The Secret of Charisma

In the 1930s, an unlikely man from rural Louisiana rose to political started.

“Huey Long appealed to working class Americans with fiery speeches and a populist agenda.”

He promised free textbooks, better infrastructure, and redistribution of wealth.

But while we might have millionaires, and men worth 2 million, and men worth 3 million, maybe.

And men worth 95 or 6 million, but that nonetheless I must be a limit on how big anyone man could get. Thousands gather to hear him speak. His promise to make every man a king soon on him a nickname, the Kingfish. But Huey Long also made powerful enemies along the way. Critic saw him as a dangerous demagogue.

They warned that he was crooked, cunning, and completely unconcerned with checks and balances.

“He fired those who opposed him, took over state agencies, and appointed loyalists.”

When Louisiana State University published a newspaper article criticizing him, Huey Long sought to it that the seven students who wrote the piece were expelled. Huey Long wasn't just popular. He was magnetic, dangerous to some, divine to others. He rewrote the rules, and dared the system to stop him. In 1929, after he became governor of Louisiana, Huey Long was impeached on charges of bribery,

corruption, and abuse of power. Rather than prove his innocence, he orchestrated a political blockade in the state Senate. He persuaded senators to sign a letter, vowing not to convict him, which made a trial pointless. He went on to become a U.S. senator. His popularity didn't just survive. It's soared. Today on the show, we take a deep dive into the psychological forces that draw us to

charismatic figures in the worlds of politics, sports, and religion. The science of loyalty and the building blocks of devotion. This week on Hidden Brain. We often turn to history to understand how the world changes. We examine the lives of leaders who spot revolutions and gather thousands behind their cause.

We ask, what made these leaders so powerful? What explained their influence? How did they manage

to change the course of history? At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, historian Molly Worthon explores how individuals inspire change, create movements, and sometimes change the world. Molly Worthon, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me. Molly I want to talk about some unlikely leaders in American history. Let's talk in the 18th century. Jemima Wilkinson was born in Rhode Island in 1752.

When she was 23 she fell ill and was on the brink of death. When she recovered she claimed to have

“undergone a profound spiritual transformation. What did she say happened to her?”

She reported that she had seen two angels and they had delivered this amazing message to her.

They told her that her body was a vessel for the Holy Spirit. That in fact Jemima Wilkinson, the 23-year-old human female, had died and now her body was a vessel for this androgynous divine presence. She stopped dressing like conventional woman of her time. She stopped using female pronouns whenever she could. War her hair long and a war large gray felt hat began dressing in a smock that concealed her figure looked a bit like a dressing gown,

sometimes war a purple crovot and she launched a preaching campaign. Her message in the context of the revolution, right, this is 1776 that she has this attack and is reborn as the public universal friend, is a kind of vague one that is compatible with a lot of different theological questions and doubts about existing churches, questions about the end times, that a whole range of followers were having in this era and she begins speaking to all kinds of

prevailing rhythms of society. So she goes to funerals, she speaks to prisoners, she also addresses

“kind of open-air markets if a sympathetic minister will give her his pulpit, she takes advantage of that.”

And some wander in to hear this unusual person who they can't quite place, maybe they can't quite figure out if this is a man or a woman, they can't quite make out the actual import of the kind of vague theological pronouncements. Some find it ridiculous, they see this as a young woman who's kind of put on a costume, but a surprising number, I mean, eventually a few hundred people, are compelled by the public universal friends invitation to step out of whatever role you've been

handed by your place in Revolutionary American Society and find something new.

“And so we're talking about followers who range from young women who perhaps had not quite”

landed in a family arrangement that was acceptable in society to very established kind of senior men in the community. One of her most prominent followers is a Rhode Island colonial judge, named William Potter, who puts a lot of his personal fortune to the service of her growing ministry. By the 1790s, she is leading a crew of about 400 followers to found utopian community that she calls new Jerusalem in upstate New York, to fully break from the rhythm of life

in ordinary communities in revolutionary era America.

I want to jump forward to the 19th century. Marcus Garvey was born in 1887 in Jamaica. He spent his teenage years working as a printer as a apprentice and eventually joined a nationalist club that promoted Jamaican independence. He spent some time in Europe working as a journalist and then founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and moved to New York. I understand that he was an unlikely leader, Molly, not a great speaker and with lots of critics.

Absolutely, the type of African American leader that the mainstream media black and white paid attention to in the early 20th century tended to be college-educated, tall, lean, fair-skinned, handsome, eloquent by the standards of upper middle-class white-educated English speech. Marcus Garvey was none of these things. He shows up in Harlem in 1916. He's fairly short, kind of built like a wrestler, very dark, complexed, not a great public speaker. I mean, we know

that he got heckled whenever he went to the street corner to try to practice. He was fearless, though. He just kept at it. He had no financial resources. I mean, he lived on cans of corn, beef, hash, and beans in this tiny, squalid apartment. While he was beginning to try to interest African Americans in Harlem at this time in his message of Pan-African Unity, which, as it emerged through his speeches and his publication,

“the Negro World, was, I think, it's clear, a really creative combination of previous iterations”

of this message of the dignity of African people and the need to unite with other kind of

spiritual and economic and political strains that proved to be this kind of amazing combustible mix.

Especially when enacted with Garvey's flair for ritual and uniform, he really himself loved to wear a plume helmet and a purple gold and green sashes and a kind of military regalia. So this movement over just a few years developed significant momentum. So he also had unconventional views about black liberation. I want to play you a clip from one of his

Americans to leave America and build a homeland in Africa. Now, wasn't that also what white

“supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan might have said? Marcus Garvey was, we would say,”

a separationist. He had meetings with segregationist politicians from the South with Ku Klux Klan members to discuss their mutual interest in keeping their races pure. He wanted, in the context of America, he wanted African Americans to achieve economic autonomy with an eye toward eventually returning to Africa and establishing political independence for people of African descent

on the African continent. Often, framing it in a way that was rather condescending to the

Africans already living there. But it was a message that had a great deal of appeal and it was a

“spiritual message as well. I mean, he was very interested in awakening in people of African descent”

a spiritual power that he said had been dormant. They had been in a state of amnesia, you could say. When I listen to him and read his speeches, I hear him as kind of a combination of Moses and Napoleon and Dale Carnegie, the kind of polier self up by your own bootstraps, you know, aspect of that message. So the effect that he had on his followers was magnified following a very dramatic incident in October 1919. He was in his office in New York when a man

bursts through the front doors. Tell me the story of what happened next, Molly. This man is clearly in a fury. He's searching for Garvey and is armed. He gets off a couple of rounds and fires a Garvey, Garvey falls to the ground, appears to be mortally wounded. The man takes off and is later captured by police and it is widely reported that Garvey's killed and his followers are grief-stricken in mourning and then a few days later Garvey appears limping with a cane to greet his followers

at a rally and many of his followers, especially since they've read these newspaper reports suggesting that their leader had died. View this as a miraculous, clearly a divinely ordained survival. And so that assassination attempt, if anything, it solidifies Garvey's power over his followers and their faith that God has selected him for a specific mission and that he has a kind of invincibility that ordinary mortals do not have.

