel stuck in life, it's often hard to see a way forward. We tell ourselves that if we just try a little bit harder, we'll figure out how to break free. At Stanford University, Dave Evans studies some of the most common traps that can lead to these feelings of stuckness. He recently joined us for two episodes of Hidden Brain. They were called Designing a Life That Matters and Radical Acceptance. We received so many questions and comments in response to these two episodes that we're going to dedicate two installments of our popular segment, Your Questions Answered, to addressing them. Dave Evans, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

Dave Evans: Shankar, it's good to be here again.

Shankar Vedantam: Dave, before the break, we heard from a listener named Jean-Charles. Something he said really struck me. He said, he feels like he's watching his own life from behind a glass. So on paper, he's achieved his dream. He built a successful company and then he sold it. But now he feels like he has no purpose. What did you hear in his story?

Dave Evans: Well, he's found himself disengaged for what it felt like it means to be a human person. You know, he didn't realize what the relationship was between his project and his personhood. And when the project was done, it relocated him in this desirable but much more disruptive than he anticipated place called financial independence. So he removed from his life that which almost every human being has had forever, which is the need to make a living. And so that human project and my participation in the human project is what locates me in my life. I mean, he loved the creativity and he loved working with his partner and he loved making a difference to his customers and he thought that was what the whole thing was about. But all of that was located on the ground of the project of my personhood, which is making my life work and making the world work. And he took himself partly out of that and he's not been able to refine himself.

Shankar Vedantam: You see that many of us hold certain notions that can get in the way of the lives we want to live. One of them is to feel fulfilled. So we feel like we're achieving the full potential of our lives. We heard from listener Sumaya who's from France. She's raising two daughters and aspires to write novels, but quickly gets overwhelmed when she tries to make progress on that goal.

Sumaya: I'm supposed to work from home and the reality is that I don't have time to work on my stories. I keep telling myself that I'm not making any money, my husband is the only one working and I'm not contributing financially for my family. Then I start looking for a job and then I stop and think of all the consequences if I go back to work, how our life would be and I just feel stuck. I think that if I publish only one novel, I would be happy, but then I think there is no way I'm going to help financially my family with only one novel and then I'm stuck again. I feel like I have everything I have. Wonderful husband, I love him very much. I have two wonderful, beautiful daughters. I love them more than my life. We are healthy, we are doing great. We live in a great apartment, we live in a great city in France. I feel like I have everything I need, but I can't find meaning to my life. I don't know what to do with my life and it's very hard sometimes.

Shankar Vedantam: So Dave, I feel like Sumaya is trying to take on multiple challenges at once. She wants to write a novel, which is a big goal in itself, but then she layers on the question of whether a single novel will be enough to move the needle financially for her family. That adds more pressure. And then she adds on another layer, which is the layer of finding meaning, which makes a challenge feel even more daunting. How do you think Sumaya can make her goals more manageable?

Dave Evans: Well, she's got a couple of things going on at the same time and very sympathetic. She's in a situation we actually call having what we call an anchor problem. She's anchored to a problem she can't seem to get loose from. So, if that's the case, her anchor problem is, I want to have an experience of meaning making, which I've attached to writing a novel, and I want to make enough money to feel like I'm contributing at a level that satisfies my preferences or frankly my ego. Those are not good or bad things, they're just true. What's really true about Sumaya's life, what's really true about their finances, and those constraints will define what the problem space really is. If she needs money, I would agree with her. One novel is probably not the way to get that. So let's go get a job and then maybe you can write short stories on the side. But you've got to do some radical acceptance about that. If your husband's fine with supporting you, are you willing to do the hard thing called accepting a gift? So it's all about acceptance and living in reality.

Shankar Vedantam: So both Sumeya and Jean-Charles, both of them get at the big, thorny question that many of us grapple with, which is what is the meaning of life? You argue that asking big existential questions like this is not always helpful. Why not, Dave?

