Why Waking Up at 3AM Might Be Perfectly Normal | Katherine May

Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Winter is coming. I mean that literally, and I also mean it in a more figurative sense, that hard times are always on their way. Good times too, but hard times are inevitable. It's just a part of life. And there are ways to make hard times a little bit easier to stay saner in these difficult moments. And I'm talking to one of the great experts in what is called wintering. That's the term she coined for hard times. Her name is Catherine May. She's the bestselling author of a book called Wintering, the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Very excited to bring you this conversation. One little caveat though, before we dive in, if you're watching, you'll notice the video quality is a little lower on this one. Please don't let that get in the way though of the conversation that I think will be quite impactful. Here we go with Catherine May. Catherine May, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you for having me. Pleasure to have you here. Let me start with a very basic question, which is, what is wintering? So wintering is a kind of dual purpose word, really. It partly refers to the way that animals and plants survive the winter out in the wild. But it also is something that I use to think about how we endure the times in life when we feel like winter has arrived for us. So the times when we feel frozen or out in the cold, there's loads of different ways that that comes to us. But I think it's a word that's got real resonance for how those times can feel. Yeah, as I was preparing for this and thinking about the term wintering, it struck me that it's kind of the rough patches, sometimes even worse than rough, the inevitable downturns that all of us face. Yeah, that's right. I think I really wanted to make the point in the book that when those times come to us, it's not because we've uniquely failed somehow and we're not the only ones that have ever either screwed up or had life kind of turn against us, although it can feel incredibly isolating. But actually, these periods of wintering are a normal part of life and they're, in fact, quite valuable when we look at them in the long term. In the short term, they're hideous. Wretched, no question. Wretched is a good word. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I find it and I think this is your intent, really liberating and comforting to know that you have now named this thing and that it's a part of life. It is quite literally nature and we don't need to view it as some sort of, as you said, personal failing. And I think underlying that conclusion that many of us reach about it being a personal failing is this fallacy that life will be an escalator of uninterrupted progress. But that's just not how it goes. Yeah, we think that there's a kind of upward line on a graph that we're aiming for. And I don't even think that's ideal. I mean, I think somebody whose life looks like that amazing climbing graph would actually not be learning and probably wouldn't really be engaging emotionally with many of the things that happen to us that are just normal. I mean, none of us get through this life without experiencing grief, for example. And yet we can feel incredibly shut out when we're enduring the worst ravages of it. And I just think we've needed for a long time a way to express that we are in that place, that we're in a down season and just to be able to talk about it. Do you think the pain of down seasons, rough patches, wintering, whatever you want to call it, do you think the pain of these periods, these days is exacerbated by the fact that we are all in this panopticon of social media where we see other people's edited lives and it looks like everybody else is going to a party that we haven't been invited to and we're in the middle of this shitstorm? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's also another aspect to social media, which is that we can be kind of brutal to people who are bringing the mood down. You know, there's I talk a bit in the book about toxic positivity and that that throwing of slogans at people who are unhappy, you know, to tell you to kind of look on the bright side or to to keep going or to keep striving. And actually what we're really, really bad at on social media is listening. You know, social media is broadcast mode and it's also people showing their most perfected, shopfronted selves that can be agonizing when you're having a really rough time. And I think particularly when you reach out for support, which you often see people do on social media and it just doesn't go down very well. And in fact, all it does is collect people trying to cheer you up rather than try to meet you where you are. You know, maybe what I'll do the next time I go through a rough patch is live tweet it, you know, like just probably not live tweet it. But you know what I mean? Like just just make content from the fetal position, not not despair porn, but like, OK, I'm in a period of what Catherine calls wintering and I'm just going to take you with me while I try to figure this out. Yeah. And that feels like a constructive use of social media. And I suspect people would really value it. I think it really would. And, you know, those those down periods can just be a few hours. They can be a few days. They can be a year. I think one of the challenges is that social media is a narrative form, essentially, with storytelling when we're on there and narratives of depression or illness or failure are frustrating narratives to follow because they're quite monotonous. And that's why they're so hard to live through. And I think that's why they get so roundly rejected on social media, because they don't pique interest in us. They don't inspire us. They don't uplift us. But they're also often not particularly dramatic either. And so we don't interest ourselves in them. And I just think, yes, please do share the next time you're having a downturn because it's so valuable to people. And I know you do a great job of that anyway. But I think this is where the value of real life contact comes in, too, because I think we behave very differently towards each other face to face. I think we listen better. Oh, there's just there's just no question. OK, you said something earlier that I just want to get you to expand upon, which is that in nature all around us, if we bother to pay attention, there are models of how to winter. Can you can you just hold forth on that? Oh, so much. Yeah, I mean, I was out in my garden this morning and I was looking around me at all the trees with no leaves. And I remember as a child thinking that trees actually died in winter and came alive again in the summer. And actually what happens is that they shed their leaves as an act of efficiency so that they're using less energy during the winter. But when we think about what those trees are doing, they're actually the heart and soul of the forest. Their roots are holding the ground together. They're hosting all kinds of hibernating creatures and particularly insects. They are massing their energies for the next burst of life. And in fact, their buds are already in place by the time those leaves drop off, which I never noticed until I wrote about it in Wintering. So there's one really great example of how nature gives us a kind of guide to how we compare back to and how even when we feel like all of our leaves have blown off, that actually we're still doing important work. And of course, another huge one is hibernation, which is a source of great fascination to children always. But when I was researching Wintering, I got to hold a hibernating dormouse. And I think you have dormice in America, do you? They are these incredibly cute little kind of amber coloured rodents. And what that really showed me that I'd never understood before