“If you’re stacking your day with so many habits and routines that you don’t have any time to sit and just be, or to enjoy your life or play, or to run into spontaneity, that’s not wellness.”
In this special replay episode, we explore how integrating small changes into your life and building small habits can help us lead richer, more rewarding lives. Our guest today is Liz Moody, host of the top-rated “The Liz Moody Podcast,” and author of the book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success.” In this deeply insightful conversation, Liz is sharing her own wellness journey, what she’s learned along the way, and giving us actionable tips we can use to cultivate meaningful change.
Health, wellness, and overconsumption
As a veteran journalist for publications like Vogue, Marie Claire, and Goop, and as an online creator with a social media following of more than 1 million followers — Liz is no stranger to changing media landscapes. She’s witnessed firsthand the transformation from primarily print media to (now) primarily digital media. While she admits there have been many positive changes that have occurred as a result of this transition, she acknowledges the negative effects and the pressure to constantly produce and consume.
Tori points out that a lot of the industry seems to have become commodified and predatory, focused on what she calls the “green juice form of wellness,” as opposed to focusing on how to actually take care of yourself.
“I always tell people to look out for the times when wellness tips and wellness is actually making your life worse, and you’re suffering more as a result of trying to suffer less.“ She advises us to pay attention to where your information and recommendations are coming from, and the possible motivations of the people giving you that information. She shares that out of the 100 ways to change your life, you don’t need to buy anything in order to do so.
The power of small habits
Before diving into some of the key areas and important ideas in her book, Liz shares her deeply personal reason for wanting to write the book in the first place. “There was a period of time where I was experiencing really extreme levels of agoraphobia. I could not get out of bed without having panic attacks for months. And there was a point where I was like, if I have to be this uncomfortable in my body and my mind for the rest of my life, my life is no longer worth living.”
Through reaching out to experts to try and understand the reasons why she was feeling like this, she began to put together a plan to change her situation. Those small steps she began taking, laid the foundation for the life she currently lives. “Little by little, I started to piece together a life and piece together a state of mental health where I could get out of bed, where I could walk downstairs, where I could go around the block, where I could go out to a lunch outside where I had easy access to run home if I needed to with a friend.”
Sticking to your habits
Ever heard of temptation bundling? Liz describes it as a clever way to intertwine tasks we enjoy with those we might find challenging or less enjoyable. “Temptation bundling is essentially pairing something that you want to do with something that you feel like you should do.”
This approach acknowledges the reality that certain activities might be less appealing but pairs them with enjoyable ones to make the entire experience more palatable. Liz emphasizes the power of this technique by stating, “It’s kind of like tricking yourself into doing something that you should be doing by giving yourself a reward.”
Gesturing, fidgeting, and the art of doing nothing
Tori asks about a chapter in the book on creativity, where Liz introduces a concept called gesturing and fidgeting. She explains it as a tool to enhance creativity and intelligence. Drawing on insight from Annie Murphy Paul, author of “The Extended Mind,” she highlights how allowing your body to move freely during tasks can foster unique connections in the brain. “Our motions can lead our thoughts often, and our thoughts can lead our motions.” Liz encourages embracing expansive gestures and fidgeting, as it can enhance creativity and intelligence by facilitating unique connections in the brain.
The discussion then shifts to the often-overlooked art of doing nothing intentionally, exploring how these moments of stillness can rejuvenate the mind and spark creativity.
Tips you can implement TODAY to kick-start life-changing habits:
- Incorporate micro-workouts – Liz suggests simple actions like taking a five-minute walk around the block or doing squats and jumping jacks to reap benefits such as improved glucose regulation, increased creativity, and enhanced mood.
- Take a cold shower – Liz emphasizes that it doesn’t have to be extreme; even ending a regular shower with two minutes of cold water can offer benefits like balancing dopamine levels and reducing the tendency to seek pleasure through immediate phone use.
- Incorporate brief joy-inducing activities, like dancing – These small yet impactful habits can be seamlessly integrated into daily life without the need for any special equipment or purchases.
Liz and Tori talk more about building small, intentional habits to improve your physical, mental and emotional well-being on this week’s episode of Financial Feminist.
Liz’s Links:
Liz’s Book: 100 Ways To Change Your Life
Mentioned in this episode:
Liz Moody and Dr. Richard Schwartz Podcast Episode
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Meet Liz
Liz Moody is the host of the top-rated ‘The Liz Moody Podcast’ and author of bestselling books ‘100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success,’ ‘Healthier Together: Recipes for Two—Nourish Your Body, Nourish Your Relationships,’ and ‘Glow Pops.’ She is a veteran journalist for publications including Vogue, Marie Claire, and goop. Liz shares her own deeply personal anxiety journey that led her to where she is now as well as actionable, fun, and science-based ways for everyone to live their best lives.
Transcript:
Liz Moody:
Changing your entire life doesn’t work. Because first of all, your entire life is not messed up. There are parts of your life that you love, even if at certain moments you’re not aware of that. I always remind myself of that when I’m jealous of somebody is that, I would never swap my entire life with their entire life. And that always gives me a sense of perspective of like, “Oh, I’m not really jealous of that thing.” I’m not jealous of all the things that come with that thing, and it gives me a sense of peace. So first of all, you don’t need to change your entire life. You’re wonderful, you’re lovable. You have a lot of good things about you, so let’s enjoy those first.
Tori Dunlap:
Hi team. Hi Financial Feminists. Welcome back to the show. Thrilled you’re here. Thrilled to talk about habits today in 2024 and beyond. But first, couple housekeeping things. You know the drill. Subscribe, rate, review the show, it truly helps us. There’s a reason I say it almost every episode and it’s because we need your support for this show to continue doing well and continue getting amazing guests. So if you like the show, go ahead and rate it and review it. Share it with a friend, subscribe to make sure you don’t miss an episode. And if you have questions, comments, concerns about money, about paying off debt or saving money or investing, our voicemail box is open. We would love for you to submit your questions all about anything personal finance or running a business or anything like that. Link below for you to send in your voicemail and we might answer it in an upcoming episode.
Today’s guest is a friend of mine and truly one of the best recordings for me in a while, because I ask a lot of my burning questions that I have about these small ways that we can change our life. And this is not going out and purchasing something in order to better our life. This is not the TikTok shop version of wellness. This isn’t over consuming or even spending more money in the hopes that we can fix all of our problems. This is instead, small, mindful actions that we can take to actually commit to something that we’re going to stick to for the rest of our lives to make these things sustainable. And we talk in the episode about how a lot of times when we say we’re going to do something and we break it, how actually damaging that is because we’ve made a promise to ourselves and then we’ve broken that promise.
And so, we’re talking today about small ways you can change your life that involve you spending no money and don’t involve you buying the miracle cure to your problems because of course that does not exist. Today’s guest is Liz Moody, who is the host of the top rated Liz Moody podcast and author of the bestselling books, a 100 Ways to Change Your Life, the Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, relationships and Success, Healthier Together, Recipes For Two, Nourish Your Body, Nourish your Relationships and Glow Pops. Yes, that was three different books. Fucking badass. She’s a veteran journalist for publications including Vogue, Marie Claire and Goop. An online creator with a social media following of more than a million who has helped millions of people transform their lives. And the founder of Healthy Convo Co, a conversation game company designed to facilitate fun and life-changing conversations.
