This is a eye-hot podcast, guaranteed human.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast playing along is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban. You even know it's in the fan's room at that point. Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom of that. That's so funny. Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, a longtime tech journalist, and consider my new podcast mostly human, your bridge to the future. Anyone can now be an entrepreneur, anyone can build an app, and it's very empowering. Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future, and we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you.
What I come to realize is that when people think that they're dating these AI companion, they're actually dating the companies that create this. We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history. And let's be honest, that can be messy. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.
But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment. Mostly, human will show you how. My goal is to give you the playbook, so you can benefit. The reason I say agency is because, like, if you can give power back to people,
“then I think that's probably the best thing we can do for your mental health.”
Listen, mostly human on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Stephanie Young, host of Love Trap, the story of former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd, caught in a pregnancy hoax. You doctor this particular test twice in silence, right? I doctor the test once. As the season continues, Laura, Scott Stelpoise, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Breaking news at America for County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. Open your free I-Heart Radio app, search Love Trap, and start listening now. Peace is the most misrepresented thing in the world. We're sold it as an absence, an absence of noise, absence of conflict, the absence of difficulty, like pieces what happens when everything hard goes away.
Here's what nobody tells you. Peace is not the absence of the storm.
Peace is the ability to stand in the middle of the storm and not be destroyed by it. And it is not found in a year, it is built deliberately specifically, sometimes painfully, through a series of choices that most people are not making because nobody has ever laid them out
“honestly. Here's what I actually want to talk about today. The peace that I got taken from you,”
not by one big dramatic event necessarily, don't maybe that too, but by the accumulation of a thousand small surrenders. The family member you stopped confronting because it was easier not to. The friend group that slowly became an obligation instead of a joy, the job that asked for a little more of you every year until it was asking for all of you. The version of yourself you set aside so many times that you lost track of where you put it. Peace doesn't disappear
all at once. It leaks, slowly, consistently, through holes you stop noticing because you were too busy managing the water level. Today we're going to find the holes. We're going to name them specifically, not in a vague set boundaries way because I'm tired of that phrase being used as a substitute for actual instruction, but in a real specific research backed emotionally on its way, because reclaiming your peace is not a spa treatment. It might be, but it is actually one of the
most important and most difficult projects of your adult life, and it deserves to be treated that way.
I want to start with the hardest category first because it's the one people are most reluctant
“to examine honestly. Other people, specifically the people in your life who are costing you more”
than they're giving you, and before you stop listening or watching because that sounds cold or disloyal stay with me, because I'm not talking about cutting people off. I'm talking about something far more nuanced and far more important. Learning to see clearly what is actually happening in your relationships so that you can make conscious choices rather than being slowly invisibly drained. There's a concept in social psychology called Emotional Labor, first articulated
by sociologist Hockstild in her 1983 book The Managed Hot. Hockstild originally described it
In the context of work.