So we've looked at a spiritual leader in the 18th century and a political leader who was born in the 19th century, let's jump forward to a completely different world, the world of sports in the 20th century. In the 1960s Tim Galway was a nationally ranked tennis player, he was captain of the Harvard tennis team, graduating, he began teaching tennis in California but he became famous for his unusual coaching style. What was his approach, Molly? He really burst onto national consciousness

in 1974 with a book he published called The Inner Game of Tennis and his message was

“quite counterintuitive, I think. Essentially he said, you've got all these coaches advising you to pay”

close deliberate attention to every detail of your forehand and backhand and your serve and to drill down until you're absolutely mindful of every detail. I'm telling you that's the wrong approach and that successful tennis is an exercise in self forgetting in silencing the ego mind.

This is a phrase he used. He brought to bear on first tennis and then later sports in subsequent

books, kind of vague mix of Buddhist and Hindu ideas, notions from mid 20th century pop psychology, regarding self-actualization. So Tim Galway suggested that high performance comes from

filmed featuring one mid-laged woman who said that she had not done anything athletic in 20 years

when she took part in a group lesson with Tim Galway. She surprised herself when she started to hit the ball beautifully. The key of all the exercises in the inner game is to focus the mind's attention somewhere where we'll not interfere with the body's ability to hit the ball automatically. So there's something wonderfully seductive about that idea, Molly, if we can only get out of our own way, skills come to us effortlessly. That's right, and this idea of your leader or your

coach as someone who is helping you unlock your potential, that there is inside you this authentic

“flame of who you really are and your true capabilities and it's already there and all you have to”

do is nurture it and release it. It's a very late 20th century way of thinking about personal identity and the relationship between leaders and followers.

When we think about powerful figures in history, it's easy to explain their influence

by pointing to their unique personality traits. Barack Obama was confident and optimistic. Steve Jobs was intense and visionary. Martin Luther King Jr. was a brilliant speaker with strong convictions. But there's an important part of the story we don't explore. That is the story of how charismatic people awake something in us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankarvedanth. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankarvedanthum. We often conflate charisma with

lackability. When we think about charismatic people, we think of people with beautiful smiles, great social skills and relatable backgrounds. People like John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, or Oprah. At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, historian Molly Worthon offers a different view. She says that charismatic people in history

aren't always charming or beautiful or even inspirational. Rather she argues, we are drawn to them

not because of their traits but because they reveal something to us about ourselves.

“Molly, I think it might help to first understand what you mean when you use the term "carisma."”

What is the history of this word? If we go back to the way the ancient Greeks used the word and bequeathed to the authors of the Bible, it's best to think of charisma or careous as a kind of grace. A gift from God or the gods that in the ancient Greek context brought with it power that could redown for good or for ill. It was power that the recipient could not completely control. A gift that the human recipient didn't necessarily ask for. The word remained in that Christian theological

context for really 1900 years. It was a fairly obscure term. You would only have a occasion to use it or know it if you were active in church or you were a professional church historian or

“theologian. How did the term come to be secularized, Molly? Around the turn of the 20th century,”

the German sociologist, Max Weber, was casting about looking for ways to describe all the complicated changes. He was seeing unfold in Western modernity. He was really interested in leadership and in the way particular individuals could turn into disruptive forces. So he borrowed the term charisma. He heard it in an election when he was a student, an election in church history and he borrowed it to describe a particular kind of authority that he saw manifest in both religion but also

importantly in politics. A type of authority that he said was different from authority based on institutions, like the institutional role of a president or a prime minister, different from authority premised on a society's tradition and separate too from authority that comes with military power.

superhuman qualities and therefore can promise for them a new path forward that is

totally impossible except for his leadership. By the late 1950s and the 1960s, American journalists start picking it up and kind of playing with the word charisma as a way to describe contemporary

“politics here. When I think of the word charisma Mali, I often associate with people who are”

magnetic. Has that been a part of the meaning of the word for a long time? I think one reason the word charisma is so interesting is because it's a term we punts to when we are observing a dynamic between a leader and followers that we can't quite make sense of. We know something's going on but we can't account for it by pointing to a policy proposal that this person is making or some other kind of common sense, squid pro quo arrangement. And I think as Americans have

played with the word charisma, it's gotten a bit muddled together with the ideas of charm and celebrity and it surprised me to observe how few of the figures I ended up studying across four centuries of American history were particularly charming. I found myself again and again

writing about individuals who were not that good looking, who were not reported to be amazing

public speakers, whose presence was maybe better described as polarizing rather than kind of universally magnetic. If we think about people who are really good at working the room at a cocktail party, they have the ability to invite you into a conversation that quickly starts to feel like an exploration

“of your own best thoughts and experiences. I think that's really the secret of charm and it's”

important but it is not enough to launch a new religion or build a political movement. The leaders

who do that I think have to offer something much more powerful and disorienting and compelling.

Can you talk a moment about the very interesting idea that like ability can actually be an impediment if you're trying to break through social norms and customs? Humans are storytelling and story-making creatures were constantly looking for ways to organize our chaos and the most successful politicians and religious leaders are brilliant storytellers that who not only offer a set of slogans critique of the other side but a plot arc, a story of where we have come and

and where we're going, who the villains are, who the heroes are, and they invite certain people in, but a narrative only has tension. It's only worth being a part of it. If there are also people who

“don't belong, who are or who are cast in rather undesirable roles. So I think if a leader is too”

preoccupied with being all things to all people, that can result in a message that is not activating, that doesn't grab and elevate a certain subset of the people hearing or reading him to the point of really building of movement, really breaking through and building a movement is going to involve eliciting quite a lot of disdain and anger from people who are not part of a story you're telling. You see that there is a paradox of charisma and it has to do with the dual

urges we have to feel like we are in control of our lives but also to fear the responsibility that comes from having that control. Can you unpack that idea for me, Molly? Most of us want some feeling of agency, some sense that we know what the point of all of this struggling and suffering is, that it hasn't been for no reason at all, but we don't quite want the responsibility of being

control but also wanting that security, they exist in tension. But I think that they're always there