She sent me her Healthier Together deck about a year ago, and it’s been one of the best ways… Or maybe two years ago. It’s been one of my favorite things to bring out at dinner parties, to have conversations with friends that are deeper than just, “How’s work going? How are your kids?” And I also do them with my partner and they’re very, very insightful and enlightening. Liz previously served as food director for MindBodyGreen, a leading wellness website where she led content strategy for the food section. A regular speaker, panelists and podcast guest. Liz shares her own deeply personal anxiety journey that led her to where she is now, as well as actionable, fun and science backed ways for everyone to lead their best lives. So excited for you to hear this episode about creating these small habits for yourself. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Liz Moody:
We just got a place for the first time in after three years of nomading.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow.
Liz Moody:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s got to feel really nice and grounding. Wow.
Liz Moody:
It feels nice and grounding. It also feels very… It’s more anxiety inducing than I thought it would be, because I think I used nomad life to assuage my anxiety in some ways. And being in one place is trying those parts of me a little bit. But I think it’s going to be great overall.
Tori Dunlap:
Cool. I nomaded for a year and that was enough. I was like, “I’m done.” Did it for a year and about six to nine months in I was like, “All right. I’m ready for my own stuff and a bed that’s consistent”, and all of that.
Liz Moody:
I think that’s a good thing to say though too, because I do think that people glamorize nomad life and I think there’s a lot of really tricky parts of it. You’re away from a community, you’re away from routines, everything feels a little bit more destabilized and I don’t think people talk about that.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re buying new stuff all the time and… Yeah. It’s such a weird example that I give, but it was like… Spices. I had to keep buying paprika because it was like, I’d be in the place for…
Liz Moody:
We traveled with our spices because we’re insane.
Tori Dunlap:
No, but that’s smart.
Liz Moody:
But that’s a personal thing on our part.
Tori Dunlap:
It was like, “Okay, every month. Okay, I am in a new place. I got to buy my paprika again.” It’s another round of paprika. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I want to talk to you first about your career in the health and wellness space. You have a long career working from Vogue to Marie Claire to Goop and then MindBodyGreen. Talk to me about how much the wellness space has changed. It’s changed and transformed a lot in the last 10 years, so walk me through some of those changes and how they’ve felt.
Liz Moody:
Obviously I think the biggest change that’s happened in the media space and the traditional media space is this transition from print media to primarily digital media. And while that can have some positive effects, I think there’s a little bit of a democratization of voices that are able to be heard, and that’s absolutely wonderful. It can also have some negative effects that I think we all are really feeling right now, which is that you constantly need to write articles. The pressure on writers and editors to churn out articles to get clicks, to get traffic is so, so, so immense. And because of that, you’re always looking for new angles, new things to be scared about, new things to be excited about. You’re pulling tiny little pieces out of studies that maybe don’t have any real world significance, because you need something to write about. And I think we feel that in the wellness world as consumers where our heads are turning this way and that and we’re like, “Do I need to be trying this? Do I need to be eating this? What should I actually be doing on a day-to-day basis?”
Tori Dunlap:
And I think also just the wellness industry in general has been highly commodified and at times very… I’m just going to say it. At times very predatory and I think very focused on a lot of the green juice form of wellness, not how to actually take care of yourself. So tell me a little bit about that transition in the last decade too.
Liz Moody:
Well, I always say two things. One, wellness is a tool. It’s not an end unto itself. So the second that wellness is making your life worse, it’s no longer wellness. If you are suffering in the name of getting well. If you are not going out to dinner with your friends because you’re afraid there’s not going to be something cooked in the right oil on the menu. If you are stacking your day with so many habits and routines that you don’t have any time to sit and just be or to enjoy your life or to play or to run into spontaneity, that’s not wellness. So, I always, always tell people to look out for the times when wellness tips and wellness is actually making your life worse and you’re suffering more as a result of trying to suffer less. The other thing that I always say is to be really, really careful with figuring out your why behind anything.
This is one of my first tips in my book, because it is so, so important. You need to know the reason for every habit, everything that you’re purchasing and supplement you’re consuming. You need to know the reason behind that and what your goal with that thing is. Otherwise, we so quickly bloat our medicine cabinets, our pantries, our daily routines with things that aren’t a good fit for us, and we run out of time to do the things that actually matter and money to do the things that actually matter to us. So for me, I’m always working on my mental health. Anxiety is something that I’ve struggled with for a really, really long time. My routine is really designed around how does this help me mentally, feel the way that I want to feel every single day. But somebody who doesn’t have the same mental health struggles, who maybe has an energy struggle or a gut health struggle, or they feel lonely and they really want to work on their relationships, their routines and what they’re purchasing and what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis, it’s going to look so, so different.
So I’m always telling people, ask yourself why. And the why cannot be because an influencer does it or because society has told me that I need to be thinner and take up less space and that will make me have more value in the world. You really need a why that is going to resonate with you, otherwise you won’t stick to something. I think this is a huge thing that people run into when they’re going to the gym or trying to eat differently, because they want to look a certain way. And then you ask them, “Well, how do you think your life would actually be different if you looked differently?”
And they don’t have a real answer for that because they know that everybody who loves them is going to love them regardless. They’re not loving them because of a lack or a bounty of cellulite. You know what I mean? And so you need a why, that is like, “I’m going to work out so that I have more energy. I’m going to eat well so that I can feel the way that I want to feel.” And that’s so much easier to stick to.
Tori Dunlap:
Just plus one on all of that, could not agree more. I think I also… My follow-up question to that, you said if you’re doing something just because an influencer is telling you to do it, that’s not a good enough reason. Let’s talk about the over-consumption in the wellness industry. We joke our team, our first center case team like, I think every other TikTok we see now has a little TikTok shop thing of like, “This is the thing that you need in order to change your life.” And then you’re suddenly like, “Do I need this thing?” So talk to me about over-consumption in the way that products are offered as solutions. How do we just stay mindful of that and mindful of the temptation? And I’m asking for myself as well, when I buy a product and I’m like, “Cool. This’ll change my entire life and make me a new person.” That’s not realistic. So talk to me about that.
Liz Moody:
I think it’s about being mindful about where the information that you’re getting is coming from and what are the motivations of anybody who’s giving you that information? That’s really important for media literacy in general when we’re talking about misinformation spreading about political things or world events. But also with shopping, literally, who is giving me this information and what do they stand to gain from me having this information? I am incredibly proud of the fact that in my book, you don’t need to buy anything to do a single one of the a 100 ways to change your life. I’m very, very firm on the fact that we have all of the tools that we need to live our best lives. We just need to know how to utilize them. But on social media, they make their money off of having us buy products. That’s a huge, huge, huge part of the financial strategy for these large social media companies. And so, obviously like TikTok Shop, they’re pushing that because that’s a huge strategy for how they’re making their money right now.
Tori Dunlap:
And I think that there’s certain things that you can purchase that will make your life better. I jokingly talk about how I bought a $70 pregnancy pillow when I’m not pregnant and don’t plan on being pregnant and I love that thing. Fucking love my snoogle. But there’s other things that I’ve bought that don’t make my life any better and that I did buy expecting to fix all of my problems and fix my life, because I was trying to fill some sort of emotional void. And was feeling gross about my body or gross about me not working out. And so I’m like, “Cool. I will buy a bike desk.” That’s the thing I bought in the pandemic. Do I still use it occasionally? And I actually used it this morning. But can I tell you the last time I used it other than this morning? Probably not.