but the concept has since expanded into something broader and more personal. The invisible work
“of managing, soothing, accommodating and monitoring the emotional states of the people around you,”
and here's what I need you to hear about emotional labor in relationships. It is real work,
it is exhausting, it depletes the same finite cognitive and emotional resources as any other form of labor, and it is almost always distributed unequally, with some people doing the vast majority of it, often without realizing it, often without the people they're doing it for, even knowing it's happening. Think about who you manage in your life, not who you love, who you manage, who's moods do you track before deciding what to say, whose reaction do you pre-simulate before
making a decision, whose feelings do you accommodate at the consistent expense of your own, whose calls leave you needing to lie down afterward. That management is costing you something and it's costing you peace. Now let's talk about family specifically because family is where this gets the most complicated and the most culturally loaded. Almost every cultural tradition in the world places a premium on family loyalty, and there's genuine wisdom in that, but it has also
been weaponized sometimes, unconsciously, sometimes very deliberately, to prevent people from ever examining whether a family relationship is actually healthy. Their family is routinely used
as a reason to accept treatment from a relative that you'd never accept from a friend, a colleague,
or a stranger. The neuroscientist and author Dr. Daniel Seagull has written extensively about what he calls the family system, the invisible set of roles, rules, and dynamics that develop in families
“over generations. And one of his most important findings is that the roles assigned to us in our”
family of origin, the peacekeeper, the responsible one, the scapegoat, the funny one, the difficult one, becomes so deeply embedded in our nervous systems that we enact them automatically, unconsciously, often for our entire lives, unless we deliberately examine them. You may have been the peacekeeper in your family, which means you learned very early that your job was to smooth conflict, absorb tension, and make sure everyone else was comfortable at the expense of your own discomfort,
and you're probably still doing that somewhere. A family dinner's on group chats, in the phone calls you dread by answer anyway, because not answering, feels like a different kind of war. That role was not your choice. It was a sight, and you are allowed right now today to give it back. Giving back does not mean blowing up your family relationships. It means making the radical quiet incredibly difficult decision to stop managing other adults, to let people feel their own
feelings without immediately rushing to fix them, to allow tension to exist in a room, without taking personal responsibility for resolving it. To answer the question, how are you, honestly, rather than with the version of you that requires the least management from everyone else? Research by psychologist Harriet Lerner specifically her groundbreaking work
in the dance of anger shows that the pattern of over-functioning in families is almost always
a self-reinforcing loop. The more you manage, the more you're expected to manage, the more you absorb,
“the more there is to absorb, the only way to change the dynamic is to change your own behavior”
within it, which initially creates discomfort sometimes conflict, and eventually if you hold steady, a new equilibrium, it will feel terrible at first. Changing a role you've played for 30 years is so hard. Do it anyway. Now let's talk about friends, because the friendship order is something almost nobody does, and almost everyone needs. The research on social connection is unambiguous. High-quality relationships are one of the strongest predictors of longevity, mental health,
and well-being. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study on human happiness in history, spanning 80 years, found that the quality of your relationships at 50 predicted how healthy you'd be at 80. Not your cholesterol, your relationships. Quality not quantity, not proximity, quality, which means the friend you've had for 15 years, who consistently makes you feel bad about yourself, is not contributing to your longevity. The group chat that is 90% obligation and 10% actual
Joy is not protecting your health.
courage to let it naturally end is not what the Harvard researchers were measuring when they found those results. You are allowed to let relationships evolve. You are allowed to let some friendships
become acquaintances. You are allowed to be honest with yourself first about which of your relationships
are genuinely nourishing and which ones are simply familiar. Familiar is not the same as good. Familiar is just old. Marcus Aurelius once said, "The first rule is to keep an untrubbled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are. Look your relationships in the face, know them for what they are, know what they used to be, know what you wish they were, what they actually are right now in the lived reality of your daily
life. Some of them are draining your peace and knowing that clearly is the first step to doing something
“about it. Let me ask you something. When did you last have a thought that had nothing to do with work?”
Not doing a meditation, not on a run with a podcast playing, not in the shower where three seconds
of quiet immediately fills with tomorrow's to-do list, an actual genuine unoccupied thought that arose from your own interior life. Not from a problem to be solved or a deadline to be met or a colleague's comment you're still processing. For a lot of people that question produces a genuinely uncomfortable silence because work has colonised the mind. Not just the hours the mind, the background processing, the free associative space, the mental real estate that used to belong
to daydreaming and creative thought and genuine presence and just being a person who exists outside of their professional function. So let's talk about what you can actually do.
“The first thing and this requires honesty that can be genuinely confronting is to separate”
your identity from your productivity. For many people, particularly higher achievers, particularly people who are praised growing up for performance rather than for being, work has become identity. Not just the thing they do, who they are, and when work is who you are, any threat to your work performance feels existential. Any criticism feels like an attack on your personhood, any failure feels like evidence that you're fundamentally not enough. The psychologist
Carol Drake, whose research on growth versus fixed mindset has become foundational in psychology and education, found that people who define their identity through performance outcomes rather than through effort, learning and process are not just less resilient. They are measurably more anxious, more afraid of challenge and less creative because when your identity depends on the outcome, you cannot afford to risk failure and you cannot afford to stop
working because stopping working feels like stopping being. Think about that for a second.