“and the most successful, at least briefly, not always over the long term, but those religious and”

political movements that have really made a mark on American history have been led by individuals who mastered the art of that balance. You see that the religious leader Joseph Smith exemplifies this paradox. How so, Molly? Joseph Smith was a child of kind of poor New England, homesteader, farmer, family, members who couldn't really make a comfortable life in the context

of, you know, the turn of the 19th century America, they were constantly scrapping and struggling

to make a living materially. And also, you know, his parents were seekers who were frustrated with existing church options. Really interested in the supernatural side of life prone to having

“dreams and visions, but unable to really find an institutional home. And that's that's”

awfully confusing and disorienting. Joseph Smith had this genius. The Mormons would say, he, you know, he received revelation that helped him to diagnose the gaps, the ways in which the existing religious story way of understanding the Bible and the relationship between humans and

God was just leaving, I guess, a critical mass of early Americans feeling frustrated and lost.

And so, he offers, as he's reporting his revelations and interpreting these golden plates that he says, he's been led to find in a hill and upstate New York by the Angel Maronai, and then he's spent the next two years kind of spinning out what this new religious community built around this new scripture will look like. In many ways, he, he, he offers a deeply

“American form of Christianity that is very much in line, I think, with the desires and anxieties”

of Americans at this time. They want, they want to have their free will celebrated and recognized. And the Mormon faith is kind of the ultimate free will faith. I mean, it's very clear in offering a roadmap for earning your exaltation and your your access essentially to different stages of heaven. So it is this, it's this story of both tremendous empowerment, but also an invitation to subsume your individual struggles and your efforts to scratch out an existence on your little

homestead in in upstate New York or Ohio into this broader story that God has ordained in some meaningful way. And so that I think is a great example of that of that paradox of offering both empowering agency and security. As you're talking, though, Molly, it feels so clear to me that when charismatic people have these followings, it's clear they have these followings because they're unlocking something in the people who they are leading. The people are hearing something about

themselves in this message. So it's, you know, even if the charismatic leader is not charming and is not good looking and is not likable, the point is the message makes me think differently about myself. That's right. And Joseph Smith is a great example of this. I mean, some people who met him in person found him really physically compelling. He was tall for the era. He had these electric blue eyes. One follower said just by shaking his hand, she felt the Holy Spirit electrify her whole

body. But then you can also find skeptics who encounter him and say, this guy is a clown. He has this dishonest face, his hands are kind of fat. I wouldn't follow him to the grocery store. You know, let alone to found a new Zion on the banks of the Mississippi as his followers did in Navu, Illinois. And Joseph Smith's story also was an early case that helped me understand in my research that the power of charisma resides much more in the story and the message than in the individual.

One of the elements of charisma that you explore is that charismatic people often promise to pull

Garvey, even true of Tim Galway. Talk about this idea that in some ways charismatic people

offer to show us a vision of reality that is in some ways behind the reality that we are seeing

“every day. I think charismatic leaders in many different contexts are positioning themselves”

alongside the message that people are getting from established sources. From tradition, from institutions, and the charismatic leader says, you think you've been told how the world works. You think you have a full picture of reality, but you don't. You've been

denied some crucial facts about your existence and your relationship to the powers both material

and supernatural. And that can take the form of a very legitimate revelation of true access to the full picture of what it is to be human. So I think this is one way we could understand Martin Luther King Jr.'s message that he is someone who destabilized, complacency,

“and a willingness to just suffer Jem Crow by reorienting the way that Americans, Black and White”

saw what was possible. Saw the reality of who each person is as an individual, and the vast chasm between the lived experience of Black Americans in the mid-20th century, and what justice really consists of. So there is a case of a pulling back the veil that it was absolutely rooted in a true revelation, if you will. But I think this can take darker forms also, and this is where I think the word charisma can trigger perhaps in our mind, a kind of negative connotation,

because it can sometimes go along with a false story about reality, an effort to undermine the news people receive from the mainstream media, or what they're told by experts, and sometimes

“that can cross over into the realm of pseudo facts. So really crucial, I think, in how we use this”

information in our everyday lives, how we evaluate leaders is to be constantly holding up the story that leaders tell us against other sources of information, and doing our best, although it's

never possible to be perfect at this, to discern, you know, is this leader really showing

me something that is true, and that changes everything, and that I have to take seriously, or perhaps do I have reason to be skeptical? Curisma is a powerful force. It has the ability to inspire, unite, and give people a profound sense of meaning and purpose. When a charismatic person speaks, their followers aren't just hearing a speech, they are seeing a new way to understand their own lives. When we come back, the different

forms that charisma has taken over the years, and how and when we should question it. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Do you have personal stories about being drawn in by a charismatic leader? A question about charisma, and how we can be swept up in the spell of a mesmerizing person? If you'd be willing to share your question or story with a hidden

brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone. Then email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, charisma. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Charismatic people draw followers in, shape movements, and alter the course of nations. At the University of North Carolina, historian Molly W Northern is the author of spellbound, how charisma shaped American history from the Puritans to Donald Trump.

Molly, I'm wondering whether you can talk about the idea that charismatic people sometimes fuse their personal story with their message. So long before Donald Trump became president, for

America was being taken advantage of by the rest of the world. Can you talk about this idea

that charismatic people are very good at placing themselves in the flow of the stories and the narratives

“that they're crafting? I think that's exactly right, and a crucial step for a charismatic leader who's”

offering a story that is supposed to draw followers into a special relationship with him or her as an individual. Looking back over Donald Trump's career long before he formally entered politics, I think he showed a real instinct for doing this. And if you go back and read his conversations with tabloid reporters in the 1980s, or you can find old footage of him on the Oprah Winfrey Show

in the late 1980s, and you find him talking about his experience with all kinds of evil actors,

who have tried to take advantage of him and rip him off. That's a phrase he uses a lot from early in his career. I think people have tied up seeing the United States ripped off, and I can't promise you everything, but I can tell you one thing. This country would make one hell of a lot of money from those people that for 25 years have taken advantage. It wouldn't be the way it's been, believe me. His account is one of himself as a self-made man, really glossing over the degree to which he

inherited his business empire from his father. And instead he describes it as this brilliant exercise in entrepreneurial creativity, one that has required him to evade at every turn, people who would try to take him down, and it's required him to develop a facility in working the system. Because the system is fundamentally corrupt, and why do laws that have no legitimacy deserve

“consistent, good faith respect? That's a line he's always walked very carefully, I think. Never”

never suggesting in his own narrative of his career that he broke any laws, but at the same time

suggesting that someone who doesn't take advantage of, you know, loopholes in the tax code, if you don't do all of those things, then you're kind of a fool. So, you know, he has crafted the story of himself as this master of this kind of working the system and taking revenge on people who are bad actors. And so it was really not a far leap at all to cast himself as he trained his eye on national politics. As the hero of the forgotten man of the hero who would really rectify

injustices and go after all of the people and the powers and the institutions that are rigged against the average American that have screwed people over to use another phrase that he's used frequently. And so he set himself up, I think, quite brilliantly, to fuse his personal story of triumph in the business world with the revenge and justice and ultimate triumph that he promised to offer his supporters if they elected him president.

