2025: The Year of Intentional Living

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Reena Ninan:
Episode 201, 2025: The Year of Intentional Living.
So I finally did something that you have been telling me ever since I’ve known you to do.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
What’d you do?

Reena Ninan:
I broke up with my cell phone.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You did?

Reena Ninan:
I actually did, and I’m talking about at night. I now charge it not in the room anymore. I’ve been doing it for a few weeks. I cannot tell you the difference. I love the feeling I have of scrolling through shopping options at night from my bedroom, but it took a little bit of an adjustment. It’s like telling a smoker to quit cigarettes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Takes time.

Reena Ninan:
Takes time. And I’ve lapsed a couple of times during the holidays, but I get it. I get why you have told me to do this for such a long time.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Alright, so what’s working? So did you put something in its place if you were scrolling before bed? Did you actually start doing something else?

Reena Ninan:
Oh, that is so interesting. Yes. I didn’t even realize I did that. I’ve started reading, I’ve started reading a couple of chapters of books that I’m never have time to read and you’re right, and I try to do it something that’s not work-related, something a topic that I’m truly interested in. And you’re right, I did find something to replace it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think I read before bed just a little bit every night.

Reena Ninan:
Every night?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, every night. But literally two or three pages. Not a whole lot. And same. I have to be really, really careful about what I choose. I can’t get anything that gets me stirred up or gets my mind going sometimes it has to be historical fiction from very far away in time, but it helps me shut down.

Reena Ninan:
It does, doesn’t it? No, you were right about it and I will tell you it’s a work in progress. Sometimes I feel like I need that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s awesome, Reena. It’s awesome.

Reena Ninan:
Scrolling. But you finally got me there. You finally got me there.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well congratulations.

Reena Ninan:
Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I hope it sticks.

Reena Ninan:
I do too. So we spend a lot of time thinking about this particular episode throughout the end of the year of where parents are, what they might need, and tell us a little bit about why you chose to go in this direction.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I do feel like a couple times a year we get to step back and think about what are the big ideas for how we’re going to go into the next phase of time. I was thinking about the episode we did at the start of last summer, which was actually one of my favorites, partly because I was able to come up with a good acronym. Do you remember SUN for Sleep, Unplug and Nature.

Reena Ninan:
I love it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And so then I was like, okay, can I set myself the task of coming up with a good acronym to bring us into 2025 in the right mood? And the bottom line was no, I could not come up with a good acronym. I have the things I want us to focus on. I have three of them, but as we unpack them, you’ll hear none of them lent themselves to acronyms. So we’re going acronym free for the start of 2025. We’ll take three things. There are three things.

Reena Ninan:
Okay.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Alright, you’re ready?

Reena Ninan:
I’m ready. What’s the first one?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, the first one, I’m going to call it single tasking. I’m going to for myself, for myself, but I’m going to propose that we all think about this work very, very hard this year to do one thing at a time.

Reena Ninan:
Wait, why is this your number one thing to reset for the new year? I’ve never heard of this. I don’t even know what this is.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I just made up that. I mean I’m sure other people have used it as opposed to multitasking.

Reena Ninan:
Of course.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Which I do like it’s my job.
Okay. I think part of why I started to think about this is I actually caught a pretty significant error I made while multitasking. I was listening actually back to somebody else’s podcast. I was listening to a podcast while doing my check deposits a couple months ago and I had myself totally convinced, oh, these are operating on two different mental channels. I can definitely do both of these simultaneously. I forgot to put in all of the account numbers for the checks to go to. And I thought there it is multitasking and we know this from the research, Reena, we’re not as good at it as we think we are.

Reena Ninan:
So why do you think having a big focus this year on Singletasking could make such a difference in people’s lives?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Alright, I think there’s a lot here. So once I got this idea, I started pulling all the research and it was actually quite a bit more informational than I even expected. There’s some things I’ve known as a psychologist, you kind of learn along the way. When you multitask, you make more errors. I knew that and I certainly have found that in my own life. When you multitask, it slows you down, which we don’t necessarily assume because we think actually I’m being wildly efficient. I’m doing two things at once, but one of the things I’ve long known about multitasking and that we’ve established is that it’s functionally interrupting oneself.
When you’re moving between tasks, it’s not like you actually can do two things really very well simultaneously. You’re focusing on one and then you’re focusing on the other. And what we know from the research is that interrupting oneself is the same as being interrupted by somebody else. You know how if you are actually singletasking and focusing and somebody comes in and starts talking to you, it’s jarring and you lose your place and then when you need to go back to what you’re doing, there’s lost time in trying to catch up. Where was I? I’ve got to get back to that. It’s no different if you’re working and then a text comes through and you switch your focus to the text, deal with the text and then come back to your work just because you allowed yourself to be interrupted or interrupted yourself, you still have the same loss of continuity, loss of where you were lost time on getting back to where you were.
Okay, so this aisle, I know, but let me just stop there. What have I said so far that you’re like yeah, or what do you thinking?