Dave Evans: Well, particularly in the form of what is the meaning of my life, which sounds like there's an answer. You know, and Bill, my partner and I, our shortest definition of the human person anthropologically is that a person is a becoming. We are all an unfolding, embodied spiritual intelligence, a very complicated being called a human person. And we're always growing into our future selves. So if the future me isn't here yet, how could my present me ever come up with one answer that is reliable for the rest of my life? So we're saying, how can I design more meaning in the life that I'm in now? So don't get stuck on trying to come up with the ultimate answer. And in both cases here, by the way, both John Charles and Sumea have a point of view about what meaning has to be. In John Charles' case, there's an unspoken assumption about his relationship with the work world that he didn't realize. And for Sumea, it's about money and meaning making. And so they've got little rules buried in their questions that are forcing them into a stuck place because they want it on their terms, frankly, and those terms aren't working. And so if we can reset to reality, here's the situation you're actually in that gives you some freedom to go forward to the place you can go, which may not be the place you want to go, but it is the place you can go.

Shankar Vedantam: Another belief that you say can get in the way of change is the need to have impact. Now, that could be impact on the people around us, impact via our work, even an impact on the world as a whole. Now, many of us strive to have that impact, but feel that our efforts are largely unsuccessful. Here's a note from listener Amy.

Amy: When I was 12 years old, I declared on paper that I was gonna spend the rest of my life saving animals. And that's what I did. At 16, I became a volunteer at an animal shelter, worked my way up through the years to animal care tech, to shelter manager, and then program coordinator, through a couple different animal shelters. And then one day, it just hit me that nothing I did really mattered. Nobody really cared. I felt like a waste of space there, a waste of money for the organization, honestly. And so I left. And now I avoid taking care of animals at all costs. It's insane. I don't know who I am anymore.

Shankar Vedantam: So I can certainly feel Amy's pain here, Dave.

Dave Evans: Oh, boy, yeah.

Shankar Vedantam: Talk about how our craving for impact shapes our choices and our perceptions of failure and success.

Dave Evans: So impact is a very worthwhile thing to pursue. We need a bunch of positive impacts. So, you know, the problem is when you put all of your meaning-making eggs, and in Amy's case, all of your identity eggs in the impact basket, you're at terrific risk, two ways. Number one, most of the time, even if you do everything right, your attempted impact doesn't work. I mean, it literally doesn't work. You try to save the animal and it dies anyway. Or even if it does work, it doesn't last very long in the world, or you succeed and then, frankly, the feeling of it doesn't last very long. The half-life on an impact, which is an objective fact, it's a transaction, it's not a living thing, doesn't go on and on and on. We worked with the US. Olympic Committee because there's nothing as exciting as ascending the Olympic platform or as terrifying as descending it. On the other side of being the best in the world is like, no way. So this is a fundamental human problem, and Amy's got it in spades. So the issue here is recognizing, number one, that I need more than just impact making, more than just changing the world as a source of what makes my life worthwhile. If that's the only thing I've got going, I'm really at risk. And number two, on that aspect of my life that's pointed toward impact making, recognizing you have no power whatsoever over the outcome of creating the result you want. All you can control is your participation. She was a very successful animal defender, but she wrote a rule for herself that unless I save this many animals or the world changes its mind or the people around me get it the way I get it, none of which she has any power over at all, by the way. Unless those things become true, all my efforts were a waste of time. And that's a powerful rule that she has written. And frankly, it's untrue and she can rewrite it.

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, inflection points, how moments when the ground collapses beneath us can help us to grow in remarkable ways. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us dream of making an impact on the world, but this aspiration doesn't always bring happiness. When we see we're not making an impact, we can start to feel trapped in a job or a relationship. At Stanford University, Dave Evans studies how we can design our lives in ways that can be more satisfying and enduringly successful. So let me turn again to listener questions and stories. We heard from a listener named Brian. He was the city manager of a community north of Detroit. On paper, he had achieved a lot of success. He had leadership, influence, stability, but inside, he says he felt trapped.

