406. How to romanticise your 20s (even when they suck)

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Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spek and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode of the show. Today I am finally doing it. I am doing a much requested topic or episode which is my guide to romanticizing our 20s, even when they suck. I think we've all seen videos or posts online about the importance of romanticizing your life, of like romanticizing your 9 to 5, romanticizing your commute, your morning routine, whatever it is. But why does this actually work? What does the psychology and the science say about these practices? And the biggest question of the more, is there any evidence? Is there any evidence that buying yourself the flowers, pretending you're the main character, using the good cutlery, the good candle work? The answer I'm going to give it to you straight away is yes. There's so much evidence. So much evidence, honestly, so much evidence I could make this a two-parter that romanticizing your life does things to your mind, does things to your brain, does things to your body, then improve your quality of life. So today we are going to talk about that. What romanticizing your 20s should actually look like? Of course, the neuroscience and the psychology behind why and how this practice will quite literally change your reality and change the timeline you are on. But also my five personal favorite, you know, romanticizing techniques and tips that you probably are not doing or you may not have even heard of. So without further ado, let's get into the episode. When people talk about romanticizing, it often gets confused with sugarcoding or even toxic positivity, like kind of like you're supposed to spin everything into a lesson and you are immediately meant to treat your pain like it is this gift. It's this amazing thing. Everything happens for a reason. Everything is how it should be. Everything is redirection. We have to be careful with this because it can turn into what we call in psychology, emotional, bypassing basically not actually letting yourself feel the full spectrum of emotions. And therefore emotionally depriving yourself of a big part of your human experience, like we don't want to be doing that. Instead romanticizing our 20s as I see it personally is choosing to experience your life as something you are actually experiencing, not just something that is happening to you or against you or with you as a victim. So it is a mindset that honestly really has its roots in the 1800s with a movement called the romantic movement. To give you a history lesson like the romantics were a group of people who really believed in the purpose and the importance of feeling experiences, getting the full complexity of it all, feeling deeply as a way to truth and enlightenment, even if it was more painful and messy than rationality. It is definitely a shift from this idea that your life is just a series of difficulties that you need to fix to acknowledging that your life is an unfolding story. Despite whether this chapter is hard or not, ultimately there is a purpose and ultimately feeling is part of that purpose. Just notice for a second what I am not saying, I am not saying the hard chapter is fun, I am not saying you have to be grateful for it. I am saying it can be a chapter without being the whole story. And this is such an important emotional skill to develop during this decade because, guess what, bad things are going to happen to us in these years and the next. It is just without a doubt, it is the promise of life, break ups, job rejections, loneliness, there is immediate pain there that has to be respected. And then there is the second layer of meaning that we get to control and by doing so that will actually shift your lived reality. Remanticizing your 20s is any form of exercise practice, mindset shift that allows you to see your experiences as meaningful even if they are actually terrible. Before we get into some of the specific practices for doing this that I have for you guys, how does this actually work? Like I feel like I have been teasing this whole episode but like psychologically, clinically, scientifically, whatever. What is the perspective? What is the mechanism that makes this effective? The biggest reason romanticizing your life or your 20s works and makes your life and your 20s better is because of the power of cognitive reappraisal. So the theory behind cognitive reappraisal, which is one of the most famous theories in psychology, basically says, you can change your emotional response by changing how you think about a situation. Even if the situation stays the same, because your thoughts are half of the reality you're experiencing by controlling the rest of the thoughts you can give yourself a better outlook and a better outcome. Cognitive reappraisal, it's basically just a reality regulation strategy that is so well documented in the research because essentially we know this. True people could be experiencing the exact same thing, but the very fact that their past or their intentions make them think about it differently would change the experience of that moment for them. And how you experience that single moment, the moment that you were in is really all that reality is ever based on. For example, a 2013 meta analysis of neuroimaging studies, I don't even know how many that did hundreds. It found that when people successfully reframed negative stimuli, so basically we're able to say, you know, this isn't all bad. This is what this could actually mean for me. I'm excited rather than anxious. I'm excited to see this unfold. The effect of this of not just accepting negativity as it was was visible in the brain, often there was increased activity in the networks involved in cognitive control, meaning making and also reduced activity in brain regions associated with heart and emotional reactivity such as the amygdala, which is very famous for that. So when we employ this reframing strategy, we're not again, we're not changing the physical event, the