Our favorite tips on exercise, sleep, and play
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Support comes from our 2025 lead sponsor of LifeKid, Progressive Insurance. Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. You're listening to LifeKid from NPR. Hey, it's Marielle.

One of my favorite podcasts is 10% Happier with Dan Harris, and he recently had me on as part of a month-long series they're doing on fitness. Basically, it's about how to take care of your body without losing your mind. We talked for an hour, which is a long episode for us here at Life Kit, but we wanted to share it with you because it's packed with tips we've learned from lots of different episodes, specifically about movement, sleep, and play. It was a fun, playful conversation.

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Hey, I'm Laurel Bristow, scientist, professional explainer, and host of Health Wanted, a new show breaking down science in pursuit of better health. From ozempic to ozone and epidemics to extreme heat, there's a lot of public health news to process. We'll help navigate these topics by diving deep, interviewing experts, and answering your biggest questions. Listen to Health Wanted on WABE, part of the NPR Podcast Network.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Marielle Sagada, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Before we dive into your principal takeaways from

covering health and wellness for many, many years. I'd be curious to hear a little bit of your backstory, you know, how and why did you get interested in this stuff in the first place? I, you know, had a cocaine-fueled panic attack on live television, so I have a pretty clear trajectory narratively between my old life and my new life, but I'd be curious. It doesn't have to be as ridiculous as mine, but I'd be curious to hear about your trajectories.

Well, I guess I have two answers for that. There's the personal and the professional. I feel like they married really well here because this feels like the show that I should be hosting, that I'm supposed to be hosting, but I didn't even, I wouldn't have known that it existed before it existed. Like I wouldn't have pitched it necessarily. Life Kit existed for years before I started and then they decided to hire a full-time host. And at the time I was a financial reporter at Marketplace, the public radio outlet.

And I covered finance and economics for a number of years, a lot of news coverage, and then a lot of consumer psychology. So I know that was attractive to them when they were hiring me. But I think the thing that really connected for my boss when we had one of our initial calls, I was actually talking to her about I had applied for a different host job at NPR. It was kind of like a screening call. And I mentioned that I was...

a lot of my ancestors' stuff, like anything I could find that belonged to them, like a little prayer book that was my grandmother's and then a little address book that was my abuela's and different little things. And also, I

So items to represent them, basically creating like an ancestral altar on my bedside table that I was on having this kind of spiritual journey that way. And I just happened to mention that to her and she was like, that would be a great Life Kit episode. Did you know we're hiring for Life Kit? You could consider applying for that. And yeah, I did. And it just it made so much sense once I applied.

connected to what Life Kit does. I was like, oh, I am this person. Like I'm the person who likes to be really practical about whatever I'm dealing with in my life. We did an episode the other day on car safety and I was like, oh, every time I drive over a bridge, I have that intrusive thought of if I'm going to, you know, end up in the water and what would I do? And then what would be the next step? So I was like, can we do an episode on this? Can we just find out what actually I'm supposed to do that'll make me feel better? So there's that. And then there's like

When people tell me their problems, I want to try to help them and give them like specific practical advice. That's not always wanted in real life. But I find that when you do like a life kit, people are seeking it. So it's a good outlet for that impulse of mine where I want to try to fix people's problems. My friend...

Gretchen Rubin calls herself a happiness bully. She can pull it off, but most of us can't. Most people don't want unsolicited advice. But if you're hosting a show and people are clicking on it, then it's very much solicited. All right. So this conversation is part of the series that we do on our show about how to get fit sanely. And I know that overlaps with so many of the themes that you cover on Life Kit. So we're going to talk about your top 10 takeaways, like stuff that you learned

personally are using from all of the things you've learned about various aspects of fitness, including exercise and sleep and even play, which I think is an undervalued part of fitness and mental health generally. So if you're cool, I thought we'd start with exercise. I'm cool. And I'll chime in throughout with like stuff I've learned in my in my own life.

But your number one takeaway after having covered exercise for a while is to incorporate small pockets of exercise throughout the day. Yeah. Like, what does that look like? For me, sometimes it looks like doing calf raises when I brush my teeth. A lot of it happens when I'm watching TV. I recently binged Severance.

Went back to re-watch season one and then watch season two. And I do a lot of... Because I've been to physical therapy over the last year or so for some stuff. And I do a lot of the exercises they give me during that. Even stuff like...