Brian: Every morning on my drive to city hall, I passed under the I-75 overpass and told myself the same thing. I have to get out of this job. I must change my life. But I was successful and bored, restless, toxic, profoundly stuck. Then my life spiraled even further downward. Divorce, drinking, sleeping alone on the floor with nothing, all while showing up at the office, poised, professional and well-spoken, but not very sharp. Just when I thought I hit bottom, the trap door opened and further I went. The FBI had wired a road construction contractor who had befriended me. We got drunk during the Christmas season and he took me out to his truck to discuss business. He handed me a thousand dollars money, money I accepted, and asked me if I was going to give him the new road contract. Shortly thereafter, I pled guilty to bribery. I was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Hello, hell. What should have been the worst chapter of my life became an unexpected reset. Prison stripped away my title, ego, and identity, but it also forced me to rebuild from the ground up one step at a time. The irony is that the very thing I feared most became the catalyst for rebirth. Prison gave me the disruption I never could have chosen for myself, but desperately needed. It forced me to confront how deeply stuck I had been long before my conviction.

Shankar Vedantam: So as Brian experienced, sometimes life forces us to change. We also heard from a listener named Audrey, who enjoyed a successful career in IT until she was laid off in 2024.

Audrey: And it gave me the opportunity to reassess. I took a step back and was reminded by one of my daughters that a while back, I had considered being a birth doula. And that seemed like such a radical departure from a director of IT, I couldn't even imagine how that might happen. But I began looking into it and have since, over the past year, built a wonderful new career as a birth doula, childbirth educator and lactation consultant, supporting new moms who are having babies. And I feel like with the birth of the first few babies that I've helped, I've done more good for the world than I did in 25 years in IT.

Shankar Vedantam: So that's another amazing story, Dave. And I'm so struck by something that both Brian and Audrey said, that they would never have made the choices they made if they had to make them on their own. It's only because one door closed that they could start to think about a new one. As someone who studied how we can intentionally design our lives, I'm wondering how these stories land for you.

Dave Evans: Well, you know, the work that Bill and I do has put us in the place of hearing lots of people's stories, lots of people like Brian and Audrey. And what it turns out is most people's lives, if you look back from 60 or 70 or 80, they'll tell you there's a handful of inflection points where everything changed. And those inflection points are the most meaningful transitions in their lives. Very often they know the exact minute those inflection points occurred. And most of them are outside in, not inside out. It's not when Audrey, you know, decided, I think I've done as much for IT as I can, and now I'm going to start living into my do-less self. That would be inside out. That would be, and I got laid off. And holy cow, now what do I do? And so it turns out for most people, not every by any means, but many important changes occur outside in. And so in both Brian and Audrey's cases, in one case prison, in one case the layoff, outside in showed up with such strength that it gave them permission to finally think differently about themselves. Maybe I could do this differently. So what Audrey is doing is a perfect example of what we say all the time. All of us contain far more aliveness, more personhood than one lifetime permits you to live out. There's more than one of you in there. She had fallen for her director of IT self. In fact, I think she actually used the phrase, I couldn't imagine a way to live into that being a birth doer. Our colleague at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, talks about that question. When somebody tells you, I just can't imagine, most of the time what that tells you is not how unlikely that thing is. It tells you that that person's imagination is not reaching far enough. So what we do, a lot of our work is trying to reframe a person's perception of themselves You are bigger than one lifetime worth of a person. You don't have to be just one of you. You could actually decide to live into another version of you. I can't promise you, you can make as much money as a birth duel as you could as the director of IT. I can't change the market forces for you. But you can actually be in charge of your life.

Shankar Vedantam: You know, I'm struck that some of the stories we've heard are people who feel like they're stuck in dead-end jobs, things are not going well, and they're trying to get themselves unstuck. But we're also hearing stories from people who say, you know, I'm super successful, but I'm not doing what I really should be doing, and I also feel stuck. And in some ways, it's a more subtle form of stuckness, which is it's success that is causing you to feel stuck as opposed to failure.

