Dr. Kari Leibowitz
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Coming up next on Passion Struck. There's an intimacy in the darkness and an intimacy to being warm when it is cold that I think can really foster connection. I think conversations can deepen and it's a sense of being closer together because who do you do that with? Who are you with in the warmth and the light when outside it's cold and dark? Those are usually people you feel very close to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Well, I think this idea of how do we do that, right? What does it look like to clear our minds of unhelpful or harmful thoughts? How can we help put people on different paths? And I think that meditation is certainly one way to do that. It's a really a way of training your mind
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And these mindfulness practices give you that meta awareness, that moment of noticing when you're in a thought that is unhelpful or destructive or noticing when you're in a pattern that is maladaptive. And I think testing some of these strategies empirically, not just meditation, but other interventions as well, that can help people notice and understand and harness their thoughts. It helps.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I think legitimize these practices in Western culture. It helps give people something to go on. It also gives us a way of directing our energy and attention, right? So say you were gonna implement something in schools or with your students or with your kids or with yourself, right? You would wanna do something that is impactful
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And I think using science to test these things can help us really understand both what their impact is, how big their impact is, and the mechanisms by which these things work. And one thing that I was also taught that the Buddha said that I really think about in my work is that the Buddha said, you shouldn't take my teachings just because I said them. You should go out
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
and examine them for yourself. Like it's a piece of gold, right? Like you don't just believe it's gold because I hand it to you. You would do some tests. You would make sure that it's actually real gold. And that's something that I really aspire to do with my work is I want to have the research.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I want to have the data to show you, oh yeah, we know that these practices improve your positive emotions or improve your health or improve your wellbeing. But you know what?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
go out and try them because if they don't work for you if they don't fit in your life if they don't feel true for you then that's not the right strategy for you and so i think this idea of marrying okay here's what science says is helpful on average with you have to find what works for you by trying things in your own life with sort of an open-minded experimental attitude is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
something I really like to do when I'm giving people strategies or tips for how to change their mindset or how to embrace winter or whatever it is. I really want to say that these things aren't one size fits all and different people are going to find different practices that work for them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Totally. And I think it's really easy for us to go along and just be lost in our thoughts or not realize that we have mindsets that are impacting us. And it's only with that meta awareness that we can start seeing
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
oh yeah actually these thoughts are just that they're thoughts right they're not necessarily an objective view of the world they're not an unbiased view of the world and so i can examine them and maybe intervene on them if i want to absolutely and i love um
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I think it was meeting my mentor, Dr. Alia Crum at Stanford, who is really a mindset pioneer in the vein of Carol Dweck, who I also had the opportunity to work with at Stanford, who was very well known for her work on growth and fixed mindsets.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And what Alia Crum has done is really expand a lot of this work into health domains, marrying the decades of research we have on things like placebo effects, right? You take a placebo, a sugar pill, and patients get better. Well, what's happening there? It's not that the sugar in the sugar pill has some healing properties.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
It's things happening in our psychology, in our expectations, in our environment and interactions with other people and in our mindset. And so really trying to quantify. How does that help our health and wellbeing? How does that impact our health and wellbeing?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And especially coming off of my background in the meditation world and in contemplative science, it was really compelling to me to have a different way to think about our subjective experience and intervene on our subjective experience because I think meditation is a really powerful tool and I would love it if everyone meditated, but it's not for everyone. Right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So for whatever reason, some people are never going to be into that practice. Maybe it's not useful for them. Maybe they can't find the time. Maybe it's hard to commit to that practice. And so the question is, how can we take that? some of the things that we know from the mindfulness world, from the meditation world, and harness them in different places.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So for example, some of my research has been in understanding mindsets in health care and training health care providers
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
to recognize patient mindsets and try to have conversations with patients that help them adopt more useful mindsets and certainly many doctors don't have time to do an in-depth meditation training with their patients to help them see their chronic illnesses differently but maybe they can have these other short conversations that are going to intervene on mindsets and instill more adaptive mindsets and so