You're sitting on the floor. It's a shoulder stretch. It's like I'm sitting back against my couch and just kind of stretching my arms out like that. It's a simple thing. Also, like lunges, squats, anything like that that's stationary or I have an exercise bike that faces the TV. So these are all very helpful. But you could also do it like if you have kids and you're waiting in the pickup line to get your kids, you could do

take that moment and pair it with movement, right? Like if you're parked and it's everybody's just waiting, you get out of the car and you do a couple squats or, you know, you reach up and move your body in a different way than you've been moving it all day. The reason for that is like you want to pair movement

movement with some activity that you're already doing routinely because that'll help you remember to do it. And it's time that's already accounted for. Like we brush our teeth every day, you know, ideally. And so if you do that or you do it when you're taking your pills or you do it when you're making your smoothie, then you find a way to work it in and you don't have as many excuses like, I just can't make time for a whole hour to go to the gym. Is the idea there that

you'll start seeing benefits and then want to go to the gym? Or is this just as good as going to the gym? It's not necessarily the former. You can still get a lot of benefits from breaking up movement into these exercise snacks, is what some people call them, throughout the day. You can still get the benefits, for instance, of strength training or cardio, as long as you're getting your heart rate up for cardio to the target zone.

which you can achieve even by walking. It's okay to break it up. You don't have to do it all at once. So you don't have to have the gym that you go to unless you like that, which I do not. I find gyms depressing a lot of the time, unless it's the rock climbing gym, because then it's like a fun little puzzle for me to do. And it's like a

competing against yourself but the lighting in gyms usually the smell all the clanking of weights and things like I hate it I won't go I'm sure for many people who feel the same way you do either because they hate gyms or because they can't find the time to go to know that you can just weave it into your life as it is is yeah liberating it is I think it's a relief for a lot of people

that they don't have to work out in the way that they were told they have to work out. And that also exercise can be fun and you can find the way that works for you at this moment. You might be really into biking around your neighborhood or something or biking on the road right now. And then you decide, meh, not so much anymore. Now I want to start jogging or start swimming or something. And like, it's also okay to just change it up.

As you get bored of one thing or what suits your needs. I like to lately, especially as the weather has gotten nicer, I'm like, oh, let me start biking again to get places in Brooklyn. Then I don't have to take the subway and I also get some exercise in.

I've been doing that with walking, taking meetings, you know, if I've got a meeting that would have otherwise been a Zoom, but I can make it a phone call. I can just walk through my neighborhood or instead of taking a cab to actually like just carve out a little extra time and walk to a place. I found that to be really helpful. I think if you take meetings when you're walking, too, like it can also help.

It can foster creativity. It can help you come up with better ideas. I have definitely felt stuck before on a story that I was working on. And then I go for a walk and I talk to my editor or a producer or someone. I'm able to think outside of the box that my apartment creates. You know, when you're looking at the same things all the time, you're

I don't know. It's like your brain doesn't go there. But then you're suddenly among the trees in the park or whatever, and you're like, you're newly inspired. There's an evolutionary case for this. I'm not an expert in this. I'm repeating things I've heard from experts. But we evolved from...

to think while moving through nature. And that makes a ton of sense because we were hunting and gathering, migrating, lots of things on the go. And so deep in our molecules, there is a good reason why taking a walk can not only be good for your physical fitness, but also for your creativity and larger mental health. I love that. Yeah.

I think it can also be really helpful to know you might get these benefits, but to let go of outcomes. So it's like, I'm pretty sure if I go for a walk, it's going to shake me loose a little bit. But I don't necessarily know in what direction or towards what productive outcome. And sometimes it'll just be the joy of that experience, the joy of being in the park and seeing people.

a little kid on their bike, like learning how to bike with their parent or a cute dog that I smile at. Or I was on the beach in Puerto Rico last week and I just watched a little crab dig a hole for 20 minutes.

He had his little claw and he would go and scoop up the sand and then come out of the hole, dump the sand, come back in. He had these like really cute eyes, you know, like a cartoon character. As I got closer to him, he got a little more wary of me. Like, is this girl going to eat me? And I was like, no, no, no, it's okay. I just want to take a picture.

So he started dumping the sand like real quick and then running back in. I loved it. Like it was one of the best moments of my trip. Just sitting there and watching this crab do his thing over and over. And then I was also like, oh, there's metaphor here for my own life, which is something we learned when we did the forest bathing episode. You can find...

metaphor in nature for pretty much anything you're going through. Whether it's the way that trees, when they die and they fall, they decompose and they become part of the forest floor and they become...

a different part of the ecosystem, right? Where mushrooms can grow and maybe like little birds can live in there. It can be a metaphor for death and grief. I find there's just a lot of wisdom in nature when you sit and watch. And so you don't always, you could go for that walk and say like, this is going to help me think about the next chapter of my book or whatever. This is going to help me come up with my business plan. Or you could go into it with a little less attachment to the outcome and just see.