was how cold a hibernating animal is. This dormouse had dropped its temperature down to four degrees centigrade, so just above freezing. And it felt ice cold in my hand, but it was still alive. And there was something that really struck me in that moment about what it really means to pull in all of your unnecessary parts for a little while in order to wait it out until the next phase, which is often what we do in winter. It's too hard for us to be going out in the world. So we survive it by slowing down. You have a lot of practical things to say about some options for effective wintering. But if you're OK with that, I'd love to hear just a little bit more about your personal story, which you talk about in the book. You've had several experiences with wintering, including when you were 17 years old. So maybe you could talk about that, but also the wintering story, the sort of multifactorial debacle that you talk about in the book. I quite like the phrase multifactorial debacle for describing my life that year. I wish I thought of that. That's how it felt. Yeah, I mean, I I feel like I've wintered many, many times over, you know, and I growing up as a sort of undiagnosed autistic girl, I found life incredibly difficult but didn't have a way to express it. I'd had big phases of illness which came from exhaustion by the time I hit my late teens. And when I was 17, I had a phase of such serious depression that I really didn't know how I'd come back into the world again. But what was interesting about that was that when I did reemerge after a very long time, I felt like I'd come into contact with my survival instinct in quite a passive way, you know, not in the way that you hear about survival instincts, you know, when people claw their way out of a pile of rubble or whatever, but actually just this sense of clinging on when life felt almost unendurable for a very long time. And that pattern continued through my 20s and 30s. And when I came to write Wintering, I meant to write a book looking back over those times from like the high ground and think and be like, well, everything's fine now. But, you know, this is this is my story. But in fact, while I was trying to write the book, this series of disasters kept coming at me. So first of all, I decided to quit my job because the stress had got so great. Then my husband had a very dramatic appendicitis, like burst appendix, very seriously ill, severe sepsis, absolute nightmare. Once he pulled through, I fell really ill. And then it meant that I couldn't work out the remaining months of my job. So that felt very humiliating, very difficult, very uncertain about how we'd survive. And then coming to the end of that, my son stopped coping being at school and we had to pull him out. And so it just felt like we were the disaster family for quite some time. And in fact, it was so it was I mean, this is the kind of thing that only a writer can say, but it was actually quite helpful going through that as I was writing the book, because you forget the rawness of those times and the huge mix of emotions that come into those moments. You know, that sense of humiliation is so great. And that sense of wanting, like giving everything in your power to claw your way out of it, but nothing working. And yeah, so the book was written from the eye of the storm, if you like. Yeah. Was there any relief in hitting a bottom and just being like, all right, well, OK, this here I am, this kind of sucks instead of the clawing and scrambling? Yeah, I mean, I think as with being in quicksand, you know, the clawing and scrambling makes it a lot worse. But of course, it's human to do it and we do try everything. But there's something about accepting that space, because one of the things that happens in a winter and quite often is that space opens up. We're often kind of outside of mainstream society. I find it always useful to make sure I get outside every day, whether through good times and bad, actually, that it helps in the happy times and it helps in the bad times, too. And that's one of the things that kind of punctuates the book, really, is me getting out, walking, swimming in the sea, which is a couple of minutes from my front door, which I love getting into, noticing the minute changes around me, actually, and the way that nature was working its own way through winter, as I was also working my way through, too. And I think also finding the kind of weird moments of joy that come up during those times, they're different to the joy and good times. But there were many moments when I thought, actually, I'm strangely happy in this place. I feel calm and comfortable and kind of pristinely sad. And I think a lot of the book is about allowing sadness to be a safe space, really trusting it. I think that's such an important thing to learn to do. Obviously, what I'm about to say is going to involve a lot of projection. So please correct me if I project inappropriately. First of all, I love the phrase pristinely sad, but and this will just echo the question I my last question, but I'm hearing again that there's after we go through the quite natural phase of clawing and scrambling, yeah, there, there's a kind of there's, it sounds like I can imagine a piece in the surrender of here we are. It's winter. And yeah, like I can be sad without the scramble. And there's an odd bittersweetness in that. I love the bittersweetness idea. Yeah, I mean, I think I quote Alan Watts at the end of the book, who says, I'm very bad at remembering quotes, but something like running from fear is fear running from pain is pain. And I think a lot of the agony of these times is our denial of the more difficult feelings that come up. And actually, if we can make space to let those really challenging feelings visit us, that's often exactly what we need. Because what's really happening in a wintering is that we are transforming somehow. It's not always a positive transformation. You know, it's not always wanted, it's not always welcome. And we don't, despite, you know, a whole world of like, you know, positive self help out there, you know, we don't always come out from a wintering better, for example, all of us one day will confront a decline in our health. But what we can reach is a place of acceptance of where we are, of understanding of it, and have a kind of a scheme for how we're going to live with the life that we are given right now, rather than the life that we're wishing for. Well, I'm sorry to be so positive, but isn't that better? We may not be healthier, we may not be richer, but we can be better having gone through this crucible or crucibles. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I mean, I know you spend a lot of time kind of musing on the word happiness and what it means to build happiness. I think a great source of happiness is knowing who you are and what you are at this point in your life. It's a kind of calm contentment. And it doesn't mean that life is in any way perfect. And it doesn't mean that life has stopped being challenging. But it is about what is. And I, you know, we live in this world that doesn't really ever acknowledge the isness of disability, for example, of long term illness, of loss, of genuine loss. And yet, nobody comes out of their wintering unchanged. And I think when you talk to people about the most vile moments in their life, which I've now done over and over again, what always kind of astonishes me is they, they don't regret it ultimately, they don't regret that awful time, because it forged who they are now. And that's all that's all we have. We only have that that present self, we can't cling to those past ones. So we're in the often tricky and misunderstood territory now of acceptance, aren't we? It's hard, isn't it? I mean, that we are surrounded by examples of non acceptance in this world. You know, we are surrounded now by AI generated images of a much