How to Have Fun Even When Life and Parenting Get Tough

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and today we’re going to talk about something I think we can all use more of in our lives: Fun. Now before you tune out, thinking that you have way more serious things to learn about and be concerned about as a parent, especially if your child has some major challenges, I want you to hang on because we’re going to cover why fun is important. And it actually goes a lot deeper than you think. We’re going to talk about how it supports our ability to better regulate ourselves, and ultimately how it supports us in being better parents and better humans. It’s relevant to all of us, especially during a time in the world when it seems like we’re tapped out from all of the doom and gloom and stress around us. So to explore this topic with us today, I’ve invited Dr. Mike Rucker on the show. Let me tell you a bit about him.

He’s an Organizational Psychologist, Behavioral Scientist and charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association. He has been academically published in publications like The International Journal of Workplace Health Management, and his ideas about fun and health have been featured in all kinds of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Forbes, Vox, and on, and on. He currently serves as senior leader at Active Wellness and is the author of the upcoming book, The Fun Habit, which will be available this coming January. I also want to mention that Mike is a parent, and he’ll talk with us a bit about that. So welcome to the show, Mike. Thanks for being here.

Mike Rucker

Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to this.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So I want to hear a little bit of the backstory before we dive into all of the research and all the things that we need to understand about fun. I want a little bit of a backstory about how an organizational psychologist came to be focused on the importance of fun and the research behind that.

Mike Rucker

Yeah, so my origin story starts in a positive light. So I got early mentorship through a gentleman by the name of Michael Gervais. A lot of folks know him now because he has a popular podcast. But I was fortunate enough to get access to him early when he was still getting his clinical hours at the turn of the millennium. And so he became a mentor of mine and really introduced me to the work of folks like Charles Garfield, and Csikszentmihalyi, so I really got interested in flow. And our relationship, I sort of graduated from that, but became a zealot of positive psychology right when Seligman was bringing that forth. And so through serendipity, I got invited to be a charter member of the International Positive Psych Association, and really used all those tools effectively. I was really living a happy life using the concepts of mindfulness and gratitude to my advantage. I had also appropriated thought leadership from the Quantified Self movement, because at the time, I had met Michael in Los Angeles, but shortly after my wife and I moved to San Francisco, so I met Gary Wolf, and kind of became part of that. So not only was I consuming all this positive psychology, but I was also quantifying it. And this is before toxic positivity was a thing, but I think I was starting to bleed into that area. And long story short, I had this trifecta of unfortunate events, the biggest one being my little brother passed away suddenly from a pulmonary embolism, and I had been a long-time endurance athlete. I was never really competitive at the professional level, but it was certainly a way that I had mitigated my own anxiety. And shortly after that, they weren’t related, but a couple of months after Brian’s passing, my brother, I found out I had advanced osteoarthritis, probably from an injury, and had to get a hip replacement, which meant I couldn’t ever run again. And then the third one being — it wasn’t unfortunate, per se, but my wife had had my back for the last six years while getting my doctoral degree, and she was offered an amazing job with Wrangler, that brought us to North Carolina. So I had these two events that were a lot to take in, and then we were also being uprooted from our support network. But I was like, “I’m okay, I got all these tools from positive psychology. I’ll find a way to be happy.” And so, again, the short version is folks that chase happiness by the tail, paradoxically become unhappy. We just know that now. But then it was emerging research. So I, like any good researcher, dug in to what was available, and trying to find these tools of positive psych that maybe I was missing, the missing link to “Why is it that as I tried to become more happy, I’m becoming less happy?”, and found out that, especially here in the Western world, and this work comes from Dr. Iris Mauss out of Cal Berkeley, and it’s been replicated by a lot of folks, but it’s not necessarily valuing happiness, because, certainly, I’m on at the top of folks who still value happiness, but work becomes toxic if you’re overly concerned about it. And so, what we now know, to kind of fast forward, is that when folks are always worried about, “Hey, I want to be happy, they tend to perseverate on that identity crisis. And so we figure out where we are, and we identify where we want to be, and we perseverate on that gap. And that’s certainly what I was doing, where mourning and melancholy was the appropriate response for a sudden loss like that, instead, I was trying to relinquish that. And so there’s a few things Barbara Fredrickson, The Broaden-and-Build, and then also this idea of the hedonic flexibility principle, we now know that folks that try and limit their emotions, that’s also a great recipe for weakening your wellbeing; It’s okay to run a wide range of emotions. It’s actually what our brain wants to do. So we have that flexibility, and we act appropriately at the appropriate time.