I love that. And my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, often says that meditation actually can be a good way to problem solve, but not in an obvious way. You're not supposed to sit down and think about the problem because that's normally what we do. Instead, you can...

seed your mind with the problem and then go into a mindful state where you're just watching your breath or noticing whatever's coming up in your body and mind. And then when you get distracted, you start again and again. Yeah. And when you let the unconscious mind go to work in this way, connections that you might not have been able to make with your every

everyday discursive mind can get made. You know, this is why we get ideas in the shower. So yeah, I see a lot of resonance there. You can work with your dream self, your sleeping self to do the same thing. We did an episode about dreaming and we interviewed a researcher at Harvard about this and she has studied dreaming for a long time and she would have her students basically, there was some problem they were working through with a project and they would

I think it was that they would think about it right before bed or they would ask. It was like one question they would ask themselves, not like poring over it before bed. But I believe it was like they would ask themselves, OK, how might I approach this? Or like, what should I do about X or whatever right before bed? And in a lot of cases, they would end up eventually dreaming about it and coming to some sort of solution that might.

show up in the form of a metaphor or like visual imagery, our sleeping minds are really good at that. And they're kind of amazing. Like if you dream, if you remember your dreams, I'm sometimes like, wow, my brain is so creative. The way it's showing me this problem in my life, but just in a different way through a movie that it's creating, this vivid movie. And it's showing me that, oh, what I'm feeling about this thing is guilt.

I had a dream once. I remember that. Okay. I dreamt that I was like, I had drawn tic-tac-toe boards on a public wall and

For some reason, I was like bored waiting in a train station or something. And then I got arrested and I was going to be sent to prison for like 10 years. And I had drawn this in pencil, you know, like it was not a high crime, but I was in the courtroom and it was like, you need to like apologize for what you've done. And they were like talking about how I was so unrepentant. And I was like, like I woke up, I was like, I'm going to be sentenced. But I didn't even know what I'd done wrong. And I woke up and I was like,

oh, the guilt is heavy. Like, what am I feeling guilty about? And I realized it was someone that I was seeing at the time who kind of used guilt as a manipulative tactic. But I didn't really recognize this about him consciously. I was like a new person I was seeing. But then after I had that dream, I was like, oh, this is the state that I'm living in. Like, I'm feeling guilty all the time. I don't like this. I don't want to see this person anymore.

Hmm. Hoping my wife doesn't have dreams for me anytime soon. I mean, I do think your dreams can help you work through whatever. It doesn't mean you have to end relationships, but it can help you understand something that you're dealing with day to day that you're like, oh, what is that? Absolutely. What does that symbol represent to me? There's a lion in your dream. OK, what do lions mean to me? What does that represent and what were they doing in the dream? That's what we talked about to that researcher about.

I love we've gone a little bit far afield, but in a great way. I'm going to bring us back, but not with any kind of feelings about it. Just to number two in your list of three exercise tips that you as the host of Life Kit have actually incorporated into your own life. And number two is exercise.

Bundling your temptations with your exercise. Sometimes researchers call this temptation bundling, but say more if you will. This is sort of what I was talking about before with the workout while you're watching TV. TV is a good example because a lot of us have shows that we really like and enjoy.

They might come in bite-sized chunks. So I really love the show Abbott Elementary. I think it's like half an hour, maybe a little less, without ads. You could save that and only watch it when you're working out. So I could say, I'm going to just...

Only watch Abbott Elementary when I'm on my exercise bike. And then that's like 20-something minutes on the bike. I imagine this is sort of like a Pavlovian response, right? You're telling yourself, I'm going to get a treat when I do this other thing that's also good for me. And that's an idea that Katie Milkman at Wharton, she's a behavioral scientist, she shared with us, this idea of temptation bundling. You know, the idea is like,

You will start craving trips to the gym or you'll start craving about on the exercise bike if you know that it's paired with, for instance, your favorite show. Yeah. Katie's amazing. She's been on this show. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes and also a link to your conversation with her as well. So temptation bundling, a lot of evidence behind that. And the third tip that you have incorporated into your own life, I think, is maybe based on my understanding of the science of behavior change.

Among, if not the most powerful, and that is finding an exercise accountability buddy or buddies, plural. Yeah, people have been doing this forever. You know, my mom and our neighbor would go for walks around the neighborhood. And it's basically like when you say to a friend, the simple version is we both want to start walking around. We both want to be more active. Let's meet up.