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I was really inspired by the work that Allie Crum was doing in the Stanford Mind and Body Lab, and I saw just a lot of potential there for harnessing a lot of these principles in new and exciting ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I think so many people just let winter happen to them, right? I think this is what our culture really encourages us to do, right? We live by the calendar or the schedule or our routines and not by the seasons in nature or the cycles of light and dark in a year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And so one thing that these activities do is they bring that mindfulness, they bring in that awareness that it's gonna be winter, it's gonna get cold, it's gonna get dark. And these actions help us take a little bit of agency over something that we can't control, right? We can't control the weather. We can't control what time the sun rises or sets.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
But we can control how prepared we are to meet those challenges, right? Whether we have the right clothing to go out when it's cold, the right accessories at home to feel comfortable, the right lighting to help welcome in the darkness during the darkest days of the year. And so I think it starts tuning us into the opportunities of the season.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So when these little behaviors or rituals become things we look forward to. Every year on the first cold day, I make my favorite pot of soup, or when it starts setting, the sun starts setting really early, I make myself a cup of tea in the afternoon to enjoy. They're small, fluffy feeling things, but they really help
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
us reclaim a time of year that I think a lot of people experience as dreary and depressing as actually an opportunity for little moments of comfort and pleasure.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And I think it's the same as what you were talking about of loving winter or looking forward to winter when you were growing up because you played hockey, because that was a special thing you only did during the winter that you looked forward to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And so what a lot of these things are asking us to do is to make ourselves comfortable and start orienting to, OK, what are the things we can look forward to in winter that can help us enjoy this season? And then I think it's also To go a little bit wider with it, it can help us meet other things proactively, right? So there are going to be other challenging seasons of life, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Maybe you have a big transition coming up in your work or your home life. Maybe you are going to have surgery and you're going to need to recover. Maybe you're pregnant and about to give birth. And if you do these things that can help you prepare, you can feel a little bit more ready to meet these challenges. You're facing them head on. These are what we call active coping strategies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So rather than denying or avoiding or doing other unrelated behaviors, just scrolling on your phone or disengaging or being in denial, they help us move towards these challenges and then can actually provide us a little comfort during a dark or difficult time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Well, I'm extremely jealous that you've been to Japan 20-something times because it was one of my favorite places that I went when I was researching the book. This all really started for me when I spent a year living in the Arctic in Northern Norway in a city called Tromsø. And Tromsø is so far north that they experience two months of what's known as the polar night each year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So that's a two-month period where the sun rises and then never comes above the horizon. And so it's very dark. It's a very long winter. It's a very cold winter. And what I observed in Tromso, I've seen in other places around the world that winter well. One of the main things I see is a willingness to adapt to the season in some way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So again, this comes back to the idea that sort of living by our modern
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
conveniences and calendars and routines I think can delude us into thinking that we don't need to change our behavior in the winter but then all of a sudden we're surprised that we're really tired during the darkest time of the year or we have little motivation or energy or don't feel like socializing in the same way after the holidays in January and so I think
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
acknowledging that it is healthy and adaptive and useful to change with the seasons is really powerful so this might be doing some of these behaviors that we've talked about making sure you're wearing appropriate clothing for the cold or lighting candles when it gets dark out or eating different foods. It might also mean trying to find ways to slow down a little bit and rest more, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Even if you live somewhere like Tampa, where it doesn't get that cold in the winter, it's still going to get darker and you might still feel those effects on your energy. So are there ways that you can get a little bit more sleep or get a little bit more rest? You can take longer showers. You can linger over your morning coffee.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
You can switch your workout so that they're a little bit slower, more based on flexibility or strength training than like really in high intensity cardio. Maybe you socialize differently. Maybe instead of doing big summery barbecues, beach picnics, You're doing more inviting one or two people over for dinner or meeting for a coffee for an hour.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I think however you adapt to the season, this idea that you're going to change your behavior in some way, how you rest, how you socialize, how you move your body, how you spend time outdoors, what you eat, that those are going to have a seasonal pattern to them, I think is great. one thing that people who really embrace winter do very naturally.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And this was something I saw in Northern Norway because the difference in seasons is so extreme that they go from the midnight sun, 24 hours of full sunlight in the summer to 24 hours of the polar night where the sun doesn't rise above the horizon in the winter. it's obvious that you would change your behavior with the seasons.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And so I think the rest of us living at other latitudes where maybe the seasonal change isn't so extreme can learn from these extreme places and say, yeah, it's still useful for me to adapt to this yearly cycle of light and dark in some way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