So what does all that mean? And so to sort of answer your question and tie this into a bow, what I found was that emotionally, if we’re in an area like a divorce or challenging situation, which I know a lot of your listeners will find themselves in from time to time, feeling, being a negative valence, what we call this negative effect or emotions where we might not necessarily feel good, but it’s the appropriate response at the time, is fine. And then there’s still ways to index activities that still bring joy and delight into your life, even if you’re not in an area of your life where you want to identify with positive emotions. And so the crux of it is that we have a lot more agency and autonomy than we think, most of us. Obviously, there are times where folks aren’t going to have that, and so I always try and make sure that I get that having those is sometimes from a place of privilege. But for the most part, when you unpack it, even folks that have an immense amount of duty, especially in my generation, the sandwich generation, where we’re not just caring for kids, but we’re also caring for aging adults, which means that we don’t have a ton of time. Generally, you can still pull a little bit of time off the table for yourself. This comes from Cassie Holmes out of UCLA, but we call it the Goldilocks Number. There’s 168 hours in your week, and so finding just an hour a day, so just 7 out of those 168, where you’re at least taking a little bit of time for yourself, for renewal, is a start. And we find that when people aren’t doing that at all, that’s when it becomes this downward spiral. So it’s not just this drudgery of your week after week. What happens is you lose the capacity to do the things that you need to do. And that’s one of the most important findings.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

You’ve raised so many important points there, and several follow up questions I want to ask. I’ll try to remember them as we go through. I think one of the fundamental things you raised that’s so important, especially for parents and the people listening to this show, is the idea of chasing happiness, and when that becomes our fixation of, “I need to be happier, my kids need to be happy, I’m not doing my job well as a parent unless my kids are happy. I need to be happy, my family needs to be happy, everybody around me needs to be happy”, that chasing that actually makes us less happy. I really want to shine a spotlight on that because it’s so counterintuitive for people, and I meet parents every week in my clinic and in my communities online, moms, especially, I think, who really believe and have been raised with this idea of, “I’m a good person if I’m making sure the people around me are happy. I’m a good parent if I’m feeling happy about being a parent, if my family’s happy, if my kids are happy”, and the problem with that is, as you so beautifully talked about it, real life intersects with that, and real life is not always about being happy. There are unhappy things that happen to us. There are stressors. There’s grieving. There’s all of these things. And if our benchmark of being a good person, being a good parent, of our kids being good kids is happiness, whoa, we’ve got this gap there. And it’s no wonder we’re feeling stressed out and stuck and like we’re not meeting expectations all the time.

Mike Rucker

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And one of the things that I kind of steal from my own work, so it’s not inherent in the pages of the book, but that I’ve realized now, sharing ideas with folks like yourself, is that a lot of that comes from introspection. And so we know that one of the tools that’s quite effective from positive psychology is savoring and gratitude. And so these are ways where we can extend the power of fun and pleasant experiences by holding them in our minds, right? But what you just described as introspection, where we’re not taking action to change our environment, and we’re taking something that was pretty awful in the moment and extending it because we’re thinking about it. And so sometimes that’s important if we need to unpack critical problems, right? Like, “This isn’t working, I either need help, or I need to solve it myself.” But when we’re wallowing, then oftentimes, that becomes quite problematic. And I’m sure in your work, I mean, it’s the crux of CBT. We know, that’s why CBT is oftentimes more effective than pharmaceutical intervention because it’s those thought patterns that slowly but surely create that downward spiral. So it’s not to say that we shouldn’t have those, because oftentimes, we do need to unpack things. But at the same time, if we’re doing it and it’s sort of a broken record, one, we know mentally, that that can contribute to ill-being, and then two, it’s time wasted on not using that thought to be able to figure out, “Okay, well, how can I make things a little bit better?” So it’s a one-two punch that sometimes can knock us on our butt, unfortunately.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And I think what it does, what I see, even for myself in my own life, what I see for the families and the individuals that I work with, even in a counseling type of setting, when we are just stuck in those thought processes around everything’s not great, we’re not feeling happy, or our kid is struggling and they’re not happy, what we do then is we miss all of the happiness and the good things that actually are happening and exist because we’re so primed to be thinking about all the negative. And I think for parents who are listening, who are raising kids with significant challenges, where it may feel a lot of the time like there’s a lot of negative, like nobody’s happy, when we get stuck there, we actually do miss the moments of joy, the opportunities for fun, the happiness that does exist, because as you said, we’re perseverating. We’re stuck on the fact that we aren’t where we think we should be, or we’re not as happy as we think we should be. And then we actually miss the happiness that is happening in our life.