physical event still sucks. What is actually happening to us? is that we are just tapping into a psychological mechanism that our brain already has. Like our brain already has this ability to think differently about a situation. Sometimes it just forgets to use that because we are so emotionally overwhelmed by all of this stuff landing at our doorstep at once that we just don't use it and we just find it easier just to accept things as they are. Models in cognitive neuroscience will often describe the brain as a prediction machine. It uses past experiences to generate expectations about what is going to happen and what will happen next basically. And then it updates those predictions based on incoming sensory data or like incoming environmental stimuli. Part of that data it's using are your deliberate thoughts and how you choose to interpret something. That is part of the data set. So this means that what you expect therefore shapes what you notice. When an event life happens, it means that that perception will be different. I feel like I'm going on a lot about this. Why does this matter for your 20s? Well, when you were experiencing a time full of ambiguous situations, the brain leans hardest on what it can predict and what it can expect to overcome that uncertainty. So if your internal model believes you're behind, if your internal model keeps telling you like, "Nothing works out for me, I'm always going to fail." It's easy to take that as a fact if you never question it and it's easy to apply that same narrative to entirely neutral situations. You know, the quiet weekend becomes evidence that you lack friends. The endless job hunt becomes evidence that you're just not smart enough. That isn't always true. People are busy. The job market is tough right now. Sometimes you have to take yourself out of that situation and view it differently and view it objectively. Whether that is through a romantic lens or something else entirely. So romanticizing though, it's basically it's choosing that deliberate pathway. It's saying, "I'm going to reprogram how I am seeing this and give my brain a broader, kinder, more realistic hypothesis for why things are happening to me." Like, this is a hard part of the story and I'm going to go over it. This is my origin story. This is what's going to make me more resilient in the future. This is just part of life, substance, and doubt. There are other reasons that these things are happening to me that may not just immediately be the reason that I understand, which is that nothing good happens to me. Life sucks. This is terrible. I'm not going to be able to get through it. That shift again, that can change what your brain sees as evidence. It also really comes down to the power of attention. I feel like we talk about attention so much on this podcast because it is your most lucrative tool, your most lucrative resource when it comes to your mental wellbeing. It is our way. Attention is our way of basically allocating our mental resources. Your brain is processing so much information more than you could ever consciously experience. If you listen to our conscious versus unconscious mind, episode you will know this very well. There are sounds you don't notice. Facial expressions you don't register. Body sensations you tune out. Forts that flicker by too fast to catch. So the brain has to be selective and it has to develop the systems to be selective. Attention is that selection system. It decides what gets priority processing, what gets amplified and what gets pushed into the background, or basically just ignored. We can understand this through what we call, I guess it's the idea. The idea of bias competition. It's a model that was proposed by two American psychologists or neuroscientists way back in the day, I think in the 1990s, which is not way back in the day, but a couple of decades ago. This model basically argues that stimuli compete for neural representation, basically brain space. And what attention does is turn our biases towards whatever is currently relevant to our current mindset and our way of seeing the world. Basically our attention is guided by our goals, guided by our self-knowledge, guided by our expectations that we get to set deliberately. So if you start to notice good, if you start to notice that everything goes right for me, or whatever it is, your brain focuses on that more. Basically a big part of romanticizing your 20s is saying, let me recognize the ordinary, let me recognize the good, let me recognize what I'm grateful for, things that signify a life of abundance, things that signify a plan, the signify things are getting better. If I focus on that, this fine tunes my attentional system to basically search for that more, meaning it becomes a larger, more meaningful part of my reality, meaning that my behavior and my reality continues to match my expectations because of how I choose to react in response. When people say like what you focus on expands, this is the more scientific way of understanding that. What you consistently attend to becomes more salient, more encoded, more retrievable, and more likely to form the basis of your sense of self, and more likely to form the basis of your sense of your 20s, basically. There's one more psychological reason that romanticizing our 20s works beyond attention, beyond these resource allocation. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and I'm my podcast 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong. Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side, a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%, that's T-W-O% on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule 1, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule 2, never mess with her friends either. We always say that. I'm Anasin Field, and in this new season of the Girlfriends. Oh my god, this is the same man. A group of women discovered they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. They said, "Oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target." He's going to get ready to serve. Trust me, babe. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Laurie Siegel, and I'm mostly human. I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future. This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley. Open AI CEO Sam Alman. I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world. From power to parenthood. Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI. This is such a powerful and such a new thing. From addiction to acceleration. The world we live in is a competitive world. And I don't think that's going to stop. Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others. And it's a multiplayer game. What's is the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility? Find out a mostly human. My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI. Listen to mostly human on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up everyone, I'm Ago Vodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the big money players network, it's Will Farrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day. I was like, "Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot." I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings I'm working my way up through. And I think I want to give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings I'm working my way up through. And I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent. He said, "If it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you." Which is really sweet. He goes, "But there's so much luck involved." And he's like, "Just give it a shot." He goes, "But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fine anymore, it's okay to quit." If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging there. It would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Ernest, what's up? Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth. On each episode of the podcast, Earn Elysia, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship. From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand. Because the truth is, most people will never thought how money really works. But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it. That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation. If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Elysia is the podcast for you. Listen to Earn Elysia on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Let me quickly return to that one final thing I said. I kind of mentioned before, which is the role of the narrative, the role of having a story for your twenties and believing that there is this underlying current of things, things working out or things taking you in the right direction. I think this is my most talked about matter on the podcast. I'm sorry if you are frequent. Listen up because we are returning to it yet again. It is just so essential to literally every single thing you choose to do in this ten year period of your life. Like narrative psychology, if I could have every twenty something no one time would be the idea of narrative psychology. It's the idea that there is an objective story of what's happening in your life. That objective story may be, you know, I don't have as many friends as I want. I don't like my job. My job is not fulfilling. I don't have the money I need to do the things I want. And then there is the narrative that you tell yourself about that story, which is that, you know, it's what makes it meaningful. What makes those objective experiences meaningful and sentimental. Like again, that story of, yeah, everything, this is actually important. This suffering is important. I am getting closer to what I want. I am learning important skills. That's why I'm going through this. This is the story about the story. In the early 2000s, research is based in Germany wrote this fantastic, this huge, fantastic paper talking about this and talking about the idea of life story coherence. And it basically means that you are able to organize events in a way that makes sense over time, especially through casual coherence, basically how your experience is a shaping you and thematic coherence. Like recurring themes that you carry with you. That coherence develops over your 20s. And actually a 2014 study published in the Journal of Personality looked at the autobiographical narratives of personally significant events from all these people, like 103 students, I think. And what they did was they looked at the story people were telling themselves about their lives. And they coded these stories based on whether they were coherent, based on whether they contained content about their identity, based on whether they were inherently optimistic. And what the researchers found was that participants who constructed a more coherent narrative of events, like this thing had to happen to lead into this thing. And failure was redirection. And this all makes sense in the flow of my life. They had improved psychological well-being. If you were able to take moments of failure as lessons. If you are able to think that your story was building to something greater. If you are able to see that everything in life is connected. Even the hard parts, like even the hard parts are still fascinating and still worthwhile in some way because they capture a part of the human condition because they are necessary stepping stones. That will make you happier. That made these people happier. This is why it is so important to reflect or create a story for your life, to explain your experiences, even the ones that saw. That is so protective. So with that in mind, let's jump into some of my actual tips for romanticizing your life, actual tips for connecting to a story about your life. Number one, every good story, every good movie needs a good soundtrack. So if you want to romanticize your 20s, make playlists for every life chapter and moment. Firstly, music is one of the most widely and most historically used emotional regulation tools across culture. Across cultures, I should say, across age groups, whether that's for comfort, destruction, for, I don't know, processing