Liz Moody:
Well, and I think that if you ask yourself the find your why thing is so applicable there too.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Liz Moody:
Because I’m not getting very much movement into my day. I’d love to be able to build more movement in, but this is all I have time for right now. I’m going to get a bike desk. I think if you’re looking through as TikTok shops are coming up on your feed over and over, instead of just being like, “Ooh, ooh, ooh”, because that’s just preying on you getting that quick dopamine hit. And there are other ways to get that dopamine hit. There are other ways to bring your dopamine into more of a state of balance so that you don’t need that quick dopamine hit. But, I think if you’re always confronting those moments with awareness, you’re going to purchase really different things.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. So you’ve mentioned your book. Your book is called A 100 Ways to Change Your Life. I thought it’d be fun to go over a couple of the key areas and the chapters that stood out from the book and break those down, especially as the whole New Year’s resolution excitement starts to wear down. But first, let’s talk about your thesis for why you wrote the book.
Liz Moody:
I wrote the book for a number of reasons. Some of which were deeply personal. So I changed my own life and I did it through incremental research back steps, much like the ones that I present in the book. There was a period of time where I was experiencing really extreme levels of agoraphobia. I could not get out of bed without having panic attacks for months. And there was a point where I was like, if I have to be this uncomfortable and my body and my mind for the rest of my life, my life is no longer worth living. It was a real horrible period for me. And I like talking about it because during that period, it was so important for me to find other people who had been where I was and were living lives that seemed full and thriving and rich to me.
So it’s very important to me to constantly say, “I was there and I am now here so you can be there too”, to anybody else who might be there. But when I was laying there in bed, when I couldn’t get out of bed without having panic attacks, I’d been a journalist for a really long time at that point. So I was laying there with my head on my pillow and my computer propped up next to me and I started emailing experts. Because that was the only thing that I really knew how to do. I started finding expert sources and I would ask them, “What is happening when you get anxious? Where’s that located in the brain? What’s happening when you have a panic attack? How does food impact anxiety?” And I started to put together a plan for myself. And to be fair, not everybody wrote back.
I was emailing the head of neuroscience at Stanford and all these people [inaudible 00:15:07] is a real never be the one to say no to yourself, which is another one of my life motto’s moment. But I’d say a good handful of people wrote back. And I was able to cobble together this plan. And when I started to do these things, my life started to change. Not overnight. There was not a, “Oh my gosh, I woke up and I’m a different person”, and I still have anxiety and I want to be really open about that. But little by little, I started to piece together a life and piece together a state of mental health where I could get out of bed, where I could walk downstairs, where I could go around the block, where I could go out to a lunch outside where I had easy access to run home if I needed to with a friend.
And that laid the foundation for the life that I live now. So I have this very personal motivation. And then I have this other motivation, which is that, there’s all of these amazing books out there that talk about things like your gut health or your hormone health or your friendships or your relationships romantically or things like that. But they tend to exist in a silo. And I think all of those books, all of those resources are so, so important. But I wanted to make the connection of your gut health, your microbiome say, is impacting your mental health via the gut brain axis. We know this, this is well-researched. Your mental health is impacting the way that you’re going to show up at work, show up in your relationships.
The way that you show up at work, show up in your relationships is going to impact your stress levels, which is going to impact your microbiome. It’s all connected. So I have 18 different categories in the book. You don’t have to go through all of them. You can do them piecemeal. If one week you’re feeling really lonely, you can flip to the section about how to make your relationships better, how to make your friendships better. If another week you’re having gut struggles, you can flip to that section. But by having all of the resources, you’re able to make your life better from a holistic perspective and people will be able to see better results.
Tori Dunlap:
I love this idea of viewing things truly holistically, because one of the things that I’ve… And this is the classic thing where I literally have just opened another tab to order your book is, I am realizing in my own life I worked with an energy coach for a couple years and I was not a woo woo type person and that felt ridiculous, but I was very similar to your story in a different way. I was really emotionally struggling and at a really low point in my life in late 2020 and grieving a lot of shit and I didn’t know what to do and was like, “Okay, I haven’t tried this. Let’s see what happens.” And one of the most beneficial things I learned from that is truly how connected our brains and bodies are. And I’ve always been the person that’s very cerebral and makes decisions based on what my brain thinks, but also has a very good gut instinct.
And yet was not realizing that these things have to correspond together and that every time I have pain somewhere, it’s my body trying to tell me something. But also that, not all of my decisions have to be made logically. They can be made with and through my body. And so, what you just said is something that I think that I’ve started to learn and want to learn more about of how all of these things are interconnected and how when we feel a certain way, our body carries it. And when we’re in a particular mindset, it changes how our bodies react to things as well. So, I just appreciate all of that.
Liz Moody:
I have so many thoughts on that. My first thought is, 2020 is when your career was really taking off, wasn’t it?
Tori Dunlap:
Uh-huh.
Liz Moody:
I just find that so interesting. So many of the most successful people that I know in the moments where everybody is jealous of them, everybody is like, “I wish I was where she is”, that’s often the moment they’re struggling the most. And I really like day lighting that, because it gives a little peek behind the curtain and I think it can make the rest of us who are sometimes on the outside being jealous, feel a little bit better.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. It’s something that… I’m not sure when we’ll really see episode, but I recorded an episode about my grief experience during that time. And yeah, publicly I talk about… Publicly we were killing it. Things were going great. Privately I was crying on the bathroom floor all the time and feeling completely and totally numb and… Not suicidal, but just questioning if I was ever going to feel joy again. And as a joyful person, that was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever experienced.
Liz Moody:
Yeah. I don’t want to dive into that too far, but I do think there’s an interesting thing that happens, especially when the outside world starts validating you immensely. And then you almost are become a little bit reliant on that and it can make your internal validation a little bit trickier. And I’ve noticed that with a lot of people whose jobs offer a lot of outside validation that they’re really struggling with that internal validation and it can make life feel really hard.
Tori Dunlap:
Anybody who knows me really well personally knows I’m a little validation monster. I’m just like, [inaudible 00:20:03]. I’m words of affirmation. I’m like, “If you want to tell me anything nice, I will just eat it like cookie monster.” Just like, [inaudible 00:20:09]. But yeah, that’s a whole other conversation.
Liz Moody:
Yeah, that’s a whole other conversation. The other thing I will say is that there’s a great research that I share in my book. I believe it’s London Stock Exchange Workers, and it essentially showed that they were able to make more money if they were able to tap into the signals that their body was giving them. So if they could sense their body, they could sense their gut, they could sense their heart rate, things like that, they would literally make more money on the stock exchange. And it’s a really wonderful research example of how tapping into your body’s intelligence, literally can be validated from a fiscal perspective. It’s not just like, “Oh, trust your gut, trust your intuition.” It’s not really woo woo. It is proven that that has huge, huge benefits. And learning how to do that is one of the most powerful tools that we can have.
So we talk about in the book, tuning into your body signals after you make a decision, literally writing down how you feel in your body. And then later when you see how that decision pans out, revisiting those feelings and say, “Oh. What were those signals?” Literally training yourself to tune into your body on a regular basis can help you tap into a type of intelligence that is really, really helpful.
Tori Dunlap:
Can we talk more about that? Because when we discuss body intelligence and understanding that, I can hear that and know that sometimes I’m good at that. Other times I’m really good at gaslighting myself. Or I haven’t been in tune with my body for years, and so I don’t know how to actually get there. Talk to me a bit, and if there’s a listener out there who’s also wondering, “How do I actually make that mind-body connection, and how do I trust myself when I do feel that way?
