Rethinking Wellness Beyond Trends: Intention Over Method with Sam Brooks

0:00Yes, think about the last sign you heard, the word wellness. Maybe it was on a sponsored post, maybe it was in a conversation about something. You should be doing the art. The word shows up everywhere now. It adds to bird arts, bookies, identities, but what if the wellness is in something you buy or achieve? What if something quite or something that lives in the choices we don't perform for anyone else? Today, we are pulling apart the layers of what wellness actually means when the longs for a day. I am Niharika and I am listening to one mistake in my life. A space where the question discuts way been handled and explored what it really means to feel

1:07old. This isn't about the latest biohack or the turning wanting the tea. It's about curiosity, integration and the courage to ask the better and real questions. Joining me today is Sam Yut, someone who brings a toxic lens to how we build relationships yet our own well-being. Welcome, Swantil, for the very home of your home. It's wonderful to be here, Niharika. Very happy. To start with, when people hear the word wellness today, what do you think is the biggest misconception that keeps them stuck or displeasured? So, what might action help them? Yeah, I think wellness, I think it's a really good question because I think wellness is so often talked about in our society today and that's a good thing.

2:08I think it's a good thing that we've started thinking about this, but I think that we often equate wellness, really specific, really specific trend or ideas that have an upload that exists in the wall around us. Such as yoga or meditation or pilates or therapy or any of these things that we've been told we should do or we should be doing. A lot of times this could have to do with supplements or something. Basically, anytime someone tells you they're going to try to sell you something in order to make you happier and make you healthier in life. That I think is often what we think about when we think about wellness.

3:14I think the reality of wellness that may seem a little bit obvious, but it's just anything that makes you feel relaxed, makes you feel at peace, makes you feel content. That can be anything. I think what people incorrectly take away from the wellness conversation we have, frankly, often in the world today, is that they need to do these things like meditation, like yoga, like taking supplements, whatever, and if they're not doing it, they are failing at wellness. Really, sometimes they're just snake oil. A lot of supplements aren't going to really have any meaningful impact on your wellness. Some of them like yoga, like meditation, can be valid tools for wellness, but they are

4:19often equated with wellness. I can tell you that someone who's tried meditating and tried yoga, one of those things works really well for me and makes me feel happier and makes me feel content at peace with my body in sync with my body. One of those things makes me feel stressed and anxious and I hate meditating. For a long time, I felt that about that because again, we think meditating, mindfulness, those are two things that come together. They have to be done together and simply not the case. So if someone is caught in that cycle, what's the first shift in perspective that might help them step out of it? I think firstly, first and foremost, it's about listening to your body and listening to

5:23your mind. That's not an easy thing to do. A lot of us are simply not in sync with what our mind is telling us and what our mind is wanting for us. A lot of times, I think myself personally, I often feel like I need to push through what my mind is telling me and push a way, kind of laziness or push a way of the desire to not do something so I can do something or a feel productive or feel like I'm doing the best for myself. But your mind will tell you what feels good and I think the first thing to do when trying to be more at peace with yourself, be more in touch with your own sense of wellness is to just take a step back to just stop and ask yourself, is this thing that I'm doing

6:23actually serving me? Is this wellness practice actually serving me? And the fact that the truth is or the little tidity, little secret is that if you're asking yourself a question, there's a good chance that it isn't because if something is working for you, you often don't need to think of it. I do yoga because it makes me feel good and it also makes me feel mindful but I don't do it to feel mindful. Whereas if I'm taking an action, I think it's very good to try out things to make you feel more mindful. But if you find yourself continually doing them and continually just doing them as a chore to feel mindful, it probably isn't serving you. And so just mostly I think if you've asked the question, that's your answer, but sometimes you may find that the answer is yes, that it is serving you in some way. But experimentation and so removing or adding wellness routines and then seeing how you

7:26feel and just being more intentional about listening to how you feel when you do those routines, that makes sense. And then it's it's interesting how we often mistake activity for alignment. As we said, we can be doing all the things right on the paper and still feel something essential is missing. Yeah, the gap between what looks like wellness and what themes like wellness, that's where the real works begin to is into your bodies. Yeah, now it's certainly, it certainly is true when I think that the idea that wellness should feel a certain way or should feel you should feel a certain way. I think anytime you've added, I think anytime you've assigned a word should to appealing

8:29that you're having or to an event in your life, that is already off to a bad start. So like I think the idea that should is where you're coming from, this idea that you have to do a thing in order to have some level of success is quite can be quite damaging to your sense of wellness. Yeah, but I think that the source is something and what we are living in, it's it's is forcefully by what the things received or to me, the source it's from there where the intention is coming from. Yeah, I think the so one thing that I talk a lot about and I'm sure we'll talk about

9:30later is is kind of being intentional about what what media you consume and how you consume when you consume, etc. So people who've listened to our other podcasts together may know that I run a positive news aggregator whose goal is to essentially be the anti social networking aggregator. So like the anti social networking algorithm. So essentially it takes it takes trusted news sources and surfaces and endless scrolling video feed of or endless scrolling feed of positive news. And I designed that first because exactly of what you're saying that we need to be kind of more intentional about the media we consume. Oftentimes the I think we can we can often like first thing we do when we get up we go to our phone or first thing we do when we get done with a work day or a school day or whatever we're doing.

