Is Luck a Real Thing? & How to Accept What You Can't Change - SYSK Choice

This episode explores the nature of luck, its impact on our lives, and how we perceive and handle events beyond our control.

1. Luck can be viewed as the outcome of random probabilities rather than a mystical force.
2. Personal preparation and decisions can influence perceived luck.
3. Acknowledging and accepting randomness can reduce anxiety over uncontrollable events.
4. Superstitions about luck, like finding a four-leaf clover, often persist despite lacking scientific backing.
5. The psychological need for control and understanding influences our beliefs about luck.

1: Introduction to Luck

Jeffrey Rosenthal discusses common misconceptions about luck and introduces a more scientific understanding. He explains how luck is often confused with probability. Jeffrey Rosenthal: "Luck is a very hard thing to pin down."

2: The Role of Randomness

Rosenthal expands on how random events influence our lives, detailing examples from daily experiences and historical incidents. Jeffrey Rosenthal: "Even if luck is completely random, some people will have more good or bad outcomes purely by chance."

3: The Impact of Personal Actions

The discussion shifts to how individual actions and preparations can shape outcomes, which people often attribute to luck. Jeffrey Rosenthal: "You make your own luck by being prepared."

4: Psychological Aspects of Believing in Luck

Rosenthal and Carruthers explore why people cling to beliefs in luck despite evidence to the contrary, highlighting the psychological comfort these beliefs provide. Jeffrey Rosenthal: "People need to feel in control, and beliefs in luck or fate provide that comfort."

1. Recognize What You Can Control: Focus on actions you can take rather than outcomes beyond your control.
2. Educate Yourself on Probability: Understanding basic statistics can demystify events and reduce superstition.
3. Maintain Perspective: Remember that not all good or bad outcomes are due to personal actions.
4. Reflect on Events Objectively: Avoid attributing every outcome to luck; assess the factors involved critically.
5. Embrace Uncertainty: Accept that randomness plays a role in life and that not everything happens for a reason.

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Do you believe in luck? That is likely going to depend on how you define it. Some people believe luck is a magical force in the universe while others think of luck as something you calculate with probabilities and statistics while others believe you can create your own luck. To get a better understanding of how luck works, I invite you to listen to my conversation with Jeffrey Rosenthal, professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Statistics and author of several books including Knock On Wood: Luck Chance and the Meaning of Everything (https://amzn.to/3uccXfh).

You don’t have to go too far before you begin to realize that life can be cruel and unfair and that bad things happen to everyone. What is most important is how you deal with and accept and ultimately make peace with the difficult things. Clinical psychologist Janina Scarlet works with people who must accept and come to terms with events that are unfair and often devastating. Janina is author of the book, It Shouldn’t Be This Way: Learning to Accept the Things You Just Can’t Change (https://amzn.to/4bHImcX). If you’ve ever had trouble making peace with something bad that has happened to you, you should listen to what she has to say.

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Jeffrey Rosenthal, Mike Carruthers

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"Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything" by Jeffrey Rosenthal

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Jeffrey Rosenthal

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deals thats dell.com deals today on something you should know, some surprisingly effective ways to save on gasoline. Then do you believe in luck? Kind of depends on what you mean by luck. I think what people mean is something almost kind of supernatural, that there's some magical forces like fate or destiny or some people are maybe born lucky. And that's kind of what they mean when they say, hey, do you believe in luck?

Jeffrey Rosenthal
Because of course we all believe there's good things and bad things that happen to us. Also, why trying to look or act younger than you really are is almost never a good idea. And what does it mean to accept something horrible happened to you? I think a lot of times people think that to accept something means being okay with it. Maybe silver lining it or finding the good side of it, or maybe not thinking about it anymore.

Janina Scarlett
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eligible items only. Exclusions apply. See ebaymotors.com. Something you should know fascinating intel, the worlds top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers hi.

You know, I've noticed that it's hard to have a conversation with someone today where the topic doesn't turn to the price of gasoline. Every driver wants to get the maximum mileage because gas is so expensive. So here are a few suggestions from popular mechanics to help save on gas, and some of these may surprise you. First of all, you should roll up your windows and use the air conditioning. Older cars air conditioning systems really did drain on the engine and decrease your fuel economy, but that's really a relic of the past.

Today, engines are better designed to handle the load of the air conditioning compressor. Don't put your car in neutral to coast down the hill. You won't achieve more fuel economy. Plus, it can be dangerous to do that when your vehicle is not in gear. It's impossible to dodge a car that swerves out in front of you, for instance, but it won't save you much fuel either.

All you're really doing is disengaging the transmission, which doesn't save gasoline. You should shut off your engine if you're stopped for more than a minute. Now, newer cars come with an eco mode that closes the throttle to reduce gas entering the cylinder. So you don't have to shut off the car if you have the eco mode. But if you don't have it, turning off your engine makes a difference if you're going to be stopped for more than a minute.