Mike Rucker

Yeah, there’s two things there that are sort of interesting to me, from an academic standpoint. One, this comes from Dr. Timothy Wilson out of Virginia, he studied this evolutionary idea that him and others, I think it also comes from Dan Gilbert out of Harvard, but we’re primed not to think of positive things, right? Because if you do have an evolutionary slant, it makes sense, right? Thinking about happy things doesn’t allow us to learn about what’s going to kill us, right? Sabertooth tigers aren’t coming to attack us anymore, right? And so what they have found, because since this is something that sort of spawned from evolution, are there benefits to thinking positive thoughts? And absolutely, there are. We know that through the science of savoring. But us humans, we’re really bad at it. So it does require practice. So this is one of those things, where whatever mindfulness practice looks like for you, you do need to be deliberate. And so oftentimes, what I’ll prescribe is just adding it to your calendar, whatever it is. Facebook will do it for you, but why mortgage that off to something that’s pretty awful for you in the first place? And so, whatever the prompt is for you, some people like scrapbooking, that’s not my thing. I do like to put little prompts in, but other folks have jars of things that do light them up. Again, you’re going to find the good in your day to day, even if there’s a bias towards challenging events. There are going to be things that light you up, why not figure out a way to sort of hold on to those longer? Because, again, we have this predisposition to hold on to the bad stuff, and it’s not our fault. Unfortunately, there’s an evolutionary slant to that. And then the other is that we do need to take some agency in co-creating those moments for us, right? And so what is it that we can do to relinquish that sense of duty? Because you sort of brought it up, a lot of us feel like, “Well, now this is our work.” Well, yeah that could be true. And like any type of work, oftentimes, it’s not going to be the most pleasant thing, right? I use this model that we don’t need to get into, I call it agonizing. It tends to have a high negative effect and also energy-zapping, but there are generally ways that you can look at that event and figure out, “Is there a way to make that more fun for me?” Even if it means relinquishing, that thing we talked about in the pre-interview. Oftentimes, especially if you’re sharing these challenges with your social network, there are ways to organize your time. We’re able to take a little bit more off the table by sharing duties with friends that might be in similar situations. Or relinquishing the guilt of “You know what? It’s okay to send your kid to camp.” I get it. The problem is that the situational awareness of any given individual is going to be different and their situation is going to be different, so it’s hard to prescribe one intervention. But at the end of the day, your situation generally isn’t unique. It might be small with regards to a shared experience, but I guarantee you, it’s not unique. And once you find others that can kind of help you carry the load, then some magic tends to happen.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s so true. And I want to start tying in the idea of fun here, because I think, and you can tell me in your research if this is wrong, but I think that people often confuse or conflate fun and happiness in that they think “I can’t have any fun, I’m not really able to have fun until I’m feeling happy,” like happiness is a prerequisite. “Well, if I’m not feeling happy or good about things, then I can’t really have fun.” And my understanding of one of the things that you’re talking about and that the research talks about, is actually that that can get flipped around, and by creating moments of fun, by incorporating fun, by taking the action of fun in some way in our life, that supports feelings of happiness. And yeah, I think a lot of people are waiting around thinking, “Oh, I can’t have any fun. I’m miserable, I’m stressed”, or whatever. But actually, what you’re saying is: It’s by intentionally creating fun experiences, moments of joy, that we actually feel better.