anger, it provides catharsis. And I think music also provides a bit of beauty to hard emotions because it allows you to feel it all so deeply. Which again, it's part of the blessing of being alive, whether we want to acknowledge that or not. Secondly, a playlist has the potential to do something really quite amazing when you think about it. It creates a container for where you are able to fully feel your emotions and then return to that later. It contains a feeling based on our associations with those songs because of our psychological attachment to music. The memories created with that music last and are able to be revisited and thought about. When your heart broken, I think, or when you're moving, when you're homesick, whatever, your feelings can feel very endless, very shapeless. So a playlist gives you emotional boundaries. It helps you move through your emotions and it means that in 10 years time, 15 years time, maybe even less, two years time, you'll be able to listen back to that music. Feel the feeling you felt then and appreciate it differently. Appreciate it as kind of like as part of the story so that you gain that coherence. Make sure that you try to use music to categorize and appreciate your life. Like if there's a song that makes you feel really ethereal and beautiful, a song that makes you feel really nostalgic, a song that makes you feel heartbroken, use those songs to bookmark moments in your experience. Think of it. Think of like how impactful like a film's soundtrack is. It can literally change how you interpret a scene and it makes you associate certain songs with certain moments. Do that with your life. I want you to make yourself a movie soundtrack to like all the different moments in, you know, the near past future as a way to romanticize them and feel them even more deeply and then to be able to return to them when you're feeling differently to understand that those emotions pass like playlist for the first week of 2026 winter for the dinner party with your friends for your first breakup for processing rejection. Have those playlists make these playlists as I don't know, little companions to the moments in your life so that you can feel it deeply. Tip number two. Make, make your alone time romantic and make it really, just make it really, really special, make it incredibly special to you to spend time with yourself. I honestly blame film and TV and social media for this insidious idea that being alone means you're automatically lonely, especially when we constantly see these people, these images of others with like their big friendship groups and like their perfect relationships and like their interesting Saturday night plans like they're at the bar, then they're at the restaurant, then they're like at a show and everybody's having a great time. We want that. But actually a lot of us in our 20s are alone more than we ever expected to be and more than other people's people realize we are not always physically alone. Sometimes it's more, it's more like a feeling like you have people around you but no one really knows what's going on inside you. I think this causes a huge amount of disappointment in us, you know, as if being single or staying in on a Saturday night or not having a big friend group means you're doing this wrong. And we don't always realize like solitude is important and psychologically protective. Of course, like community support networks add years to your life. They're so important. I'm not saying like spend all your time alone, but I think making your alone time romantic and special is so important if you want to feel happy. There's a really interesting paper from the personality and social psychology bulletin that explores solitude as a really important aspect of self-regulation, basically being able to bring yourself back into yourself. That's the best way I can put it. The research has found that solitude actually helps reduce the intensity of negative emotions when it is something that we deliberately choose to practice. The key here is actively choosing rather than feeling like we are passively being thrown into an alone state we don't want to be in. A further study from researchers at the University of Reading called this process of choosing and deliberately cultivating your solitude as crafting solitude. And they talk about the importance of being intentional and making your alone time meaningful and full. Like consciously thinking of a constant or a play or a game you really want to go to and then deciding, I'm going to do that by myself instead of waiting to be disappointed and feel like I don't have a choice in being alone. Taking yourself out for a cute date, having no plans on a Sunday so choosing to make it really special for yourself by cooking your favorite meal. cooking like a beautiful, beautiful breakfast or going for a long hike by yourself, getting your room really, really cozy, getting your skincare lined up for the night. Like those small shifts of like, I have a choice here, I have agency, I love doing this, changes the emotional charge around solitude to make it something you're excited about and you can really gain psychological insight from. I also think for those of us who want kids like want to get married, want families, there will be a time in your life when you will look back at these solitary moments with envy and with like a deep desire to have one more night in your own bed, one more night alone, one more day where you didn't have to follow an itinerary or tell people what to do. One more day where you had like no plan. Here is that chance. You know, do it for your future self, do it for the future you. Part of that is again, really appreciating every chapter you're in for what you may miss one day, really appreciating, you know, yeah, I'm lonely and that sucks, but one day I'm gonna miss being lonely on yeah, I'm heartbroken and whatever, but like one name gonna be in love and miss this feeling. In the same vein, I think one of the easiest ways to romanticize your 20s is just to create any kind of ritual. Yeah, rituals around being