Liz Moody:
I have a few tips for this and I am definitely there as well. I think it’s incredibly hard for all people, but especially women who have been fed messages from the second that our eyes are open about who we’re supposed to be, what we’re supposed to feel on a moment to moment basis. Of course it’s going to be hard for us to listen to ourselves. How are we supposed to differentiate our own voices when we have never had a single moment where we get to just hear our own voices? So a few things I think are really helpful. One, you mentioned self-trust. I think that self-love and self-trust really go hand in hand. And those are built from keeping tiny promises to ourselves. It seems very simple as a concept, but if you look through your day, I bet most of our days are littered with a string of broken promises.
This looks like, “I’m not going to look at my phone first thing in the morning.” And then you roll over in bed and you’re feeling kind of groggy and you don’t really want to get up and you reach for your phone and you’re like, “It’s fine. I deserve it. I’m going to just look at it this time.” That’s a broken promise to yourself. That is you diminishing your trust in your own word and your ability to trust yourself. It’s connected to self-love because then later if you’re saying, “I love myself, I believe in myself. I know I can make this decision. I know the right choice.” You’ve broken that trust. Why would you listen to that voice? So, I think one of the most helpful, pragmatic things that we can do to build this relationship, because I need pragmatic steps, people are like, “Trust your gut.”
I’m like, “Right, right, right.” Okay. Where is that again? And how do I do that? But the most pragmatic thing we can do is notice or even intentionally make these small promises to ourselves and then keep them. And if you find yourself breaking them day after day after day, set the bar lower. If it’s not, I’m going to go to the gym every single day, I’m going to walk around the block every day. If it’s not, I’m going to meditate for 20 minutes. I’m going to meditate for two minutes. Do it until you can keep the promise to yourself. You can build that foundation of self-trust, and then you can amp up the habits that you want to have and you can amp up your ability to tap into your gut to figure out what you want in this world.
Tori Dunlap:
If you’re not watching on YouTube, Liz, just read me for fucking filth. Jesus Christ. It’s so funny you say that because right before we hopped on this podcast, I ate lunch and I had a mini lunch at 1130, and then I knew I was going to have calls. So then I had a bigger lunch, and after mini lunch, I had my chocolate for the day. And then I said, “No, we’re not going to have any more chocolate because you had half a chocolate bar and that’s enough.” And then what did I do? I had more chocolate, which is not a bad thing, but I had already had chocolate. I didn’t need more chocolate.
Liz Moody:
The thing is, it’s not a bad thing inherently, it’s a bad thing because you told yourself that you weren’t going to do it.
Tori Dunlap:
And then this morning I had signed up for a bar class at 7:15 in the morning, which I don’t know you normally do, because that’s too early. And last night I was like, “Nope. I’m not going. I’m not going to do it.”
Liz Moody:
And that’s a great example of your gut was trying to tell you something your gut was saying, that’s too early. I don’t do bar classes.” Even the way you explain that to me, you’re like, “I don’t do bar classes that are like…”
Tori Dunlap:
That’s true.
Liz Moody:
… But you’re trying to become the type of person who did that. And so that’s fine. I completely am on board with evolution and transformation, and I don’t think that we’re fixed. I think that I believe very strongly in a growth perspective in a Carol Dwecky in sense. But, I think you can set the bar lower. Maybe you put on a bar YouTube for 15 minutes and you do that when you roll out of bed in your pajamas.
Tori Dunlap:
Which is what I was supposed to do. That was the happy medium I was supposed to do. But then I sat in bed and watched Survivor instead, which was also great.
Liz Moody:
Live out, play out last.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, baby. But it was not the thing that I had intended on doing so,
Liz Moody:
And I think we have to be gentle with ourselves too.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. No, but I love what you just said, which is, if it is a promise, I think the difference is, if I had said to myself, “You are a bad person and you are gross, so you don’t get chocolate.” That’s a punishment. That’s not a promise. It is, “Tori. Hi, I love you and you had some chocolate already because that’s what makes you happy and that’s what you wanted, but you don’t need to eat the entire chocolate bar.” You’re, “Okay. You don’t need to eat the entire thing.” And now I didn’t, but I ate more than I promised myself. And I think that that’s the difference is it’s like, I’m not shaming myself or I’m not punishing myself, but I have made a promise and I really appreciate that. I’ve never heard it phrased that way of like, “I’ve broken a promise to myself.”
Liz Moody:
And going back to what we talked about earlier, I think this is why finding your why is so important, because it is so much easier to keep those promises to yourself if you know the motivation behind those promises and if that motivation actually resonates with you and isn’t just something that you’ve been told that you should do.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Well… I’m going completely off script here. But then my next question, and this is a personal question as well is, I get caught in the treat mindset, which is like, “Life is hard and you deserve a little treat.” And I completely agree and I will treat myself. But then it’s like my fourth treat of the day, and I don’t know if I needed four treats, but that’s the justification is it’s just like, “Life’s hard. You get to have more chocolate.” And so we’re going to love ourselves and we’re going to give ourselves more chocolate, even though we don’t really need that. I don’t know. Am I asking you to fix my life? Kind of.
Liz Moody:
That’s what I’m here for.
Tori Dunlap:
What is the balance there? What’s the balance there? Because it’s like, yes. We deserve treats and we shouldn’t be punishing ourselves, but also we want to hold ourselves to a higher standard. I don’t know.
Liz Moody:
I think what we’ve been sold and what you’re talking about is a false dichotomy that treats are treats because they’re not inherently good for us. And I don’t think that that’s true. I think that there’s a lot of ways that we can treat ourselves that will make us feel good now and make us feel good later. So from a really pragmatic perspective, I would ask what treats make you feel really good in this moment and genuinely feel rewarding and feel good later? That’s a real question.
Tori Dunlap:
Watching Survivor in bed. That was honestly really a really lovely way to start my day as I woke up earlier than I normally do.
Liz Moody:
And I think that’s beautiful. That can say to yourself like, I’m not rushing around right now. That can say, I deserve a moment of peace before I’m jumping into my day.” I think treats can look like different things for different people. So one, I would say, let’s try to build a life that we’re not trying to escape from, so that our treats can feel genuinely fulfilling instead of some type of escapism. And if your treats are consistently a type of escapism, I think then it’s time to step back and look at the life that you need the treats to get through. And then beyond that, I would say, can we evaluate this false dichotomy of treats have to be things that are essentially bad for us or make us feel worse later? Because I think that a lot of treats can feel really good now and taste really good now and feel really good later.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and you talk about in your book this idea of temptation bundling. Can we talk a bit about that?
Liz Moody:
Yeah. Temptation bundling is based off the work of Dr. Katy Milkman. She is a Wharton professor. She is absolutely amazing. She studies behavioral change. So, temptation bundling is a really wonderful way to get yourself to do the things that might be a little bit harder to do, and it is via little treats. So this is a great way to use your little treats. It actually can cut back on using the treats in times that you may not want and use those treats to get to what you want to do. So what you do is, you take the things that you dread doing, but you know that you need to do. Things like folding laundry is one for me. I don’t have that many chores. My husband does far more of the household labor, but my one chore is laundry, and I still am terrible at it.