Mike Rucker

Yeah. And so like any good academic, you need to start defining terms. And so you’re spot on. We look at fun as an action orientation, and happiness, in psychology, we call it subjective wellbeing for a reason, right? I mean, it’s fleeting. It’s something that really only exists in introspection. So someone literally asks you, “Are you happy?” And then you need to think about it in kind of context. Fun is in the moment. It’s rooted in mindfulness. That’s what makes it so beautiful. And it’s really just: Are you finding pleasure in this experience or are you not? We call it valence for whatever reason, but negative valence is things that aren’t that fun or pleasurable, and positive valence are things that are fun and pleasurable. And so just architecting however you’re engaging in a particular activity, if it’s not pleasurable for you, how could you flip that? And sometimes you’re not going to be able to, and that’s okay. It is one thought that I meant to bring up before, so I’m going to close the loop on it, and that is that another problematic thing is we try to solve our problems. So you had mentioned, we’re in it, so when is this going to get better? And waiting around for that it’s as problematic as chasing happiness, because a lot of these things aren’t going to be solved. But once you can relinquish that, like, “Okay, I get it, this is a situation that’s probably going to be persistent”, I use this metaphor of “How do you build your accessibility ramp?”, because a lot of times I deal with aging well in the context of wellness, and you’ll see folks that are in chronic pain, that look at using a cane or building accessibility ramp to their house as a scarlet letter, because then that means that “Something’s wrong with me.” And once they do that, one, they save more time, and they relinquish a lot of pain because they realize, “Okay, this is a situation I’m going to have to deal with, and no one really cares.” Oftentimes, this is like a perception issue that we keep inside, that’s only creating more pain through mental anguish. And so I like that metaphor: Accept the condition and then build your accessibility ramp, because no one cares. Figure out how to make it a little bit more pleasurable. And oftentimes, relinquishing that guilt is the first step. Or the sense of duty. Sometimes people don’t feel guilty, necessarily, but they’re like, “Well, this is the hand I was dealt.” It was, but you still have some agency and autonomy to be able to co-create these experiences that might be more fun. Like you’re just dropping your child off to something to sort of get through the day. Is there a way to change that up where maybe it’s art therapy because you’ve always loved art, or maybe it’s a dance class where you can create because you were a dancer? What is it? What are these activities that maybe will be helpful as an intervention, but then also light you up inside a little bit, because it will draw you back into something that was fun for you, whatever that is.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love what you said about how we get stuck in the problem and trying to solve the problem, and that actually, most of the problems we deal with in life are inherently unsolvable, or at least not totally solvable. And that rings so true for anybody who is parenting a kid with significant needs that are going to be ongoing. Some of you listening may have kids who you’ll work through some remediation, some therapies, whatever, they’ll be on a developmental track where they will move on and become independent, and some of you are parenting kids where this is the reality of your life. Yes, you’re working on things, yes you’re doing therapies, but your child is not going to become 18 or 21 and not need you. This is not a solvable problem from the standpoint of, “Well, at some point, I’ll have this all fixed and then I can go on,” but we sort of act like that, right? Like, “Well, I can’t do things for myself, I can’t bring joy into my life until I have this thing fixed and solved.” Well, that’s a recipe for lifelong depression, because some of these things are not going to be solved. We have to learn how to live with them, and what you’re saying is to bring some joy to ourselves and to our kids in the process, because this isn’t something that’s time limited, that’s just going to get solved.

Mike Rucker

That’s absolutely right. You nailed that on the head. When you wait around for something to change — My brother is not coming back. For folks that are going through divorce, that’s not going to change. You’re going to need to adapt to this new normal. If you have a situation like what you described, there are going to be ebbs and flows, but it’s not a solvable thing, where again, there’s this point B that you’ll arrive at. And it ties into the broader big tent that we talked about, that happiness, as cliche as it is, isn’t a destination where all of a sudden, now moving forward, you’re in a fairy tale. Unfortunately, life has its ups and downs, but you can bias yourself towards the ups, whatever that is for you. For some people, that’s going to mean that they need to build in the psychological safe space that allows them to do that, because the rest isn’t fixable. But to wait around to experience a little bit of joy in life, you nailed it on the head. We know this, empirically replicated over and over again, that it will eat you to the point where even if duty is tied to the highest value in your identity, you’re going to lose the capacity to be able to do that, and then that will sink you. It’s like tying an anvil to your leg. And so oftentimes when people are stuck, to your point, like “This just isn’t going to work”, well, then tie it to the fact that you are going to be your best self with regards to what you value, and that is the sense of duty and contributing to the loved ones within your inner circle, because being able to have more resilience and more ability to do whatever it is you do is only going to help those around you. And so by living a life devoid of pleasure, it incapacitates you in so many different aspects, not just mental wellbeing, but also physical wellbeing. Eventually, you’re going to break. And then you’re going to be the one that ultimately needs the help.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, when we’re falling apart, we can’t be there for our kids or anybody else who needs us. I want to drill down a little deeper and really sort of define something you’ve touched on, but I really want to be clear for people, because I think sometimes when we think about the word “fun”, or we think about play, it conjures up ideas of “Oh, I need to plan an elaborate day of self-care, I need to plan an elaborate trip with my kids” or “Oh my gosh, you’re telling me I got to be out in the yard after dinner playing and having fun with my kids for three hours in the yard.” We think of these huge things, and I think what you’re talking about with fun, and you’ve touched on it, moments that bring us joy, that’s a different thing. I mean, yes, it can be fun to plan a day at the amusement park. Yes, it can be fun to plan a week-long vacation. Well, that’s actually only fun most of the time if we do that without our kids. But it doesn’t have to be those elaborate things. And in fact, what you’re talking about is these daily little pockets and moments, right? So can you give some examples and just sort of define that a little bit more for us?