alone, but rituals for when you get your first paycheck and a new job. Rituals for getting ghosted. Rituals for every job rejection. Rituals for every single first date. These are essential. Rituals sound very spiritual, like prayer, like something like that, but there's a lot of research actually showing that having sacred sentimental practices for key life events or even really minor events like helps people cope with uncertainty by creating something you can control, that you find cleansing, that you find calming or romantic, and you can keep returning to it because again, it's something that you control. There's one specific study from 2014, from researchers at Harvard, that actually found how rituals can be particularly healing for people going through really hard things, like specifically people who are grieving. That's why visiting grave sites is so important. That's why lighting candles continuing to celebrate the birthdays of those who have passed can be so powerful because it continues to keep a part of them alive and keep a certainty and a sense of control of the things that feel uncontrollable. It allows us to feel again, like, yeah, a control, but also like there is some magic, there's some peace, there's stability to moments that are really hard. Everything around you could fall apart and you could still light that incense at the end of the night. You could still make sure that you walked outside for 20 minutes every day. I also think rituals in our 20s make the ordinary feel important and significant, which we sometimes lose by being in such a rush to get places and like tick things off a list and be successful and blah, blah, blah, blah. And they help us mark points in time. They help us like maybe even mentally close certain chapters or open certain chapters so we're like, cool, I'm here. I mean, this moment, I'm not in that moment anymore. Let me give you some examples so that you can kind of see what I'm saying here. The biggest one I think of is like, I have a ritual when I start a new job, I always use a small part of my paycheck to buy myself something really nice that I know will last. Like a gift to myself, like a nice pair of earrings, a handbag, I think I did that one once. Something that I know I'm going to have for years that signifies this new chapter. This literally started like when I was, how old was I when I got my first job? 49 months, like 15. And I got my first paycheck, it was $200, which is actually quite a lot of money, but I think I'd worked like a lot of shifts. And I bought myself a pair of ripped denim jeans, no shorts from one teaspoon. I don't know if you guys remember that brand. Those shorts did not last. They were so ripped, it was almost inappropriate. But the practice is still there. I've done that for every job, every contract sense I actually didn't do anything for my Netflix deal, which I still feel like I need to do. So I'm breaking my own ritual. It's just been very busy. But yeah, I have one item from every past job I've started. Another ritual is having a specific first date outfit or a first date perfume. And on the other end of the spectrum, obviously like different life experience, but having a breakup ritual. After you break up, go get a bad haircut, rearrange your bedroom, take everything they gave you boxed all up, burn it, bury it, store it. That sort of thing. As a cleansing thing to be like, cool, that chapter is done. I'm ready to psychologically move forward. I physically closed the door. Another ritual, something I actually started doing last year was that I, or this year I started to walk the number of kilometers as the same, the age I was turning, I took that age and did that number of kilometers as a walk. That is the most complicated way of describing this. But basically turn 26 walk, 26 kilometers. Turn 29, walk 29 kilometers. Start at 9 a.m. Dordal along, invite some friends. And it kind of signifies a new year. Like I'm doing this hard thing. I'm seeing a new things and I'm doing something that marks, this is what I did on this birthday instead of doing nothing. I think rituals around birthdays and aging are amazing to symbolize like the privilege of getting older. And just again, make your birthday feel special so that time feels marked by these moments. Same for the start of a new year. Same for the start of a new season, new cities, new life, like that sort of thing. It marks things in time. It says that everything in life, every experience is still important. And during transitional times, it also stops us from keeping things like open-ended that can kind of, I don't know, kind of cast a shadow over us. Okay, we're gonna take one final short break with this episode before I dive into my final two tips for romanticizing out 20s. And when we maybe shouldn't romanticize hard things, and we should just let ourselves feel a little bit crap. (upbeat music) - 2%. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%, I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more, to look past the impractical and way to complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. - We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong. - Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side, a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. - Listen to 2%, that's T-W-O percent on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Row one, never mess with a country girl. - I'm rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that. - Oh my God, this is the same man. - A group of women discovered they've all dated the same prolific con artist. - I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? - The cops didn't seem to care. - They said, oh hell no, I vowed. - He's gonna get what he deserves. - Listen to The Girlfriends, trust me babe. (upbeat music) - I'm Lori Siegel, and I'm mostly human I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future. This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, open AI CEO Sam Alman. - I think society is gonna decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world. - From