So what I do is, you take the thing that you hate the most and you bundle that with the thing you love the most. And this can’t just be, “I like listening to podcasts, so I’ll listen to a podcast while I fold my laundry.” This needs to be, “I reserve my favorite podcast. I only listen to her first 100Ks podcast when I’m folding my laundry.” So you are saving that podcast for the time that you’re doing the thing that you don’t want to do. Maybe you have a favorite snack. You only eat that snack when you’re doing your email inbox clearing once a week or something like that, although I’d really like if you ate your snack mindfully. But things like that, you’re taking the thing you hate the most and you’re combining it with the thing that you love the most and you’re only doing the thing that you love the most during the time of the thing that you hate the most, so that you are motivated to do it.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Maybe it’s listening to your favorite album while looking at your money.
Liz Moody:
Yeah. Honestly. That’s a great association and I think that we have so many negative associations with money that we need to tip the balance on. And I love the idea of being in a really beautiful, relaxing environment or listening to a really wonderful album, things like that, that make dealing with your money a beautiful sensory experience. I think there’s something really lovely about that.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and I like the idea too of it’s the thing that it’s only that. Because I can go, “Oh, I like listening to podcasts and I’ll do it.” For me, it’s taking out the trash. And my partner knows this, taking out the trash and the recycling. I refuse to do it. I hate it. And so, he will often come in and do it for me because I hate it so much. And so, yeah, it’s not just like, “Oh, I’m going to listen to podcasts”, but I cannot listen to the Liz Moody podcast. I can’t listen to maintenance phase, I can’t listen to whatever podcast I’m looking forward to, unless I’m doing the thing that I know I need to do, even if I hate it.
Liz Moody:
Imagine if you could only watch Survivor when you are doing something that you absolutely hated.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Okay. But real question, does that make me hate Survivor then if I’m doing the thing that I hate? Or does it on the flip side, make me actually love the thing?
Liz Moody:
It hasn’t for me.
Tori Dunlap:
Does it make me love taking out the trash.
Liz Moody:
Because you’re doing the thing you hate. That’s the thing. Is like, I feel so good after I fold the laundry. I feel like I’m finally a contributing member of my household. And so the fact that my favorite podcast can get me there, an episode of Real Housewives of New York can get me there, it makes it even more wonderful. And I actually think saving things. Having things not constantly available to us, increases their value in our minds. That’s something that marketers use over and over and over again. So I think the idea, “Oh, I can only engage with this media when I’m doing this thing”, actually would increase its value, not decrease it.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, it’s something you look forward to, which is the idea of treats. It’s not a treat anymore if it’s just things you’re doing all of the time. It doesn’t feel special. It’s just your lifestyle now, which can be fine, but that’s not a treat anymore. That’s just the thing that you’re doing all of the time.
Liz Moody:
Also, there’s incredible psychology around the fact that we enjoy anticipation of excitement and pleasure far more than we enjoy the pleasure itself. So we get more happiness out of planning a vacation than being on vacation. And I think that looking forward to your favorite podcast or looking forward to your favorite show can be as powerful as actually watching it or listening to it.
Tori Dunlap:
I was just about to cite the vacation example. I’m literally going to California tomorrow for four days in a hotel, really nice hotel with my partner, and I’m just like, I’m looking up I’m like, ritzcarlton.com. What are the like… Tell me all of the features of the hotel. Tell me what the spa looks like. I’m so excited.
Liz Moody:
Well, and such an interesting part of the human experience is that, when we go on the vacation, because it’s real, because the weather might not be perfect because we might not sleep perfectly through the night because there’s a noise.
Tori Dunlap:
Because we get sick.
Liz Moody:
It’s real. Yeah, we get sick, which is one of my biggest fears when I travel. All of these things. We literally do enjoy the anticipation more. So I tell people, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t obviously go on the vacation and enjoy the vacation as much as you possibly can. But I do tell people to lean into the planning element of it because that is part of the joy of the vacation. Going on the hotel website, reading all the restaurant menus ahead of time and looking at the pictures of the food on Instagram, that is part of the vacation. And you shouldn’t treat it like it’s a chore, a burden to get through. You should enjoy it as part of the vacation.
Tori Dunlap:
I love that. Let’s talk about, if you are listening, when this episode comes out, the new year, new you mindset is starting to wane. Maybe you’re just looking to build some new habits this year. How do we stick to our habits and why is it helpful to achieve some of the bite-sized goals you talk about in the book as opposed to saying, “Okay. Tomorrow I’m going to change my entire life.”
Liz Moody:
Changing your entire life doesn’t work. Because first of all, your entire life is not messed up. There are parts of your life that you love, even if at certain moments you’re not aware of that. I always remind myself of that when I’m jealous of somebody is that, I would never swap my entire life with their entire life. And that always gives me a sense of perspective of like, “Oh, I’m not really jealous of that thing.” I’m not jealous of all the things that come with that thing and it gives me a sense of peace. So first of all, you don’t need to change your entire life. You’re wonderful. You’re lovable. You have a lot of good things about you, so let’s enjoy those first. But second, the more that you try to change it once, the harder it’s going to be. And the less rewards you have built in of feeling like you are achieving your goals, the less likely you are to stick to these things.
So bite-sized goals are a tip in the book, and they’re essentially looking at your greater goal. So something like, I want to write a book. If I had sat down one day and just said, “I want to write a book”, and I’d pulled open my computer and I’d started typing, it would’ve felt so intimidating. I would’ve been like, “Where’s the finish line? How I’m going to do this every day?” But instead, I said, “I’m going to write a 1000 words a day. I’m going to write a 1000 words a day until this book is done. And if you’re a writer, a second little hot tip is, those a 1000 words can be absolutely trash. Absolute garbage. You will edit it later, it will be great. So every day I wrote a 1000 words. They were often truly hot garbage words, but they were a 1000 words on the page, and that was my bite-sized goal.
So I would encourage anybody to zoom out a little bit. In a year, where do you want to be? What do you want your life to look like? Pick one thing and then walk it backwards. What’s something that you can do on a weekly or daily basis to get you towards that larger goal? It’s also going to be much more helpful. It’s going to be really, really helpful for avoiding procrastination because you can procrastinate on, “Oh, in six months in a year, I want to have this done forever.” But if you’ve broken that down into every single day, I need to do this, you can’t procrastinate on that because you know what you’re actually doing and you know what you need to achieve in that 24 hour period.
Tori Dunlap:
And I think that’s how we sabotage ourselves. Of course, is it’s like, okay, because we get motivated, which is very lovely and exciting, we’re like, “Okay. I want everything to change.” And because we don’t have patience, we’re like, “I want it to change tomorrow.” And again, I’m now just calling myself out. And then of course it doesn’t happen because it’s unrealistic. And it’s also the recipe for us giving up because we don’t see immediate results and we don’t see an immediate complete lifestyle change. And so we’re like, “Well, fuck this. This isn’t worth our time.”
Liz Moody:
We need to have rewards for our habits. So those can either be things that are intrinsic to the habit. So one of the ways I’ve been able to stick to a workout routine, which took me over 30 years, well, I guess I wasn’t walking for some of those years, took me a very long time to be able to stick to a workout routine. And that was after years of working in the wellness space and editorial. But the way I was able to do it was noticing the immediate after effects. Before I was doing it to essentially have a different size body. And every day I’d go do my workout, and then I would look in the mirror and my body looked the exact same afterward, and I was like, “Well, this is stupid. Why am I even doing this?” But when I switched it to, “Oh, on the days that I work out, I have significantly more energy. I feel significantly calmer.”