Mike Rucker

Yeah. So again, it comes down to valence, right? We know things are either not pleasurable or pleasurable. But what I often have folks initially do is just look at the 168 hours in their week. And I have this simple model called the PLAY model. It’s easy to Google, just type Rucker PLAY model, it’ll pop right up. And it stands for pleasing, living, agonizing and yielding. And so the pleasing and living quadrants are the activities that bring us that joy, and the agonizing and yielding are ones that don’t. And so just categorizing your activities within those four quadrants tends to be a fairly good sorting tool to just become initially mindful, because oftentimes, that’s the low hanging fruit. So the yielding one means activities that, when we think about them critically, aren’t fun, but are really easy for us to do. So it ends up being ways of pacifying discomfort.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Scrolling social media?

Mike Rucker

There you go. Or relationships out of convenience, or oftentimes binge watching stuff. So people will jump on me like, “Well, I love my Netflix show.” And I’m not villainizing that. If you spend an hour with your partner engaging in something, like one of my favorite shows is Lost, right? So sitting there, I would watch it with my now wife and a bunch of friends, and we would unpack it for another hour, that’s fine. But if you’re watching this show week after week, and someone asks you, “What happened?”, and you can’t answer it because it’s just a way to sort of zonk out on the couch. Here’s another paradoxical thing, is that oftentimes we’re like, “Well, I just need that time for renewal.” But what we know is that you’re actually doing something that is enjoyable, one, you sleep better, but two, you have more resilience. It takes a couple of weeks, similar to any sort of psychological intervention, to kind of see that lift, and we don’t know exactly why because neurochemistry is complicated, but what we do know is once you start to enjoy your time, you have more resilience, and then that will start instead of this downward spiral, to build an upward spiral. You’ll start to want to do more fun stuff, you’ll start to get more organized around your time. Even if you have ADHD, because this works for non-neurotypical folks as well. You just get it, like, “Okay, I wasn’t using my time wisely.” And again, these are really simple interventions. Sometimes, when things are simple, they’re the hardest things to implement, right? Because one, you can push them off to next week, like, “Oh, well, that’s so simple. I’ll do it when I have time.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Well, I think the yielding thing you’re talking about there, that’s tricky, especially in a 24/7 tech world that we’re in, I see this in kids and teens that I work with, as well as adults. It’s easy to think in the moment that it’s making you happy to sort of zone out and watch YouTube videos or scroll on up, but actually, the data is really clear that the more we get sucked into doing that, the less happy we are—it’s passive. Kids would say, or even some adults would say, “Oh, but that makes me happy/That helps me in the moment.” But actually, what it does is just avoids, right? It’s like short term avoidance, but really, it’s not helping us be happier, and there’s no agency, there’s no creating of something that then fuels being and feeling more positive. And all we need to do is look at the rates of depression and anxiety in teens and young adults, as it correlates to the amount of time they spend on social media in particular, to go “Oh, wait, yeah, that actually is not something that’s bringing a lot of value to us.”

