One of my favorite quotes is from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said,

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

We are so obsessed with doing in our culture. And I've noticed

adverts over the Christmas period and into the new year where they talk about getting

away from the stresses of modern life by exercising ever harder, by getting on the exercise bike,

by running, by doing a class.

It's all push, push, push, but very few people embrace doing nothing.

And there is something of an epidemic of burnout right now and overwhelm and pushing yourself

really hard when you're in that state is a bad idea and can lead to people

crashing. And yet we find it so hard to stop and do nothing, to just simply be. And yet that is the

way to let our nervous system settle down, to get free from overwhelm and to develop deep and

powerful resilience.

Here to explain is Steve Magnus, the author of Do Hard Things, The Science of Resilience.

What happens is we kind of live in a reactive world, where we're like the dog who sees a squirrel and just, you know, going from squirrel to squirrel and going crazy with our head. Well, that's what happens here is that instead of being able to

kind of just sit with who we are and our being and, you know, the world that is going by,

we just always look for the shiny objects.

And that trains our brain to literally be stressed out because it is always looking for something

better to do. Why? Because we've trained it to look for something better to do. Every time we,

I'm not, I'm not here to hate on phones,

but like every time we like, you know, pick up our phone, you know, for maybe the listeners,

there's a study that showed that something like 90% of people have felt like a phantom vibration,

like they felt like their, their phone was vibrating or making noise or whatever,

...