If you cannot comfortably answer the question, who are you without your job? Not defensively, not with the list of other achievements, but genuinely and peacefully, then work has taken something from you that it was not entitled to. Your work is what you do. It is not who you are. I'm Laurie Seagull, a longtime tech journalist, and consider my new podcast mostly human, your bridge to the future. Anyone can now be an entrepreneur, anyone can build an app,
and it's very empowering. Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future, and we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you. What I come to realize is that when people think that their dating is AI companion, they're actually dating the companies that create this. We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history, and let's be honest, that can be messy. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model
hallucinates a story about you. But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment. Mostly human, we'll show you how. My goal is to give you the playbook, so you can benefit. The reason I say agency is because, like, if you can give power back to people,
“then I think that's probably the best thing we can do for your mental health.”
Listen to mostly human on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than no grip, a new podcast tackling the
Culture of motor racing's most coveted series.
under-export pockets of F-1, including the astrology of the current grid. Louis Hamilton,
“Crap the current sun, Cancer Moon, wouldn't you know it? Michael Schumacher is also a Capricorn”
Sun, Cancer Moon. The story of the sportsman's consequential driver strike. We have one man who, upon hearing that he was going to be fired, freaked out, and apparently climbed out the window of the bathroom, and was Dan and Ricardo's illustrious F-1 career a success story, a cautionary tale, or some combination of both. He started getting all this attention, and he may be started to think, "I'm bigger than this. I'm better." And plenty of
other mishab scandals and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent, dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to no grip on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is I-Girl. You may know me from my I-Girl series I've done on the streets of New York over the years, while I've got good news. I am bringing those interviews and many more to this podcast. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success,
but we are also talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work with the women
“shaping culture right now. As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated, so you have to”
work extra hard, and you have to push the narrative in a way that doesn't compromise who you are in your integrity. You know, I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja. Each week, I have unfiltered conversations with female founders, creatives, and leaders to talk about ambition, visibility, and what it really takes to build something meaningful in the public eye. Because being an integral isn't about the spotlight, it's about owning it. I think the negatives
need to be discussed, and they need to be told to people who maybe don't do this every day, just so they know what's really going on. I feel like pulling the curtain back is important. Listen to I-Girl with Bailey Taylor on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Now let's talk about the Always On Problem, because this is where pieces being stolen in real-time
hourly, and most people have normalized it completely. The expectation of constant availability, of being reachable, responsive, and cognitively present at all hours is historically unprecedented, and the research on it's effect is damning. You don't have to answer the email, just knowing it might arrive is enough to keep your nervous system in a low-level state of alert. This is called anticipatory stress, and your body does not distinguish between the stress of actually dealing with the problem
and the stress of waiting for the problem to arrive. The court is all response is similar, the cognitive load is similar, the depletion is similar, which means you're phone on your bedside table, with work notifications enabled, is not a neutral object. It is a device that is keeping your
stress response mildly activated while you sleep, and yet dismantling always on culture feels dangerous.
It feels like a professional suicide. It feels like being the person who doesn't care enough, and it is the uncomfortable truth. In some environments, it actually is dangerous. There are workplaces where boundaries are genuinely penalised, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but I am going to tell you this. Research on deep work by computer scientists, town newport, and on recovery by Sabine Sonntag consistently shows that the people who do the best
“most creative work, most important work, are not the ones who are always on. They're the ones”
you protect their cognitive resources fiercely, who create clear demarcations between work and not work, who allow their minds to actually rest, because they understand that a rested mind
produces better work than an exhausted one. The always on person is not your most valuable employee.
They are your most depleted one doing their worst thinking and calling it dedication. Here is what reclaiming peace from work actually looks like, not quitting, not a dramatic confrontation with your boss, but a series of daily, deliberate, non-negotiable acts. You stop performing busyness. There's a difference between being busy and being productive. Most people know this, but they perform being busy anyway because the culture rewards the performance. Stop performing.