Mike Rucker

Yeah, I did a deep dive into that, especially for the book, and it was fascinating. That’s why I made the admission a little bit earlier, but neuroscientists now hate calling dopamine “The pleasure neurochemical”, because we just know it’s not, now. And so what we think is happening, not me, but folks a lot smarter than me, is we know folks get excited. This comes from gambling studies, but now has been replicated with social media. It’s that anticipation of a variable reward. We’re going down, and as we scroll, what’s going to be the next little thing that lights me up? And so we know dopamine is getting released. We think that dopamine’s evolutionary purpose was to get us excited so we would learn something. So that’s why it is a high arousal, but it’s not very pleasurable. And there’s obviously a component, too, of oxytocin. We don’t know what it is, but there is no oxytocin released. We feel this sort of saccharine, sweet sense of connection because we see folks, but we know that oxytocin isn’t getting released unless we have that social connection. So that’s where it’s getting weird, and we’re getting deep into the weeds, because Zoom sometimes gets vilified, but if you can see someone’s eyes with these mirror neurons, you can still feel empathy that’s not there with social media, even though we know it’s fake. So it’s a complicated sort of mix. But to put a pin in what we do know now, you’re exactly right. We displace this discomfort because we’re bored or we’re lonely, or whatever it is. So we feel this fake sense of connection, this fake sense of entertainment, and it’s not filling us up. And so the way we can look at it is we’re not building any equity. When we take the time to connect with friends, to actually pick up the phone and ask them what we’re doing, this is equity that we know pays dividends later on, because we build resilience, we’re less lonely. If we do get bored, we can think about those good times with friends. We just don’t get any of those benefits with social media, unfortunately. But to your point, we feel like we have, which is so unfortunate. We’re really starting to figure out how damaging this stuff is.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think so. I think 10 years from now, we’re going to be in a totally different world, in terms of our understanding. Unfortunately, we will have sacrificed a generation of young people in the meantime. We’re going to have to undo some of the damage with that. But yeah, it’s fascinating. And we’re all part of the big human experiment going on with that, right?

Mike Rucker

Well, it’s a little bit of grace, right? I realized that with my youngest, we had to pacify him because we were both working. And so we are the product of his bad habits right now. And we don’t want to make it punitive, so anyone listening, I’m not throwing stones at you, because I’m living in a big glass house.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Well, and I say all the time. We are the first generation of parents raising kids in this world of all this. We don’t have previous generations or models to look at and go, “Well, how did our parents do this?” We’re trying to figure this out and navigate it for ourselves. At the same time, we’re supposed to be guiding and helping our kids to navigate it. It’s tough, absolutely. But I think the reason I wanted to jump on that, I want to get back to the PLAY model, but I wanted to spotlight that because I think especially now, there are a lot of mom’s spending a lot of time on social media. There’s the good and the bad, there’s the connection and the being able to meet people that you may not know in your own community, who can relate to the struggles you’re going through with your kids or with whatever. But I think it’s being mindful of maybe which quadrant that’s really falling in. Is that serving to be action oriented and relational and filling my cup up? Or when I’m really honest with myself, is it actually just allowing me to avoid discomfort and kind of numbing out, and not really rejuvenating me? And I think that’s different for each of us. But to just be aware of it, that’s what I loved when you talked about that PLAY model and the four quadrants, I was like, wow, that’s a great exercise for each of us just to step back and say, “Of all the stuff I’m doing every day and every week, how much of it is falling into agonizing and yielding categories versus the others?” I think probably there’s a lot of us that would be maybe uncomfortable to see the reality of that.

Mike Rucker

It’s a great way to start because you identify low hanging fruit. And if you don’t even feel like doing that, I think due to social pressure, both Android and Apple allow you to see how much time you’ve spent on these apps. If you want just a taste of how this feels, go ahead and take a look because it’s always humbling. And to circle back again, similar to the example of consuming entertainment, I would say you’re spot on there, right? These are great tools for connection. Oftentimes, the lens I’ll look from is: Is what you’re doing for betterment? Is it to acquire information? Are you using it as a way to connect to your inner circle, and so it’s facilitating the growth of your personal tribe? Or are you really doing it to displace discomfort? And generally, most people who can be honest with themselves can tell that fairly quickly. Again, if you’ve kind of scrolled a hashtag with regards to fashion, and the first 15 minutes were great because you were snipping ideas and things, but then an hour has passed and you can’t remember the last 45 minutes, that’s a good litmus test.

We’re taking a bit of a turn here, but that’s another important thing about time. When we keep displacing discomfort that way so that we’re not actively making new memories, that’s when time starts to go by fast, and that can also be debilitating, because then we don’t have any of these moments that we can savor that really are the essence of reminiscing. This work comes from Bronnie Ware, but a lot of folks have taken her work and created academic work around it. And so we know that folks that just kind of live their life through others, oftentimes at some point, whether it’s through palliative care, or even earlier, an immense amount of regret will overwhelm them. And so taking charge now and building up some defenses against that becomes really important because you don’t want to break.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

What I think is really interesting about us focusing on this element of social media and tech use, is that first of all, it’s applicable to us and our kids. But also, it is a bit of low hanging fruit if we’re honest with ourselves about how we’re using it and the amount of time we’re spending. It is low hanging fruit because a lot of times, I think the objection to the idea of how we can make work more fun, or enjoyment or even rest and rejuvenation is “Well, I don’t have the time.” Well, when we’re honest with ourselves about how we’re using some of this time, suddenly we go, “What would it look like if I scrolled for 10 minutes less. How could I use that 10 minutes in a way that would fill my cup, that would bring some joy or some engagement to me?” What a great exercise to do with our kids too, like, “Hey, what would happen if we spent five minutes less on YouTube? What can we do with that five minutes that would give us a boost? That would rejuvenate us? That would help us feel joy?” It strikes me that that’s a really tangible way that we could look at that.