The auto club estimates that your engine consumes a quarter to a half a gallon of fuel each hour when it's idling and slow down, fuel economy peaks at around 50 miles an hour, then drops as you continue to speed up. Cutting your highway speed by five or 10 mph could increase your fuel economy by as much as 14%. Avoid the quick, fast starts and stops that eats up a lot of gas and make sure your tires are inflated correctly. All of these things can add up to save you real money on gasoline, and that is something you should know.

As much as we like to think that we are in charge of how our life goes, many of the events and aspects in your life are completely out of your control. Instead, probability, chance and luck determine a lot of what happens to you. And yet so much of this is misunderstood, which is why Jeffrey Rosenthal is here. Jeffrey is a professor in the University of Toronto's department of statistics, and he's author of several books, including knock on luck, chance, and the Meaning of everything. Hey, Jeffrey, welcome to something you should know.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
Thank you very much. So the word luck tends to be like a catch all term that applies to probability, chance, and some mysterious force that you could call luck. How do you look? As somebody who studies statistics, how do you look at luck? What is it?

Yeah, well, luck is a very hard thing to pin down. And to put a little context, I mean, I've for years written and spoken about various things, about probability and randomness, but they were usually more concrete things, like a medical study or a public opinion poll or the odds of being killed in an airplane crash, all these kind of concrete probabilities. And then people would say, yeah, that's great, professor, but, you know, do you believe in luck? And it would always kind of stop me. I got to be pretty good at answering a lot of questions, but answering, do you believe in luck?

Well, what do you mean exactly? So it's kind of exactly as your question. And so I thought about it a lot more now, and I've sort of managed to pin down that I think there's two pretty different things that people sometimes mean by luck. So the first one is, sometimes people just mean the things that happen to us which are outside of our control, and they could be good or bad. So, for example, you win the lottery.

Well, that was good luck. Or you meet the love of your life. You just happen to. Or you happen to be in the right place to get the right job that you've always wanted. These are good luck things that happen, or there's bad luck things.

You know, you get cancer or you get in a car accident, all these bad things that happen to us. That's bad luck. But that doesn't always seem to be what people mean when they say luck and you believe in luck. So I've had to think more about what people mean when they say, what. You just described is what I think of as luck.

Dell Technologies
What do you mean? People think of luck as something else. Yeah. So a lot of people. I mean, because, of course, what I just described, you know, it wouldn't even make sense to say, do you believe in it?

Jeffrey Rosenthal
I mean, of course I believe in it. We all have these things happen to us all the time. But I think what people mean is something more, something almost kind of supernatural, that there's some magical forces like fate or destiny, or you deserve it or it happened for a reason and so on, and they believe luck. And some people are maybe born lucky, and they have this special power that good things happen to them, and other people were born unlucky. People ascribe all these kind of supernatural, magical forces, and sometimes they call that luck.

And that's kind of what they mean when they say, hey, do you believe in luck? Because, of course, we all believe there's good things and bad things that happen to us. Question is, what do people mean? Do they mean something more, something kind of supernatural? Well, that's a great point, because everybody can think of people that really seem to be very lucky, or people who seem to be very unlucky.

Dell Technologies
Families like the Kennedys, I mean, they've had a lot of bad luck. You know, people have died and been murdered. And, I mean, and good thing, there are people that good things just seem to happen to. So I guess people want an explanation as to why. Absolutely.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
I think that's a lot of it is people don't want to believe that bad things just happen or the good things just happen. There has to be a reason or a cause, or it has to be just, or there has to be some payback, some destiny. But it's interesting, the kind of examples you give of people that a lot of good things happen to them or a lot of bad things happen to them. I give kind of two responses to that, and one is that, of course, sometimes the things that happen to them are partially of their own doing. So you could say maybe the Kennedys, maybe they drank too much and they weren't too careful, and some of the bad things that happened to them were not just random.

So that's one explanation. But I think also, and especially being a professor of statistics, I think of it in terms of whether you're judging the luck sort of after the fact. Because even if luck is completely random, just by random chance, some people are going to have a lot of good things, and some people are going to have a lot of bad things, and then after the fact, you can say, okay, look, this person had a lot of good things, and this person had a lot of bad things. And that's just consistent with the laws of randomness as we understand them. But when people say someone's lucky, sometimes they sort of mean it as almost a foretelling the future that I think tomorrow something's going to happen in this good or the next day.

So there's sort of that they have this power, and that's where, as a professor of statistics, I say, well, wait a minute, the things that are random, we can look to the past and see the patterns and see who had the good luck and bad luck, but in the future, it's still going to. Be random again, and it is random. I mean, the person who wins the lottery, and everyone will tell you that, you know, playing the lottery statistically is stupid because you're never going to win except the guy who won. Yeah, well, I mean, lotteries are a good example. And in fact, when I first started doing public speaking about probability, to my surprise, a little bit, the thing I get asked about more than anything else is about lotteries and, hey, is there some system to beat the lottery?