Once a week, let's meet up every morning, whatever the cadence is. And because you know that this other person is relying on you, you're less likely to flake on it than you would be to flake on yourself. A lot of us are people pleasers, so we need that

impetus to please another person to actually meet our own goals, or in this case, health goals. There are lots of ways of doing this. You don't necessarily have to do it with just one person and do exactly the same thing. I like the idea of

parallel play in a way, but like doing slightly different things. You know, you can be, you could be on your exercise bike while your friend is doing yoga, you know, in the same living room. Or you could both do your own exercise and then just say, we're going to meet up for a coffee after. And this will be like before work or something that works for you. I would never do that because I'm not a morning person. So I might be like a post-work kind of situation. But

It can work really well for exercise. It also works for other pursuits, like creative pursuits. And we can get into that. I know that that's an area of interest too, just like pursuing fun and joy and play. I went to a woodworking group last night where we meet up once a month, we make wooden spoons. I say we, I'm new to this, it's my second time, but I really liked it and I was working away on my spoon. And it's that idea of like,

I'm not going to work on the spoon the rest of the month. I'm just going to go for a couple hours and we're going to do the spoons together, you know? Is there anything more Brooklyn than that? No, probably a lot of what I say is going to sound very, very Brooklyn. Yeah. And then we have a drum circle in the park. And no, it is kind of great, though. Like people, people are really nice. And like, I feel like you meet like minded folks.

And someone will stop you if you're using the knife the wrong way. Someone will be like, no, no, no, don't do that. You're going to cut your finger off. It's not a class, but it's a community, which I love. And the goal is not like, oh, I need to make this many spoons. You know, it's not anybody's job. It's more just like, I want to learn this skill. I want to work with my hands. I think that feels good. It, again, gets me thinking in a different way.

Yeah. No, I buy it. I'm smiling just because I used to have a colleague back when I had a meditation app. My colleague Eva once unironically told me that she was in an artisanal yogurt listserv and I was like, there is nothing more. That is super, that is over the top. Yeah.

Well, maybe the spoon making club is also kind of ridiculous. You know, I don't know. Maybe it's a notch below the artisanal yogurt. Having said that, though, there's something deep here around...

The power not only of having accountability buddies while you're doing exercise, but just to connecting to other humans, you know, in pretty much any context, as long as it's voluntary, is incredibly powerful. I don't have trouble getting to the gym. I actually like it. I'm a bit of a mutant in that way. And I have been recently doing some group workouts on the weekends and

It's so much more fun to do it with other people. It's the same vibe where my form is often bad. And so like the other people in the room are helping me with my form. And so that's really helpful. Yeah. Let's talk about another area of fitness that I think, you know, often when we talk about fitness, people go right to exercise or food, but sleep is.

I've often referred to as the apex predator of healthy habits, like nothing can happen if you're not sleeping. You very kindly let me know in advance about the three sleep tips that you've heard about in the course of hosting your show that you've actually incorporated into your own life. And one of them is

And I'd be curious to hear you explain this. Find your sleep sweet spot in 15 minute increments. What does that mean? Yeah, sleep sweet spot is very hard to say. I'm impressed that you got that out. 30 years of being an anchorman. So this was we talked to Rebecca Robbins. She's a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. And she was saying, basically, you want to get seven to nine hours of sleep in increments.

in a night. That is the ideal range. A lot of people will say that they can do with less, but often they're taking naps throughout the day or they're reaching for a lot of coffee or they're drinking 24-hour energy from those little bottles. That would probably give me heart palpitations, but I know some people rely on them. And so are you on the seven-hour range?

part of the range? Are you in the night hour part of the range? It's possible you fall outside of the range also, but you can sort of figure that out. Figure out your personal sleep needs in 15 minute increments, like work your way back and be like, okay, do I feel more well rested?

If I try basically sleeping for 15 minutes earlier than you normally go to sleep. So like 15 minutes earlier than normal, you start doing all of the sleep hygiene stuff that we talk about, which is like, put your phone away.

Ideally, stop watching TV, especially stop watching it on a laptop. Start turning the lights off, the same as you would for a baby when you're trying to teach them to go to sleep and this is your routine. You got to do it for yourself too. Maybe part of your sleep routine is you take a bath or whatever it is that cues you, reading your little book in bed, dim lighting. You start that routine 15 minutes earlier and then...

You just keep inching it back and you're looking for whether you're able to wake up and feel refreshed and have enough energy throughout the day and not really be like have to reach for the coffee and the energy drinks.

You can do that over the course of time because often we know, too, if you try to be like, you know what? I'm going to go to bed earlier. I'm going to be so much better about this. You do it one day because you try to do it all at once. You're like, I'm going to sleep 10 hours tonight. And then it doesn't happen again. You got to do it in small bits.