Mike Rucker

Yeah, and there’s some really easy ways to do that. I would say more in increments of 15 minutes. Because 5-10, we’ll let that time pass, just thinking, but if you’ve seen a friend that you haven’t talked to for a year, and thought “I really miss that person”, just pick up the phone. And oftentimes, there’ll be an aversion, because neither one thinks that they have the time to connect. But remind them that that’s what needs to happen, and you’ll build a habit. I’ve seen it time and time again. Another is if you keep getting FOMO through this paradox of social media leading to this negative valence state, use that 15 minutes to plan whatever it is. If it’s a hobby, let’s say it’s knitting, then you keep looking at knitting Instagrammers because you love it, and that lights you up, but you’re like, “I just don’t have time for it”…

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

You’re not actually knitting.

Mike Rucker

Yeah, exactly. Or if it’s a vacation, start planning it. If you don’t have the money, start trying to figure it out. Research how you can either reframe that so that you could do something locally, something that’s affordable. Or if it is affordable, but it’s not something that you could prioritize with time, start to figure out what the things are that you need to get done to do it. And so those are two different ways. If it’s a social connection that you’re kind of trying to solve with social media, then just call that person. And if it’s something that has to do with activity, like, “Oh, I wish I was doing X.” and it’s a way to connect with x, again, to your point, over time, if you replace it, you probably could do X in some form. So just get more mindful, use your agency and autonomy to take steps forward to actually do that thing. And again, it’s that simple. It’s another one of those simple things when you’re like, “Well, this is how easy it is.” We’ve talked about guilt. We’ve talked about a sense of duty. There’s also, “I don’t want to look stupid”, because a lot of these things are just a shift, and you get embarrassed that you let it go on for that long. And so I find that I have fallen victim to that, too. Sometimes when things are so simple, you’re like, “I don’t want them to be that simple.” But they are.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Because then we have to look at why we’re not actually doing that. And also, if we think that something’s going to be really complicated, then it’s like, oh, I can use avoidance, then. Like, “Oh, I don’t have the time”, when it’s like, “I actually do have the time and it’s simple”, then we actually have to face doing it, which is tricky.

Mike Rucker

Well, and I fall victim to catastrophizing, just so that people know, this isn’t something where I’m a guru on the top of the mountain. I will be like, “Oh, well, yeah. But if I do this…”, and I’ll just have to roll it back. Again, I’ve gone through my own cognitive behavioral work. And so I’ll just reframe it, like this is one of the worst possible outcomes. And probably yeah, it might happen, but then just try again, right? And so a lot of it is self-experimentation, like once you do finally get on board with that, like, “Yeah, I do need to take a little bit of time off the table for myself or figure out the activities that I’m doing. How could I make it so that I’m enjoying them with the folks that I’m engaging in the activity with?” Then you start doing these self-experiments. And, to be honest, maybe I’m a geek about it, but I also find that it adds more value. It contributes to the upward spiral, because you’re like, “Okay, well, that didn’t really work out.” I borrowed this from Carol Dweck, I’m sure you’ve talked about that plenty, but once you get into that growth mindset, these setbacks, you can laugh about them, like, “Oh, well, that didn’t go right.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Which is actually great modeling for our kids, too. And it’s striking me as we’re talking about this, if you have a child who very easily gets sucked into negative mindset, negative thinking, everything is wrong, or bad or drudgery or whatever, that these things to model for them and to work with them are really important for them in shifting that mindset too. I want to just touch on one more thing before we wrap up. Before the show started, you used this term while we were just having a conversation, you said, “Co-creating fun”, and I think that’s really interesting to think about in the realm of family dynamics, and even parent-child relationships. And it just struck me because you were talking about how we can leverage this to be more efficient with our time and do things that will help us. Parents often are aware that spending quality time with their kids is important, they sometimes have guilt around not doing that. It strikes me that creating opportunities for some fun or some joy together, is a great efficient way of supporting everybody in the family system, and just being efficient with how we’re using time and spending quality time together. And I wonder if either as a researcher or as a dad, if you have some thoughts on that.