Do you think his story in some ways mirrors the stories of other people that you have looked at other charismatic people and that, you know, there are followers of his who, you know, almost quite literally are willing to die for him and believe so deeply in what he stands for. And simultaneously, there are other people who look at him and don't know whether to roll their eyes or just to throw their hands up in disgust. You know, he seems to have walked extremely strong passions

in completely different directions. Absolutely. And it was observing those very polarized reactions back in 2015 that helped send me down the path of of trying to understand the phenomenon of charisma across the centuries. And I absolutely did find that polarizing effect on people is echoed, you know, all the way back into colonial times up and to up into the present. I'm wondering Molly, when you think about someone like Donald Trump, you know, his views have actually been fairly

consistent about some of these issues for a long period of time. And well before he became president, his sense, of course, that he's being ripped off, that the country's being ripped off,

“that you have to, you know, take on these institutions and these elite forces that are,”

you know, array it against the common man. These are all views that he's held for a long time.

in driving their followers? Or are they really accidents of history? Which is that they happen

to have a set of views and beliefs and perhaps even personal stories. And these happen to fit almost like a key into a lock into the needs of the people who are around them at the time.

“That's a great question. And I think the charismatic leaders have to have a kind of”

genius and an instinct for reading their time and identifying the driving anxieties and desires of their cultural moment, especially among people who are not being served by the narratives

currently on offer in the culture. But I have never run across a charismatic leader who struck me as

100 percent pragmatic and just adopting, you know, some mix of views and making up some story will be nearly purely because it seems like it will play well. Instead, I think you're right, that there has to be this kind of magic, this synergy between the leaders, natural self-understanding and aspects of his or her own story and the way he connects specific parts of that story to this this grander picture.

As a reminder, if you have questions or comments or Molly Worthon that you'd be willing to share

with a hidden brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone 2 or 3 minutes as plenty. Email the file to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line charisma. Again, that's [email protected]. Molly says that we live today in the age of the

“guru. I asked her what defines this type of charismatic leader. I think it's interesting to play with”

the term guru in a broad sense. And to remember, too, that charismatic leadership very rarely exists in a pure form. It's often combined with other kinds of authority. So, the frame of the guru as a radically anti-institutional figure, who is positioning himself as the gateway to truth and knowledge, that that's a useful frame, I think, for understanding Donald Trump, while, of course, also recognizing that he has conventional institutional authority as the president of the United States.

But I think it's a broader cultural phenomenon that we can see manifest across the political spectrum. I became fascinated by the story of Oprah Winfrey and the kind of personal do-it-yourself spirituality that she developed alongside her media career. And I think much of her effectiveness and popularity, you know, really rocketing to fame in the mid-1980s when she was in her 30s. Lay in her ability to convince many Americans that what you were seeing on her

show was her authentic self. It was, it was just, you know, straight shooting, asking the difficult questions, pulling back the veil on reality that, you know, more polite talk show hosts would ignore. I say this on my show all the time. Can you really forgive if you haven't gotten angry? If you haven't dealt with how you really feel, I don't know if you can go from having been abused

“to forgive it. But it becomes folded into this broader story of how you should be in the world”

that draws on various new-age religious influences, you know, Deepak Chopra and, really, kind of, she's a sort of omnivorous consumer of all kinds of religious and spiritual tools, you know, every, everything from her own Christian heritage, you know, what you grew up with to more kind of Eastern religious techniques to just a way of talking about shopping and acquisition as self-empowerment and a way of actualizing your potential. These are all a way of recasting religion,

not as joining a traditional community, you know, deciding to obey an institution. But rather,

suiting yourself. Because only you have the power to take responsibility to move your life forward.

“And so it's a whole picture of reality that I think she offered her most devoted fans and it's”

part of why you encounter in Oprah's fans, a sense that this woman is laying out a path away of being, you know, she's not just a talk show host. So I think that frame of the guru helps us make sense of this whole cultural picture and people as disparate as Donald Trump and Oprah. I think what I'm struggling with Molly is, you know, I'm trying to imagine what if I was, you know,

somebody living in Nazi Germany in 1936. And this messianic leader comes along and basically

tells me a story about, you know, lost glory and the glory that is achievable if Germany were to achieve its full potential. And I'm inspired by the story and I want to follow this person. What should I be doing when I feel like I'm gripped by somebody who has the story that feels like it's unlocking something within me and I feel like I need to follow this person? What are the questions I should ask myself that, you know, I don't have the luxury of hindsight waiting 30 years to see

how something is turned out. But in the moment, what kind of question should I ask myself to

“determine if I'm on the right path? Boy, that is in some ways the question, right? And I think”

part of what your question has to compel and all of us is a recognition that even in these cases that in hindsight seem kind of black and white morally, if you're in it, it can be very hard to tell, you know, up from down and get your moral bearings. I guess I have two main thoughts. One is that there's a real power to being embedded enough in a long-standing ancient philosophical or religious tradition that you can avail yourself of all of its resources and perspectives on a range of

different challenges in human experience. So when I think about the small number of German Christians

who resisted the Nazis and remained deeply critical of Hitler even, you know, in the case of

Dietrich Bonhoeffer attempting to assassinate him, I see that clarity of moral vision as a reflection of staying grounded in the whole of the tradition, not whatever kind of attenuated useful version of this old tradition, the leader happens to be endorsing. The second needful thing is to ask,

“who is this charismatic leader casting as my enemy? Who is he telling me is the villain?”