Reena Ninan:
I’m thinking when you think about multitasking, the way that I feel it most in my day is talking to my children because they come through the door or maybe it’s an hour after they come through, I’m still responding to meetings, work, emails from my phone. I think I’m connecting with them and having a snack, but I’m really not. Now that I’m multitasking and I’m sure they don’t feel great about it, even though they never voice it. Now it’s just norm behavior for me. But I didn’t understand that single tasking and focusing on that one thing and giving it my all and then moving to the other thing would be more efficient.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That’s what I think the trick is, is that we think we’re being efficient and what we’re actually doing is two things badly in what you’re describing. You’re like both not as focused on the emails as you mean to be, and you’re not as focused on your kids as you mean to be. And so yes, you’re getting them both done at the same time. But if we think about, and I’ve had to do this and I actually don’t love doing this, but I’ve gotten better at doing this sometimes I do have an email that I legit need to send. It actually happened this morning. I work before my eighth grade daughter gets up and I had sent one email saying, okay, next is coming an introduction and it really mattered to me to get the next email out. And she came and I said, I need three more minutes to just do this and then I’ll be ready to think with you about breakfast. I don’t love doing it. It actually in the end, I think feels better for her and better for me if I have articulated I’m not available, even though I’m sitting here in my pajamas in the kitchen working on my computer.

Reena Ninan:
So you tell them that it’s great.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, at least this morning I managed.

Reena Ninan:
I know. I know what you mean.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so then I’m like, okay, so these are the things we know and these are already pretty compelling that it slows you down. You don’t do as good a job. That’s reasons enough to get more serious about singletasking. But then I pull the research and Reena what I come across. I just love, I love how we do our studies. I come across these research studies where we bring people into a lab and we have various levels of tasking we ask them to do. So we’ll ask them to do just watch an engaging video. That’s all you’re asked to do. So they’re single tasking on that. Then we’ll have another group where we’re like, watch this engaging video and then we’re going to talk to you every once in a while about an unrelated task, basically like your kid. And then they just layer more and more and more tasks on people using different groups so they can measure what’s the impact. Now the way we measure things is by collecting spit, collecting, collect spit. So in our mouths is a very rapid response that tells us how much cortisol and other stress hormones are in our circulating.
So they put these people in all these different tasking conditions from single tasking to I think in the most intense condition they have them trying to do five things simultaneously. I mean it is really a lot. And then after a period of this, they collect some saliva and then they collect it 10 minutes later, 20 minutes later, 30 minutes later. And here’s what they find. The stress levels of everybody who is multitasking are way higher than the single tasker. When we focus on one thing at a time, our stress stays at the levels it should be. As soon as we start bringing in lots and lots of things to be doing simultaneously, we are not only slower making more errors, we’re also becoming more stressed.

Reena Ninan:
I’m all about lowering the cortisol level. If for those of us in the perimenopause menopause, it is the buzzword cortisol, right? Yes. But first off, is there a spit thing I can buy at CVS or something? I would love to be able to show my family, my cortisol level’s high. I can’t do this right now. But that is fascinating, Lisa, that we are thinking we’re being more efficient and more productive, but the damage we’re doing is not really good.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s not. Okay. So I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks. I was like, all right, I’m really fascinated by this. And so one of the things right now I started to observe, is there such a thing as good multitasking? That’s something I’ve started to observe.
This morning. I was brushing my teeth while throwing things down the laundry shoot one hand brushing teeth, the other’s throwing things down the laundry shoot. And I’m evaluating as I’m doing it, thinking, okay, well I’m not making mistakes per se. This is pretty easy stuff. I’m not slowing myself down. I actually am accomplishing these two jobs at once. I don’t feel particularly stressed doing this. Maybe I’ll allow it. One thing I want people to take from this is, I’m not saying go single task everything. That’s probably impossible. But for me, even Reena, knowing we were going to talk about this starting to reflect here I am multitasking, what is the cost? Is there a cost? Could I do this differently?