Do one thing every day that's just for you. Eat a meal without a screen. Maybe go on a walk without being on the phone. One hour that work does not get to take over everything else. One thing per day that reminds your nervous system that you're a person,
Not a machine.
is asking you to betray yourself. But the sumwork does. Some work asks you to act against your values or to suppress your voice or to participate in dynamics that corrode your self-respect.
And if that's happening, no amount of personal peace practice is sufficient. The answer is
structural. The answer is change. This is the part of the episode that it almost didn't include because it's the hardest part and the most personal and the most likely to get dismissed.
“But it's also the most important because here's the truth that all the external work,”
the relationship audience, the work boundaries, the lifestyle changes, doesn't address on its own. Sometimes, you are the one taking your peace. Not them, not work, not the algorithm. You, me, us. The relentless internal monologue that critiques everything. The rumination that replays the conversation on loop. The catastrophizing that takes a mildly concerning email and turns it into a disaster by 3 a.m. The comparison that looks at someone
else's life and immediately generates evidence that yours is inadequate. The mind at war with itself is one of the most exhausting environments a human being can inhabit. And most people are inhabiting it constantly, having become so accustomed to the noise that they've stopped noticing
it. I want to share some research from Ethan Cross. The first tool is what he calls
distanced self-talk. When you're inside a spiral, when the inner critic is loudest, when the catastrophizing is most vivid, you refer to yourself by name. Not I, but you're actual name. Jay, what's actually happening here? Sarah is this thought true? I know the sounds of his are, but it works because of the neurological distance it creates. Using third-person language activates the same prefrontal cortex regulation that we see when people successfully coach others
through difficult emotions. Have you ever found it easier to tell someone else what to do
“then yourself? That's why using your name in third-person works. You become briefly, your own”
wise friend, rather than your own worst enemy. Studies show it reduces emotional intensity, measurably, and produces significantly clear thinking within minutes. The second tool is what Cross calls temporal distancing. When you're consumed by a problem, when it feels enormous and all encompassing impermanent, you ask, will this matter in ten years? In five, in one? This is not dismissiveness. It is the accurate recalibration of perspective that anxiety systematically destroys.
Let me be direct about something before I go into this. Peace is not a destination. It is not a state you achieve and then maintain effortlessly. It is a practice. Something you build,
lose, rebuild, and lose again in an ongoing cycle that never fully resolves and never needs to.
The people you know who seem genuinely peaceful, not performatively calm, not disassociated,
“but actually grounded in clear, are not people to him peace came easily. There are people who have”
done specific, deliberate, often difficult work, and they still have bad weeks. They still get pulled off center. They still find themselves in the spiral or the argument or the 3am loop. The difference is not that the disruptions don't happen. It's that they know how to find their way back. Here is what the finding your way back actually looks like. The first practice, know your specific drains. Peace is personal. What drains you is not what drains everyone,
and you cannot protect your peace from things you haven't identified clearly. This requires an audit. Not a vague sense that things feel heavy, but a specific accounting. Get a piece of paper, write three columns. People, environments, patterns. Under people, write this. Who, after you spend time with them, leaves you feeling constantly depleted. This includes people you love, love and depletion are not mutually exclusive. Under environments, where do you feel most
agitated, most unlike yourself? Your office, a particular family member's home, your own home in a specific configuration, cluttered, noisy, full of unfinished things, or whatever it may be. And under patterns, write down what behaviors of your own, reliably produce a loss of peace. Doom scrolling before bed, saying yes, when you mean no, checking your phone first thing in the morning, eating alone at your desk, over committing and then resenting everyone on the calendar,
name them. Peace specific. Because a drain you've named is a drain you can address. A drain you're only vaguely aware of, continues leaking indefinitely. The second practice,
Create one non-negotiable peace anchor per day.