more perfect, smooth world. We're surrounded by modified faces and bodies. We're surrounded by a public sphere where most kinds of people are actually invisible, you know, where we don't really see carers, where we don't really see the chronically ill, where we don't really see the disabled, you know, these people are not shown to us. And so when we become them, which most of us do, on some level, at some part in our lives, we really struggle with that acceptance, because we lack those, those mirrors on ourselves. Nevertheless, our work is acceptance. And one of the ways that we can do that, I think, is to look around us authentically to step out of the very glossy fake spaces that we consume and to actually look down our streets and see our neighbours. And we will immediately then see those mirrors that we really need to reach that place of calm. This will not surprise you that I completely agree with you. We need to step out of the hall of mirrors. I'm preaching to the choir, I think. Yeah, yeah. Well, but it's, you know, I actually have no problem with preaching to choirs, because we just need to hear it over and over again. So because of the power of human forgetting is so strong. If you're a regular listener of this show, you know that we're always adding amazing new teachers and new guided meditations and hosting live sessions over on my app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. What you might not know is that we also now have a full library of not just guided meditations, but also short courses and challenges. 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That's instanthydration.com slash 10 happier promo code 10 happier. But so what I was trying to pull off there was to plus one what you're saying about the power of stepping out of the digital hall of mirrors as a way to get in touch with reality, but also then to pivot to one of the main beefs you hear when you bring up this subject of acceptance is, well, you, Dan, you, Catherine are talking about passivity, about being a doormat in an era when unacceptable things are happening all around the world. And acceptance, you know, it sounds unacceptable in in that context. But yeah, I say acceptance. I mean, like not being at war with reality in this moment, seeing things clearly as they are. And then from that, I think, wiser space, choosing how to respond. Yeah, I agree. I always differentiate between control and agency. I find that a really helpful kind of distinction to make, you know, that one of the things that makes us miserable is believing that we have control, which we just don't. The world is out of our control. Unfortunately, it would be so great, wouldn't it, if it were, but it isn't. What we do have is agency. And that agency can only come from seeing the world as it is and from really understanding it because we can only take effective action. And to give a kind of real world example, yeah, we are all watching the news right now and feeling horror about so many different things and that horrible sense of powerlessness. That is the truth, though, right? We are actually quite powerless, but we can exercise our agency in lots of different ways to do what we can in those situations, whatever that choice is. We can, you know, we can donate money, we can give our time, we can realise that we can't affect the thing that we're seeing on the news, but perhaps we can affect something closer to home. You know, there's loads of different things that we have agency to do, despite ultimately not having control over it. I would say that that's different to not seeing the world as it is and therefore not thinking that anything's wrong at all or not even being aware of it. Like that's the difference that I think we're making, that actually, we can't take any effective action if we don't feel that powerlessness in the first place, because it's the same as just not engaging with the situation at all. What you're saying, which again, I completely agree with, reminds me of the way Buddhists talk about the difference between empathy and compassion. So empathy is, you know, feeling in this context would be like feeling all the powerlessness and rage that we feel when we look at the news. Compassion is empathy plus agency. Okay, well, I have some amount of power and influence in my sphere, whatever that sphere is. And so I will do my best with whatever power I have. That's agency. And I don't have full control. But it allows me to metabolise all of my feelings and not be swamped in them. I love that. It makes me think about existentialist philosophy, actually, and Sartre saying that even in the most confined circumstances, there's always choice. Those choices may be minute, but there's always choice that we take. And I just think that looking at the people I know who've affected the most change, or been the most, you know, really shown that compassion in action, it doesn't come from a disengagement with how the world actually is. It comes from a profound engagement. And often they've moved through that sense of helplessness first before they've began to think, but actually, but actually, but actually, here's what I can do. And so, yeah, I'm, I'm actually okay with people thinking that it's passive, because sometimes that passivity is the phase that we need to be in, in order to listen. And in order to, I mean, another another concept that I would draw from Buddhism, particularly from the Zen peacemakers, and the philosophy of not knowing, that's the first action, that's the first stage in taking meaningful social action is going back to a place of not knowing, so that you can truly listen and truly acknowledge the smallness of who you are, in order to then move into something that is meaningful social action. Everything about our modern world is pushing us toward knowing, right? Certainty, that, you know, those are the bad guys, we're the good guys, this is right, this is wrong, bright lines everywhere. And, and what the Buddha called for, and, and, and the Zen Buddhists really, really highlight this is a profound not knowing, open mindedness. And it's not to, it's not to encourage you to drop your values. There are some things we know, you know, killings, stealing. These are hopefully, hopefully, we still know that. Yeah. Well, the sane among us know this, right? People listening to this show. Yeah. And so we're not saying, you know, when the Zen folks are talking about not knowing, they're, they don't mean abandon all of your values. And, you know, it's, you know, inescapably postmodern, or whatever, it's like, really, you know, not knowing. And that being the place of action, as opposed to certainty and dogmatism is, is really interesting, and I think quite effective. I think so. And I think that I really admire people that go through values change as well, actually. I mean, there are, there are people who listen hard enough to let their centre shift, which has to be admired. I mean, obviously, I think there's a right and a wrong direction that because I have a sense of value. But it also, it also makes me think about sorry to, you know, we're reeling out the kind of Buddhist concepts, but the idea of the beginner's mind, and how valuable it is to approach something from the start from a kind of place of emptiness, almost. And the way that we approach learning as a beginner is so much more effective and thoughtful and humble than how we approach the world if we think we know about it already. And as we get older, it gets harder and harder to step in that mindset. But that's, that's often what I'm interested in, in doing in my writing, certainly is to try and reverse back through all my assumptions and think, wait, what if I didn't know anything about this at all? Where would I, where would I go? Let me run this by you. This is from Sharon Salzberg is an amazing teacher. Yeah. And she has this whole riff about how we