In the fall, yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I've met people who love to bake bread and like they can't bake it in the summer because it just makes their house too hot. So winter is bread baking season. I think this is a big thing in Japan where the seasonal food culture is so strong that they're really changing what they eat with the seasons changing. with what's in season.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Hot sake is only for winter and cold sake is only for summer and things like that. And I think it helps you be in tune with the cycles of nature. And then it gives you things to look forward to. You look forward to roast season and soup season because it's limited. You don't do it year round.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Yeah, so I think this idea of coziness, for me, it's really a sense of psychological safety. So some of the listeners might be familiar with the Danish word, which is translated as coziness. Lots of different cultures have their own words. So in Norway, it's kuslig. In the Netherlands, the Dutch word is gezellig, which is like, more of a communal coziness. It's more social.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
But I think there's a feeling of being at ease. The difference between going to a dinner party where you feel like everyone is judging you a little bit and you're not sure if you're doing it right and you go home and you're like, oh my God, like, why did I say that thing? I sounded so dumb.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
versus going to a dinner party where everyone is warm and welcoming and non-judgmental and you feel really at ease with everyone. I think this idea of coziness is It's a little bit of a freedom from striving, I think. It's a sense of being able to just be.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So Mike Wicking, who wrote the little book of hygge, often talks about hygge as you're at a ski lodge with your friends and it's snowing outdoors and you spent the whole day on the slopes. And then you come in and you're hanging out by the fire and drinking wine or hot chocolate or whatever, right? It's this...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
idea there's nowhere else i need to be there's nothing else i need to do i can just be at ease and at peace and i think that's really what belonging is about right it's that sense of ease that is social and communal but it's very relaxing and it's very nurturing and i think winter can be a time to foster that i think the reason that a lot of this
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
conversation about coziness and belonging makes sense for the winter is because there's something about it being dark and cold outside and being inside where it's warm with cozy lighting that is very intimate, right? There's an intimacy in the darkness and an intimacy to being warm when it is cold that I think can really foster connection.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I think conversations can deepen and it's a sense of being closer together because who do you do that with? Who are you with in the warmth and the light when outside it's cold and dark? Those are usually people you feel very close to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Totally. I think slowing down really makes space for that. And I think we all so often see winter as the absence of these other things, the absence of the things that fill our days during the go-go season. But to me, what I have observed in a lot of winter loving places is that people see this as a relief, as a break, as a respite that sort of helps them recover from the go-go of
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
spring, summer, and fall, and that this slowing down, connecting intimately, maybe going inward, connecting with yourself a little bit more, making a little bit more time for, yeah, contemplation or solo activities or artistic pursuits really is restorative and that the sort of darkness of this time of year really facilitates that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Well, I want to acknowledge sort of two barriers to this kind of rest, right? So some are circumstantial, right? Maybe you work in a job that doesn't allow you an opportunity to rest, right? Maybe you're a hospital worker. Maybe you're a service worker and the holidays are really crazy. Maybe you have caregiving responsibilities. You have little kids at home working.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
those who are not slowing down just because it's dark out and cold out or you're caregiving for an elderly parent or someone else who is sick. I think those are very real barriers to rest. And then I think the other flip side of that is the people who could rest But like you said, there's these feelings of guilt or there's a real moralization, I think, of busyness and not resting and persevering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And I think that the antidote to... at least one of these, if not both of these, is really to reframe rest as vital. It's really vital to the whole process. And I think if you look at the natural world, you can see that, right? What looks like a dormant time in nature is actually utterly necessary for the growth of spring.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And one of the things I really liked researching for the book were about plants that have a A lot of the stone fruits we love in the summer things like cherries and peaches and apricots if they don't have enough time spent in the cold in the winter, they can't bloom properly in the spring. And I think about rest like this, but if you don't have that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
downtime then it's actually harder to do the things that you need to do at other times of year the other thing i really think that is helpful for overcoming guilt about rest is thinking about guilt-free rest as a vital life skill that we all will need to practice so i think it's a fact of life that we will all encounter seasons that force us to slow down. We'll be sick.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