protocol that requires 30 minutes before anyone else wakes up. One thing per day, that is yours,
that restores you, that you protect it like your matters because it does. For some people, this is 10 minutes of complete silence before the household awaits. For some, it's a walk that has no destination, no podcast. For some, it's a physical practice, not for the fitness, but for the specific experience of being fully in a body, rather than fully in a mind. For some, it's cooking a meal slowly and without distraction. For some, it's reading a physical
“book for 20 minutes before sleep instead of the screen. The specific anchor is less important”
than the non-negotiability of it. The research on self-regulation by Roy Bowmeister and others consistently shows that the people with the strongest self-control are not the ones who use
willpower most. They are the ones who have structured their lives so that the most important things
require the least willpower to protect. They've made peace the default not the exception. One anchor every day, not when you have time, you'll never have time, but before the time disappears into everyone else's needs. The third practice, this might be the most upsetting thing I'm going to say today, and I mean it seriously. You are allowed to disappoint people. Not truly, not carelessly, but deliberately lovingly in service of your own truth and your own
“capacity. The research on chronic people pleasing by psychologists Harriet Breaker in her book The”
Disease to Please found that compulsive people pleasing is not a personality trait. It's a survival strategy. It developed because at some point, making other people comfortable felt safer than honoring your own needs. And it worked in the context in which it was developed. It is no longer working. Every time you say yes, when you mean no, you're making a deposit in someone else's account
and a withdrawal from your own. And accounts that only pay out and never receive go to zero.
Then they go negative. And then they go to the thing we're calling burnout and resentment and a slow grinding exhaustion of a person who spent years prioritizing everyone else's comfort over their own. You are allowed to say, I can't make it. I need this weekend to myself. I don't have the capacity for that right now. I love you, and I'm not available for that conversation tonight. Said with warmth, said with care, but said, the people who genuinely love you will not
leave because you told the truth about your limits. The people who need you to be limitless in order to stay are not your people. The fourth practice, create physical peace. This one is underestimated. The research on environmental psychology, particularly the work of Roger Ulrich on how physical spaces effects stress and recovery shows that our surroundings have direct measurable effects on cortisol levels, heart rate and cognitive function. A clotted space maintains a low-level cognitive
load. Your brain keeps registering the unfinished, the disordered, the pile of things that need to be dealt with. It cannot fully rest in a space that it reads as incomplete. A space with natural light, with some element of nature, even a plan, even a view of sky, measurably reduces physiological stress markers. The fifth practice, the radical act of doing nothing and calling it enough. Here's the final practice and the hardest one for people who have built their self-worth
on productivity. Sometimes peace requires you to do nothing. Not nothing is a precursor to something else, not nothing is recovery so that you can perform better tomorrow, trust nothing, as its own complete and sufficient act. You are not what you produce, you are not your productivity, you are not your value to other people or to your organization or to your family's logistics or to anyone's expectations. You are a living being and living beings need rest the way they need water.
Not as reward, not as indulgence, but as biology. When you can sit in a chair in a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do and nothing to justify and feel the particular specific warmth of a life that is genuinely yours. That is not laziness. That is what you've been working towards all along. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you share this with a friend who's stressed, burned out or working too hard. I hope it helps you create and find peace in your life.
“And remember, I'm forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you.”
If you love this episode, you will also love my interview with Kendall Jenner on setting
Boundaries to increase happiness and healing your inner child.
actions of others, you know, you're at mercy of things that you can't control. Hi everyone,
“I'm Cheryl Strade, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new”
podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventures, and adrenaline
seekers to discuss the inner landscapes that informed and inspired their extraordinary
feeds. So we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable
“challenges. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,”
or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Nora Jones and my podcast playing along is back
with more of my favorite musicians. Check out my newest episode with Josh Groben. You're here to the fans of it that's for me. Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom of that. That's so funny. Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lori Siegel, a longtime tech journalist, and consider my new podcast mostly human, your bridge to the future. Anyone can now be an entrepreneur, anyone can build an app,
and it's very empowering. Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future, and we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you. What I come to realize is that when people think the day of dating these AI companion, they're actually dating the companies that create this. We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history, and let's be honest, that can be messy. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates
a story about you. But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment. Mostly human, we'll show you how. My goal is to give you the playbook, so you can benefit. The reason I say
“agency is because, like, if you can give power back to people, then I think that's part of the best”
thing we can do for your mental health. Listen to mostly human on the iHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This isn't iHard Podcasts, guaranteed human.
