This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how we doing today?

Something I think about a lot, and you're going to hear me mention this a bunch during the course of the interview.

But anyway, something I think about a lot is caregiving.

Let me just pull the curtain back just a little bit.

Much of my content creation is aimed at the version of myself 20 years ago, at age 35 or 36, head firmly up his ass, careerist, an optimizer, working on every aspect of his health.

To be clear, many of those things are still true of me, but life has intervened in such a way that I've learned a lot in the intervening years about caregiving,

something I really never thought about previously.

Having a child, having a wife with health problems, having parents with pretty significant health problems as well, that shit will change you.

And I've actually come to see caregiving as an incredibly important skill.

And it's one that you can actually think about

within an optimizer framework, which again was the framework that I certainly had in my mid-30s and

to a certain degree retain. We know that compassion makes you happier and healthier. And learning

how to take care of other people is extremely good for you, which is counterintuitive, but true.

Not for nothing, learning how to do this is also good for the world.

So today, we're going to talk to somebody who did not expect to be caregiving at her age,

at least not caregiving in the way that has been demanded of her.

Emma Heming Willis was in her mid-40s when her husband, the movie star

Bruce Willis, got a devastating diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia or FTT. At the time, Emma

was a mother with two little kids, and all of a sudden she had to become a caregiver for her

husband as well. This was not the life she thought

she was going to live. And now she's out with a book where she talks about some key lessons

...