And what do I actually know about those people? What are my sources of information? In most cases, right? I mean, that set of questions was not at top of mind for Germans, you know, who were looking the other way or directly complicit in the Holocaust. But for the minority that helped save Jews and worked in the resistance, that personal knowledge of these victims as

individuals, as, you know, multidimensional humans, was absolutely crucial in inoculating them

against Hitler's antisemitic propaganda. So, you know, in our current moment and, you know, I don't, I certainly don't want to accidentally draw analogies. I think we always have to be very careful in drawing historical analogies. But certainly, we live in a time when very few Americans know in a personal way, people who are on the other side of this political divide. And those relationships are hard to come by for all kinds of reasons. But at the very least, even if we don't have access

to those relationships, we can remind ourselves of that birth of information, the fact that human beings are complicated and any kind of monolithic story of the other side has to obscure far more than it clarifies.

imbue our daily lives with purpose and meaning. They make us feel good and we want to be close to them.

I was a New Orleans some months ago and word got out that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey were eating at a private room in a restaurant. Word leaked out and soon the crowds started gathering. The intersection was soon swamped with hundreds of people. All they wanted, a glimpse of their heroes. It made me think about the connection between charisma and romantic love. When we fall deeply in love, the person we adore seems to walk on water. Every gesture they make is beautiful. Every word

is a pearl. When you think about it, we relate to our lovers as if they were imbued with charisma.

Their quirks, their habits, their sense of humor, we find every aspect of them to be fascinating

“and charming. So what happens when one of these relationships comes to an end?”

Breakups are devastating because the demand that we wrench ourselves from the orbit of someone we found irresistible. It becomes something like, oh, you're not entirely the person I thought you were. I thought that you would honor the relationship the way I hoped to honor the relationship. When we come back, we dig deep into the psychology of breakups as we respond to listener questions about the end of relationships. Stay with us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm

Shankar Vidantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vidantam.

There are certain painful experiences almost all of us will have to go through.

“We'll have uncomfortable first days at a new school or a new job. We'll fight with your friends.”

We'll grapple with the grief of losing a parent. And unless we're very lucky, we'll break up with someone or have our heart broken by someone we love. In movies and on TV, breakup scenes often make us laugh. It seems so obvious to us the audience that this relationship is doomed. But in real life, there often isn't much to laugh about when you're in the middle of a breakup. When you're the one sitting across the table from the person you love, hearing them say, I'm leaving you can be an

agonizing experience. The period that follows the initial shock of a breakup can often bring its own distinct heartache. You start to question everything. Did they really love you? What did you do wrong? Could you win them back? Was there someone else? How long will it take you for you to stop thinking about them? At the University of Windsor and Canada, Antonio Pascoa Leone studies how we process breakups and how we can make this particular type of

loss less painful. Antonio joined us as part of our recent love 2.0 series. If you missed that episode, it's the one in this podcast feed titled How to Move On. Today, we welcome Antonio back to respond to listeners, thoughts and questions in our popular segment, your questions answered. Antonio Pascoa Leone, welcome back to hidden brain. Thank you, sugar. Antonio, after we released our episode with you, we heard from listeners who shared how they

had struggled or were continuing to struggle with really deep sorrow in the aftermath of a breakup. I'd like to start with this message we received from a listener named Molly. She went through a breakup about 13 years ago and it took her a long time to get over the loss of the relationship. Why is it that if I was dating this person and he died, I would be allowed and in fact even expected to continue loving him for the rest of my life. But because he is not dead,

I am expected to get over it to stop loving him to move on. What I don't understand is sort of,

“what is the difference? I mean, isn't a breakup essentially a death that relationship is dead?”

The person that we know is dead to us now. Why are we supposed to approach breakups differently than an even more permanent kind of loss? So Antonio, I think Molly is looking for permission to continue to grieve. Will be on the point that others think she should stop grieving. Is she right? I mean, I think it's an interesting question. I can hear that the pain and Molly's voice

problem, let me just answer her question, which I think is that the first part is our breakups

the same or similar to somebody just dying. And I mean, they're both going to be very hard. You break up because someone doesn't want to be in the relationship. Someone is unhappy and someone wants it to end. So there's a difference in vision

“and that has to be dealt with that has to be accepted by the person who's being broken up with, right?”

In death, it's possible that that both people are really happy and then somebody dies. And so it just has to be accepted. You know, you might feel like the universe is unfair,

but it's not a struggle between two people's visions of what we could do together.

Right. So when someone dies, we may grieve them, but we don't necessarily feel rejected by them, but in a breakup, the person who splits up with you is still walking around, still doing their thing, perhaps now with someone else. You know, I can see in some ways how that can be more painful. Yeah, I mean, you have a disagreement, a difference in how you see things, right? There's the relationship has expired or turned sour or run its course.

You know, the other piece that Molly kind of points at or that comes to my mind is this has been a long time, right? And of course, when resources, emotional, cognitive,

“and otherwise are trapped kind of stuck on this and there might be more life to live, right?”

It's important to end something so that one feels freed up to explore new possibilities. Antonio, a listener wrote in with a hypothesis about why things often get worse before they get better after a breakup. Carlos Alberto saw something online that said that after a relationship ends, people may experience a withdrawal of sorts from their ex-partner. Essentially, the post suggested that the struggle we feel after a breakup might be similar to the cravings of someone experiencing

an addiction. Here's Carlos Alberto. And I feel that this view is very reductive of the relationship and it doesn't really encompass all the complexities that are going around. But on the other hand, I do feel that it makes sense in a certain way. So, my question is specifically if there is value in this understanding of breakups as recovering from addiction or if this is a rabbit hole that is not really worth exploring. What do you think Antonio is the comparison between

breakup grief and addiction withdrawal on the money? You know, when you first introduced it, I thought,

and then the first thing Carlos said, I realized Carlos and I were on the same page. It is a bit reductionistic, right? You know, there are some things that are just very sort of functional in terms of getting over an addiction that might be similar behaviorally in terms of getting over a relationship. You're going to have to change your lifestyle. You're going to have to

“change who you hang out with. So there's some similarity there. But I think the issue of relationships”

and grief become also more complicated. It is reductionist to think of it as just that because as Carlos was kind of hinting, there are other issues of personal meaning, of attachment, of identity and you know, there's no correlate there with respect to drug addiction. Antonio, a listener named Cliff reached out with a question about how to know when we might be stalled out versus taking time to recover from a breakup. Cliff and his wife got together when

they were teenagers and they were married for 25 years. But eight years ago, Cliff's wife asked for a divorce. It threw him for a loop and he says he's still struggling to move on. Here he is. I'm healthy, active, and have a good career. Yet I feel unable to move forward emotionally. The idea of dating again in my 50s even after a year still feels impossible. Being alone feels safer than risking being hurt or blindsided again. At the same time, I recognize that this belief

may be rational. My question for Antonio is, how can I tell the difference between thoughts that are irrational and those that may simply reflect caution or self-protection is choosing to

for where I am now and how might someone in my position even if I tried dating begin to trust the emotional roller coaster that can come from it. So Cliff raises a really interesting point Antonio.