Or what are the chances I'll win the jackpot? And, you know, when the lottery jackpot gets big one week, I always know it because I always get a few phone calls from the media saying, hey, can you go over again with us the probabilities of winning the lottery? But, yeah, I mean, I would certainly agree with what you said, that, you know what? It's just random. And if you buy a ticket, it's extremely unlikely you're going to win the lottery.

And there's no reason to think it, but there are a lot of people I've discovered who will think something like, oh, everything good is happening to me today, so I'm going to buy a lottery ticket because I think my chances are higher today, or, I just did a good deed, so now I deserve something good, so I'll buy a lottery ticket because fate is going to give me this lottery jackpot, and people will believe all sorts of things, how they can influence this randomness. Whereas I would say, look, they're just going to make a random draw with those balls in the urine, and it's just random. Yeah. Well, who hasn't, like, found a $20 bill on the ground or got the parking spot right in front of the store and said, I should buy a lottery ticket today? I'm just having great luck.

Exactly. I mean, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm referring to, where people believe that they got this sort of supernatural power. Now, there's no way that those lottery balls in that urn could actually know that you won your $20 or that you're having a good day or that that could actually influence things, but people still believe it. And again, it's partially because they want to. You know, it shouldn't just be random who wins the lottery.

It should be based on certain patterns of the universe. Well, there is a belief, and I think many people hold this belief, that if you do good, good things will happen to you. What goes around comes around. That's all part of the Kumbaya of life, that good things happen to good people. But statistically, probably not.

Dell Technologies
But people hold on to that and use that as a motivation to. To do good things. And you can see why people want to believe that because it's certainly much better to live in a world in which the people who do good things have good things happen to them and vice versa. But, you know, we all know also, there's not always that way. Sometimes there's horrible suffering by people who are very good people, which is sad, too.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
So, yeah, it fits into this real human need of wanting things to happen for a reason. And also, I might add, in fiction, you know, if you look at movies and so on, then that's what tends to happen in movies. The good guy wins in the end, or things come or someone makes some prediction that something's going to come true, then in the end, it is going to come true because that's more interesting, it's more exciting, it's better for the movies. But in real life, it doesn't always happen because there are the laws of randomness. Well, in your book, you give the example of the man who felt mysteriously drawn to a hawaiian beach where he happened to meet his half brother he never knew he had.

Dell Technologies
So is that just random? Yeah. So, I mean, it's a great story. And fill in a little more details. You say there was these half brothers who had never met, and one of them was working for a hotel in Hawaii, and the other one lived in Massachusetts and takes his family for a vacation in Hawaii.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
And they happen to meet on the beach. They start chatting. One of them asks the other one to take their photograph. They start talking about people they know and eventually discover their half brothers. And it has a really positive effect on the younger half brother who'd been just working this hotel and was kind of down on his luck, you could say.

But then he gets to know this whole family he didn't know existed, and it has a really happy ending, and they're all happy. So a lot of people would say, oh, you know, that was fate. You know, there was these magical forces which drew them together. And as a professor of statistics, I find myself in this sort of unhappy role of having to say, well, when you start looking at the bigger picture, you can say how many pairs of people are there out there? Such that if they did happen to meet somewhere on some beach and started chatting, it could have a really big impact on them because they were long lost relatives or whatever.

There's actually lots and lots of pairs of people out there. And you know what? Most of them don't meet on a beach, and most of them don't have their lives changed. So when you look at it from the bigger picture, you can see that actually, by the laws of random probability, occasionally these incredible stories are going to happen just by chance alone. It doesn't really provide evidence of some supernatural force, but that's what people want to believe.

Dell Technologies
Yeah, well, but it says in your description a man who felt mysteriously drawn to a beach in Hawaii. So you're adding a little mystery into that that stirs the pot a bit. Well, yeah, it's funny. People will often describe those things post fact, right? They'll say, you know what?

Jeffrey Rosenthal
I had a feeling something was going to happen at the beach. But if you're a little more systematic and saying, okay, from now on, tell me every time you have a feeling before it happens, and then we'll see how many of those feelings come true, it might not be as impressive. And that quote you're giving, I have a feeling that might have been from the publisher's pushing the book a little bit. And it's probably, I wouldn't have said it quite that way because he might have said later, I had a mysterious feeling I was drawn to the beach, but I would be a little bit skeptical of that. We're discussing probability, luck and chance in your life, and my guest is Jeffrey Rosenthal.

Dell Technologies
The name of his book is knock on wood. Luck, chance, and the meaning of everything. I would imagine that most employers or managers do not relish the idea of having to hire someone new because the whole process is so iffy. How do you find the best people? Where are they?

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So, Jeffrey, you study probability. You're a professor of statistics and the laws of probability. Where do they come from? I mean, what are they and where do they come from? Yeah.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
Well, there's a whole mathematical subject of probability theory which goes back a few hundred years. It originated with studying of gambling games, you know, and games of chance, rolling dice and cards. And, you know, where the chances this guy's going to make money when he gambles. And it's a pretty solid mathematical theory. That is to say, there's a mysterious thing of, you know, what is this randomness?

