Dearest Pod Squad, welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

By the end of this episode, you are going to understand why all of the things we're doing to make ourselves feel better

are making us feel worse.

And we're going to fix it, okay?

In the next 50 minutes, we're going to fix that and tell you how to actually make yourself feel a little bit better and not get tricked.

To do that is the only person who

could really help us do that. And her name is Anna Lemke. And she is here with us. She is the

medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, program director for the Stanford Addiction

Medicine Fellowship and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic.

She is the recipient of numerous awards for outstanding research and mental illness,

for excellence in teaching, and for clinical innovation in treatment.

She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations,

has testified before various committees in the United States,

House of Representatives, and Senate keeps an active speaking calendar and maintains a thriving

clinical practice. I'm tired even reading your bio. So, well done. Okay. So we are trying to make sure that every single one of our episodes kind of swirls around one question, okay, that we can answer by the end of the episode. Because we have, through 15 years of this, figured out that every time anyone tells us a story or a problem, or we tell it to each other,

we're really asking one of like 20 human questions. And one of them seems to be what people say

to us over and over again in different variations is, how do I feel better? I just want to feel better.

And what we figured out is this question is sort of revealing an underlying problem, which is

we don't feel great, okay?

On a regular basis, we don't feel great.

And to feel better, we try all these quick consumption fixes that actually

make us feel worse and on and on forever. So in your book, you start with a list of these things like

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