It isn't always easy to tell where the line is between healthy self-protection and irrational fear.

Do you have any advice for him? Not my heart goes out to him. When one sort of speculates that it may be irrational, that suggests that something that's crossed as mine. You know, but there's also no obligation to date other people. You don't have to. There's nothing wrong with deciding. Well, I'm fine on my own. That's okay too. So really, the question sort of becomes, what hurts more? What's missing in your life? Is something missing in your life?

“I mean, life is risky business. So, you know, a date somebody and they might not”

be interested in you or you might be not so interested in them. And then there's that whole.

I mean, it's a lot of work finding the right person. But, you know, we don't look for people because it's convenient. We look for people because we want to connect. And so I think Cliff, it might be useful to sort of consider to what extent am I, um, depriving myself of of possibilities, right? I knew somebody who once said, I broke up with someone. So, so that I would have the possibility of falling in love again, you know? So, so what do you need, I guess, and what hurts the most?

Because it costs you something to be so safe as well.

“Many of the most common questions we ask after a breakup are why questions. We want to understand”

why this rupture happened. We find ourselves pouring over our relationship looking for clues.

When we come back, we dig deeper into this process and we'll talk with Antonio about how to know when it's time to start letting go. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Throughout our lives, we all will experience various kinds of rejections. Maybe we'll be turned down for a part in the school play. Our dream university will say no to us. We'll toil over a job application only to receive a generic

response saying thanks but no thanks. But one of the worst forms of rejection is the end of a relationship. To have someone say, I know you, I love you, but I no longer want to be with you. Antonio Pascoa Lione is a psychologist who studies the impact of relationships on our well-being and how we can navigate the emotions that engulf us after a breakup. Antonio, when you tell people about your research, there's sometimes skeptical about whether

the emotions we experience after a breakup are generalizable. They assume that each person's response is unique, isn't it? Well, each person is unique. In the details, in the way you experience it, and what it means to you, obviously, that's like a thumbprint. That's your unique experience.

“And at the same time, you know, is it unique? Isn't actually going to be an opinion question?”

This is an empirical question. There are some common patterns that predict wellness outcomes. And you know, that's probably because we're humans. Humans have a similar parameters for their functioning. You know, you attend to certains there's a lot of overlapping human needs. It's a funny puzzle, though, because if I were an astrophysicist, I would say, well, it's like this. And people would sort of nod and go, okay, I guess so. I can't, I can't see that far, so I'll take

your word for it. But relationships and emotion, everybody, everybody has direct experience. And which is kind of wonderful. But it also means that people hold up what we find against their personal beliefs, and the personal kind of experiences. Now, after a breakup, many people find themselves turning things over and over in their minds,

sometimes be a problem. Well, rumination is almost always a problem, right? I mean, it's tricky to

know, am I ruminating or am I getting stuff done? Rumination is busy work, right? You, it's emotional. There are emotions there, right? You can think of three kinds of rumination. The anxious rumination

“is always worrying about the future and creating scenarios, what if this and what if that?”

When we talk about things like unfinished business or losses, relationship losses, you'll get more depressive rumination. Depressive rumination tends to be about the past. It's not about problem solving, but it's about if only I should, if only I had, you know, it's regrets kind of replaying events of the past and if they had been a little bit different. Of course,

there's an overlap between depressive and anxious rumination. The third kind I'll just mention to

be complete here. I'm sure we could make up others, but when we're talking about relationship is angry rumination. So, you know, but these also are scenarios, they tend to be vengeful at

“the end, right? In certain kind of ways. If only I had said that clever thing and I hope so and so”

gets their come up ends. But notice these are all scenario based. They tend to be a replaying of a scenario. It's the plot and characters being reworked and it tends to be a very cognitive, verbal loop keeps you really busy. So, especially when it's anxious, you feel productive in some sort of way. And yet, that verbal cognitive loop insulates you from sinking a bit deeper into what's really going on, which is the present, right? And issues of loss, issues of shame, that can be

very painful. You don't get caught up in those much more maladaptive emotions, but as you stay on these secondary hopeless, helpless, rageful sort of things. We received a lot of listener questions about rumination. I'd like to share a couple of them with you. The first is from a listener named Sophie. Sophie told us that she and her boyfriend broke up earlier this year because of something that she did. Here she is. I'm trying to piece together this version of me that

loved him so much and then this version of me that did. What I did and hurt him and the two are just aren't connecting and it really scares me and freaks me out and makes me question whether or not I am a good person, a person who should be in romantic relationships. Is it possible to truly move on and heal from a breakup? That was essentially your fault. So, Sophie has stuck on the idea that perhaps she is in the kind of partner or maybe even the

kind of person that she thought she was. What can people do when they find themselves in this sort of room in it of Psycholentonia? One thing Sophie's doing is, or at least in this excerpt, right, is thinking of herself in a relatively static way, right? It's like I hurt somebody, I ended the relationship. So, in life and in relationships, you get to, you get to reinvent yourself. You have choices now. You get to decide to do things differently. If you have regrets about

the way you treated somebody, you can commit to not treating other people in that way. And I don't

“think you should sit around and wait until you're perfect before you're in a relationship because”

that's not really how it works. Nobody's. Nobody's got it all sorted out perfectly. And the truth is you grow the most on the contact points, on the boundary line between you and someone else. You grow the fastest. It's hard to compromise. It's hard to negotiate. It's hard to have a sense of we, but that changes you. And so, you'll become a different person by being in a different relationship. I would imagine that the rumination process is particularly

common when a breakup is sudden and you don't know why the other person cut things off. It is not named Frida, wrote in about her recent breakup, her boyfriend ended things with her out of the blue. She writes, "I really don't know exactly why he broke it off.

I've asked to talk with him several times and he always makes excuses not to talk.

and still want to talk with him about what happened. Any advice on how to move on?

I'm wondering Antonio, how can we find closure when a relationship ends and the person who has ended it won't give us any answers?"