Reena Ninan:
It’s been really powerful. Now very aware of all the times you’re multitasking that you probably would not have been conscious of. But now you know.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
But now I know. Okay, so then there’s something else that’s so cool. As I’ve been playing with this over the last couple of weeks, unsurprisingly I’m spending more time single tasking, and it’s even things like driving, not putting on music, not calling people. I’m like, I’m just going to drive. I’m just going to drive. Okay, I have brought this up before, but I’m seeing it in a whole new light. When we are single tasking, we think we’re just doing one thing. I’m just driving my car. Our brains are so powerful that we’re never doing just one thing. You know how we’ve talked about in the past? Soft fascination.

Reena Ninan:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Soft fascination kicks in. Okay, so just a quick recap. Hard fascination is when we do things that are totally engaging, use up all of our bandwidth. One’s very engrossing thing, like watching a really engaging movie or a kid playing video games or it’s doing six things simultaneously. And when we’re doing that, that’s what we’re doing. Soft fascination is when we’re doing something boring or routinized and we leave the rest of the space open. What happens with that open space in terms of bandwidth is that our mind goes to work on solving problems and addressing questions that have been running in the background and taking up energy.
So, Reena, in my leaf turned over, getting ready for 2025 that I was doing over the last couple of weeks when I am driving in silence and I’m like, look at me singletasking. Suddenly my mind is like, oh, you know what you need to be doing? Here’s a solution to that problem. Oh, that you should have called that person when you get home, you had promised to call that person. It’s like your mind is ready to help you out and we need to create space for it to do that. So I will just say single task so that your mind can actually really be your friend.

Reena Ninan:
It’s almost like I’ve got this work computer that I’ve got to reboot and formally completely shut down or else in the middle of a meeting it will reboot on its own. It’s really annoying, but I get it. Maybe there’s a reason why it has to shut down fully and then recharge and reopen again.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Because there’s too many things running makes. Exactly. Makes. Okay. So that’s us, right? I think of our minds being a lot like computers in terms of having lots of open tabs. I think multitasking, we just open 40 more I think when we single task what we know from the research and it is so powerful as a personal experience. I hope people try it out as soon as you slow down and just wash dishes while doing nothing else or drive or, it’s funny, Reena, a while ago I have an apple watch. I put the hand washing app on my Apple watch. And it’s kind of neat because it detects when you’re hand washing and then it starts a 20 second timer. And mostly the reason I’m stuck with it is like I’m such a brown-noser and if you do a good job at the end it’s like good job. Well done.

Reena Ninan:
It’s a gamification of it all right?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Exactly. I’m like such a sucker for it.

Reena Ninan:
Oh, that’s great.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And so one thing I even will do, I mean 20 seconds feels like an eternity when you’re washing your hands for 20 seconds. I have really tried to just be like, I’m just going to do this. I’m just going to do this. What’s amazing is your mind goes and finds the thing you need to have been paying attention to, brings it forward. So even singletasking, but it’s multitasking in a good way.

Reena Ninan:
I’m curious what your other two things are that you’d like us to focus on.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so the next one is guilt-free leisure. I want us to not just enjoy ourselves and take leisure time, which every human being needs, I want us to not feel bad while we’re doing it.

Reena Ninan:
I can understand the value of that, but in practice, I failed miserably.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
A lot of people do. A lot of people do. And so there’s a couple sort of research points we want to make on this. There’s a cultural component here. There are some cultures that are better at leisure and enjoying leisure than others.
The French are good at this as a culture. The French, when they’re enjoying their leisure, they are enjoying their leisure and they feel they have a right to it. And perhaps if you’re French, this is easier for you. Americans are not good at this. Families from India are not good at this.

Reena Ninan:
For sure. I can attest to that one.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yes. And we have research.