First of all, my dad worked at Brigham and Women's for about 30 years as the head of radiation oncology. So I'm quite familiar with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. It's an intense job, radiation oncology. Yes, it was. So this idea of going to bed early or earlier is a thorny one. It actually connects to another of your takeaways. And it's really something I see in my own life, too. There's this concept. This is one of my favorite terms, revenge therapy.

nighttime procrastination or revenge bedtime procrastination. Just last night, in fact, I got home from dinner. I went out to dinner with some friends and I got home at 10 and

I have learned recently, actually, that 10 is actually the right time for me to start my sleep routine. You get in your footie pajamas and you're... Exactly. At my footie pajamas and my chamomile tea. No, actually, my bedtime routine is walking meditation. Okay. Because my big sleep obstacle really is like a restlessness. And so if I can do like a amble around the house for...

10, 15, sometimes 20 minutes before bed while I'm trying to be mindful. It really gets my body ready to go to sleep. And then I read a little bit. But I found that if I push it too late, it screws me up. And so last night, that's exactly what I did. I pushed it too late and I had trouble sleeping. And this, I think, is a very common issue. And it's on your list of things you've learned. So what have you learned about revenge, nighttime procrastination and how to deal with it?

Well, okay. I'm wondering, what did you do when you got home? What did you want to do? Oh, I watched TV. You watched TV. Okay. So I think revenge bedtime procrastination is really about you go all day. You're maybe being very productive, whatever it is. You have to, like, you go to work. You get this done. You get your errands done. You drop your kids off at school.

And then maybe you socialize and that's important to you too. Or you go to the gym and that's important to you too. But then you get home and you want some quiet time or you want some creative time or you want some time with your partner and you can't squeeze it all in into one day. And so you're like, but

But I don't want the productive stuff to be my whole life, like my whole day. I can't have my whole day. And so you try to carve out this extra time. And you're like, I can steal from sleep me. Because that's really what it is. You're like stealing from your sleeping self. And you're stealing from yourself tomorrow. But you're sort of like, I need to do this right now. And sometimes...

It can be bad if you're like you can get into a pit because you're like, I want to feel creative or something, but you don't have a creative project you're really working on. So instead, you go online and you start online browsing and shopping. And that's like fake creativity. It's just giving you a little bit of like a buzz. It's giving you a feeling that.

you're doing the thing that you seek, but you actually are not, and you might end up just buying something, then you look up and it's midnight or it's 1230 or something like that or 1 a.m. And so that's also really common among people who have high stress jobs. And they're like, I need that break. If you are going to do those things, like if you do want to stay up and be browsing or whatever, you should not do it in bed.

You should make your bedroom a space that you can actually relax, a space that's just for sleeping and I would say like to be reasonable also for sex. I mean, that's what most people do in their beds and that's like a healthy thing. But those two things...

And not online shopping, not working, not watching TV can help you a lot. And if you are up and you're like thinking about something, you're stressing about something, she says, get out of bed and just deal with it or write a note to yourself or whatever, and then get back into bed and try to sleep. Yeah, we've had experts on the show talk about this, and it seems like it just comes down to

teaching your brain that the bed is a place to sleep. And if you're teaching it that it's for anything else, I was having a conversation the other day with a therapist for my own stuff. I've been suffering with claustrophobia and she, in the process of the conversation said, our brains are really dumb.

And it will panic, even though you rationally know there's nothing to fear. And the same, I think, applies to a certain extent with sleep. If you're training the brain that, oh, yeah, this is a place where I shop on my laptop, then you're in a state that's not congenial necessarily to sleep. Have you talked about the claustrophobia thing on the show? Yes, I have, although I'm in a whole new place.

realm because I've been dealing with this for about three years now and I'm now kicking it up a notch and getting serious about it because my family is getting very tired of me needing to take Klonopin to get on a plane because it makes me annoying in the moment and grumpy later when I'm hungover. I've had some experiences with claustrophobia too so I'd be curious to listen to any episodes that are specific to it. It's a not uncommon phobia

For me, it's like I got locked in bathrooms a couple of times. And so now I'm like public bathrooms. I'm like terrified to lock the door unless it's a lock mechanism that I can like. Yes. See and, you know, know that. Yes. I completely relate to that. Yeah. Nightmare fuel.

But I know what you mean. That's what I was going to say. Like, I know what you're talking about, where your brain is like, okay, but I'm fine. Someone is going to come and eventually and they will be able to get the door open. But I'm like, I'm going to die in here. It just your brain goes to like a million, you know? Yeah, I get it.