And I tap into that and I notice that that builds reward system where I actually want to do the workouts. The same if you can’t find an intrinsic reward for your habit, then I think you can add in a little bit of an extrinsic reward. You can have the commitment devices, you can have the album listening, you can have the Real Housewives, all of those types of things. But your habits that you have, they need to have rewards, otherwise you won’t keep doing them. So intrinsic rewards are my favorite. And that goes back to the find your why. I don’t mean to keep pressing it, but I just think it is so, so, so important.
I know that my why is about my mental health, and it’s about being able to live the experientially rich life that I want to live. So energy and calm are top, top, top of my list. So when I tap into, “Oh, I’ve found something and it is free, and I can do it in my living room, in my sweatpants every day”, that will give me that sense of calm and give me that sense of energy, I’m all about that. That is so motivating.
Tori Dunlap:
We had Sadie Lincoln who was barre3’s founder on the show, and I have talked many, many times about how barre3 completely changed my life and changed my approach to fitness and working out in my body. And one of the things that speaking of rewards, yes, I feel better and I can see the change a 100%, and I can also feel myself getting stronger. But especially after COVID, I have realized the importance of going and doing something in person with other people, where my phone is not involved, where no technology is involved. I run an entirely digital company that is virtual, and I love my team, but I don’t get to see them in person. And I show up to class and I’ve made friends.
And at least even if I don’t know anybody in the class, I have other human beings around me for that 45 minutes to an hour where I’m not touching my phone, where I’m focused on my body and where also there’s other people and other people’s energy. And that truly has just made such a difference. And I’ve only just understood in the last six months to a year how much I desperately missed that and have needed that.
Liz Moody:
I want to point out something you said, which is that you’re not on your phone. Because you essentially can’t be on your phone at a workout class. And I hear this from people all the time. I love going to my yoga class. I love going to my workout class because I can’t be on my phone. And it almost feels like people are apologetic as they say. It’s like, “Oh, that’s a silly reason to enjoy going to a workout class.” But I think it is such an important thing to realize, especially if one of your goals is redefining your relationship with your phone, which I think that’s a huge goal for so many of us. But we’re out here relying on our willpower. We’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to reach for my phone, so I’m just not going to do it.” But our phones are so incredibly addictive.
They have been designed from the ground up to be so incredibly addictive. So if we want to stick to that habit, to that goal, we need to literally put boundaries between ourselves in that and that situation. We need to not rely on our willpower because our willpower was never designed to withstand the pull of this technology. That is not a failing on our part. That is by design how the system works. So I think doing things like going to workout class, building in times of your day where you literally can’t reach for your phone, plugging your phone in another room at night, that’s not cheating or you being weak. That is how we have to do it because these things are designed to hijack our brains.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to just highlight, you can tell you’re talking to two podcast hosts. I just realized that we’re doing the thing where we’re like, “Hold on. What you just said is so crucial and important.” We’re doing the hosting back and forth.
Liz Moody:
I love it. Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
No, I fucking love it. It’s great. You can just tell it’s like [inaudible 00:41:50] we could do a whole parody spoof of this. Wait, I just want to write what you just said. Hold on. We have to highlight what you just said.
Liz Moody:
Oh my gosh. We should do that. Like the TikTok, what is it? Where it’s like…
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I’m a podcast host.
Liz Moody:
I’m podcast host. I’m going to tell you to…
Tori Dunlap:
I’m going to say, “Hold on. I have to call that out really quick.”
Liz Moody:
I have three thoughts on… Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
But I do want it, I’m going to call it out really quick. What you just said I think is so crucial is, I think when it comes to money too, is we think, “Oh, it has to be hard because then we’ve “Earned it.”” And what I often tell people is, you don’t get an extra gold star for making this harder than it has to be. And I think about this in my own life all the time. I will force myself to not write things down because I’m like, “Well, you should just remember it.” And then of course, I don’t remember it, and then I’m fucked. And then I’m like, “Why didn’t I just write that down?” Oh, because I thought it was weakness. I thought it was weakness if I had to write something down in order to remember it. And it’s the same thing with money. It’s like, “Oh. Well, I should remember to pay my credit card every month.” I’m like, “Just set up an automatic transfer. Just set up an automatic payment.” You don’t get an extra gold star if you make this harder.
Same thing with your phone. It’s like, “Okay. I should just be able to not look at it.” Well, unfortunately we’re at the point where that’s not going to work. So, it’s not you being weak, it’s not an apology. It’s something that you have to do, and that’s okay.
Liz Moody:
Well, and then you have to question what societal messages we’ve internalized to make us believe that suffering is strength. Honestly, suffering is not strength, but we have internalized that it is. And I would ask who’s benefiting from that? And I think there are a lot of people and the people we want to benefit is ourselves. So I think deprogramming that messaging a little bit can be incredibly beneficial.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to skip down to, you have a chapter in creativity. Let’s talk about gesture and fidget with intention and do nothing with intention because I’m really bad at the do nothing. And I will also say that my team wrote that question with an I pronoun because again, they’re also reading me [inaudible 00:43:53]. So tell me more about doing things with intention, especially like doing nothing with intention.
Liz Moody:
So we’ll start with the gesturing and fidgeting. That’s really easy one. This is also from Annie Murphy Paul. She’s the author of The Extended Mind, and she’s a science journalist who studies how we can tap into types of intelligence that are not as lauded on a societal level or that we might not even be aware of. And her work shows that gesturing and fidgeting actually helps us make connections in our brains that we wouldn’t otherwise be making. Our motions can lead our thoughts often and our thoughts can lead our motions. So the way that that can be beneficial in our day-to-day life is instead of forcing yourself to sit there and keep your arms clasped tightly on your chest, allow yourself to make big movements to talk broadly. And that will help you piece together the connections in your brain that will help you think more creatively and think more intelligently.
I think this is especially important for children in schools. We tell them they have to sit there and stay in their desk and don’t fidget and don’t squirm, and we’re actually impeding their intelligence. And also I think getting in the way of a lot of the natural energy that they have as children. But I think that if we said to ourselves, let the children squirm a little bit, it’s actually helping them think, that would be a nice reframe on a societal level. And I know when I’m doing interviews or I am even writing my book, I’ll say something out loud and be talking to myself. And I allow myself to move my arms really broadly, even though it feels a little silly sometimes, especially if I’m alone in my room, but it does help my brain work a little bit better. So that’s just a really fun and easy tip to implement.
Doing nothing. That’s a little bit harder. It’s a little bit of a harder tip. And that’s because we are mired in a culture that tells us that our value is based on our productivity and our worth is based on our output. And I think that we really need to examine those messages to feel comfortable in our value of just sitting. But one of the ways that I at least find helpful to do that is to know the real benefits that doing nothing has on my brain. So doing something active like meditating or working out, these are great. These have known brain effects. But just sitting in the in-between moments and not actively trying to do a mantra or something like that, just literally sitting is so beneficial for your brain. It essentially allows your neurons to do a reset. It’s a very colloquial way to say it, but you’re literally allowing your brain to wipe itself clean, to reset, and then it’ll be able to think in different creative ways and to fire in new and exciting ways.
So I look for tiny opportunities to do this in my life. One of my absolute favorite ones is at stoplights when I’m driving, I used to always, always reach for my phone. Red light, reaching for my phone. I just couldn’t be alone with myself. And now I use that it’s a very quick opportunity. So it’s not scary. It’s a promise that I can keep to myself. I don’t reach for my phone. I just sit there. It’s uncomfortable. It’s weird. I don’t like being alone with myself. I have to get to know myself in a way that I haven’t had to do in a really long time, but it’s gotten easier. We become better at what we practice. And the more that we practice being with ourselves and knowing that we have value just for being ourselves, the better we’ll get at it.