“Yeah, I think a lot of people get stuck there. Sometimes there's even ghosting or other sorts of”

very abrupt endings and the person's out there somewhere, but they're unresponsive. In the episode we did, something that we talked about was the idea that although the relationship was a shared project, me letting go and moving on after the relationship is not a shared project.

We will not be doing that together. Just like we don't break up together, meaning in

synchrony. Henceforth, this is my own project. Obviously reaching out, there's nothing wrong with that. Trying to have a conversation, trying to get closure. Maybe there are things that you want to tell the person, maybe the things you want to ask. But that you will make use of that in the way that's useful to you, and if they're unavailable or unwilling, then that is actually information. It becomes something like, "Oh, you're not entirely the person I thought you were. I thought

that you would honor the relationship the way I hoped to honor the relationship."

So that's another loss in some ways, but the relationship is yours to move on from is what I'm trying to say.

A list-known Jennifer wrote in about a situation where a relationship ends amicably, but the two people actually want to stay in contact with one another and try to remain friends. Here's Jennifer. I'm really struggling with how to do that because I'm just still working through my emotional baggage and the hurt that I feel and at some point, I want to do it.

“Can it be done as my question? What do we need to do to make that happen?”

Each of us individually or is it a giant mistake? I'm wondering Antonio, have you seen any success stories of exes finding their way to becoming friends? Yeah. That's going to be a long road, though. It's not going to happen overnight. And I think it's wonderful when people do. It depends how long ago the breakup is being, and if that has been put to rest, but sometimes that's just a way of letting the other person down

more easily. One of the puzzles here and one of the reasons why there's going to have to be some time off, let's say. Are we wanting to be friends just because it follows on the heels of a very intimate and tight romantic relationship? Or are we wanting to be friends because if I didn't know you and I bumped into you at the library, we might become friends. One of the puzzles I just want to be really clear about it is the goal of the relationship

that would be the new relationship because you've kind of maxed out in terms of intimacy in the relationship with the person as you know them. You have been together shared life, had dreams, made love. That's probably more intimate than most friendships. So now you're looking for friendship. So it's kind of to roll back the relationship. It's not going to be the same relationship. If you're able to become friends, it'll be getting to know the person in a whole different context.

My parents is a funny example. My parents split up when I was 10. My father remarried. In some ways, I guess they kept in touch. Well, for many, I don't want to speak for them, right? But it's like, well, they had kids. That becomes a shared project, right? So when I say redefine the

“relationship, it's the relationship becomes then about co-parenting. And that's important, right?”

We have different goals and there's a different end. Not now my parents are quite elderly. And I remember, you know, we get together for holidays or birthdays. My father, my mother, my stepmother, my brothers. Everybody's at the same table. And it's great, right? And you can tell these are now these are friends, right? And there's a sense of community. So there's going to be a reinvention

right? You're really going to have to give some time. You still have to end the relationship.

“When we go through a breakup, it can feel like we are saying more than just goodbye to our partner.”

We're also saying goodbye to the future we imagined together. The trips we would take, the life we would build, it's hard to imagine how to move forward, how to fill in all the gaps left behind. Up next, Antonio will answer your questions about how to find peace after a breakup, and offer guidance on how to avoid a split in the first place. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Antonio Pascual Leone is a psychologist at the University of Windsor and Canada. He's the author of principles of emotion change, what works and when, in psychotherapy and everyday life. He joins us today for the latest installment in our series,

your questions answered. Antonio breakups are not always a surprise. Sometimes we know that a

relationship isn't meant to be, and we pursue it anyway. This happened to one of our listeners named Selene. Her partner recently broke things off and Selene is coming to realize that her own emotional issues might be playing a role in undermining her relationships. Here she is. Basically, long story short in my scenario. I know why it didn't work out. There was a lot of communication issues and emotional disconnection and lack of effort because of it.

What didn't help and a punch in the gut was the fact that I was dumped through a voice note. So what I'm currently struggling with is a lot of self-blame that I couldn't get myself to end it. And I guess my other issue is that I fall into loneliness and crave companionships

before I get any work done on myself and basically start seeing other people before I know I'm ready.

And I know myself enough that this is another struggle that is for sure to be expected. So it sounds like Selene is aware of what she needs to work on Antonio, but finds it really difficult to follow through before loneliness compels her to start a new relationship. What do you

“make of her dilemma? I think what Selene is saying is, I hope she feels like it's okay if I”

it's like she's saying I'm a working progress, right? But we all are, I'd say to Selene, I am too over. So this work to be done and that doesn't mean one has to change relationships to improve oneself when it's often reinventing relationships as one changes who one is. But when she says about her own emotional issues, whatever they might be, she made reference to sort of a lack of effort. And that peaked me a little bit because sometimes people say things like, well you know we'll

see where it goes. When I hear somebody say talk about lack of effort or we'll see where it goes, I cringe a little bit, I kind of go well. I can make a good guess where it's going to go.

Because the reality is that the rate of success of relationships is relatively poor, right? If we

go by divorce rates are maybe, you know, close to 50% depending on where you are. I'm just talking statistics. 50%. Those are bad odds. If you aren't sure that you want it to work, well now you've given up your only leverage, right? Relationships work because you lean into them. And for that reason, one needs to sort of think about in what kinds of ways am I not leaning in?

“What gets in the way of me loving someone or allowing them to love me? So I think that's really key.”

Seline's question really highlighted how difficult it is to find a sense of ease when we've gone through a breakup. You've explored strategies that can help in these moments. One idea is to focus and identifying what you call unmet needs. Say more about the centonia. That's right. Yeah. All emotion is about needs and negative emotions are about unmet needs. And you know,

not just highlighting something's wrong to you but organizing and orienting you to what you need, right? So emotion becomes procedural. I need to have a sense of camaraderie. I need to feel understood by someone. I need a sense of playfulness. I need fun. I need fun with somebody where we

“toss it back and forth. Those are existential and and attachment oriented needs, right?”

Often moving on is about figuring out what's missing now. And once you identifying it, you can kind of put it to rest the relationship, I mean, and you organize to start looking for that specific thing that you're missing. We received a number of messages from listeners who wanted to share their strategies for getting over a breakup. This one comes from a listener named Deb.

At the age of 41, Deb went through a divorce. She struggled and felt like she'd never move on.

Until about a year later, she decided to try something new. Here she is. I took out a yellow-lined writing pad and pen, and on every single line, I wrote thank you, and then I would fill in the blank for some way, shape, or form, that my former husband had made my life better. Five pages later, I had led out from my head and heard all those aspects of my former life with him that made a difference for my stories of the past, my impacts on the present

“and possibilities for my future. That's what that letter meant to me.”