Yeah. So the dumb brain of ours, it's an amazing, it's not dumb, but in this way, it can be kind of dumb and it needs to be trained like in a very kind of obvious ways. And so if you're teaching it at the bed is a place to get activated or acquisitive or inquisitive or productive for many of us, it will make sleep harder. Yeah. Another thing, by the way, that we learned was that it's very important to keep your bedroom at a cool temperature.

I like to sleep a little more on the warm side, but Robbins was telling me, you know, you want to make sure it's under 70 degrees, ideally. Even in the winter when you're trying to be all cozy, you know, under your sheets, because they have done...

Studies on this and they have data to show that when they increase the temperature from that people sleep was more fragmented. So they were tossing and turning more. They were more disrupted. They were having more nightmares. So that's another thing we can do to set ourselves up to be successful is like keep it cool in your bedroom.

That was the third, just a flag for folks, that was the third tip for sleep that you've found to be helpful in your own life, keeping it cool in the room. I was interested to hear that you're a warm sleeper because I use air conditioning in the winter to keep the room cold. I have a lot of trouble sleeping unless the room is pretty frigid.

I mean, I will say this has been a roller coaster over the past year because I did treatment for breast cancer and I had went through chemo and had hot flashes, like really terrible hot flashes. So I dealt with that for a long time and that's shifted now. So then I was all about the air conditioner in the winter. I was like, this is no problem for me. I don't even need the heat on. But my base level, yeah, I feel like my little like my hands and feet get cold and I just want to be...

tucked up. Now I understand why you reacted the way you did to my saying the thing about my dad being a radiation oncologist. He was actually a specialist in breast cancer before he retired. So I'm sorry to hear that you went through that. Are you doing all right now? Yeah, I am doing as well as I possibly could be. So my scans have been clear basically since surgery, but they did all the other things that

As a just in case, you know, that's how complicated it is with with cancer. It's like they don't know for sure that like a little bit of it didn't get out. A little micrometastases could be somewhere in your body.

That's why I had to do chemo and that's why they do radiation. But I get checked regularly. It's hard to know what to say because people who haven't gone through cancer or like haven't maybe had a family member go through it, they ask, or are you in remission or are you cancer free? And it's like a little hard to answer those questions. Like as far as I know, but I feel good. I feel healthy. It's just one of those things that is.

going to be with you. It's just going to be a thing that you have to be careful about and check on. And I was already interested in living a healthy life, but now I also know that

What a big role these kinds of practices play in preventing a recurrence of breast cancer, specifically because breast cancer is hormone mediated. And so sleep plays a big role. What you eat plays a big role. And also exercise does. There have been studies that show it can decrease the risk of a recurrence significantly if

If people, women exercise regularly, they get like the recommended amount that the government recommends every week. And so seeing those numbers, I was like, OK, I really need to be consistent about this. This is going to help me maybe as much as taking this pill is helping me, you know? Yeah. Motivation to get even more serious about the things we've been talking about, but also perhaps even.

Yeah. I definitely don't take it for granted. I never did, to be honest. I lost a few family members when I was pretty young. An aunt and an uncle who both died young. My uncle was, I think he was like 52. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to die.

died from a heart attack. And my aunt, my tia, she died from colon cancer in her 50s. And I was like under 10 years old, very close to both of them. So I think I always had this idea that that can happen, you know, when you're pretty young. And I've always lived in a way that's very like seize the day kind of. Nothing is promised. And I was always pretty careful.

That's the thing. Like a lot of people who get cancer young are like, wait, I did all the right things. I thought I was doing all the right things. And then you realize there are more things you could do. And there's more like ways to avoid environmental toxins or try to. But there's this feeling of like, maybe I've realized that you can do all the right things and bad things can still happen. It's not your fault. But also very much like I said this to some friends and family at the time.

People were asking me if I was feeling like, why me? Why did this happen to me? And I was like, you know, not really, because it's a little like, why not me? I think it's one in two people get cancer in their lifetimes and one in eight women get breast cancer. So I was like, well...

Those aren't great odds. It has to happen to somebody. But if it's why not me that this could happen, then also why not me? Why can't I have amazing experiences after I'm done with treatment? I just want to have a beautiful, brilliant life. I want to still be able to have a kid. I want to find the partner who's the right fit for me. I want to have a great community and learn how to

carved wooden spoons on Monday nights in Brooklyn. Why not me? You know, flipping that has helped me. I could get you into an artisanal yogurt. Let's serve if you want. You know, I'm lactose intolerant, so I can't take you up on that. I'm sure they have vegan variants knowing this crew. OK. I'm curious because when we went to my team, went to you and said, hey, we'd love to have you on. Talk about fitness. What have you learned? And

You came back with three things that have really hit home for you on the exercise front and three things that have really hit home for you on the sleep front. And then instead of talking about diet or something sort of obvious on the nose when it comes to fitness, you wanted to talk about play. Why play and how does that link to fitness in your view?