Tori Dunlap:
I wrote in a book once, very similar to the stoplight, is that every time you touch a doorknob, just take a breath. I don’t do this. I should do this. But I love that of just these little tiny moments that again are, I’m not asking you to go to a silent retreat for a weekend. I’m not asking you to sit on a yoga mat for eight hours and meditate. Just at a stoplight. Just don’t reach for your phone.
Liz Moody:
Although I will say, and I completely agree, obviously, I think that those little moments are so, so powerful, and the little moments are what make up our lives. Fundamentally, we are spending eight hours a day doing the rest of our lives and 20 minutes a day meditating at best. And we are a result of the thoughts that we’re thinking, the things that we’re practicing constantly. So that eight hour to 20 minute ratio, the thoughts you’re thinking all day, those little moments are going to be the things that matter most. But just as an interesting side note, I just interviewed Dr. Elissa Epel for my podcast, and she is a stress expert. She’s one of the world’s leading experts on stress. And one of the things that she said in the episode that I found fascinating is that, doing those longer periods of retreat, like doing the eight-hour meditation thing or going away for a retreat weekend, has incredible effects for a year after you do it.
So sometimes, if you aren’t a person who can incorporate these things on a daily basis, I actually found it kind of heartening to know like, oh, maybe I can do a weekend thing if I can’t do a daily thing. And that weekend thing won’t just pay off for that weekend or a week or two after. But for a year afterward.
Tori Dunlap:
As someone who’s about to spend four days at the Ritz-Carlton, Santa Barbara and hardly leave, I’m very pumped about that. Little different retreat, but I’ll be sitting and doing nothing. So I’m pumped about it. Talk to me about a failure resume.
Liz Moody:
Oh, a failure resume is fascinating. So I first heard about this when I had Dan Pink on my podcast, and he did this incredible book about the power of regret. And a failure resume is a really great tip to harness the power of regret. So it’s essentially you make a list of all your failures. All of the things that you perceive as failures in your life. And then you do another step which is, what did you learn from that failure? And so you’re taking something that you view as a negative in your life and you’re saying this had a purpose, it had a function. A very interesting journey that I have had with this is around my anxiety and my agoraphobia. For years I was weak when I moved London, if only I had built a community faster. If only I’d done this, this, and this, I wouldn’t have had this period of intense anxiety that derailed the path of my entire life.
And it’s only recently in being able to reframe this perceived failure into, my life now exists because of that period of my life that I can appreciate the way that the connections have worked on my path. So the failure resume is a really, really useful tool to understand that we get to where we are via where we’ve been. And then also if you’re like, “Well, what if I don’t like where I am?” How can we look back at the perceived failures and learn from them and make new steps and new choices for the next phase of our life?
Tori Dunlap:
I think about that all of the time. I think that’s one of the things I actually do really well, is even mistakes I’ve made or failures I’ve had, or decisions I’m not proud of, I can always find the thing I learned from it. Or like, “Oh yeah, that’s the reason we did that at that time. And yep, it’s probably cringe now, but nope, we did that.” Or for me it manifests a lot in dating. Of like, “Oh, I stayed with that person for way too long.” And rather than just being like, “Oh, Tori, you piece of shit.” I’m just like, “Yeah, she was her first relationship. She didn’t know any better. She was dealing with her own stuff and that’s okay.” And we know better. What is it? Maya Angelou. When you know better, you do better and learned a lot from that. So I love that practice.
Liz Moody:
Also, if you were looking back at your past self’s choices and they were all the exact same choices as you would make now, that means you haven’t grown or evolved at all.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Liz Moody:
Which is not an ideal way to live. So I view looking back at choices that past me has made, which some of them were insane. I’m like, “Girl, you did not need to be doing cocaine at 8:00 AM in Buenos Aires.” But if I were going to make those choices now, if I were back then saying the things that I was saying now, it would mean that I had learned nothing and I had evolved in no way in the last decade of my life. So I’m excited to look back on those choices because they’re a reminder of how far that I’ve come and how much work that I’ve done.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. That’s how I feel too. And I talk to little me all the time. I talk to 20-year-old me, I talk to 7-year-old me, she and I are in constant contact. And rather than being like, “Oh my gosh, she was so cringe, or how could she make that choice? That’s so embarrassing.” I’m like, “You know what? You were just doing the best you can with what you had. You were just doing the best you can with what you had.”
Liz Moody:
What a powerful sentence though. Truly. You’re doing the best you can with what you had is I think one of the most powerful sentences and the most radically accepting of ourselves sentences that we can utter.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, well, asking myself to hate the younger version of myself. How heartbreaking. That’d be like yelling at a child or yelling at me a couple years ago when she was struggling. That’s insanely cruel of me to do. And maybe that’s a call out for a listener, but you don’t deserve the abuse that you’re giving yourself.
Liz Moody:
Either past you or present you. You are doing the best with what you can and what you have right now as well. Talk to yourself how you would talk to your best friend, talk to yourself how you would want future self to come back and comfort you. Talk to yourself as if you were that child. You have that five-year-old, 10-year-old, 20-year-old inside you because you still do. We talk to ourselves so cruelly. And again, we get better at what we practice. If you practice talking to yourself like you’re a piece of shit, all day, every day, and then you try to look in the mirror and say, “You got this girl. I love you. You’re great”, you’re not going to be good at that. You have not practiced that.
Tori Dunlap:
Liz, you might know this already. Have you heard about the practice of writing, not just letters to yourself, but writing back and forth as some people call it God, some people call it love or the higher version of yourself. Have you heard about this?
Liz Moody:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
So incredibly powerful. We’ve talked about it on the show before I think, but whenever I am struggling and I forget about this all the time, but I forget to do it. But when I do do it, it’s so helpful of just literally giving myself what I need and it’s like, “Hey, love. What’s going on? Oh, I’m really stressed. Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. What’s going on?” And it’s like back and forth and it’s me giving myself the validation and the comfort and the care I need or the clarity that I need, because I always know, Tori always knows it’s just either really loud in here or I can’t figure it out for myself or I just need somebody to validate me. And that’s been one strategy that’s been so helpful in building my own self-love and my own self-confidence is just realizing, “Oh, I already know. I just need permission or I need validation, or I just need to hear it from all of the noise that’s going on around me.”
Liz Moody:
Are you familiar with IFS?
Tori Dunlap:
What is that?
Liz Moody:
Internal Family Systems. It’s a type of therapy. It’s founded by Dr. Richard Schwartz. I had him on the podcast. It’s an incredible type of therapy that would, I think really resonate with you based on what you’re saying. But it’s about how we have all of these different parts inside of ourselves. And the therapy is to go in and essentially talk to the different parts and have the different parts talk to each other. And it’s incredibly transformative for people. There’s wild studies around it with suicidal people. There’s wild studies around it with people who’ve experienced really intense forms of trauma and it working when very few other types of therapies have worked.
Tori Dunlap:
Interesting. I’ll go listen to that episode after we’re done.
Liz Moody:
And you should have him on your podcast. You would really like him. He’ll probably do, so you’ll hear this. If you listen to the episode that I did with him, he’ll probably do a little IFS session on air, which I had heard about beforehand, but I was like, “No, he won’t do that with me. It’s okay.”