We'll be recovering from surgery or burnout. We'll be grieving. Maybe we'll be recovering from childbirth. We'll maybe have other losses in our lives that force us, whether we like it or not, to slow down. And I think that can be really hard for people who have never practiced that before.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
But if you practice that each winter and you take each winter as an opportunity to slow down and embrace rest and be okay with feeling more tired and giving into your body's tiredness and nurturing it appropriately, then I think that can really prepare us for these other challenges and make it a little bit easier when we do need to slow down.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
now for the people who have these other circumstantial obstacles to rest i think it's really helpful to try to reframe rest in different ways right so maybe you can't get a lot more sleep maybe that's not possible for you at this time in your life but you can find rest in other ways right you can stretch a little bit in the morning or before bed you can take a slightly longer shower you can pause and close your eyes and breathe
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
for two minutes in between different components of your day. You can free yourself to rest in other ways as well. You can say, I'm not gonna respond to text messages or emails after a certain time of night. I'm going to give myself a mental break from some of these things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So I think these ideas of experimenting with different kinds of rest and different ways of resting can be a really powerful antidote both to actual schedules that are really crammed full and to these feelings of guilt that sort of tell us that we shouldn't be resting when rest is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
a fundamental human thing like you don't get mad at yourself for needing oxygen or to needing to use the bathroom then it doesn't also make any sense to get mad at yourself when you need rest right this is a fundamental part of being a living being all living beings need rest
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
This is a really important question. So I think there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about seasonal affective disorder. So as it's currently defined, seasonal affective disorder is a subtype of clinical depression. So that means in order to have seasonal affective disorder, you have to first meet the threshold for clinical depression.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
before you can be diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder. And the reason I think that's important to internalize is because I think a lot of people have the view that is less serious than clinical depression, that it's a lower threshold when that's actually not the case. And I think a lot of this comes from the way seasonal affective disorder was originally described and diagnosed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So it was originally described and diagnosed using a tool called the SPAC, which is the Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire, which basically measured people's fluctuations between seasons. So what time of year do you sleep the most, eat the most, have the least motivation, socialize the most? What time of year do you feel the best?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And what this scale did was it said, OK, if you have too much seasonal fluctuation, then you might have seasonal affective disorder. And people who live in these really extreme winters, like in northern Norway, where I was living, don't really have that perspective. It's not really reasonable to think that you wouldn't fluctuate and change with the seasons. And so modern thinking
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
has really shifted to say, OK, it really has to be first clinical depression. So it has to have a lot of symptoms of depression, things like a huge lack of motivation or energy, feelings of guilt or worthlessness, suicidal ideation, large rapid change in weight loss or gain. These symptoms have to be sustained for at least two weeks. And critically, it really has to impair your daily functioning.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So that maybe that means you can't meet your job responsibilities. Maybe that means you can't take care of yourself. You can't shower. You can't get out of bed. Maybe it means you can't take care of your other caregiving responsibilities, like taking care of pets or kids. And if that's you, definitely that's a sign to talk to a health professional, talk to your doctor, talk to a therapist.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
But I think a lot of people have a much milder version of that where they feel more tired in the winter. Maybe they feel less motivated. Maybe they feel less social. Maybe they're sleeping more. And the only sort of available lens in our culture to really interpret those feelings is to say, oh, something's wrong with me. I must have seasonal affective disorder. I must have winter depression.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
When in fact, that's a really natural response to the changing daylight and the changing temperature that we experience in winter. And so the discussions around seasonal affective disorder were meant to warn people and help people be on the lookout for a potential mental health episode.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
But I think what they've done is given everyone a top of mind explanation for if they feel a little bit more tired or a little bit less motivated in the winter, thinking that they have a full blown seasonal affective disorder when really What it is, it's just a normal response to the seasons that doesn't need to be pathologized.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And so I think if it's not so severe that it's interfering with daily functioning, it's a lot more adaptive to look at this and say, okay, where can I get more rest? Where can I cut back? How can I meet myself where I'm at without pathologizing what is a pretty normal response to the darkest time of the year?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Thanks so much for having me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I really grew up with this belief that you can't enjoy yourself outside if it's cold or dark or rainy. And I really internalized that until I had to spend the year in Norway. And it was very clear that if you didn't go outside ever when it was cold or dark or rainy, you'd be stuck in your house for several months every year. And so I think