We and this is true in periods of wintering. And this is true, I think, for many of us in moments of political tumult, we we grasp towards certainty because we think that's what's going to make us feel better. But most of us embrace the kind of certainty that is apocalyptic. We think we know how things are going to go and they will suck. But so therefore, Sharon's thesis is the not knowing is where the real freedom, creativity, to use your word again, agency lies. Yeah, yeah, I think that's so true. And I I'm actually really tired of these apocalyptic visions. You know, I I hear them every day, this sense of absolute hopelessness, this sense that the world is ending at the moment, that we're at the end of history. I mean, for a start, if you basically study any history, you'll understand that we always think we're at the end of history. We always think that disaster is imminent. But also, I've got no interest in the people who are giving up right now. I've got a lot of interest in the people who are not even necessarily expressing hope, but they're just taking the next step forward. They're just doing what has to be done. They're taking care of people. They are taking the action that is presented in front of them. Again, a lot of people would see that as terribly passive. But those are the people holding the world together right now. Yeah. And always. Yeah. I've said I agree with you so many times in this podcast. I wonder if we can now reach. I love to hear it, Dan, honestly. I don't get that much at home, you know. It really is a great manipulation tactic to just say, I agree with you, even if you don't. I have not done that here. I'm wondering, though, whether I wonder whether we are in the realm of a mild disagreement, though. And I agree with you. The most interesting people really are the folks who are or just taking that next step forward. You know, this has become so cliche now, but the Mr. Rogers thing of like looking for the helpers. Yeah, look for the helpers. Yeah. I do have interest in the people who are giving up, not because I think that's the move, but because I think we need to we need to rile them up. We need to get them off the couch. And I think that I think people are giving up because they've they've fallen into the trap of getting exercised and freaked out over and over and over and then bumping up against reality and realizing there's not much they can or concluding there's not much they can do about it. When in fact, actually, the real model is the folks that you're interested in who are just doing the next right thing. And that is available to all of us. It's the hidden work, isn't it? It's the hidden work of carers, of, you know, the people who work in our social services, who work in our hospitals, who work in our schools, who just get on with it and who are just doing the thing that they know needs to be done. And it's unobtrusive. It's not showy. But that is what life is. I mean, to switch books a bit, I know we're talking about wintering, but this is what I wrote about in Enchantment is the kind of the exhaustion that we feel from years of spreading fear online. And I did half a PhD once in evolutionary storytelling. And I'm still really hooked on this kind of idea that comes from evolutionary science about danger signalling, essentially, and about the way that animals danger signal to each other. So the big example is the rabbit who, when a rabbit runs, their tail flashes white behind them, like the motion of running makes their tail flash and that sets other rabbits off running. And so you get these chains of running rabbits. They don't even know what they're running from anymore, but they've seen the danger signal, they respond to it. And so then you can get these whole kind of herds of rabbits. I don't think you have a herd of rabbits, but that's fine. Running and running and running for the sake of running. And I think that's what's actually happened to us since the advent of social media. We have learned that one of the effective strategies for gaining followers and interest with our storytelling online is to send out danger signals. Nobody's really interested in safety signals. We're very interested in danger signals. And we spread them, we pass them on because it feels dangerous. So we must tell someone else. And so we're passing on these chains of fear and danger. And then we're exhausted and we're so exhausted that we can't face social life anymore because that feels dangerous to us now because it's full of these conflicts and arguments and new information that feels even more dangerous. And so the thing that I think we most need to do is to break the danger signaling and to start focusing back on life as it is presented to us and on what needs to be done on a basic level. And that's just how we've always survived up until now. Is there a middle path here where we can speak clearly about the genuine dangers abroad in the land while also giving people helpful advice for navigating this insane environment? Yeah, absolutely. And of course, not all of these things are fake. I mean, I know there's quite a lot of fake stuff going around, but these things are real. But I think we have to understand our capacity to process news on the scale that we're trying to process it. And I think one of the most important things that I've done in the last few years, and I would urge anyone else to do this, is to choose my sources of news, to choose it wisely and to look at it once a day. To go back to that model of the newspaper that you read in the morning, but it was limited. There was an end to the news. And unless that news is on my doorstep or affecting a member of my family, in which case I can definitely find more sources, it's enough for me to stay really well informed once a day and then to decide what agency I have in that situation and to take action if I can and need to, but also to put it down. Because actually, we cannot keep functioning with this level of terror rolling towards us all the time. Can I ask you a question? I'd love to ask you what it's like to work in that industry, like whether that affects you as much as it affects the viewers. Like, does the terror feel very close? You know, it's interesting when I, I mean, I've been retired from the news business for coming up on almost five years or maybe now. That's quite the anniversary. By the time I, by the time this post is probably fully five years, I, you know, oddly. There's a, when I was in the news business. I was dealing with it from a very clinical standpoint, like I was just, I was just working. So how do I deliver this almost? Yeah. How do I deliver it? But then even more embarrassing, like how am I doing compared to the competition? Am I getting this scoop or am I getting this assignment? And so it was all of that. There were multiple layers of the processing that kept me at a distance from the horror of it. There were a few points in my career where I really was hit by it. I was very upset and continue to be about Trump. So that broke through. And then, you know, I spent a lot of time in Iraq and other places in the early aughts. And so that definitely there were moments where that broke through. But largely there is a buffer because you're literally working with all of these facts and trying to figure out the right order in which to present them. And then also then there's the all of the selfish stuff around how am I doing? And so in some ways now I'm more freaked out because I'm... You haven't got that kind of, I don't know, shell around you almost that protects you from it. That's so interesting. And I wonder if there's a little, I mean, it's a little like you hear about the kind of the soldiers who are now remotely operating drones and things like that, that actually the trauma of that situation hits them much later. It takes them a while. It takes a while to like catch up with them almost. Yes, because they're playing a video game. And I was kind of playing a video game with the news. That's so interesting. Sorry to ask you questions, but I was really curious. No, it's all good. I find it particularly satisfying when one of our sponsors has become a regular part of our home life here at the Harris household. 