Something You Should Know
How Your Body Affects Your Happiness & Good News for Self-Critics and Perfectionists
Mon, 06 Jan 2025
At airports all over the world, luggage gets lost – sometimes forever. So, what happens to it? It can’t sit there in baggage claim forever. Well, in the U.S. a lot of the lost luggage makes it way to a place in Alabama and the contents of that luggage can be yours for a price. Listen as I explain. https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com You have heard people say, “Happiness is a state of mind.” But it also might be a state of body. There is some wonderful news about how what you do with your body can significantly affect your level of happiness. In fact, your body is constantly sending messages to your brain about what it is experiencing which in turn affects what you think and how you feel. This is according to my guest, Janice Kaplan. She is a journalist and former editor of Parade magazine – and she is author of the book What Your Body Knows About Happiness (https://amzn.to/49XpSFj) It appears that a lot of people walk around with a nagging sense they aren’t good enough – that they are not living up to their potential, that they should be doing better. If that sounds familiar, you need to hear my guest, Ellen Hendriksen. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today, among others. She is here to reveal some fascinating insight into how feeling like you are not good enough is really a form of perfectionism. And she has some great suggestions to help anyone break free of all that self-criticism. Ellen is the author of How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists (https://amzn.to/49YfIo6). Most of us accumulate a lot of receipts. For every purchase, there is a receipt. Often, we feel compelled to keep them but is that really necessary? Listen as I reveal which receipts to hold on to and which ones you can toss out. https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/receipts-which-to-keep-and-which-to-pitch.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: "Established in 2025". Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happens to lost luggage at the airport?
It turns out that we're happier in blue spaces near water and in green spaces when we're outside. There's a psychologist out of the UK who found that two hours a week spent near the water actually improves your well-being quite dramatically.
Also, why most receipts you keep you could probably throw away. And understanding the feeling of perfectionism and what it's really trying to tell you.
The word perfectionism is actually a misnomer. Instead of striving to be perfect, it's really about never feeling good enough, especially in the context of an ever more competitive culture. It makes sense that we respond with the feeling that we're not good enough.
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The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. We're doing this episode around the holidays, and a lot of people travel around the holiday season. If you're an air traveler, you have no doubt noticed that occasional suitcase that goes round and round on the carousel after all the other passengers have long gone. Have you ever wondered what happens to that suitcase and all the other unclaimed baggage?
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Chapter 2: How does your body influence your happiness?
You bring it home and it just doesn't taste the same. And is it true that wine tastes better in Paris? Well, absolutely. And that's because when you're in Paris, you're not just drinking the wine. You're drinking in the atmosphere. You're drinking in the most romantic city in the world. You're drinking in the sense of being in this charming little cafe. We actually taste with all of our senses.
There's been some really interesting research showing that you can influence how people feel about a food or what they're drinking by changing the environment where they are. one researcher gave people glasses of whiskey and he sent them to three different rooms that he had set up with dramatically different environments. And he had them describe the whiskey in each room.
And the one of the rooms, for example, that was set up to be very bucolic with green lighting and with beautiful things that gave a sense of the outdoors, People described the whiskey as having sort of a grassy taste, and then they would go to the next room that was set up very differently with jazz music, and they might describe the whiskey as being a bit edgier.
And he laughed to say that the people were holding the same glass of whiskey in their hands as they moved from room to room. So at the end of it, they realized nobody had been tricking them. They had been tricking themselves. We take in everything in our environment and we attribute it to the food that seems to be on the plate in front of us.
So knowing what you know, like how do you incorporate this into your life?
Back when I wrote the Gratitude Diaries, I knew that if I was unhappy about something or if I could catch myself in a moment when I was just being incredibly grumpy, I would actually stop and literally make myself stop and try to reframe the situation and try to think about something positive and try to think about how could I look at this in a more positive way.
And that's pretty wonderful because it gives you a sense of control and a sense that you don't have to just rely on the events that are occurring around you. You can change how you perceive them. Now that I've written this book, What Your Body Knows About Happiness, I'm able to use my body in a similar way.
So if I'm unhappy, sometimes I might stop and make myself stand a little straighter as I'm walking or give a little smile or look up. Or if I'm sitting in my house or apartment and aren't happy, I'll step outside.
So being aware that there are things that you can physically do to change how you feel, to perk up your brain, as we said before, to go someplace new, really gives you that sense that you're in control, you don't have to be reliant on what's happening around you.
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