Yeah, we've done some episodes on this and they confirmed what I think I felt intuitively, which is that play is a basic human need. We interviewed someone named Stuart Brown, who has been studying play for his entire career. And he talks about, first of all, that like humans aren't the only animals that play. Lots of animals do it.

leopards, bison, ravens, dolphins, from an evolutionary perspective, it might not seem to make sense at first, like, because it could often, it could be risky, it could be costly, like, why do we do this thing? But animal play scholars and biologists

biologists argue that it actually serves an important role. It can help us adapt to difficult circumstances. It can help us practice skills we need to survive and help us problem-solve and collaborate. And there are studies on this. Mostly, there are some in animals, and I think it might be a little harder to study play in adult humans and see the outcomes. But just based on the data that they have,

They believe that plays a really important role in our lives. And then I think we can also feel this when we do it and we just like kind of intuitively see the benefits of it.

So play, I think, can be lots of different things, though. It's not necessarily like, let's go fly a kite or games that you hopscotch or things that you did as a kid on the playground, though, if you're into that. Cool. But for me, a lot of it, a lot of it is about creativity. A lot of it is about storytelling. I find my play through storytelling.

fashion, through nature. Like I was saying, I like to watch a little hermit crab digging a hole. And I find that playful.

almost like talking to the hermit crab. That's an element of play. Or even sometimes you can be playful with yourself. You're in the kitchen and you do something stupid. I have this like water filter that takes a long time. It's a reverse osmosis filter. It takes a long time to like fill up my jug of water. So I'll just like leave it going. And then on the countertop as the thing is filtering. And I forget about it.

Every other time I forget and it starts flooding like it's flooding the the countertop and then onto the floor and I'm like, oh, my God, like you did it again. Instead of being like, oh, like I'm so stupid. Like sometimes I'm just kind of laugh at myself like I'm my own bad roommate, you know.

You can just sort of be like, oh, you goon and sort of like have a moment of play with yourself, you know, or you could do it with a little bird that lands on your windowsill. You'll find these moments throughout your day, just like we talked about with exercise snacks.

Yeah, it's not just a practice. It's an orientation to life. I like that. Yeah. One of the things you mentioned in the little memo your team sent me about takeaways that have been important to you vis-a-vis play. One of the things that you talk about is that for many of us, like we don't even know where to start. We hear that play is good for us and then.

We look at our lives and we're like, yeah, well, I haven't thought about this in a long time. I don't see how to fit it in, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the experts on your show advised that if you want to get a sense of what your play style is, cast back to interpolate back to your childhood. And what were the things you enjoyed doing then? You say more about that. Yeah. So one of our experts, he was saying, oh,

What were your favorite ways to play as a kid? Were you super into Legos or erector sets? You know, did you like finger painting? Did you like make-believe or catching fireflies or seeing how far you could catapult yourself off of the swing set? I really liked playing with Barbies and telling stories with them and dressing them up and little dramas and love triangles and things.

We added on to that with what we learned from Stuart. Stuart Brown worked as a psychiatrist for many years, and he would ask patients about their early experiences with play. He and his colleagues would review the notes, and they noticed certain types, and they came up with basically a list of play personalities. I think there are ageists.

eight of them. You can be more than one of these, but maybe, you know, you see kind of where your clusters are. You might be the joker who loves to laugh and make other people laugh. I

practical jokes, physical comedy, wordplay. It could be a lot of things. You might be the artist creator, which resonates for me. You might be the kinesthete who finds joy in movement. So like swimming, running, stretching, whatever it is, archery. There's the director who loves to call the shots and to plan parties, stuff like that. There's the storyteller, which also resonates with me maybe obviously and for a lot of journalists.

You can refer to his list, Stuart Brown's list, to see which of those personalities resonate for you. Or maybe you'll come up with a category of your own. Coming up, Marielle talks about how to assess how much play you're getting in your daily life and how to get more. I'm curious, like, when I was preparing for this interview and I was thinking about, you know, how much play do I have in my life? I mean, I do play the drums, but not as much as I would like. I do exercise a lot, but it doesn't feel super playful unless I'm doing it with other people. Yeah.