So maybe it comes from, you know, whether it's the dealing of the cards or the rolling of the dice or whatever, but once you have that randomness, then mathematically we can combine it. We can say, what's a chance? You'll win? At least three out of your next five hands, or that kind of thing. So we can combine that mathematically.

But then statistics kind of looks a little more broadly in some sense and says, well, what do we observe in the world around us? And can we try to explain that using the mathematics of probability? So there's sometimes this little bit uncomfortable relation between this solid mathematical subject of how we manipulate these probabilities and seeing the world around us and trying to fit into that and trying to draw inferences about the world based on this theory. And so those people that do win, you have to think, well, maybe they have something special. Of course, it depends on the game.

Dell Technologies
You know, some games are more chance and some games have some skill. But, but you wonder, well, what do those people have because, you know, I never win when I, which is why I don't gamble very much anymore, because I never win and it's not fun to lose, so I don't do it, but other people do it, so why. Right. Well, I guess again, I'd give a multi part answer, and you sort of hinted at it yourself that first of all, there are some games in Vegas and so on, which involves some skill. For example, if you're playing actual poker against other humans, not just the video poker machines, then there's a lot of skill involved in that.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
Even games like Blackjack, there's some skill in how you make your decisions. And people try to do fancy things like try to count the cards to figure out if they're more likely to get a high or low card. Next. There's some element of skill, but, and also I have to say there's some element of dishonesty or bad reporting that is just because your friend says they always win money at Vegas. You'd have to scrutinize that carefully to make sure it's really true.

Sometimes they only remember the times they made money and they forget the times they lost money or whatever. But I'd say the number one thing is kind of going back to what I said before, that after you're done in Vegas, you can see some people made money and some people lost money. You can say, boy, that guy made a lot of money. He must have been lucky. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the next time he goes to Vegas he's going to make money or that he has some intrinsic power to make money.

It could just be random. And that's, again, this looking at it after the fact versus before the fact. Well, it does seem, and there are plenty of people that talk about the difference between luck and chance, that you can make your own luck, but chance is chance, and the rules of chance are the rules of chance. Yeah, well, that's one way to say it. As I say, people use these words like luck and chance and so on.

Hard to pin down exactly what they mean. But yeah, it could be if you want to say chance is actually the rules of probability that we understand, well, then that whereas luck is this thing that's harder to pin down, you mentioned making your own luck, which is a phrase people use. And to me that has to do with, for example, if you're very well prepared and you're very well qualified and so on, then you're more likely to succeed. So then when you do succeed, there could be just some random luck involved, but there could also be some based on, which isn't luck at all, based on your actual abilities and your actual preparation. So that's why often when you say, oh, that person's really lucky, if you look at it more carefully.

Well, yeah, but they also worked really hard and they studied really hard, and they had a backup plan, and they thought of everything in advance, and they didn't just wing it. And that could be part of it, too. Well, I know you're not a history professor, but it makes you wonder where and how all these superstitions came to be when you know, whether it's, you know, four leaf clovers or knock on wood or. Or lucky rabbit's foots, why they become so commonplace when there's no basis to them. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I do know something about their origins, and some of them have specific origins. For example, you mentioned knock on wood, which happens to be the title of my latest book. And it's. I had to look into that a little bit. And it comes from old spiritual beliefs that the spirits resided in trees.

And if you touched wood or you knocked on wood, you would be communing with the spirits, and that would help you to have good luck. So that's the origin of it. But I think more fundamentally, it's not so much a history lesson as a psychology lesson. Right. Because I think it really is going back to this human need to want to have reasons for something.

And, you know, if you're scared, you don't want to just say, well, I'm scared, and maybe it'll be bad, and there's nothing I can do. You want to say, no. I can commune with the spirits, or I can look at my star sign, or I can look at my pattern of how much luck I'm having and whether it's fate and whether I'm a good person. You can sort of try to come up with all these explanations to maybe calm yourself or give you some sense of control over what's about to happen. Whereas sometimes you don't really have much control.

Dell Technologies
Well, it seems from listening to what you're saying, that we really don't have a whole lot of control. It's almost as if you're saying when your number's up, your number's up, and there's not much you can do about it, whether you're knocking on wood or rubbing your rabbit's foot, probability is probability, and that's the end of the story. Well, I mean, of course, there's lots of things you can do which aren't about randomness. If you're worried about getting killed in a storm, you can build a better house that's going to protect you from the storm. And if you're worried about predators approaching, you can hide.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
And there's a lot of things you can do or more modern, if you're trying to get ahead in your career, you can take some night classes to improve your abilities and you can study harder and you can be nice to your boss. And I mean, there's all sorts of things we do which are perfectly logical things to try to improve ourselves or try to take precautions or try to minimize the risk. And those are all completely logical, and I'm not saying anything at all against them, but somehow it's really just when people go beyond that and they say, yeah, I mean, I've taken certain steps, but never mind that I feel lucky today or it's fate or it's destiny, that things will go good. That's the part that I'm not sure is supported by the evidence, because people. Have looked at that, right?