Dave Evans: There's a big difference between proving to yourself that you can achieve a certain outcome and wanting to live there and do that. When I was 18 and I was a senior in high school, I had always thought since sixth grade that I should be the president of the student body. For some reason, I decided that's who I am. And so when I was a senior, I ran for president because I wanted to win president. Now, my dear friend Kent, who really wanted to be president of the school, he spent his whole summer interviewing every high school president in all of Southern California. He talked to all the principals, he was looking at where is the education going, what reforms could we bring to our high school. He had this huge platform of work and policies that he was going to lead to actually make the school a better school. I just wanted to be elected. I just want to have the experience of all my peers going, Dave is our favorite guy. And so I ran and thankfully Kent beat me with a stick. I lost miserably. And I walked away from that going, shoot, thank God. You know, because I don't want to do this work. And there's a huge difference between, I really want to be elected. I want to become CEO. I want to make a million dollars. I want to have a best-selling book. I want to have, I want to achieve something. I want to achieve, you know, a ribbon or a prize of some kind. And then, oh, now I am the CEO and I have this huge job and it's a ton of work and everybody's on me all day long. They're like, oh, wow. We talk about designing your life, not designing your goal. Life isn't a goal. Life is a lived experience.

Shankar Vedantam: So many of these questions often come to the fore in midlife. People are often taking stock of where they are, where they want to go. Here's a story from listener Olga.

Olga: I am a woman in my 40s and in my 20s, I had this drive and plan. I was going to be an attorney. I had a whole career path planned out for myself. And when I came out of law school and I wasn't able to secure position, I ended up just letting that dream die and it stopped me from making any plans. And I find myself kind of drifting along with my husband's plans or my parents' plans or whoever else has an idea for where their life is going to go. I have a job and I'm working, but I don't feel like my life is designed. I'm wondering, do you have any advice for somebody who is facing kind of a midlife, without a design in plan, without an idea of how to design your life moving forward on best steps to take?

Shankar Vedantam: So Dave, you and I talked a bit in our Hidden Brain Plus conversation about using design thinking in different stages of life. That conversation was called Seasons of Meaning for anyone who would like to go back and hear it. Talk if you would, Dave, about the particular design challenges we face when we're at the midpoint of life and how you would advise Olga at the stage that she's in right now.

Dave Evans: So, okay, Olga has a real problem and I've encountered it many times. It's not that uncommon. So she had something very specific in mind and it failed, didn't work out. She actually did everything right. She went to a law school. She was on the plan that she had conceived in her 20s and had energy for and it didn't work out. And when it didn't work out, she had no plan B in mind. She probably didn't have an idea of what the not a successful lawyer, Olga, even could be and what would design thinking recommend that Olga do. Olga needs something that she hasn't had in a long time, an interest in something she cares about. And so if I were sitting down with Olga in office hours, I'd say, Olga, look, you've been doing other people's things for a long, long, long time. It has worked out okay. It's not horrible, but it's not very life-giving. And now finally, your psyche is saying, hey, we think it's our turn, but we have no idea what to do with it. So great. That's a great project. Let's go curate your curiosity. Tell me what you're interested in. Tell me what books you read. I would work with her to find anything at all that she cares about and let's grab one or two of those things and start reading vertically down into those things. Let's write those authors and find their contact on LinkedIn. Let's get into the conversation. Let's see who else in your town cares about that and go buy them a cup of coffee. We'll start working on Olga caring about something she cares about. It's totally doable, but she's got a long sleep to awaken from.

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, listeners share their stories of how they've gotten unstuck. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Stanford University, Dave Evans studies design thinking. He says that this approach can help us lead more meaningful lives. Along with Bill Burnett, he's the author of How to Live a Meaningful Life, Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy and Flow Every Day. Today, he's answering listener questions and comments about his work. Dave, one of the suggestions you make is to remain fully engaged, but calmly detached with any project. Unpack this idea for me. What does it mean to be fully engaged, but calmly detached?

Dave Evans: So fully engaged means you're showing up, you're fully participating in what you're doing at the time. It really means you're entering the flow state, which we could talk more about. But what that means is my attention, my energy, my experience of myself and my surroundings is all focused on what's actually happening right now. I'm not talking to Shankar and thinking about what I'm going to cook for dinner, or our friend Catherine who's visiting, I hope she's having a good time. That's not being engaged, that's being distracted. So engagement means my full attention in the present moment. Detachment means, and that thing I'm doing, I'm doing for its own sake, freely, not worrying about the outcome and its results. So gosh, I really hope this Q&A session goes well. It's great that Shankar called back and asked me, okay, that's all worrying about the outcome. So I want to be fully engaged, so I'm really thinking about your listener questions. I want to be detached, and those two things together allow me to be more fully alive in the moment, and that full aliveness allows me to feel more like a person, and feeling more like a person is pretty meaningful.