Mike Rucker

Yeah, absolutely. So the two things that I have found, again, supported by the research, this comes from Dr. Dunn out of Toronto, I believe. But we do know that the happiest parents tend to be selfless parents, right? So I kind of started there. So this sense of duty isn’t necessarily selfless. And I want to be careful here, because this doesn’t necessarily mean that you give all yourself away, right? But the reason I bring that up is I think when you are co-creating activities for your kids, starting with them as a starting point, letting them be the Northstar is important. Now, with that said, the important caveat is: It’s not fun if you’re both not having fun, if you’re not finding pleasure. And so simply sitting down with your kid and negotiating, the same way they would with their own friends, again, is a simple step, but you never see it, right? We have reasons for that. As adults, for us to be emotionally mature, we need heuristics, right? And so we won’t geek out on the science, but it should be obvious. We have all of this incoming information coming at us, and to be able to survive as adults, we need these bumper rails. So oftentimes, we’ll just relinquish that control because we know what the task is at hand, to watch over our kids and make sure they have fun. Just taking that extra step and reminding yourself that both of you guys can have fun within any given activity, so if you don’t want to play Candy Land for the 10th time, or for my kid, it’s another hour of Minecraft, because I’m kind of done with Minecraft, I can negotiate with him, “What is something that we can both do that’s fun?” Right now, it’s going to the movies. It’s something as simple as that. And again, if that was mindless, then yeah, that would be in the yielding category. But because we were really liking it right now, we just went to see Buzz Lightyear and unpacked it and talked about science and STEM type things afterwards, that’s something that we both really enjoyed. Where, again, if I had kind of relinquished control and said, “Okay yeah, let’s do this Minecraft thing”, that hour would have sucked for me and not been renewing. And so it’s as simple as that. But oftentimes, we need to be reminded to take that extra step that we have—through transactional analysis, we can allow ourselves to be parents and children at the same time, and oftentimes, we forget that. Again, this is showing grace, right? We’ve kind of needed to have those types of skills to be adults. And so to be able to step back into play with your children, while still maintaining a sense of “Well, I have this duty to be a parent”, it takes extra work, but the good part is it only takes an extra minute or two.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love that. Man, that is such a great takeaway of “How can we both figure out something or a way to do this, that will bring us both joy, that will both have fun with?” And it’s modeling so many important things. Right there, as you’re talking, I’m thinking that would reduce a ton of resentment that parents end up living with, because they end up resenting the time with their kids because they hate doing the same things over and over, especially if you have a kid who really gets stuck on the same thing. And this idea that, “Oh, wait a minute, we actually can negotiate how to spend this time together so that we both enjoy it”? Man, that’s awesome.

Mike Rucker

And the last thing there, because I know we’ve got to go, and this is a little bit provocative, but oftentimes — Again, I don’t work with parents a lot, but this does seem to be common, is: Are these relationships out of convenience? Where does your best friend live? Like 15 minutes more away. Really? So an extra 30 minutes so that those four hours will be really a great time. You’re shaving off 30 minutes so that three hours is a horrible time? There’s all sorts of low level tactics if you’re just a little bit more honest with yourself. Take a little bit of time in realizing that you have a little bit more control in the situation, especially when you relinquish the fact that you can be dutiful and still have a fun life. And again, not necessarily it being a happy time, right? It’s just like how do you make it a little bit more pleasurable so that it’s not something that’s soul sucking?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Which ultimately makes us better for our kids, when we feel a sense of duty and a sense of what it means to be a parent that really is soul-sucking and creates resentment and all of that, that’s sort of the antithesis of good parenting and what the experience of being a parent should be. So many really interesting things to think about here. You’ve raised a lot of great points, given us some really practical tips. I know that your book, The Fun Habit is available for pre-order now. I know it won’t be coming out until January of 2023, but I’d love for you to tell people where they can learn more.

Mike Rucker

Yeah, so It’s available wherever you buy books. Thanks for allowing me to plug that. And then, if you’re interested in the science of fun, I write about it at michaelrucker.com

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

You’ve got lots of great blog posts. It sort of went down a rabbit hole on your website of things, and it’s great. So I encourage everybody to go there. Mike, this was such an interesting conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today.

Mike Rucker

Thank you so much for having me. It was a true delight.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And thanks, as always, to all of you, we’ll catch you back here next time.