64: Oliver Burkeman on Happiness & Negative Thinking
The Highly Sensitive Person Podcast
Kelly
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2016
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm thrilled to have on the podcast Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.
Oliver is a writer for The Guardian. In his column titled, "This column will change your life", he explores ideas around social psychology, self-help culture, productivity, and the science of happiness.
The Antidote was one of those books that came at the right time in my life. I was struggling with insomnia, brought on by anxiety....brought on by feeling like I wasn't achieving enough every day. This book helped me feel a lot more at peace about the "glass half empty" personality I've always had. It explains powerful concepts from Buddhism, Stoicism, Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts (and more) in his entertaining, accessible, and lovely writing style.
In this episode, we talk about:
- Why traditional "positive thinking" doesn't work,
- The downside of goal-setting,
- Embracing uncertainty,
- Meditation,
- Whether thinking too much makes you depressed,
- The answers he's still looking for,
- and more!
You can find Oliver on his website and Twitter (let him know you liked this interview!) And of course, you should buy his wonderful book.
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Podcast music attribution: Bust This Bust That (Professor Kliq) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Highly Sensitive Person Podcast, a twice-monthly podcast for people who experience the world intensely. |
| 0:10.4 | Join me on a journey of acceptance of our highly sensitive person traits. |
| 0:18.5 | Welcome to episode 64 of the HSP podcast. |
| 0:22.6 | I'm your host, Kelly, and today I am so thrilled to have with me, Oliver Berkman. |
| 0:28.7 | I discovered Oliver after I read his book, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. |
| 0:35.3 | Actually, I read it twice back to back. |
| 0:39.6 | It explores the upsides of negativity, uncertainty, failure, and imperfection. Oliver is a writer for The Guardian. In his writing, |
| 0:46.9 | he explores ideas around social psychology, self-help culture, productivity, and the science |
| 0:52.2 | of happiness. His column in The Guardian is titled, |
| 0:55.5 | This Column Will Change Your Life, which I think is meant to be kind of funny, but it is a life-changing |
| 1:01.1 | column. Welcome, Oliver. Thanks so much for taking the time to be here today. It's a pleasure. Thanks |
| 1:06.8 | for inviting me. I want to say a little bit more about your book and how I found it. Someone |
| 1:11.4 | recommended the antidote book to me ages ago and I put it on my Amazon wish list with all these |
| 1:15.9 | other books that I wanted to read someday. And my dad discovered this wish list. I didn't even know |
| 1:20.6 | that it was public around Christmas time and all of a sudden I get this book in the mail. |
| 1:25.5 | And a while later after that, I was dealing with insomnia for the first time in my life |
| 1:30.1 | and was pretty distraught over this terrible new development of not being able to sleep at night. |
| 1:35.5 | So I picked my book off of my nightstand that I've been meaning to read and started reading |
| 1:40.8 | at night when I couldn't sleep. |
| 1:41.7 | And it was incredible because it was like exactly what I needed to be learning about at that time. |
| 1:48.3 | I've always thought of myself as kind of a glass half empty person. I'm sort of negative. |
| 1:53.1 | And I know people who are really always upbeat and positive, and I always wished that I could be more like them. |
... |
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