Dell Technologies
I mean, people have examined this in real life and found that there's not much to it. Yeah, so people have dyslexic. And it's interesting because in some ways it's hard to do careful, controlled experiments of some of these things because they just involve, you know, what happens over the course of your life. So if you just report it later, people say, oh, yeah, I remember that day I knocked on wood, and then later that day I found a $20 bill. But you want to say, yeah, that's great, but we'd have to be more systematic and say on which days you're going to take which steps.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
But there have been some more careful attempts, for example, with astrology, which is something else that I think fits into this need to have an explanation for what's going to happen and so on. So there have been some careful experiments where they get a bunch of astrologers and they'll do things like, say, look, here's the personality descriptions of certain people, and then here are the star sign charts for certain people, and you have to match them up. You have to say, which of these star charts do you think fits in with this personality the best? And maybe not so surprisingly, they do not do well at those. They really don't do any better than random guessing.

And to me, that's pretty convincing evidence that while I understand why people believe in things like astrology, it really isn't supported by the evidence. But I've also learned that if people believe in those things. You're not going to convince them by these studies anyway. You have to wonder why, though, the superstitions about luck persist if they don't work. Because, I mean, people think if you find, for example, a four leaf clover, that that will bring you good luck.

Dell Technologies
Well, why do they think that? Why, some of them is just because it's rare, right? Like you mentioned, a four leaf clover and, well, you know, most clovers only have three leaves, so it's rare that you get one with four leaves and then people will remember that and then be striking. And then again, if you believe that leads to good luck, as I say, most, most days, you can find something that you could point to, which was good luck. Right?

Jeffrey Rosenthal
So if you want to believe it anyway, it's fun, right? Isn't it fun if you find a four leaf clover instead of just saying, oh, yeah, it's a slightly mutant plant, who cares? Let's move on. You want to say, no, this is really important. This is really significant.

And they say, of course. And that's probably why I passed my calculus test this morning, is because I found that clover. So I think really it comes down to psychology. A lot of them do have origins in various spiritual things, but in the end, it really comes down to psychology. One of the things I find really interesting is when strange, bizarre, unusual things happen and we find out about them, it skews our belief about how unusual they are.

Dell Technologies
So talk about that some things are. Really, really rare and people don't appreciate how rare they are, partially because of the news media structure that we have. I'll use the example. Let's say there's a horrible home invasion and some family gets attacked and beaten up and it's horrible and break in, and that might well become front page news, right? And that would be front page news, not just in the little neighborhood where it happened, but in the whole city where it happened.

Jeffrey Rosenthal
And maybe the whole country, maybe the whole world, if it's gruesome enough, and everyone will say, my God, this is so terrible. And then, of course, everyone will think, that could happen to me next, right? And maybe it's going to be, my family is going to be attacked and people get really scared and so on. Whereas I would take the point that the fact that this became such big news is because it's fairly rare, right? And in fact, because we live in a society with this kind of news media, if something horrible happens, maybe you hear about it because it happened to one person out of millions and millions and millions of people that it could have happened to, but you still hear about it, then there's this sense of immediacy, like, it could happen to me next.

And I sort of have this theory that because humans evolved in smaller groups of hunter gatherers, maybe 50 or 100 people or whatever, in those times, if you heard, hey, somebody you know was mauled by a lion, you could be next because that means one of the 50 people around you was just mauled by a lion. But when you see a horrible front page headline, that means one person out of millions and millions and millions had this horrible thing happen to them, and it's extremely unlikely it's going to happen to you next. And if you just stop and think a little bit about just how unlikely it is, it's actually very comforting. But mostly people don't. Mostly people just picture what happened and think it could happen to them and they feel like there's a good chance it's going to happen to them next.

It's like, no, almost anything else you can think of is more likely to happen than this extreme event because it's actually so rare. Which is what makes this so interesting. I mean, there are so many temptations and influences that make you tend to believe things that in reality just aren't so or so unlikely, but you think they're more likely, that it can really mess up your judgment. So it's good to get some insight into this. Jeffrey Rosenthal has been my guest.

Dell Technologies
The name of the book is knock on wood, luck, chance and the meaning of everything. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Jeffrey. Okay, great. Thank you.

Candy Valentino
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Dell Technologies
It'S been a while since I've talked about the Jordan Harbinger show, but I've been listening all along. The Jordan Harbinger show is a podcast that I'm going to predict you will really like. Since you like this podcast, something you should know. With each episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show, Jordan digs deep into fascinating topics with fascinating people. It's a little different than the topics we cover, but still so, so interesting.