Shankar Vedantam: So staying in the moment and remaining engaged is a worthy goal, but it can be tricky to maintain that over time. A listener named Kaushal says his life seems great on paper. Here he is.

Kaushal: I'm someone who is from the hills of Sri Lanka. I got a great scholarship to go to one of the best schools in the world. I then moved to London, married and loved my life. I have a gorgeous little baby who's 13 months old, and I do incredible work as a consultant in financial services. I have a phenomenal team, I have mentors, I have opportunity. So it's all there, but I feel stuck. What landed for me was the distinction between being in the moment to do better at what you're doing and being in the moment just because I was raised a Buddhist, so mindfulness, presence, that's all been taught my whole life. But where I struggle with is, how do you actually keep staying in the moment? How do you keep making the best of the moment? Is it a habit? Is it something else? Just would love some thoughts on that.

Shankar Vedantam: So David, sounds like Kaushal is doing many of the things that you and others would recommend. The question is how to maintain these practices, not just when you're making time for meditation, but as you're going about your daily life. Any thoughts on that particular challenge?

Dave Evans: Yes, and I'm smiling because I'm very impressed. Kaushal has really thoughtfully observed himself and asked an interesting question. He's catching himself realizing, oh my goodness, moment by moment, I notice, am I in this moment and I'm loving it because I'm doing it well, or am I enjoying it, am I loving it because it's intrinsically valuable to me and I love this thing. So what he has pointed out is we recently had this conversation with Bob Waldinger at Harvard, the last project leader of the longest running behavioral study of mankind, the Harvard Adult Study, reminded us that if you live all through extrinsic motivations outside in, curing cancer, making the money, making partner, whether it's a selfish or a selfless goal, it's still outside in, and you lose track of the intrinsic motivators of love, compassion, joy, things for their own intrinsic sake. You do too much extrinsic and too little intrinsic, you start losing over time the capacity to even notice and catch the signals of the experience of the intrinsic experience. So what Kalashal is catching himself in is, oh my goodness, I'm mostly extrinsically motivated. So the first thing is be forgiving. If I'm a becoming, I'm going to get better tomorrow, which means by tomorrow, I will look back and say, I was worse today. That's okay. You don't have to boil the ocean in one step. One step at a time, you're a becoming, we're going to get there. It starts with the realization, he's actually in a very good place.

Shankar Vedantam: Dave, we heard from some listeners who said that their ability to redesign their lives is limited. Three years ago, listener Miguel moved with his family to Singapore. His wife landed an exciting new job and they jumped at the chance for their two young kids to live abroad. But Miguel says it hasn't been easy.

Miguel: I've had to also make a really big adjustment as far as how I spend my time, how I view career, and I've also had to navigate some loss. My mom had died a few months ago due to complications from cancer, which really sparked a lot of questions about just purposefulness in life and meaning. These are questions that I myself had asked when I also got sick during the pandemic, also with cancer, which I have since survived. I really appreciate the designing of our own lives, the concept of that, and I'm just wanting to figure out what's a way I can honor that process without having it be so self-centered. Having two really young kids and a partner who depends on me, I would like to make sure that even as I interrogate my own life and think about how to make responsible choices and restart career, that I don't do so without compromising my responsibility to my partner and to my kids. So if there's any question there, I suppose it's, what can I do to balance designing my life and taking this fresh opportunity for a new start while not neglecting my responsibilities as a partner and as a parent.

Shankar Vedantam: So Miguel has been through a lot over the past few years, Dave, and as he said, he also has responsibilities to his partner and to his family. And that means his ability to maneuver for himself might be somewhat constrained. How can people like Miguel still think about designing their paths forward when they have all these responsibilities and constraints?