Reena Ninan:
It’s work, work culture. No, I can say it from personal experience and seeing families around us, but I think that it sounds great, but especially if you are listening to this podcast from America, it is a work culture where you work, work, work. And I feel like the pandemic, we slowed down a bit, but now this year especially, I think so many people are being asked to come back to work minimum three days for many five days if you weren’t before. And already many people already have been doing this for some time. So how can we have guilt-free rest when there are dishes? We’ve got to figure out what we’re going to eat next week. There’s a pile of laundry. But it’s interesting, I noticed my husband always needs to read every day. He’s a voracious reader and I realized he needs to read the way I need to work out. It’s for our mental health. It really is. But he is able to do that. I told you I gave up my doom scrolling at night and started to find other ways. But it is so hard to do this.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It is. Okay. So there’s some other research that can help us out here. So what some researchers have found is that for people who struggle to allow themselves guilt-free leisure, having a rationale can help. So let me give us some rationales. So one thing we see in the research is that when people cannot enjoy leisure, even though they take it, because eventually everybody has to stop working, eventually people do step back for a minute, but they can often feel bad while doing it. What we find is if you actually don’t enjoy it, if you don’t have fun with it, if you don’t allow it in a comfortable way, it is associated unsurprisingly with higher levels of stress, lower levels of wellbeing, and it’s even associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Reena Ninan:
I believe it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So that’s a rationale in terms of why to enjoy it. It’s not good for you to become depressed, it’s not good for you to become anxious, nor is it good for your family. So if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for your kids. Enjoying leisure is really important because if you don’t enjoy it, and this is what the research has found, it doesn’t work very well for you.

Reena Ninan:
So can you give me an example of something? There are a lot of things I enjoy doing. For instance, in December, I love working out, but I cannot tell you the number of times I fully missed working out to make deadlines before the end of the new year for work.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And that happens, right? I mean we just get into these crunch times. But what I like about your example of working out as a form of leisure, and for me it’s the same going on walks, being outdoors, that’s leisure for me. Leisure doesn’t have, it can be whatever it means to you. So for your husband, it’s reading for you, it’s exercising. For other people, it may be hanging out with friends. For other people, it may be watching tv.
Many of us probably have multiple forms of leisure. I love tv. So it can be active and it can be productive in its way. Working out is productive. And I think that for me and maybe for you, that’s part of why I can enjoy it more. I need to feel like I’m still getting something done. And that’s for me a way that I can enjoy exercising and walking and hiking and things like that is like I’m also getting something done. If that’s what you need, fine. The goal is to feel good about it while you’re doing it.

Reena Ninan:
Now, guilt-free rest. I’m thinking about this. I’m like, there’s no way you could have guilt-free rest every day. Do the French do that? What is going on? Is it the wine? Is it the cheese? I do love both, but.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so then the question is how much and how often.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think this depends on who you are. And I think it depends on two things. One, I think it depends on stress levels. And the other thing I think it depends on is how quickly you rebound because those are very unique to individuals.
Okay, so two, assess this Reena. And this also plays to having a rationale that allows you to enjoy leisure. My favorite metaphor about stress is that it’s like strength training. It is good for you, but only when combined with enough rest. Another rationale for allowing leisure is to realize if we’re going to gain capacity and get better and better and better at what we’re trying to do over time, we have to work hard and then we have to take enough time to recover. So to your question of like, well, how much and how often? Well, if you’re not working that hard or if you’re not lifting very heavy weights at the gym, you need less recovery. If you’re working really hard, you need more recovery to allow yourself to rebuild. In the same way, if you’re lifting incredibly heavy weights, you’re going to need some more time to recover. And then I would just say different people recover at different paces. Some people need a long time, they may do a period of work and then need a nice long piece of leisure. Other people may bounce back after watching one TV show. So I think it’s individual differences, but the critical and universal piece here is go all in. Go all in. Because what we find in the research is that even when we force people to take breaks, if they don’t feel that they can enjoy it, they don’t get the benefit. They are not energized by it, they don’t feel better. And I’ll tell you this funny study, it’s done at Ohio State University here near where I am.
They brought people into a lab, they assessed how do you feel about leisure? And they asked them questions like it’s a waste of time and figured out who endorsed that versus people who were like, it’s great. They then gave them all of these boring forms to fill out just really tedious stuff, which is how we do it in labs. We come up with some terrible task. Then they said, okay, you have to take a break. So they forced a break and they made them watch cat videos, like funny ones. And then they sent them back to doing the tasks. At the end they assessed how fun were the videos. Now these people had no choice but to do it and nothing else to do. So they really, and they had given them tedious stuff to do before, but the people who had at the outset said, breaks are a waste of time. Did not enjoy the videos nearly as much as the people who came in with the like, yeah, no breaks are cool.

