Why You Wake Up Feeling Behind (And How to Fix It) | Oliver Burkeman

0:00Who likes bugs? Not me. I guess my wife does. My kids sometimes like bugs, but I don't like bugs in my house, right? I don't like them around my food. I don't like them crawling on me. I don't like bugs. And the problem is you see one bug and then you ignore it and all of a sudden you got hundreds of bugs and you got an infestation. If you are looking for DIY pest control, check out today's sponsor. That's Pesty. They're making protecting your home from unwanted pests super simple. With Pesty, you can get started at 35 bucks of treatment and get a customized plan based on your location, bugs and climate. They send you everything you need, pro grade pesticide. That's the same stuff the pros use. They give you a spray or they give you a mixing bag gloves and instructions and you can complete the whole thing in less than 10 minutes. My wife loves bugs, which she also loves our animals. And so she's always worried that killing the bugs will kill the animals. Well, Pesty pesticides are fully registered and have been used in hospitals and schools all over the country. And you can try Pesty totally risk-free with their 100% bug free guarantee or your money back.

1:00If the bugs don't go away, you get a free refund. Keep the bugs away with Pesty. Just go to Pesty.com slash daily dad for an extra 10% off your order. P-E-S-T-I-E.com slash dad for an extra 10% off. Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie Do it gaming team take on Gilly DeKing and wallow 267's million dollars gaming in an epic global gaming video game showdown four rounds multiple games one winner plus a half-time performance by multi-platonomartis Traviemekoi. Watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship match against Neo right now at globalgamingleague.com that's globalgamingleague.com everybody games. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Dad Podcast where on the weekends we do a deeper dive and how to get better at our most important job being a parent. Sometimes in these episodes I talk to best-selling authors and elite performers and other guests but lately I've also been having

2:01conversations with my wife Samantha the co-parent of my two boys. We do it over in the Daily Stoke studio here in Bastard, Texas. She and I talk about things that we're working on as parents, things that we're working on as people and how we are supporting each other, challenging each other and like I said trying to get better at what we do. Guest or not I hope you hear some ideas here that will help make you a better parent. I was better for having the conversation. I hope you enjoy. Just as nothing tests your stoicism quite like having kids nothing tests any of your philosophical or religious practices quite like having kids because as a parent right there's just like always more that you have to do. As work we've got to do for our kids, we've got to work, we have our house, we have our marriage. It's easy to feel like you're behind like you're just doing a terrible job and that feeling of just like starting on your back foot which you know I've had

3:04every day for 10 years is something I talked about with Oliver Berkman. I don't know if you know who he is. He used to write for the Guardian. He had this great column called this column will change your life which turned into his massive bestselling book 4,000 weeks time management for mortals and then he has a new one called meditation for mortals which I really enjoyed. Also he came out to the podcast and talked because he is also a dad and we talked about that feeling of being on your back foot. How it can shape your mood, your day, your ability to be a good parent before it even started. I wanted to share this here on the podcast because I think it really relates. I know I've heard from some of you about feeling that exact idea and if we can loosen that emotional grip of it, I think it'll make us better at what we're doing. As I said, Oliver's work is amazing. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at Oliver Berkman. You can grab sign copies of meditations for mortals and 4,000 weeks at the Pinn and Porch and you can listen to the full episode of this podcast over on the Daily Stone Podcast or you can watch it on YouTube because it

4:07just went up and people have been loving it there. So thanks to Oliver for coming out. Let's get into it. So for the last seven, eight years I've been driving Ford F-150 and I put some miles on this thing. We're driven across the country multiple times. We're driven to Florida multiple times. Toad heavy stuff. It's been scratched by cows. I've backed into borrower. It's basically time for a new car and that's why I've been messing around on car gurus because car gurus has the most inventory transparent deal ratings and real-time price drop alerts. With car gurus discover you can skip the filters and describe what you're looking for in your own words. You basically just type in what you want and car gurus discover instantly surfaces real listings that match your exact needs. Plus you can access dealership mode which gives you everything you need to navigate the dealership with confidence my least favorite part of buying a car. You can compare cars side by side check pricing and estimate your final cost so you can navigate the dealership with confidence