Tori Dunlap:
And then it did. It devastate you?
Liz Moody:
Yeah. It definitely did. And I was like, “Wow, this is very vulnerable and very personal”, but I think it’s helpful to see it in practice. So just be warned. He probably will do that, but that’s part of the fun.
Tori Dunlap:
Cool. I’ll have Kristen, if you’re still here, take a note of that. Let’s do a little bit of rapid fire. If we’re talking about changing our life with these small habits, what are a few things that someone can implement today without having to go out and purchase anything or swipe up on an Instagram Ad? It’s not swipe up, it’s tap. But you know what I’m saying. Tell me the quick and dirty like a couple things that someone can do right now after listening to this episode.
Liz Moody:
Okay. So a few quick, easy ones. Micro workouts, one of my absolute favorite things to do. If I had to choose between my larger workouts and my micro workouts, I would choose my micro workouts every time. This is literally a walk around the block. A five minute walk every hour or so. This is if you don’t have time to go on the block or it’s freezing out, just stopping and doing some squats, doing some jumping jacks, getting your heart rate up. These micro workouts are going to improve your ability to regulate your body’s glucose. They’re going to enhance your creativity. They’re going to enhance your problem solving. They’re going to enhance your general brain function. They’re going to improve your mood. So many benefits and they happen so, so quickly. So I’m always looking for opportunities to fit in just a quick jolt of getting my heart rate up throughout my day-to-day life. I love that one.
Taking a cold shower. I know that cold exposure is over hyped, but there are some really great benefits. And one of my all-time favorite benefits is that it can balance your dopamine levels. So doing something hard, like taking a cold shower. But also, and this is so interesting. I interviewed Dr. Anna Lembke for my podcast. She’s one of the world’s leading experts in dopamine. And doing something like getting caught in the rain, carrying your groceries to your car, that’s a hard thing and that’s going to balance your dopamine levels and make it easier for you to not reach for your phone to find pleasure and motivation in your day-to-day life. So I love that because it’s completely reframed for me when I accidentally run into these hard moments in my life instead of being like, “Why is it raining when I’m trying to carry my groceries?”
I’m like, “Oh, I’m balancing my dopamine. This is excellent.” So I love that little bit of a reframe. And I also think cold showers are a powerful way to bring that dopamine balance into your day-to-day life. I just end on cold. I don’t think you need a cold plunge. I don’t think you need to do it for as long as you think. There’s also really interesting research that shows it doesn’t need to be as cold as you think. Just do your normal shower and end on about two minutes as cold as your tap water can go, and you’ll experience a lot of benefits from that. I’m trying to think. I have so many. I am like, “What do you want? What problems can I solve?”
Tori Dunlap:
No. Those two are already great. I had forgotten. I used to do this back when I worked a 9:00 to 5:00. I invented for us a squat squad. And whenever… It was usually me yelling squats, I was probably annoying as hell. I’m sorry to any of my coworkers, but if one of us just yelled squat, we had to step away from our desk and do 20 squats and then go back to whatever we were doing. And you could opt in, you could opt out at any time. But I’m now thinking, her first a 100K squat squad, and I’m going to literally pitch it to the company. But I put it on, I forgot I did that.
Liz Moody:
[inaudible 00:59:03] Somebody who slacks squat, everybody has to go squat.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Have the squat squad channel and anybody can opt in. And then if you can’t, obviously don’t do it. But if you’re in the middle and you see it, cool. Bring out 20 squats, call it good.
Liz Moody:
I’ll also say putting on your favorite song and dancing wildly to it for the duration of the song counts as a micro workout and is a wonderful way to improve your mood in the middle of the day.
Tori Dunlap:
I will say, also with all of this what I’m realizing too, I’ve heard this advice before and I just need to do it is, I’ve already said this. I forget a lot of the things that make me feel good and in moments of stress I don’t know what to do, I think I need to make myself a list. And then if I’m feeling stressed or I just need a little bit of a boost, I can go to that list and be like, “Okay. We’re going to do one of these things because I can never think of them in the moment. But then I have 25 things.
Liz Moody:
So I have two list prompts for you in the book. I have The Life is Never Boring List, which is essentially you making a list of ways to spend your interstitial moments or the moments where you’re like, “I want to do something but I don’t know what.” And that’s a list of things that are pleasurable or fun for you. And you keep that on a list, you keep it on your phone, you just open it in those five minutes while your pasta water is boiling, or in the time where you got home from work, but you’re not quite sure what at that time you open it, you can consult the list and you can do something fun. So we have a whole prompt for how to make that in the book. And then we also have a mental health checklist, which I think is really, really helpful.
And that’s essentially looking at the things that are most researched to have an impact on our mental health so that you’re trying to do those every single day to set yourself a mental health baseline. Things like, having time with your community, making sure that you’ve eaten a vegetable, making sure that you’ve moved your body in some way. And we have five things on that checklist in the book, but it’s really helpful on those days when you are feeling down, you can just pull open that checklist and say, “I haven’t done two of these in two weeks.” And it gives a little bit of clarity into maybe where you should start and why you might be feeling the way that you’re feeling.
Tori Dunlap:
Liz, holy shit. This has been so helpful. One of my favorite episodes I’ve recorded in a long, long time. Where can people find out more about you? Where can people buy the book? Tell me all of it. Plug away.
Liz Moody:
So the book is available wherever books are sold or on 100waystochangeyourlife.com. We have 18 different categories. The book covers every single part of your life as you can probably glean from this conversation. We’ve got gut health, we’ve got longevity, we’ve got relationships, we’ve got friendship. We’ve got your sex life, we’ve got your success. We’ve got how to choose what habits you want to have, how to go after your goals. We have literally every single part of your life covered in this book, and it’s really developed so that you can go to the different sections and pick and choose as you need them in your life. It’s a long-term companion, not something that you just read once and you’re done, you leave it out. You’re going to need different things at different points, you can flip to it. And then I am also the host of the Liz Moody Podcast, which is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
We have a great episode with Tori. It’s a little bit of an older one, but I still absolutely love it. And I believe this back to the holistic wellness point that we were talking about earlier. I’ve been saying for years, finances is such a key part of our physical health, of our mental health. I think it’s as important to be talking about and should be included in the wellness conversation as much as your microbiome or things like that, because you can’t take care of your microbiome if you don’t have money. And if you’re stressed out all the time about your finances, that’s literally impacting your microbiome. So thank you for sharing your wisdom with our audience, that was so appreciated. And we have tons of different episodes covering all types of different topics, anything you need to live your richest, most rewarding life. And then I’m Liz Moody on TikTok and on Instagram, and I share bite-sized tips for different ways to change your life.
Tori Dunlap:
Amazing. Go change your life.
Thank you to Liz for joining us for this episode. You can find her work linked in the show notes. You can also find her books, especially a 100 Ways to Change Your Life, wherever you’re getting your books, wherever you read books. Thank you to Liz for joining us. And as always, thank you for being here, Financial Feminists. This episode in particular is such a good one to share with your community, share with your friends and family to spark conversation about habits in the new year and about how to actually keep the goals that you’ve set out and the resolutions you’ve set out for yourself this year. So, feel free to share it with a friend and get talking. Thank you so much for joining us Financial Feminists. We’ll see you back here soon. Have a great day. Okay, bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant, research by Sarah Sciortino, audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf, marketing and operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew.
Special thanks to our team at Her First $100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonnar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram, and Meghan Walker, promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, please visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