Dave Evans: Well, of course they are. We're all constrained. Design thinking is not a magic wand. Design thinking is not the perpetual motion machine that is suddenly going to, oh, if I design my life, now that's the key and I can get everything I want. No, you can't. That's totally okay. Welcome to humanity. Now what we're saying back to acceptance is I begin with reality, including the acceptance that I am a finite person. In a recent book, we talk a lot about the three big reframes around impact, fulfillment and the scandal of particularity. What the heck is the scandal of particularity? It's the recognition like, oh my gosh, it turns out no ultimate is ever fully experienced. Love, beauty, justice, compassion, you name it. We'll never ever actually see that whole thing in reality. We see temporary, flawed, constrained, circumstantial reflections of those things called a particularity, and they come and they go. Then when you realize that, then suddenly you go, oh my gosh. One of the biggest particularities is me. I am a small expression of the fullness of the thing called me. We will never know the fullness of Miguel. We will simply know the revealed Miguel that he chooses to bring to the world in the constrained little thing called 7x24 hours, and the constrained little thing called what Singapore is doing and what his family has. He has boxed himself in, and that's the good news. Because now the design task isn't to transcend that box or to beat gravity. You can't do that. What you can do is I can make the most of what is. So design, we talk about get more out of your life, not cram more into it. There's nothing missing in his life other than deeply accepting the priorities of what he's going to do and what he's not going to do. Once those decisions are made, own them and then get the most aliveness out of them you possibly can. So constraint is actually your friend, because it narrows the field of what you have to worry about. I just turned 73 and past 50, you start losing muscle mass. I'm a motorcyclist and I like to go on motorcycle tours with my soon-to-be-wife, and I have a rule. You're not allowed to ride a motorcycle, you can't pick up. Well, I've got this great big 600-pound motorcycle, I can barely pick it up, and the time is coming when I can't do that anymore. Is that a problem? No, it's just true. So I'm going to live into it while I can, enjoy the heck out of it while I can, and then I'll do something else. Constraint is not an enemy, it's just true.

Shankar Vedantam: We talked earlier about the perils of putting too much of our self-worth into the idea that we need to make an impact. We heard from a listener named Brittany who teaches high school orchestra. She often senses that students take orchestra because it looks good on college applications. And she wonders whether her teaching is actually helping students fall in love with music. Here she is.

Brittany: And I had one particular student who was a very fine musician, an all-state violinist, you know, pleasant to work with in class, but I really thought that I annoyed her, and I really thought that I was, that she was just barely tolerating my existence and my enthusiasm for all things orchestra related. And she gave me a letter at graduation that completely floored me and got me 100% unstuck. Because in her letter, she outlined how much she respected everything that she had witnessed me do in the past several years and how the orchestra program had grown in the few short years that I had been there, how she found it so inspiring to have this experience with a woman conductor. She went on in the letter to write about how she had written about me for her college application essay which got her into her dream school of Georgetown, and how inspired she had been every day that she sat in my classroom. I mean, cue the waterworks. I was just completely shocked that I had had this profound impact on the student and I had genuinely no idea. So I've kept that letter all these years and I pull it out once or twice a year to remind myself that even when it feels that I'm not making the headway that I want either musically or personally with these students, that chances are I probably am because I had no idea the impact I was having on this student.

Shankar Vedantam: So I want to talk for a moment, Dave, about how when we think about impact, we're actually focused on the impact that we can see. We're often not paying attention to the impact that we cannot see. Very often the things that we do can have impact far beyond what we are actually aware of. In this case, of course, Brittany heard from her students, so she found out what was happening in her students life. But for many of us, the things that we do, many of the things in our day-to-day life, are going to have impacts on people that we cannot possibly ever learn about. In some ways, we discount them and we imagine that we're having no impact.