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Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free to start selling with no seller's fees so you keep everything you earn. You mentioned Enchantment, and you're right, it wasn't the original plan to talk about it, but I don't care, fuck the plan, that doesn't really matter. With all due respect and love to Eleanor Vassili, the producer who worked very hard to prepare us. But can you just, since you mentioned Enchantment, what is that book about? Enchantment is a book that I've been working on for a long time. But can you just, since you mentioned Enchantment, what is that book about? Enchantment is kind of the book that answers the question, okay, I'm coming out of my wintering, what next? Which is something that people ask me a lot. I wrote it mid-lockdown and it really is a book about how to work through that really profound sense of dislocation that we can feel and how to make contact with the world again. I actually, I begin to feel that it's a very relevant book for right now because I'm hearing people say the same things to me again as when I was writing Enchantment, which is I'm panicking all the time. I don't think I'm allowed to rest. I don't think I'm allowed to have a spiritual life. Oh, I could meditate, but life is too urgent for me to do that, so I will leave that until stuff has settled down. A big symptom seems to be that people can't read. It's like our attention keeps sliding off the things that we consider to be a bit too soft and on to worry all the time and anxiety. Enchantment is a walk through how to reconnect with awe and wonder and how to find it right outside your door rather than believing that it's always in this kind of glamorous distant place that you can maybe visit once in a lifetime. Yeah, so it touches, I think, on a lot of the things that we're feeling right now. So if I'm hearing you correctly, your diagnosis is that many people feel that rest in any form, but it also could be reading, is self-indulgent given the state of emergency in which we're living, and so they're running themselves ragged because they feel that's the appropriate response as opposed to resourcing themselves to respond more effectively. I think that's exactly right. I think. it feels like there are so many urgent things going on and yet at the same time for most people, and I realise there'll be loads of people listening for whom this has come right to their doorstep now and that's a moment where the action is really obvious, but for loads of other people they see it in a distance and are really concerned by it and so feel like they can't allow themselves any of the things that would actually charge them up and restore them in order to be ready for that fight when they can take action and I increasingly think that the work for those of us who are not on the front line at the moment, apart from giving all the support we can, is to almost store up those soft parts of life, to kind of maintain them and look after them and tend to them so that they are ready for the people who need them. It's almost like we're maintaining a vision of the world as it should be against that hideous mainstream Trumpian vision of bitterness, selfishness, snatching, anger. It's the opposite of that. It's like the work that we do is to take care of all of the stuff that's beautiful that those people just don't understand. I just want to make sure I'm effectively disambiguating some of what you're calling for here and so we can understand it and unpack it. I think you're making a call for rest as a necessary component to responding effectively to everything that's happening but it's not just rest, it's kind of some sort of spiritual life too, or if you don't like the word spiritual but it's sort of an embrace of beauty. It's a difficult word, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. I think it is. I mean, it really surprised me that I wrote such a spiritual book. It's a book about the stuff that I've often felt too awkward to confront in my own life. By the time I wrote it, I'd been a meditator for maybe 15 years but I'd always seen that as a tool, almost a neurological tool, rather than wanting it to be any more than that. I think one of the things that I came to realise which led to me writing the book was that I needed a concept of what was bigger in the world than me and what felt connective and actually what felt actively magical sometimes, what felt transcendent. Those are the things we're at such risk of abandoning in favour of the real world and I just think we really, really need both and we can make space for that as well as doing all the good that the world needs. I think one feeds the other and the exhaustion we feel will burn us out and so we need something to maintain our energy, our passion, our spark and our sense of awe at this extraordinary planet we live on that's full of extraordinary people. So magic, mystery, beauty, wonder, awe, rest. They're big words, aren't they? Yeah, but they can be deployed in an annoyingly vague way. Stepping outside and looking up is not impractical and not gauzy and annoying to me. But what you're really saying is these words can be understood in service of addressing the emergency. Of activism, yeah. And I also think that, yes, they're big amorphous words but they can be very simply defined. You know, like I talk about when you hold a stone, it's only a few steps to realise how ancient that stone is and how it was forged and how it got there and how it represents the geology of your landscape and that can take you downwards through the soil. It can help you think about your ancestry, it can help you think about the folkloric connections that we make to place. They're, you know, like small things, very everyday things, very ignorable things, the kind of things that kids pick up and we say, oh come on, put that down now, we're in a rush, we're trying to get to the shops. Those things can hold such deep fascination for us and can unpack everything we need to restore our deep, deep ancient connection with the world and it's immense value. Okay, I'm going to alter my relationship to rocks actually and then I'm not even making fun of you, I think that's actually a good, next time I'm on the beach. I'm definitely without a rock. She's holding up a rock. Yeah, I've got a rock. Yeah, yeah. We go back to rest and the guilt that many of us feel, myself included sometimes, when I'm just taking a break during the course of the day. This is the type of thing that the me of 20 years ago would have scoffed at but now when I get into bed or when I get on the bike to exercise I will just say to myself, I'm doing this to make myself stronger and happier so that I can make other people stronger and happier. May we all be free of suffering. It's so hokey but it's really useful and I think that framing goes right to the guilt. I mean it's an annihilation button for the guilt. Absolutely and it speaks to the way that we've often treated the hardest working people in our society for a long time, which is just to say keep doing it, keep working. I had an object lesson in that this year. My husband got cancer and I had to care for him for quite an extended period of time when he was very, very sick. I mean obviously I had a child, I understood what it was to give care but the brutality of that process and the way that there was nothing in our world that made space for me to rest was such an eye-opener about how we treat caregivers and how much invisible work is done without ever having