10:30We go on our phone to try and sue ourselves and honestly it's us going back to feel that sense of to try and feel that sense of wellness. But every time we're doing that every time we're going on to a social media feed we're essentially spinning the barrel like a game of Russian roulette and see to see how we're going to feel. We're allowing the algorithm to tell us how we're going to feel and spoiler alert they're probably going to we're probably going to feel worse because the algorithms are just designed in such a way that they kind of prey on the worst elements of human of human psyche and our psyche focuses on the negative. So that's I think one of the most important things that people can do just some like a day to day basis is be more intentional about their media whether that's through a tool like rally news my good news aggregator or through some other through some other tool but just being intentional about our consumption of media because so much of our life in the

11:36modern era is can is contributed by social media. Yeah very cute because we often blame of issue that that is all because that but the responsibility also lies on the ability and like comes you will just want to hear comes yeah that almost be more than. Yeah yeah I think it is it is true that yes that these algorithms exist but I think to blame and people say oh they're like cigarettes or whatever they're like they're they're bad for you and these companies are bad for you and that may be true but like you said we now know they're like cigarettes right so it's now sort of incumbent on us to take our wellness into our own hands and decide how we're going to interact with those algorithms and when we're going to interact with those algorithms I think it's it's I'm not trying to tell people that they should just completely get off social media but I think deciding

12:38when and how to interact with social media and what to supplement it with so for instance I think that the rally news the positive news can be a really good supplement to these things to these algorithms especially early in the morning those first couple of minutes are so important in deciding how you're sort of defining how you're going to approach the world and starting from a place of positivity of good news I think is a really powerful way to to set yourself off in the right way that when you do interact with those algorithms later on that they don't kind of send you spiraling. So what do you think the deeper part of your work causes underneath why so many people struggle to find the sustainable relationship with their own here on how long can we be.

13:40I think it's scary to a lot of people scary to me sometimes I think like the idea of I think so first of all I think we have been conditioned to think that our that we need to be perfect this is not exclusively because of social media but it is contributed to this idea for sure that it's the good old Protestant work ethic that you need to that there is that you are more holy if you are hard working and if you're productive and this often this has led inadvertently to a world in which I think we have a real difficulty acknowledging our own faults and acknowledging our weaknesses and so I think a lot of the time to a

14:46certain extent you know what's there you know what is there inside you often time this is I think why people have got feelings those feelings don't come in the moment they are there they have been under the surface people are just choosing to ignore them a lot of cases and I think that's because it's scary especially when to acknowledge the truth about yourself or to acknowledge this kind of relationship that you have with yourself and it's a really interesting way of putting it a relationship that you have to yourself would cause them to have to make a change and so I think a lot of times we live in a world now where okay maybe in the past if you weren't a very good runner you would die if you couldn't safely get run away from the lion right we're in a place now as a society where we can sort of live without acknowledging the truth the truth of ourself ourself in its entirety and we can kind of

15:55stumble along we can you know a coolers we can stew ourselves with social media and we're never gonna we're not going to die if we do that and I think this is it's just too easy frankly to not be in touch with yourself today it's comforting to so far because we don't know what we're gonna uncover from ours yeah exactly we know some of assumptions even to ourselves what we assume what we are it's in this assumption if we are getting close by the part becomes uncomfortable to be definitely because I've learned as a food that I'm currently it's hard to give me something else to do sure yeah yeah it's it's it's a different it's a difficult balance you have to strike I think like because you do want to be in touch with yourself you do want to be

16:59aware of the full picture of yourself warts and all but I think you also need to accept yourself and I think there's a different I think a lot of people if they do start to acknowledge their who they are they can often I know I've struggled with this of like they can often kind of focus too much on the negative too much on the faults and kind of end up in a vicious cycle of anxiety and and and unfulfillment and that obviously is not conducive to wellness it's not a healthy relationship with yourself either so what's one practical or let's look to approach your development to someone who wants to build a more honest integrated relationship with their own value yeah so I would say that's there's gonna be a little bit cheating but I'm gonna say that for me what was the most important to kind of get in