Dave Evans: Well, Brittany had a very good day once you get that letter. That's a lovely experience. That kind of thing does happen all the time. But back to that fully engaged, calmly detached idea, you have to remember you don't know what somebody else is thinking. There's a great line that my late wife used to quote all the time from Rabindranath Tagore talking about relationships where he said, the best we can do is to salute one another from the borders of our solitude. He was talking about intimacy. We were in a marriage, we were talking about that, that we can get incredibly close in an us. But at the end of the day, that other person over there is this mystical combination of spirit and intellect and physicality and somatic reality and history and DNA, and culture, and the truth is, I have no idea what their experience is. Can I remember to respect that? There's always the border of solitude between me and every other person, and that shouldn't scare me off. It should simply make me a little humble, so that there's that possibility I remain a little bit open. I recall a student, every now and then we get a troublesome student. There's a young man who's in a small group, and frankly, he's acting out, and he was grumpy and difficult, and he didn't like to answer the questions, and he criticized other people in his group, and we hoped he'd drop the class. I tricked him into coming to office hours, where I was probably going to encourage him to drop, and it started with, well, how's it going? I had this incredible experience. He starts, and again, in this very grumpy, upset way, he goes, well, I don't know, I'm having such a good time. This thing is really amazing. It's changing the way I think about everything. I'm so glad I'm taking the class. And these other students are really helping me. I'm like, okay, the soundtrack and the video are really out of sync here. And I said, oh, okay. So I did coach him, but I said, now, by the way, and you're kind of struggling with this, aren't you? He goes, yeah, I really am. Yeah, the struggle part's really evident. In fact, it's kind of overwhelming the joy part, and you're scaring your friends, get you back off a little bit, and he did. But the point being, you never know. And then meanwhile, what that does mean is, let's say Brittany didn't get that letter. At the end of the day, do the work, bring your gift, whether or not it lands. There's the old line, that one plows one plants, another waters, but God gives the growth. Back in the day when we lived in an agrarian society, we remembered I'm doing my part, and it's part of a greater thing that I'm not in charge of. In the post-capitalistic technologically enabled world, we think we actually can control outcomes, and we can't. You just do the best you can do.

Shankar Vedantam: I want to play you a story from listener Laura Dave. She recently retired from 35 years in education, and in many ways, I think her story sums up so many of the ideas you have been talking about.

Laura: I had many opportunities to work with people that I really appreciated and with thousands of students over the years, who I believe I've impacted in a positive way. That said, I'm not sure that my career really was the fulfillment in my life. It wasn't until I retired that I discovered that there is no destination that you could call happiness, that you can't set a goal, that I'm going to be happy in the future, or I'm going to find my life fulfilling when I look back on it. Rather, I've discovered that it's more of a daily journey, where I spend time each day making choices that allow me to arrive at the places that give me happiness and make me feel like my life is fulfilling. I volunteer, I enjoy the outdoors, I enjoy cycling, I get outside every day. I spend time with my family, my grandchildren, my friends. And I do things that probably I would have never done when I was working full-time and just trying to get all the tasks in my life out of the way. I would just hope that everybody gets the chance to make the choices that make each day very happy and ultimately give them a fulfilling life.

Shankar Vedantam: So I think Laura could take your job, Dave. What do you think?

Dave Evans: Yep. No problem. Laura has cracked the code. She points out, wait a minute, even though I had the career, the output, the impact, the result, that in and of itself was not first and foremost what my life is about. It's lovely when that occurs and it does matter. Don't get me wrong. Having a positive impact, if you can pull it off, is totally worthwhile. But what makes it worthwhile isn't just that result. That result is frankly just the feedback loop. What makes it ultimately worthwhile is I am stewarding this thing called my life. Her job isn't to be the best teacher in the world. Her job is Laura Ng. Laura Ng looked good in the teacher form and now it looks good in a retired form that includes volunteering and enjoying nature. And what we're doing is taking this little chunk of aliveness that we've been given. Now, whatever your philosophy, whether you think God gave it to you or the universe did, or DNA gave it to you, you didn't give it to you. None of us formed ourselves. We've received from somewhere this gift called an aliveness. And it's up to you to steward how to bring it to the world, including just every single day, nurturing that on behalf of yourself and one another. And if you do that well, we all win. She's doing a great job.

Shankar Vedantam: Dave Evans is a behavioral scientist at Stanford University. With Bill Burnett, he is the author of How to Live a Meaningful Life, Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy and Flow Every Day. Dave, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Dave Evans: Thank you, Shankar.

Shankar Vedantam: Next week on Your Questions Answered, Dave Evans responds to your stories of radical acceptance. We also heard today from psychologist Lisa Miller of Columbia University. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider sharing it with your friends and loved ones. Word of mouth recommendations really help to connect more people with the ideas and research that we explore in the show. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.