5:12with more than four million listing car gurus has the biggest selection of cars and you'll be able to find the right one and the right deal. It's no wonder that car gurus is the number one most visited car shopping site according to similar web's estimated traffic data. You can buy or sell your next car today with car gurus at car gurus dot com just go to car gurus dot com to make sure that your big deal is the best deal. C-A-R-G-U-R-U-S dot com car gurus dot com. Would you ever wake up like and you had a dream about like your spouse and you're just like angry like or they're angry with you it's kind of like that like it's clear you got in some sort of emotional place or vibe that like you have to do some real work to get out of because the thing that you're upset about is not real right you know you're like you just did this horrible thing to me in my mind and I know it's not real while I was asleep it was real and now I'm having the

6:15and that there's probably a metaphor in there and you're just like you're having the impression of feeling that whatever but it's not actually true yeah and so you made it up so you have to kind of work yourself out of that and I think you can do a like a life version of that too like you wake up and you're like everything shit or I'm behind or like you can wake up in an emotional place that is not based on anything you've had time to experience right right yeah no absolutely but it's real for you in a sense and so it needs your attention yeah and you can you can certainly make it real by how you treat people right so it's like if you immediately pick a fight with your kids yeah or you go straight your inbox and you're you decide to take this that or the other personally like the world will oblige you if that's how you want to feel today right because it's it's all the overlay that you're putting on things right I mean the back foot feeling is is definitely something I write about a lot but the other sort of side of that it's the same point really is just I used to have this sense and I occasionally will fall back into it these days of

7:20time sort of these kind of tranches of time that I'm sort of moving through in my life so that I see if I can convey this properly so like I would be working and it would be my turn to do school pick up at 330 and then from 330 till like after dinner that's I'm going to be focusing on parenting and as the as 330 approaches it's like this thing is moving towards you through the day it's like in some sort of like James Bond movie or something right the walls of the room again smaller and smaller and I would get more and more sort of stressed about the time running out and resentful of this thing that I have to do but also like most days I really enjoy doing that thing yeah certainly it's very very high up in my values of what I want to give my life to and it's just the fact of relating to time in this particular sort of finitude is a problem way that that sort of defines that upcoming thing as as uh as something to be moan

8:27because yeah somewhere in the back of my mind or in some like pre-unverbal part of my unconscious there is this assumption that it shouldn't be the case that tradeoffs are involved yes yeah you're just arguing with the reality that you can't do two things at the same time right well I think about that and that's why I was saying like the key is just to say no to things because it's like okay so if I get resentful when there's like things in the calendar but I also understand that like life is things you have to do did I eat up the patience that I have with that because I agreed to this call and this meeting and this thing that could have been an email and then so you know I'm like okay this is my publisher I gotta be nice you know or I this is I gotta talk to the accountant about this thing or you know this person really wanted to just hop on the phone for three minutes even though I they've done this to me before and it's ever three minutes and it never actually needed to happen so I did all that and then 330 comes along I got to pick up my kid and now I'm like what the fuck will anyone let me work you know and it's like yeah right I should be polite and accommodating and patient with the one thing that I like

9:33doing and actually matters and is by the way totally my responsibility which is you know picking them up from school and having fun together yeah but before that yeah I've used it up on a bunch of trivial yeah and so it's like when I pull up my calendar and there's not much in it I'm like today is a great day you know and when it's when it's there's a bunch of things I'm like you know and so part of it I think is just like the decisions you made beforehand yeah so you're not having to use like your zen mastery of your emotions to deal with this situation that was right you voluntarily put yourself into right and I think what yes I mean what what that brings up for me when I think about that is like first of all I think like isn't it crazy because we are both in a situation through great fortune where we really can decide to say no to lots of things that come in and it's not going to be calamitous and people are going to understand and yet maybe it's different for you but the the weird stuff from childhood of like my sort of got to be like obedient to these different