any permission to stop. I'm lucky in that he is getting better. He's still not great but he's looking after himself a bit more now. But the exhaustion that I felt at the end of that process and actually the alienation, the sense of not being cared for myself and an abandonment by the society around me that just took my intensive labour for granted has made me really think about the flip side of that and why it's so right for you to say I need the things that basically restore me in order to be able to keep on doing the good that I'm trying to do in the world. If I'd have carried on with the level of care that I was giving for a few more months, I'd have honestly been flattened for a couple of years afterwards. I was so, so profoundly drained and it's so important to express that. We're not really supposed to talk about that. We're supposed to say it was a privilege to give it and of course I just stepped up and those things are also true. But having an encounter firsthand with that level of exhaustion was so informative for me, I think. I'm sorry that you went through that, both of you. That sounds awful. Do you know what though? It's ordinary life. So many people listening right now will be going through exactly the same thing and it's so ordinary. It's just absolutely everyday stuff and it's what people are doing all the time. In your discussion of rest and your call for rest, you sometimes speak disapprovingly of what you call performative rest. What is that? Performative rest is rest that looks good to the outside. The image that I think we can all conjure up really easily is who I call yoga girl, who is this beautiful thin blonde woman in unrumpled yoga clothing and she's sitting in the perfect lotus looking like she's access nirvana and she's bullshit. I'm so tired of her. I'm so tired of her. I'm so tired of being pushed that as rest. Rest is really messy. It takes practice. We both talk about meditation quite a lot so it's not even worth me repeating this but we both know that meditation is not a smooth path. It's like this crazy bumpy ground that's full of doubt. It's wriggly sometimes. It rarely looks or feels enlightened but the value of it accumulates nevertheless throughout our messy humanness and it certainly doesn't make us perfect but it does make us better and more able to cope. I also think that rest is often not still for lots of people, that rest is found in motion, that it's found in activity, that rest is really guilt-ridden and complicated for loads of us and that we need to often distract ourselves in order to rest because we just can't bear to sit still like that. The guilt would enfold us. So yeah, I just want to ditch spa day yoga girl vision of rest and get into the real grit of it. That's what I've been exploring in my podcast and it's been so so interesting. Amen to all of that. Is there yoga boy? Is there the kind of equivalent for men? Yeah, it's the douchebag with the man bun who's playing ostentatiously spiritual music under his Instagram posts of his abs. Yeah, of course. It's got much worse out the last few years, hasn't it? I mean, we've lived with yoga girl for quite a while but there's an upsurge of some really grim yoga boy stuff on the other side now. I don't like it. There's usually a large dose of biohacking in the male version of this. No, I don't like it. I'm not having it. I'm not having any of it. It's gross. No, absolutely not. Fall weather can be fickle and Bombuz makes socks that can handle whatever the weather throws your way. Merino wool blend pairs for keeping your toes warm, sweat-wicking sports socks for fall race training, and dressy styles for any fall weddings you might have. I was actually working out this morning and very frustrated that my Bombuz were not clean and not in my sock drawer so I had to wear a different pair of socks which I don't love as much as my Bombuz. In fact, as I'm saying all of this, I'm realizing I need to go to Bombuz.com and order some more socks because I love their athletic socks so much. 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They're not even waist high and she has lined her office with them and filled them with books and the net effect is it looks quite beautiful. It's an elegant solution and that is what Wayfair can do for you for many of your interior design and also outside backyard furniture solutions as well. And now they have something called Wayfair Verified. Wayfair helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value and trusted reviews. Products that you see through Wayfair Verified are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. Find pieces made for real life and get even more value with Wayfair Rewards. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get five percent back on every purchase. Head to Wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. We're now kind of in practical land at least I think. So let's spend a little bit of time there. So in wintering you talk about some things we can do to get ourselves through rough patches but I think it very much applies to what you're interested in now is you know just living in a tumultuous world. And so some of the things you talk about are cold water immersion. You mentioned earlier swimming in the sea. I'm never going to call it cold water immersion. I'm going to call it swimming. I'm so sick of the cold water stuff. I love swimming. I love swimming in cold water. Here we go. Here's performative rest for you. This is where I see what my friend calls sauna bros. I have a friend, my friend Robbie, who is like very involved in the emergence, I think the healthy re-emergence of rediscovery of what is quite ancient sauna bathhouse culture, hot and cold. sometimes in water, sometimes not, and thunders against the sauna bros who are just performatively showing you how much time they can spend in the cold water, in the cold plunge, etc, etc. But cold water and heat both have a lot to recommend them, so say more about that. Yeah, I mean, when we look at these kind of ancient cultures, like the Finnish culture, which I talk about in wintering of sauna, which has both hot and cold, you know, it's often digging a hole in the ice, getting into the icy lake, you know, in between bouts of sauna-ing. Those cultures are founded in pleasure and not biohacking, you know. They are not founded in how many calories it's going to burn or whether it's going to, you know, increase your mental acuity or increase your endurance for your, I don't know, whatever crazy sport you're into. It's not what it's about for me, and I just think we take these beautiful things. I love swimming in the cold sea. I always wanted to do it, and when I started writing Wintering, it gave me permission to start. People ruin it all the time. The number of times people come up to me and like, did you lose weight when you started doing it? Like, that's none of your business. Also, brackets, no. How far do you swim? How long do you stay in? How cold is the water? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, and in fact, most of the time I go in there and I just tread water. We wring the joy out of these things and wring the beautiful sociability that is often inherent to loads of these things and make them into work and individualistic, like self-improvement, and I am so tired of it. Like, if you are called to cold swimming, do it, but do it for the pleasure and do it to actually explore the limits of your body. The Tantra teacher Barbara Karelis has this beautiful phrase that's the resilient edge of resistance, which is about understanding that line that your body can reach that feels good just before it crosses into unpleasantness. The way she describes it is that you know when you stroke a cat, the cat will show you that line very clearly, you know, that it will show you what's giving it pleasure and then the minute that you step over it, it will bite you. That happened to me with my cat last night. That's such a beautiful, mindful thing to explore rather than, I'm gonna get as cold as I can, set a timer and then put it on Instagram. That's not teaching you anything, honestly. It's giving you nothing. It could be good for your follower count, but yeah. It absolutely would and that's the problem with it, isn't it? But again, it almost functions as a kind of danger signal because what the conversation becomes is if you don't do this, you are not optimising your body enough and you are not fighting hard enough against your mortality, which I don't even know where to start with some of these things, honestly. Right, it's a tricky line because like I want to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible, but I also don't want to wring the joy out of all of my quote-unquote wellness activities, which by the way will degrade your health and lifespan. 100%. But also I think we have to think about these very kind of intensive individual pursuits of health and think about how they actually fall within a society and a community and I am very sceptical about whether you can pursue these things to the degree that they're pushed online and still be loving, helpful and useful within your family and your community. Like are you actually taking part and are you helping to carry the load or are you going outside and making videos of yourself in an ice bath? That's the problem. And also I think all of us have to accept that we are not going to live forever. That's a more useful place to start from than can I live forever. I think I probably can if I only find the right set of things to do. It's another illusion. I'm surprisingly grumpy at the end of this conversation. I'm so sorry. I just want people to have a nice time cold swimming. I appreciate that. Well, speaking of having a nice time, a couple of other things that you recommend kind of have to do with rituals. And yeah, so just say a little bit more about that. Yeah, I am really interested in the role of ritual. I think for me, it came up when I was researching wintering and began to look at how we make it through psychologically almost. And if we look back into history, one of the effective strategies I think that we had was gathering for different rituals at different points in time. So we all know Halloween. That is actually an ancient observation of the crossing into winter. We know Christmas, but actually we don't think too much of the solstice anymore, which is this incredibly important knot moment, which is how we think of it now. Not just the shortest day, but it's actually this passage of days when the sun is at its furthest extent and is barely rising. And that has always been a really important ritual space. There's also a ritual space at the beginning of February, which is known as Imolc in the Celtic tradition, St. Bridget's Day in Ireland, or Candlemas in the Christian church. So it's this very early marker of spring. All of those moments are moments that we used to mark. We used to get together and celebrate this change. And they used to just help us have more beats through winter, which now just feels so long and bleak and interminable. But one of the important things for me about ritual is that I think we need to learn to hold it lightly. So loads of us grew up with rituals that felt very heavy, that were very dictatorial, that were perhaps like heavy on liturgy or performance, and that we didn't necessarily feel our way into. To me, a good ritual is a simple space that we bring ourselves to as we are. And often by walking through those steps, whether it's like lighting a candle, or walking a path, or plunging into cold water, we often get to really see ourselves and to really experience our feelings. And if we set rituals up right, we welcome people in to bring difficult moments to those rituals rather than to hide them or disguise them or make them look pretty. I think, yeah, I really think that building rituals, however we want to build them, can really help in winter, like winter itself, but also, you know, very difficult times. Somebody listening to this might rightly ask, that does sound real and helpful. Yeah. So how do I do it? Like, I'm not a member of an organized religion. I don't have friends who are into this shit. Like, what do I do? Yeah, I've spent quite a few years now trying to convince my friends that we must absolutely celebrate the winter solstice. And gradually, gradually, they do. More people join me every year. I think you can celebrate rituals alone. Sometimes, for example, there's a moment in the year that I mark that I can interest absolutely nobody in, and I'll just go outside and watch the sunrise and light a candle and just take that pause. That can be enough. That's like the simplest form of ritual. But actually, you might surprise yourself if you talk to the people around you and ask them or invite them to say, do you know what? I've found the last few months really hard. There's this moment that I'm going to mark. Will you come with me? We'll, you know, we'll have hot chocolate and light a bonfire outside, or we'll watch a film that is deeply significant to me together and enjoy each other's company. You can make it an invitation. The other thing I would say, though, is that consider whether there is a group or just a particular ceremony that you'd like to join. I mean, I'll give you an example. I live near Canterbury Cathedral, which is quite a cool, cool thing to live near. And last September, I joined a service where they bless the hops, which they've done every year for decades and decades and decades. But it's this really unusual cathedral service where Morris dancers are brought into the cathedral. They dance by the altar and animals are allowed in too. And so it feels like the whole space has been completely disrupted. It's the very beginning of autumn. It's quite near to my birthday, which I liked, and it's the very end of summer. And that was a ritual that I joined in with and attended for the first time and absolutely loved. So there's lots of different ways in, I think. Is there something about rituals that mark transitions that, I don't know what I'm trying to get at here, but there's a way in which we can just walk through life on autopilot and marking discrete moments of change can jar us out of that? Yeah, we've got quite bad at marking rites of passage, I think, actually. You know, we're okay at birthdays, we do marriages, we do funerals, but we feel a bit weird about them now because we don't really want to acknowledge the death part. But there are many others too. Traditionally, having your first child was a very ritualised space and we've rejected some of those things for good reasons. But actually, some of the things we could do with coming back, being held by your community in this moment of great transition would actually be very useful rather than the isolation that so many people go through. Losing a loved one is a huge one, particularly losing a partner, I think, or a parent. We used to have very clear ways of marking these moments in our lives and also marking our progress through that grief and the way that it changes over time. So there are just loads of moments in life that we could return to. I've thought about it a lot as my son becomes a teenager as well. There's very little outside of school, which is very achievement-based, that acknowledges his transition towards adulthood, the slow walk towards it, the different bits of independence he's gaining, the different bits of knowledge and wisdom, but also what he also needs in terms of support. Yeah, I've thought a lot about this the last few years. I'm not sure I've truly solved it, but there are so many fascinating examples of cultures that do this really well. My culture, or half of my heritage, is Jewish and the bar mitzvah, I think, properly