18:03to wellness to get into in touch with my own wellness was to lower the level of kind of ambient noise around me and the level of ambient anxiety around me and how I did that was through good news the good news that became rally and again you don't need to just go to rally I'm not I mean I am pitching rally but you don't need to go to rally you can go to other providers or you can do it without good news entirely but I think that for me setting like a positive news routine that allowed me to set my days that the first thing I would do every morning is go on rally I would read sometimes it was just one to two minutes sometimes it was 20 30 minutes of positive news stories to then kind of give myself the best chance to set up a positive mindset with the day for the day that was super helpful to me that was kind of the in terms of small things that make big differences that was like the most important thing for me is to kind of lowering my ambient level which then

19:05kind of helped me be able to do all the work that then came afterward to being more in touch with yourself and so I think in terms of like small things if you if you want to read positive news and join me on rally I mean that's fantastic but if not maybe it's not even news is your problem right that was my problem was was anxiety anxiety and ambient anxiety because of the news maybe it's not maybe it's social media maybe you just need to set a hour long social media ban in the morning so you're not going to use social media and maybe you need to develop an affirmation in the morning or journal in the morning or something that I think setting yourself up in the day to get yourself the most likelihood to go into the day in a positive direction is pretty key in order to get yourself low because you can't really be in touch with yourself when your anxiety level is super high you're constantly operating at like full battle mode against your your ambient anxiety so I think that's really important so how do you suggest someone stay the bad

20:14practice when it doesn't feel productive or when the busy is aren't obvious right yeah I think that's that's it kind of goes back to what we're saying in the beginning where if a routine if you're trying a routine and the routine doesn't feel good if it doesn't feel like it's working you have to ask yourself if you find yourself constantly over analyzing your routine chances are it probably isn't working for you so if you go download rally for three weeks you read positive news on rally and you're just like every morning you're like this is sure to get there I think probably the answer is that rally isn't for you and that's not you that's not really helping you and again like like I like we started off by saying if if someone is trying to sell you something it's probably not necessarily valuable for you so like

21:17similar kind of like what I was saying with meditation meditation is not valuable to me doesn't mean it's not valuable to many other people but for me it was not valuable and so I think keeping in on with the intention not necessarily with the method so if you say I think I think a morning setting your focus for the day or setting the direction you want to go in the day in the morning is very important that I would say is probably most people that's beneficial for them but if you try rally or you try something else try meditation you try yoga in the morning and you're like this isn't working after a couple of weeks I wouldn't recommend that people just stay with it I think you you got to stay with it to a certain extent you got to give it some time to feel like it's gonna work but I think if you hit three weeks if you hit a month and it isn't working you're not feeling it it feels like a chore you're just gonna grow to resent it if you keep focusing if you keep forcing yourself to do it so I wouldn't just stop and then go back to

22:18what you were doing before but instead I would see okay what's another thing that might be more aligned with what I want to do and how I want to do so that's how I always try to operate when I I am very ruthless about like taking a routine away that isn't working for me but I always have one to replace it with so I don't just like go back to before and so I think that's like just focus on keeping the intention keeping the the goal in mind and in the end of the day the routine is just a conduit for the goal hmm what makes sense and I think the way living world got that only rewards vis-a-vis hopeless so so practice is that deep enough slightly can feel like they don't count at all but I think the most meaningful shit would only happen in often happening in the mountains in the moments where they stop

23:23performing wellness and start living with it and as good as if you're failing it doesn't work for you but it's tells you that you are in the right direction just effilism when you want to yeah yeah I read a quote once that um it takes the average person I think 7 or 8 job interviews before they actually get a job and so that people should stop thinking about their should again but people should stop thinking that um uh that failing a job interview is bad but rather that they're one step closer to that ninth job interview that seventh job interview and I think that's the same with these kind of wellness things is what matters is the intention not the method and thank you so much for this publication thank you for going thank you for having me it's a very

24:23nice conversation it's people want to continue pulling your work or read out to make a defined interview yeah the best place the best place to reach out is at rally news that's rally.news r-a-l-l-y.news um we are on web and also available as an android app um on uh the play store so that's the best place to get in touch I don't really have personal social media but there is some social media for the company there you can also email me I'm happy to chat at sam at rally.news um and yeah just would love to hear what you think of the the product if it's working for you of the site if it's working for you great if not then yeah I mean they just keep on with the intention of being more well and being more in touch with yourself yeah thank you for sharing that and thank you for spending this time with us. Thank you Naka. Before we go with noise I want to meet you with this you don't have to optimize your way into killing hole you don't have to earn

25:31this or justify care by yourself well-miss real wellness start when you stop trying to cure something and actually start listening towards already bare and what's already true. Thank you for being yellowish most I will see you next time on wellness game of the