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
This expression is really about fortifying yourself against the elements and not letting perceived bad weather stop you. And this is something that I challenge my students to do or I challenge participants in my workshops to do is to dress up, really bundle up for the weather, for the cold or the rain or whatever it is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
and go outside for a walk in bad weather, in cold weather, in the rain, in the snow. Of course, be safe about it. If it's a blizzard, maybe not. But most winter weather, you actually can bundle up and go outside and enjoy. And when my students do this and come back and reflect on it, their reflections almost always follow the same pattern of them being like, I didn't want to do this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I almost bailed. I thought it was going to be terrible. Then I did it. I got outside. I started moving. Actually, it was nice. And then I was feeling good. And then I noticed that the sound of the rain is really beautiful or the city was really quiet or nature looks really different at this time of year. And then you know what? I did it again the next day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And I think it's really about overturning some of our preconceptions and these narratives that we fall into about what we can or can't do and trying to yeah, gear up and then really be open to the experience of what it's like and really be open to having some of our assumptions be overturned.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And watching people go through this experience and be surprised by it is it's a really powerful practice that I think leads you to ask, OK, what else could I do? What else have I been telling myself that I can't enjoy, that actually maybe I just need to gear up a little bit and go out and face, and I might have a really good time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Totally. So I think even if you don't experience a really harsh winter, unless you live really on the equator or in Hawaii, you're going to experience these seasonal fluctuations in darkness. And so I think really working with the darkness is a very powerful practice, right? So it's almost a cliche to be like,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
light some candles in winter and you won't be depressed and obviously it's not quite that simple but really lighting candles with the intention of welcoming the darkness of embracing the darkness of creating a cozy atmosphere that is only possible when the sun is setting earlier that really changes the meaning of darkness and so
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
really at its heart, all of these strategies for embracing winter, all of the sort of components of cultivating a positive wintertime mindset are about asking yourself, what are the opportunities here? What is better at this time of year? And you can ask yourself that wherever you live.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Thanks so much. Yeah, I was really excited to get that endorsement because they read a lot of great social science and behavioral science books.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
If you live somewhere that is really hot in the summer, then there might be a lot of things that are actually better at this time of year. And so I think that is really, the key transformative question that when you're faced with a challenge, when you're faced with difficulty, asking yourself, what is the opportunity here? It doesn't mean you have to like the thing that's happening to you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Doesn't mean you have to be grateful for it, but we're all gonna experience things outside of our control that we wish were not happening and meeting them with, okay, what's the opportunity here? Are there opportunities to connect? with myself or my loved ones or my social support network? Are there opportunities to make positive life changes?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Are there opportunities to practice going into a period of rest and rejuvenation and contemplation? Whatever it is, that idea of looking at the darkness and saying, what is the opportunity here? I think really changes the way that we experience the challenge and difficulties that are going to come for all of us at different points in our lives.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
You can go to my website, KariLiebowitz.com. I also have a newsletter there that you can sign up for called Wintery Mix. And of course, I hope that you will maybe check out my book, How to Winter, which has a lot more tips and things that we didn't get a chance to get into today. And if you try anything that we talked about on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
You can reach me through my website and I always love to hear people's winter stories.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Thanks, John. This was such a pleasure. Thanks for all your great questions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So I grew up with the Jersey Shore in Asbury Park, which is a Bruce Springsteen country. They're filming the Bruce Springsteen biopic there these days. And it's a beach town. It's a summer town. And so I lived in a place where summer was king. And especially as a kid, when you have summer break, That's what you're waiting all year for.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And winter is really the time of year that you just have to get through to get to the good season. And this was so ingrained in the culture around me that I just thought it was fact, right? Winter is a bummer. Summer is great. And in the winter, you're going to be cold. You're going to struggle getting up in the morning for school. That was really hard for me in the darkness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