observed. My son won't have one because he's only a quarter Jewish. So would he be able to choose to have one if he wanted? I don't suppose he would, you know, I did. I think he would want it just for the money mostly, which is what got me to do it when I was a kid. But, you know, I was half Jewish and I opted for, I asked for it and therefore did it. I think when you get down to a quarter Jewish, it's, I don't know. But there are other things we can do to, you know, beyond just a birthday to celebrate the inexorable march toward adulthood. Yeah, which is so challenging and so hard. And, you know, we talk so often about how kids aren't allowed to grow up anymore, or how they're going to be living with their parents forever because they can't afford their own places or whatever it is. We talk down their progress into adulthood so much. And I think we're in desperate need of a way to actually mark the signposts of the move towards it, which are actually really remarkable when you're watching it, but very hard to sort of notice and express on a day-to-day basis. It's such an important thing that we're missing. One other practical thing I wanted to ask you about before I let you go is, you write a lot about insomnia, which I am interested in as a lifelong insomniac. Yeah, so what are your practical tips and tools for those sleepless hours? Yeah, I've always been a, I mean, I'm a very light sleeper, I suppose you could say, but I wake a lot in the night. And one of the, I mean, many things about writing Wintering really changed me. But I think the biggest aspect of all was understanding how normal it is to wake in the night, particularly in winter. There is a brilliant book called Days Close by a historian called E. Roger E. Kirch, who shows that there is a very quiet, a very hard to discern, but nevertheless, definitely there historical record of a space in the night that he calls the watch. He's not really sure that it was consistently called anything because it was just such a normal part of the day. But before the advent of electric light, he shows that it was completely normal for people to go to bed, sleep for roughly four hours, let's say, wake for a couple of hours and then go back to bed and complete the second half of your sleep. So he talks about it as a first and second sleep. And this, not only is it just normal to wake in the night, like not something particularly troubling that we should upset ourselves about, because often the anxiety we feel about it makes it way worse. But also, we used to honour this phase of the night as something really special within the 24 hours that we were living through. So it was a time when you prayed or meditated, for example, or had quiet conversation within your family, perhaps had sex as well. When we came to research this much more recently and plunge people back into the conditions that they once would have lived in all the time, restricting their light, for example, we found that people fell right back into this pattern of sleep very naturally. that actually if we tested their blood chemistry during that couple of hours in the middle of the night, that it was very different to the blood chemistry at any other point of the day, that it resembled more the blood of a lactating mother than anyone else in society, even for men, and that actually it almost primed us for a very kind of dreamy, meditative state of mind. So I don't worry so much about my insomnia anymore, I just get up and read instead. I think that's the ultimate, this is not the right word per se, but the right hack or mindset shift is don't problematize it, get up, do something fun and pleasant, not Instagram, and then when you're ready, go back to bed. That's right, and in fact, for me, it's lovely. As a kind of complete introvert, it's this lovely time of night when I have the house all to myself, it's quiet, I don't turn the lights up too high, I don't look at any screens, I don't contact the outside world, but it's actually very pleasurable to have that time and to just trust it. Most of us are not gonna die from lack of sleep, it's okay, and I think we can just, it comes back to that habit, that modern habit of measuring everything, not just time, but now we all wear these little wristbands that measure our sleep, I look at my sleep hours too, and they scare us, they really scare us. But in the deep past, when we got up in the night, we would have found company, it wouldn't have been lonely, there would have been people looking after children together because children have always woken in the night, it's completely normal. There would have been older people whose sleep is often quite broken, and there would have just been people in their watch. It's such a different way to see it. One last thing to ask you about, you've mentioned reading several times. Do you see that as a deliberate practice either for periods of wintering or any other time, any other difficult time that we might be enduring? Yeah, I mean, I think as a writer, I would say that, wouldn't I? But I do think that actually, thinking about the different kinds of reading can unlock a load of very wonderful pieces of support during difficult times. I mean, not enough people read poetry anymore, for example, but a good, well-chosen poem can be the most enormous support in a really tough time. And it's something that we might return to over and over again. We're not reading to get through that TBR pile that we've displayed on social media, we're reading to comfort and reassure ourselves and to think through a problem. I think also I write in wintering about children's books and how important they are as we grow up, but how important they can continue to be to us as adults because they often use winter as this kind of device to show how we scramble in difficult times and how we come into our own when we're at our most challenged. When things have got a bit too much, I'll often read back through my favourite children's books, first of all, because they're beautiful pieces of literary art that we should value more, but also they often speak very directly into survival. And I find them incredibly helpful. Catherine, it's been a pleasure to meet you. Let me just, before I let you go, ask you to please plug all the books you've written and your podcast, which you mentioned. Oh, yes. So I am the author of Wintering, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. The following book, Enchantment, I have to check the subtitle for that, Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. I'm rubbish at subtitles. I don't understand them. I would just like them to be called Wintering Enchantment, but apparently we have to do other things these days. And I run a newsletter called The Clearing, which is accompanied by a podcast of the same name where I ask people to imagine their dream retreat. And I would love to ask you those questions one day if you ever fancy it. Catherine May, thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy. Likewise. Also, a quick ask before I let you go. If you've got a minute, head on over to danharris.com and sign up for my newsletter. It drops in your inbox on Monday mornings, often a busy and stressful time for us. I try to write a short essay that has a little bit of wisdom, actionable, practical wisdom that you can immediately weave into your life on Monday mornings. A lot of people find them helpful and I hope you will too. You can sign up at danharris.com. It's totally free. Now to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart and Hayden Broome. Post-production is handled by the great folks over at Greenhorn Creative and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening. Deuces. Insurance is not one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you wanna pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. 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