Recently he had a great two part conversation with ex federal agent Robert Mazzur about how money laundering works. Now, I've always, I've always wondered about that and, well, now I know. And there was another great conversation with Adam Gamal. He's an american Muslim who fought terrorism in one of the US's most secret special forces units. It is a riveting conversation.

If you want to broaden your worldview and discover some truly thought provoking ideas and insights, you really should try the Jordan Harbinger show. As youll hear, Jordan is a great interviewer and really gets people to open up. Search for the Jordan Harbinger show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Have you ever had something happen to you and your reaction was this isnt fair, why me? This should not be this way. It actually happens to pretty much everyone and yet we tend to think were the only one. These can be really major events in your life or just small annoyances, but nevertheless, that feeling that you were dealt a bad hand in life can have a serious impact on you, which is why Janina Scarlett is here to discuss it. Janina is a clinical psychologist and author of the book it shouldn't be this way.

Learning to accept the things you just can't change. Hi Janina, welcome to something you should know. Thank you so much for having me. So describe in more detail what happens when somebody has that experience of this is unfair. It shouldn't be this way.

Janina Scarlett
I think most of us who are going through this, it shouldn't be this way. Experience feel like it's only us because I think societally we're expected to put on our I am fine masks and pretend like things are going okay when in fact they aren't. And I think that we're left to feel completely alienated in whatever horrific or heart wrenching experience we're going through. How do you describe that experience? What is that feeling?

Dell Technologies
Because everybody's felt it. But I would have a hard time naming it or defining it. I can name it in one word, and that word is loneliness. And whether it comes from grief or heartbreak or being outcast somehow, maybe being bullied or prejudiced against. The specifics of the experience might vary from person to person.

Janina Scarlett
But essentially, I think the experience boils down to loneliness, the belief that nobody else can understand what we're going through, and also the internal oppression of our own experiences because of societal expectations to be, quote unquote. Fine. Yeah, that seems to be the goal, right? That people talk about is that at some point, you'll be fine. You can accept this, or you can make sense of this or that.

Dell Technologies
At some point, this, too will pass. Right? I think a lot of times people think that to accept something means being okay with it, means maybe silver lining it or finding the good side of it, or maybe not thinking about it anymore. But in fact, that's not how healing happens. Healing happens when we recognize that whatever happened did in fact happen.

Janina Scarlett
And that acceptance starts at the permission that we give ourselves to grieve over whatever experience we went through. So maybe an example or two would help here of either real or you make them up, people and experiences that they go through and how they get to where you're talking about. So, for example, I might be working with a client who is in an emotionally abusive relationship. And for that person to understand what's happening, for that person to truly accept what they're going through, it means to be able to admit to themselves that they're going through, for example, emotional abuse, to be able to sit with whatever emotions are showing up. And we'll do that in therapy.

Will actually sit, for example, for, let's say, three minutes in silence and make room for frustration and sadness and anger, and allow that person to really feel it in their body. Allow them to cry or scream or have whatever reaction they need to have. Because in order for that person to figure out what steps they would like to take next, they first have to process what they're facing. And as you say, everybody does it their own way. Some people may need to scream.

Dell Technologies
Other people may need to not say a word. Absolutely. And that's what the silent space is for. I like to think about it as an appointment with our feelings. So one way of doing that might be to quite literally set a timer for, let's say, three minutes.

Janina Scarlett
And imagine that in those three minutes, we can almost have an arena in front of us, where in this arena, our emotions can run free just for those three minutes, in whichever way it makes sense, whether it's to sit in silence, to cry, to scream, to write, to notice the tension in our chest or the pressure in our stomach and just to breathe. And so for many people, having the permission for their emotions to run around is kind of like taking a dog to a dog park and letting the dog off the leash. Right. It's letting the dog run around so that they can let some of that energy out. And our emotions need to be able to do the same thing so that we can have the clarity to figure out what we're experiencing and what would be the most helpful actions for us to take.

Dell Technologies
Couldn't it be sometimes that. That no action needs to be taken, that, in fact, time will fix this. And that is also an action. Right. So sometimes even recognizing that a part of healing is sitting with grief, that, too is an action.

And that's an o because it seems like you're not doing anything. Right? Exactly. So sometimes people think we're not doing anything because people think that doing something means that it will change drastically and therefore we should feel better. But in fact, just giving our emotions the permission to be is an action, and it's an active action, just like building space for somebody else's emotion.

Janina Scarlett
If we're, let's say, supporting a loved one who's grieving, we can't bring their loved one back. If, let's say, our spouse is grieving the death of their parent, we hug them because they're grieving, we can't bring their parent back. But we're making space for our loved one's grief. In a similar way, if we make space for our own grief, that, too is an active step so that we can process what we're experiencing. And that's a big part of healing.

Dell Technologies
So you've used two phrases that I want to talk about. One is that you may avoid your feelings, and the other is that you need to experience your feelings, allow your feelings. And I think a lot of people don't know what that means. It's. They sound like, you know, psycho talk, like, but you're just avoiding your feeling.