I just felt like I was shivering for months and all the things that we like to do, going to the beach, going to the boardwalk, going to concerts, getting ice cream, those were all sort of summer activities. So I really grew up with this bias that I think is common in a lot of the US, definitely in New Jersey, where I was from, against winter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Yeah, and I think you bring up a really good point. I'll talk about this more later, but I think people who have things they like to do in the winter, like playing hockey or winter sports, tend to really enjoy the season because that's an opportunity there. And actually growing up by the Jersey Shore, because you're on the Atlantic, it doesn't stay below freezing that often.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So every once in a while, some of the lakes would freeze over, but I think it's unlike in Pennsylvania when you're more inland, you can't really count on that every year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And so really that climate difference of being somewhere below freezing where things freeze, you can ice skate, you can play hockey, maybe you get more snow, can make a big difference in what activities there are to enjoy in the winter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Totally, yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Yeah, I mean, I've always been interested in understanding how other cultures perceive what it means to be a good life. And I studied contemplative science and compassion meditation with Tibetan monks and nuns in India when I was an undergrad. And that really opened my eyes to Buddhism.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
not only how much our subjective experience creates our reality, but also the ways that we can exert more influence over our subjective experience than perhaps we realize that we're not just
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
passive observers like a video camera taking in what's happening around us we're constantly selectively attending to things interpreting those things and making meaning out of our experiences and the things we see in the world and so i really became fascinated in this idea of how can we use this to help people?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
How can we use this to help people thrive, live more meaningful lives, overcome challenges? And that was what I really spent my time in graduate school studying when I was part of the Stanford Mind and Body Lab, which is led by Dr. Aaliyah Crum, who really studies how our mindsets influence our health performance and wellbeing. And there I was really introduced to a way of
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
using Western science to rigorously measure and understand the impact of our subjective experience, our mindsets, our beliefs, and how that is shaping our day-to-day feelings, emotions, health, well-being, and how by intervening on these mindsets and these subjective interpretations, we can help people be happier and healthier and perform better and thrive.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
Well, I really felt like I was already part of one of the mandates that he had given. So my mentor at Emory is named Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi. And Geshe Lobsang was a Tibetan monk for many years. And now he runs the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Emory, which has a lot of different components. Some of it is meditation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
training people in compassion meditation and bringing compassion meditation to Western communities. Some of it is a new curriculum they're developing on social, emotional, and ethical learning. And another branch which I was involved with was called the Emory Tibet Science Initiative.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And this goal was really to marry contemplative Buddhist knowledge and their rigorous tradition of the science of the mind with Western science. And so this organization at Emory was formed to facilitate cross-cultural learning. knowledge and research and understanding between these two groups.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
So as part of this, there were professors from the US who were brought to India to teach Western science, physics and neuroscience and biology to Tibetan monks and nuns. And we also were bringing contemplative practice meditation to Emory and other places in the West.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And I was working on a summer study abroad program where we brought Emory students and other American students to study in India and to learn about Tibetan Buddhism and culture and medicine and science and meditation to really facilitate these kinds of cross-cultural exchanges. And you've seen over the last decades, I think really in part largely to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
His Holiness the Dalai Lama's vision and leadership in wanting to bring these traditions together. There are so many scientists who have been given this calling to use their research to further these goals. And now we have monks and nuns, some of whom are my friends from my time at Emory and in India, who are well versed in Western science and can bring these traditions together. And I think
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
It's really powerful because I think Western science has a really good model for empirically testing questions objectively and really understanding and measuring things objectively over and over again.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
But this idea of taking a scientific approach to your own mind and your own consciousness and your own internal experience is something that the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has a lot of experience with and a lot of knowledge of how to do that systematically and rigorously.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
And so certainly my audiences with His Holiness and my time studying Tibetan Buddhism have really informed the work that I'm doing now. And it was just such a great job to be part of organizing his visit to Emory and leading these students abroad in India.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kari Leibowitz on How to Overcome the Winter Blues | EP 554
and playing a small role in the mission of what the team at emory is building under sort of the guidance and supervision and insight of his holiness and spearheaded by geshe lobsang tenzin negi who is really putting together a bunch of these programs at emory well thank you so much for sharing that and it's interesting that the buddha once described the mind as a wild horse