Reena Ninan:
So you’re saying mindset matters.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Mindset matters. Mindset matters. That is my second thing for this year is when you rest, enjoy it. In the name of it being what you deserve, in the name of it being what is going to help you build capacity over time and in the name if you need it of warding off depression and anxiety.

Reena Ninan:
I would love to do this and figure out a way to do this daily, but I just know, and I think a lot of parents listening, there are so many pressures of carpooling to work, pressures to what’s for dinner that you can’t hit the reset, but we all desperately need that reset every day, even if it’s just one thing. What would you suggest then for those of us who really would like guilt-free rest? Is there a way to turbocharge that during the day? To do one thing somewhere at one point to say, I’m blocking off these 10 minutes in my calendar and I’m going to do x.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I believe in routinized recovery. I’ve always been a fan of this and I think routinized means it’s in our routine. Anything in our routine we’re saying is a priority. We’re saying we care about it. So if we care about this and I think we should care about this, it’s got to be in the routine. I also think you sit through 10 minutes if you are doing 10 minutes where you are really allowing and enjoying it and savoring it. I love looking at stuff online, pretty things, pretty clothes. I love that. If I’m like, here comes my time to do that and I get to just enjoy it fully, I think I will need less of it than if I’m doing it while feeling kind of guilty and I’m supposed to be doing this other thing. So it may even be efficient to do it this way.

Reena Ninan:
Wow, that is great. That is really, really great. Lisa, you’ve got one more thing for us. What is it?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
One more thing. This one’s quick and easy and very obvious, but it’s connected to the first two; connection. People.

Reena Ninan:
So true.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Making people a priority and making relationships a priority. And when we look at the research on this Reena, it is quality, not quantity.
It is also, and this is how we loop it all together, focus when you’re with your kids, if you can be with your kids, when you’re with your friends, be with your friends, really connect and then you enjoy it when you finally get to be with other humans or your set aside social time, do not spend the whole time thinking I could probably get some work done right now. We’re going to focus on connection as the last thing just so critically important and so central to what it means to be a person is that we have meaningful relationships and connection and we’re going to use the first two singletasking and guilt-free leisure to make those connections better and stronger and more sustaining for us.

Reena Ninan:
Do you know one of the things on the topic of connection this year that I did, you guys have heard me talk over the years of my salad club, the gang in my neighborhood that we’ve become very close to. We worked out during Covid outside, we decided that we were going to pick one Thursday every month, put it on everyone’s calendar. And literally we set this up in January for every single month and it was blocked off and we would meet for dinner. And so we laugh like you can’t imagine we drink, we eat, it just, we all look forward to it and get to see each other. But I have found if I don’t put it on my calendar and block it and mark it off, it doesn’t happen.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s exactly how life is, right? We have to prioritize it, make it part of the routine. And then you said something in there that I just want to underscore, we’re already getting benefits from it before it even happens because it’s there to look forward to and we have research showing that when we have something to look forward to, it starts to help us even before the event itself. So there’s so much value in getting it on the calendar.

Reena Ninan:
Oh, okay. I love this concept of 2025, the year of intentional living. I am going to every month pick something that I’m going to be intentional about. But I think just in our day-to-day, the three things that you’ve mentioned to us could be so valuable to be just mindful of it. Single tasking, guilt-free rest and high quality connections. We don’t need an acronym. These are great, great ways to move into the new year.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They are.

Reena Ninan:
And what do you have first, Lisa, for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It gets to the question of resolutions. And so I’ll tell you something I’m resolving. I’m going to work very hard to shut down notifications on my phone for set periods of the day when I know myself to be working. In theory, we know we’re supposed to do this, but for me, if I reframe it as this is how I single task and I single task in the name of reducing stress, making fewer errors, doing things faster, I think it’ll help me to do it. Humans as a group, I know this as a psychologist, are much more likely to change behavior if they have a rationale, if they have an explanation, not just because somebody tells them to do it. So if we are talking with our kids about maybe singletasking more, maybe enjoying their leisure more, connecting more, having these explanations, the biology behind it, the research behind it, the science that holds it up is part of how we get ourselves to change behavior and it can also be part of how we get kids to change behavior.

Reena Ninan:
I like that. I love this reset that we have for the new year and how you’ve got us thinking about the new year of living intentionally.
Lisa, next week we’re going to talk about what do you do when your son’s friends are sending him porn or gifs? How do you intervene? I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.