Well, I don't. What? What does that mean? I don't know. What does it mean to feel your feelings?

Is it to think about them? Is it to what? Yeah, great question. So there are multiple parts of feeling our feelings one is to allow them to be there. So, for example, if we notice ourselves feeling sad, maybe we might be missing a loved one that either passed away or we haven't interacted with for a while.

Janina Scarlett
Rather than switching modes and thinking about something else and busying ourselves away from this emotion, it might mean taking a few minutes to think about how we feel about this person, to experience what that sadness feels like in the body. So, a way that we can feel our feelings is to notice, where do I feel this? For example, we might feel sadness in our chest. We might feel sadness in our belly. We might feel anger or frustration in our shoulders or our jaw.

Most people don't think about emotions as physical, but they are. Emotions, quite literally, live in our body. If we can notice where we feel these in our body, we can make space for these emotions by being curious about them, like, what's bringing these emotions to my attention. Or we can practice self soothing. So, for example, we can notice the emotion of sadness or grief in our stomach or our chest, or maybe as a lump in our throat.

And we can imagine almost like, taking these emotions out and looking at them as if they were a small child and be offering a hug, a comfort to our emotion, the way that we would hug and comfort a small child. So, practicing noticing emotions, maybe trying to notice, what do they feel like? Where do I feel them? What does this remind me of? And practicing self soothing techniques, the way that we would soothe, maybe.

Maybe a baby, for example, can allow us to be more present with them, can allow us to self soothe, can allow us to be better at attending to our own needs, rather than not noticing what we need in the first place. Well, you talked about how some people will try to tune it out, switch their thinking, think about something else so that you're not thinking about that. And I think people do that because they don't want to dwell in it, just mope around and dwell in it. They want to get on with their life. And I think the assumption is that there is a timeline to grief or trauma, or that you're thinking about it after a certain amount of time that you are dwelling.

And that's where I really like setting appointments with emotions. And so for many of my clients, I recommend daily five to ten minutes appointments with your emotions as almost like a meditation practice. You can set your timer for, let's say, five minutes and notice, what emotion am I feeling right now? Where am I feeling it? Is there an event attached to this emotion?

Is there maybe something that's making me sad, maybe not sometimes we just feel sad because we feel sad. And can I breathe into the sadness? Can I breathe into this sensation in my stomach, for example, or this tension in, let's say, the lump in my throat? And for many people, just this very brief meditation practice or mindfulness practice, if you will, can allow a better in tunement with our emotions and also can allow us to be freer to focus on other areas of our life outside of this practice. You can think of it as if you have a pet having a daily time that you spend with your pet, right?

Maybe you take your dog to a park, maybe you play with your cat is so that your pet doesn't feel abandoned. And it doesn't mean that you have to spend 24 hours with your pet, but it's. It's a way that you're honoring this connection. And I think that when we honor our emotions in this way by making time for them, they don't grow into things like overwhelming grief to the point of depression, to the point of us having trouble sleeping. They don't grow into panic attacks to the point that we can barely function.

And so it's almost like brushing our teeth on a daily basis so that we can protect our teeth's health over time. So what does the other side, once you get there, look like? And what I mean by that is if something horrible has happened to you, and I'll just. In my own life. My mother died when she was 60.

Dell Technologies
She was way too young. And I, you know, I don't dwell on it, but I still think it shouldn't be this way. I'll never think, oh, it's okay. I mean, I don't know what acceptance feels like or looks like, because if it shouldn't be this way now, seems like it should never have been this way in the first place. You're absolutely right.

Janina Scarlett
It shouldn't be this way. Right. The acceptance can even be of that reality. It shouldn't. Somebody shouldn't die so early, and somebody shouldn't lose their parent so early.

And it's heartbreaking. And so a part of acceptance is to recognize how unfair some of these things are. And so sometimes it might be even noticing how painful that is to have missed out on that time with somebody we loved so much. Right? It might mean maybe spending some time looking at their pictures or remembering some of the memories that we might have shared with that person.

It might mean, in some cases, maybe talking to them or writing to them. It might mean taking some time out of our day to allow ourselves to feel that grief in our throat or our chest and breathe into that grief for a couple of minutes. And I think it's about honoring the fact that, yes, it shouldn't be this way, and it is. And it sucks. And it's almost like making room for the sock, if that makes sense.

Dell Technologies
But doesn't that, though, getting out pictures or writing letters, doesn't that just stir it all up again so we can. Think of it as, like, a fizzy drink, right? So if. Let's say I'm holding a water bottle, but if, let's say I was to be holding a soda bottle, like a Coca Cola bottle or a sprite bottle, if I was to shake it up and shake it up and shake it up and shake it up, but keep the lid on, that pressure would build up, right? So then if I was to then open that bottle, that pressure would erupt.

Janina Scarlett
And that's what happens when we haven't been around our feelings for a long time, when we haven't looked at pictures of our loved ones, and then we take them out. It's almost like taking the cap off of a shaken soda bottle. Yes, we will likely experience a heightened experience of grief. We might cry. We might feel pain.