Outside of my new bedroom window, I made a sundial on the ground, and after crumbling up those heartfelt statements of gratitude, I burned them and imagined the resulting smoke moving through the air and to its intended recipient. My former husband. From that moment on, I could tell my story without pain or tears or anguish. It was fabulous.

So there's abundant research that finds that gratitude is a powerful tool for many realms of our

lives Antonio. Is it possible that it can also help us with breakups? Absolutely. I think it's wonderful. It's very creative, and it's very agentic, and she runs with it, right? So part of it is very action-art and do something. Nobody ruminates with a piece of paper the way Deb was talking about. I mean, at least not usually. So notice that one of the things here is she's committing to paper or to conversation with someone

or to write, it's not just in your head going around turning it around in circles. There's a sense of undertaking a task. The other piece that Deb mentions is ceremony. There's a ritual,

“the idea of, right? I think I'm often saying to people, after you've done all the work not before,”

you can't do it at the beginning, but after you've done the work, you still have to decide. That it's over. There's a decision point where you say, and I'm going to put this to rest, and that serves several functions. One, it creates a sense of closure. Notice the other person doesn't have to be here for this ceremony. It can be private. You do your own thing. It has to be done after you do the emotional work, of course, but it also becomes a reminder. A moment in time and space

where I let it go and walked into the rest of my life, which is what she describes, right? Then there's the piece about gratitude. In the original episode, we talked about a goodbye exercise, where you might write down what are the good things you're saying goodbye to, what are the bad things you're saying goodbye to, you know, goodbye good rhythms, and what are the hopes and dreams, right?

Because the reality is, we had something together, and it was a value.

This next question is from a listener who is on the outside of a breakup looking in. Her name is Christine. I'm wondering how to help a friend who's been through a difficult breakup, and seems to be stuck in a never-ending loop of rumination after a year or more, and they just can't seem to move on. How can I be of help?

Yeah, that was a good question, right? If you care about people, and you see them suffering, you

want to help them. It depends how long they've been stuck this sort of way. It depends how long

“the relationship is, right? I think in some sense, if somebody were in a with a life partner,”

and then the marriage ends, or the relationship ends, a year after the breakup, they're still stuck with it and working through it. I wouldn't say that's outside of healthy, right? I mean, it takes time, and the longer the relationship, the more it's going to take time, right? You know, so it kind of depends on the context of what we're considering, but let's imagine it is kind of getting a little taken a bit of a while, maybe the relationship wasn't as significant in this

person's life story, but obviously important enough for them to be feel broken over it. Maybe the relationship was a year long, and they're grieving for a year. This is starting to be a bit well, yeah, it's that's the long time then, right? And if you're a friend or family member, somebody who's still grieving or is seem stuck, I would say, give them company to fill the void. I would say, help them figure out what's important to them. You know what I mean? Often at the

end of a relationship, people don't really know what they're looking for. So maybe give them some space

to actually do that. The third thing would be, if people are really stuck in a hole,

“that's almost always from a first person perspective, right? I feel sad when I think of”

myself and first person in this situation, but you can move the person to a third person perspective, kind of like somebody else looking in, right, and that that will be you, of course. So then one starts talking about a life story, a life narrative, and you might have a story that's a sad story, but dot dot dot, where to from here. And the story's not yet finished, there's still life to live so what do you want to do with that, right? And I think that is also

important to help shape people up and lift their chin a bit to stare at the horizon. We focus most of this conversation on how to cope with feelings that come after a relationship ruptures. But I'd like to end with a listener question about how to support relationships that are not yet at the point of no return. A listener named Lu sent us a question along those lines. Lu says, I'd love to ask advice on how to break through the distance and silence that occurs when our romantic

relationship feels like it's drifting apart. When both parties are feeling vulnerable and unsure of where they stand, what are some key questions we can ask our significant other to bring us back to honest communication. What do you think Antonio? I think this is a lovely question from Lu. I have already said, if you're just waiting to see what happens, that's a coin toss,

“heads or tails, right? And is that what you want? Because if that's what you want, then you'll get that,”

right? And yes, you can move through the procedures of life, the comings and goings, and you're busy with work, and when busy with stuff, maybe you're busy with kids, you have projects, relationship maintenance takes time. You've got to put time into it. Where there's a sense of we, that's a very strong predictor of good outcomes. So, how do you do that? You look at your partner and you say, how are things, right? You make time for the relationship, you check in how they're

doing, and sometimes the years roll by, and you actually have to reinvent the relationship. If you think of projects you've done, I don't know, I wrote a book, but people do other sorts of things, right? They you renovate a house or you start a career or have children, you know, these things are a big project in life takes six to eight years, you know, from beginning to end.

And I mean, if you're having kids that keeps going, but of course, the first six to eight years

are really special and very hard. So, you know, if that's true for everything else, it's probably true for relationships too. And if you don't reinvent the relationship every six to eight years, well, then it will probably expire, right? Which is okay too. But if you wanted that

You don't have time for that. You have a date breakfast.

Often one is kind of rediscovering. I find myself with my wife. We have kids or kids are like nine and ten now and it's sort of like, oh, oh, that's who you are. That's interesting. That's exciting. Be curious. That would be my advice. Be curious. Don't take it for granted.

“You know, I remember hearing someone say, if you don't make time for health,”

you are going to make time for illness. And I love that line because it suggests that being healthy

is a proactive exercise. And as you're talking now and Tony, I'm realizing the parallels here. If you don't make time for your relationship, you will make time for your breakup. It's very true. And it's very time intensive if you have a breakup.

“Antonio Pascua Leone is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada. He's the author”

of principles of emotion change, what works and when in psychotherapy and everyday life. We also heard today from Molly Worthon. She's a historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the author of Spellbound, how charisma shaped American history from the Puritans to Donald Trump. Hidden Brain is produced by hidden brain media. Our audio production team

“includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Audem Barnes, Andrew Chadwick”

and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm hidden brain's executive editor. Around Sankeiro today is Kelly Ruden. Kelly has worked for me for many years as my lecture agent, she's fielded incoming calls and emails and set up many speaking engagements. She's retiring and I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for her many years of friendship and service. Kelly is a master gardener and I expect she's going to get to spend many more hours

in her beloved garden. Thank you again Kelly. If you love hidden brain, please be an ambassador for us. Tell one or two friends about the show.

Your word of math recommendations are one of the most powerful ways to connect more people

with the ideas and research we explore on hidden brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.