10:38like yeah and the way you can give like basically everybody in the world some sort of a strange quasi parental authority of you absolutely disaster there's this really fascinating exchange that Sennaka talks about where he tells a story about Alexander the great so Alexander the great wants to to conquer some territory and you know he's been so successful that the leaders of that country come together and they go they call him meeting with him and they go like look if you don't attack us we'll like we'll give you this part you know and and Sennaka quotes Alexander going like I didn't come all the way across the world to take what the leftovers you're willing to give me he's like I'm going to take what I want and give you the leftovers now obviously this is brutal horrendous idea but Sennaka is using it as a metaphor analogy to go this is how we have to think about philosophy and self improvement etc that you don't like commit yourself to all these professional goals and all these activities and all this stuff and then you give the little bit leftover to meditation

11:39philosophy reflection quiet stillness whatever you want to call it it's it's the other way around yeah that's the main thing yeah and then you can if you have anything left over that you can spare you can give it to this random phone call or whatever yeah and so he's basically just saying that we have it precisely backwards that and most people myself included have some dynamic version of this dynamic at home which is like you promise the bulk of your time to professional things and then you give your kids the little bit left over the office is closed today I can hang out with you or whatever and then we go but I do this all for my family my family's my number one prayer and it's like the calendar doesn't lie yeah it's the exact opposite revealed preference yes yeah absolutely yeah no I agree and I struggle with it all the time of course and that's that's what really struck me is that like I don't want to say no to something it's bad even when I really don't want to do like I remember I was CCed on some email once someone had asked someone I knew to do something and the guy just responded hard pass and I was like wow I love it you know like if I could ever do that

12:46I would be so proud of myself but he was not just no it's like not interested at all but we we find ourselves not wanting to be rude to these people yeah but you'll be really rude to a nine-year-old they have no say like yeah like the consequences for the nine-year-old is what they're going to think when they're a 39-year-old yeah that's a long way away so you're not thinking about that you know so you're like yeah sure I'll do this thing yeah and I mean I think I'm better saying no to things than I than I used to be but it doesn't get easy and again and again I'm amazed by how okay people are with it in certain contexts because in certain contexts they were just having to go see if you were interested yes I've even had a few contexts where because of the stuff that I write about where where people sort of respond with relief because it's like if you'd just done this then like I might not have been living your philosophy and I would be testing you but they're like they're like actually Kissinger has this thing about he's like at early on in your

13:48career you're you're worried that you're boring people and then you get to a place of power influence and they worry about boring you yeah yeah and and like you get to a place if you're lucky or if you've talked about these things where then you say no stuff and the people are like I'm so proud of you well I wish that if you had seen the the ringer that you just put me through you would you yeah not be so proud and maybe you could have just not done it in the first place yeah right I had a doctor like six people to get them to confirm that I shouldn't do you know yeah yeah and then the other thing that never seems to get easier is the complete impossibility of properly judging how long anything will take anyway right so there are plenty of occasions where I say yes to things and I know all of this stuff about saying no and I'm like right but I'm taking a sober decision this is 20 minutes of my life and of course it of course it isn't yeah yeah right right you agree you think oh it's one hour talk but you got to fly there the night before and then you got to fly home and so it's like wait I just I just that was a 36 hour commitment that I just did there's a lot

14:53to be said I mean so well-known thing but there's a lot to be said for that question for asking yourself whether you would whether you'd be looking forward to it or say yes to it if it was happening tomorrow or today when you're dealing with things that are a year or two out I find that is very good for surfacing like oh no I can exactly imagine the mindset I'm going to be in the night before this yes this thing so maybe listen to that hey thanks for listening to the daily dad podcast you can get this the email every day as well at dailydad.com please leave us a review in iTunes most importantly if you know any dads or parents would benefit from these messages please spread the word thanks