But also, if you remember, the soda bottle doesn't keep exploding forever, right? It might. We might have that initial explosion, and then it will settle, and then the soda will become flat. And that's what happens with our emotions if we haven't been facing them for a while. At first, yes, it might be almost like a pain attack, and we might cry, or we might feel that heartbreak all over again.

But then it will settle. If we stay with it, it will settle. But there's also a different way of opening the soda bottle. If it's been shaken up, we can open it slowly over time. And as we open the lid, very, very slowly, the pressure settles.

And that's what happens when we make regular appointments with our grief rather than taking long time intervals between them. So acceptance means what? What does acceptance do that when you don't accept it, it doesn't do. What does it feel like? What is it?

Dell Technologies
Because it seems like acceptance means I'm okay with it. And there are a lot of things that happen that you're never okay with. And I think that's a misnomer. I think a lot of times people think that acceptance means being okay with it. Acceptance is the willing to acknowledge that it did happen.

Janina Scarlett
The willing to experience whatever emotions arise as a result of this experience, including the anger and frustration that had happened, including the grief including the sadness. Whatever emotions and experiences come up, it does not mean being okay with it. If somebody was, let's say, sexually abused in their childhood, that never should have happened. There's no world in which that's okay. There's no therapy that will get you to the point of stating, yes, it was okay, I'm okay with it.

The point of acceptance is more to practice stating, it happened, it was terrible, it shouldn't have happened. I am mortified about it, and perhaps maybe I am safe now. Hopefully that individual might be safer now, but it's making room for whatever unprocessed emotions there were so that the person can allow themselves to be present with whatever other experiences are going on right now. It does seem that just from my own experience, that one of the things you worry about is whatever happened, you can't un have had, you can't undo it. So you're going to be thinking about it for the rest of your life.

Dell Technologies
I think of this like, if you're a parent and your child dies, as horrible as that is, it'll never go away. You can't undo it. You can't pull that out of your brain and put it aside. You'll think about it every single day for the rest of your life and it will hurt. And how could you not, how could you not think about that for the rest of your life?

Janina Scarlett
How could it not hurt? Right? An experience like it hurts because we care, it hurts because our heart is broken. To deny that would be inhumane. And the purpose of these practices is never to deny or invalidate the awful pain that we have been through.

It's quite the opposite. It's to validate that pain and to make space for healing, which means allowing for grief to take place. What else about this? When you talk to people, or people talk to you about what they have trouble with, what haven't we talked about? That's important to this whole process.

I think for a lot of people, the fear is that they might not feel like they have what it takes to face the pain of it. And I typically say you don't have to face it all at once. There is a practice that researchers Kristin Neff and Chris Germer identified, the practice of opening and closing. So we can think of it as opening and closing a book. We can open a book completely, or we can kind of peek at it, you know, just a tiny little bit and then close it.

Or we can open the door all the way, or we can open the door just a tiny bit and peek behind it. And so we can practice that with our experiences. We don't have to go all in. It's okay to take time. It doesn't mean the pain diminishes, but it might mean that love grows around it.

Dell Technologies
Yeah, I like that. It might mean that love grows around it. That's a great way to end this discussion. Janina Scarlett is who I've been speaking with. She is a clinical psychologist and the name of her book is, it shouldn't be this way.

Learning to accept the things you just can't change. Thanks, Janina. I really enjoy this conversation. Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Janina Scarlett
Michael, thank you so much for interviewing me and thank you for your wonderful podcast. I truly think you're helping more people than you probably realize.

Dell Technologies
Well, that's a nice thing to hear. Thank you, Janina. Hey, have you ever, I don't know, changed your hair or wore some piece of clothing, deliberately trying to look younger than you actually are? You probably shouldn't do that. A study found that adults who tried to dress or act younger than they really were actually came across as older.

Participants in the study who portrayed themselves as younger were also rated as less likable and more deceitful by the younger panel of judges. Psychologist Alexander Shoman explains that young adults generally dislike older adults who try to invade their age group. Theres one simple trick, to appear more youthful without coming across as a wannabe. And that is to smile. The panel consistently estimated photographs of people with happy faces younger than their actual age.

And that is something you should know. It really helps grow our audience. It really does. If you tell someone about this podcast and get them to listen, that word of mouth is really what helps our audience grow. So please tell somebody and ask them to listen.

I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Hey guys, welcome to the candy Valentino show. I'm Candy Valentino. I was a founder before I created, could legally order a drink.

Candy Valentino
And for more than two and a half decades, I've built, scaled, acquired, and exited multiple businesses in diverse industries. Now my goal is to help you by sharing the knowledge that I've learned, the mistakes that I've made, and the wisdom that I've developed over my journey. Bi weekly episodes every Monday and Thursday. The Candy Valentino show. Wherever you listen.

Mike Carruthers
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