power to parenthood. - Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI. - From addiction to acceleration. - The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's gonna stop. Even if you did a lot of redistribution, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others. - What's is the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility? - My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI. - Listen to mostly human on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. (upbeat music) - What's up everyone? I'm Ago Vodom. - My next guest, you know from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the big money players network. It's Will Farrell. (whimpering) - My dad gave me the best advice ever. I was like, "Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. "I don't know what that means, but I just know the ground links. "I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place "that comes look for up and coming talent." He said, "If it was based solely on talent, "I wouldn't worry about you." which is really sweet because but there's so much much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fine anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. Yeah, it would not be. Right. It wouldn't be that. There's a lot of love. Yeah. Listen to ThinkStat on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Strait, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. I also bring a bit of advice into the mix. So we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull out what you already have inside. We're coming into this world, fighting for our lives. All I'm going to do is pull out what you already got inside. We're there to support and celebrate each other. And that's not like a your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it. Yeah, exactly. And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I did this episode on whimsy a month or two ago now. And it kind of blew up. You guys loved it. It like strangely went viral on Instagram, which side note. The comments are honestly quite funny. I had no idea whimsy could be so controversial, but people were up in arms. Like people were angry in those comments, but that's besides the point, something I spoke about in that episode. If you haven't listened to it, it's amazing. Please go listen to it, which not to to my own horn, but it's a great episode. Something I spoke about is the importance of collecting and representing your memories through trinkets, small souvenirs through junk during your 20s. We are constantly shedding the skin of the person we used to be and shedding the life of the people we used to be. And sometimes we look back on a year and we wonder like where the heck did all the time go. I have nothing to remember this time by. And we struggle to actually think and appreciate what we've done by collecting trinkets, by collecting postcards, notes, whatever it is, these actives cues for our memories. It's one way to kind of prevent that evaporation of time that a lot of us experience. 2021 study in Australia found that possessions like souvenirs, like photographs, really any object that is meaningfully attached to a time or moment can actually preserve that experience for us and make the moment feel more vibrant, feel more important in hindsight, and of course, feel more romantic with the capital R. Feel more deep. Think about when you were a child. I know I used to collect shells from the beach. I was a kid which apparently you're not meant to do anymore. So I'm very sorry, but I was a kid back then. Nobody knew anything. I used to collect beany babies. I used to collect little figurines and I still have so many of them. And it physically is very grounding and it physically feels like I'm carrying moments of my life with me. I'm carrying memories with me that maybe don't have a physical representation, but I'm in like in my mind, but I'm making that physical representation for myself. Things and ways to do this is like junk journaling, but try doing a junk box this year. Cinema tickets, receipts from a date, a note from somebody at concert wrist band, a postcard, a menu, a chocolate wrapper, like it doesn't have to be neat. You're not, nobody's going to put this in a museum. Maybe they will. I don't think they will. It's a time capsule for yourself, or do like one scrapbook page per month, just one photo, one sentence, that's it. Something like, "March was hot." I did XYZ. It was a photo that I took on my iPhone, but you know, I spent some really nice time in nature. And now I have that and I remember that and I can come back to that. On this note, my final tip. Half of romanticizing your 20s is providing ways again for you to really experience hindsight and for you to really reflect on the past and how far you've come and how meaningful past experiences were to the story that you are creating. So with that in mind, the biggest thing you can do for your 20s and romanticizing them is to make vlogs for yourself and yourself only. Let me explain this. When I broke up with my first proper boyfriend when I was at university, I remember feeling like so deeply sad and so unhappy. And so what I started doing was vlogging myself, crying. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but I would talk to myself on the camera and be like, "I had just some having such a hard time. I missed this about him. I missed that about him." And I would keep doing that until I felt like I didn't need to do it anymore. And only recently did I find those videos again. I found like 20 of them. And I was like, "Wow. I feel so happy that I documented that. I feel so happy I now have the privilege of getting to sit back with hindsight and be like, we really did get better." And everything really turned out the way it was meant to be. And we didn't want to end up with him anyways. That is such a privilege. I genuinely feel so lucky that I had that opportunity. And again, it's this hindsight. It's this part of you that only gets to find experiences like romantic in the future. And if you don't give yourself the opportunity to fully like re-submerge in those moments, obviously you can do it in other ways, but like sometimes you miss that. You miss how heartbreak, rejection, pain, terrible things, job, losing your job, going broke. Like, you forget that it's all going to be okay. And that it's all taking you somewhere else. And so starting that practice now of genuinely filming yourself when you feel the need to talk, when you feel like this is a moment or a memory that you are going to want to return to. Here's a fantastic way to romanticize what you're going through. It's a fantastic way to just, yeah, I feel like I've said it enough times. It's a fantastic way to create story and to have parts of the story that you can reflect back on and then project forward with to see that things are going to get better in the future. Now, to drill one final point home before we conclude this episode, contrary to all the nice sentimental tips I've given so far to vlog yourself crying, keep junk in a box, whatever. Sometimes the most romantic loving thing you can do for yourself is just let yourself fall apart. To just let yourself feel like crap about a situation. Our 20s are a hard decade. This is hard. You're a baby adult. You are in your infancy of adulthood. And as you mature, there is so much to learn. And part of that learning is through pain, which really sucks. But I think we all learn that the older we get, practice emotional acceptance basically allow negative emotions to pass through you rather than fighting them, lean back into them. This has been found to actually predict better psychological outcomes, feel a depressive symptoms, less anxiety over time compared to constantly trying to put a positive spin on absolutely everything. I know that sounds contradictory, but you are allowed to be messy and you're allowed to be sad and you're allowed to feel lost and not necessarily know that you're going to feel better, but just hope. Like you're allowed to feel sorry for yourself sometimes. I feel like we need to say that it's actually a good thing. You don't need to fix it. You don't need to rush through it. Just name the emotion accurately. Care for your body in the most basic sense, movement, food, sleep, water. And when you're ready, you can maybe look for the silver lining. You can maybe add the narrative back in if you want to do that. Sometimes honestly the hard feelings are where you feel most alive because it hurts so much and almost feels good. Do you know what I mean? By that, the pain almost feels satisfying and gratifying because it reminds you that you're alive and it reminds you that you are here and as bad as that is and as much as you're like this is just ripping me into shreds, there's always a parallel happy experience that's going to balance things out. Well, I at least believe that. I really do believe in the balance of the universe. When you experience bad, good, good will return. So to summarize, romanticizing your 20s isn't a trick to make bad things always feel good and magical all the time that is impossible. You cannot actually answer the physics of life. It's not a way to stop bad things from happening. It's just a way of stopping bad things from becoming the only narrative you tell yourself about your life. We know this works because psychologically we have evidence for methods like cognitive re-apraisal. We have evidence for attention bias theory. We have evidence that our beliefs about a situation do allow us to better control the outcome and it matters to us. I think this whole process matters to us because in a time this turbulent and ever changing as our 20s, having that stable coherent story of like this. This is all linked. There is no invisible string that runs through this all. Stop us from discarding or just wanting to push through hard things and let such just feel them and just be like, cool. I'm here. I'm in the belly of life. If there's, if not going to go well, at least I'm going to feel it as deeply as I can. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have made it this far and you were listening on Spotify, leave, leave a little comment down below how are you planning to romanticize your 20s. Is there something that you do that I didn't mention that you think is important? As always, huge thank you to our researcher Libby Colbert for her contributions and her help on this episode. She is truly amazing. Nor the drill by now, but until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We're going to talk very, very soon. Two percent. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter and I'm my podcast, two percent. I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side, a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to two percent. That's T-W-O percent on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. I bowed. He's going to get ready to serve. We always say that. Trust me, babe. I'm the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Edwin Castro, also known as Castro 1021. And I'm Conkey, his best friend and business manager. We also love sports. And with the world cup right around the corner, we'll be breaking down the biggest storylines ahead of the big tournament here in the USA. On a recent episode of the podcast Money in Wealth with John Hill Bryant, I sit down with Tiffany the Buccaneista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money. And if you look like in our families, if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here. We break down budgeting, financial discipline and how to build real wealth starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever told. Listen to Money in Wealth with John Hill Bryant from the Black Effect Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Miles Turnne and I'm Greana Stewart and our podcast Game Recognized Game has never been done before. Nothing's off-limits. We talk tanking. You can't be rolling around the city like this tonight before games." Check out Game Recognized Game with Stuy and Miles on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Guaranteed Human