Then I was thinking about socializing. I really like to see my friends and I, so several nights a week, I probably could do it every night, honestly, we'll go to dinner with friends. I really, really like that. And so like I did last night, I'm doing it again tonight. That seems to incorporate both storytelling and

And joking for me in my experience. But I don't know. Does that make sense to you? I think your dinners could be playful or they could not be depending on what's going on at them. I think we've all been to dinners that feel more like a funeral. And then we've been to dinners that feel super playful and have those elements. So if it's good vibes, if you can joke around with your friends and and lean into that.

I went to a dinner party recently and we did Esther Perel's game. I think it's called Where Should We Begin? And it has the prompts on it. And that led to some really playful conversations. Some people like to get together with their friends and literally play games, like board games and things, which I do not like. I don't need to learn new rules to anything ever again. I don't like it either. I'm like, I...

I'm going to want to do this really well. And you've been practicing this because you own this game. You've been practicing this thing at your house for years with every person who comes through and there's no chance I'm ever going to win. So we're not playing this. Maybe we could play Candyland, but we're not playing like a strategy game. You learn what you like and what you don't like. You learn what feels like play to you.

And it's going to be different for every person. And yes, you can go back to childhood and think about what felt like play then, because sometimes that's like a more pure vision of ourselves. Or it's like when we had less maybe distracting us and we just kind of gravitated towards what we liked. I'm curious for you as a kid, like what were your favorite forms of play? Music. My parents were really into what we would now call classic rock, although at that time I don't think they called it classic rock.

So just current rock them, you know, the Beatles, the Stones, Green's Clearwater. I was born in 1971, the band. So that definitely scaled up to me learning the drums as a kid. And still, you know, my son, who's 10, plays the drums. And so there's that definitely joking around. It's a huge part of my life. Storytelling. I keyed in on the thing you mentioned before about like being on the swing and then jumping off. I don't do enough of this, but there's something about

That we feeling that biking, skiing, rollerblading, skateboarding all have that to them. And I can see it a little bit. Yeah, I was on a beach vacation with my son recently. We're boogie boarding. That sensation is, I think, really powerful. I love that. So this is reminding me as I was thinking about this this morning, I remembered a C.S. Lewis quote that I wrote out and had taped on my bedroom wall when I was in high school.

And it gets at this, and I wanted to read some of it to you. So he says,

But most of your friends don't see it at all and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. And I'm fast-forwarding here. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction of something not to be identified with but always on the verge of breaking through? The smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side.

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling, but faint and uncertain, even in the best, of that something which you were born desiring, and which beneath the flux of other desires and in the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? I like that a lot.

Yeah. And I think for me, it would be something around humor. Humor. And the we, I love the we thing. Like that is a common, that's a common thread. And you can think about what else might get you there.

Is it a physical thing like roller coasters? You know, do you like that feeling of physically being suspended sort of in the air? Or is there like a mental thing that it's like it's a loss of control, but like a controlled loss of control? Yes, these are really interesting things to think about.

Let's just close on this. This is another tip for play. And this comes from Catherine Price, who has been on this show and is a friend of mine and wrote a book about play and gave a great TED talk on the subject. And she, Catherine, has this acronym that stuck out to you, SPARK, S-P-A-R-K. Can you walk us through it and why it stuck in your mind? This is from an episode that was reported by Julia Furlan. She's a journalist and

here in New York. And I really liked this bit of it because, I don't know, acronyms, they just, they help you remember stuff, you know? So I love an acronym. So it's SPARK. The S is make space in your life for fun.

It's like we fill up our lives with all kinds of things and some of them aren't actually nurturing us. For me, that's social media is often not nurturing me and it's taking too much of my time. A lot of the things that go on in my phone, online shopping and just even activities that feel obligatory but actually aren't.

The people that you don't really vibe with that much, but like you keep going to that meetup or you keep hanging out and you're like, actually, I don't have to do this. I don't have to invest in this connection. I can say no to that to leave space for other things to grow. I think that's really important. And not always rush in to fill the space. Like let it happen. P is for pursuing your passions. So...

Again, what is that look for that common thread that we were talking about? The smell of cut wood in the workshop, that wee feeling when you're jumping off the swings, those things that for some reason it resonates for you in here. The things you're really passionate about and you don't have to try to balance

become expert level at them necessarily. Like you're just doing them for the joy of doing them and maintaining that passion. You don't have to monetize them either. The A is attract for attracting, attracting fun. And that's really about developing an attitude that's open to it. And again, I think it's that playful mindset. I try to live in that playful mindset and one that's very like

I meet new people. I ask them what they've got going on in their lives. I make connections. I went like, I'm trying to learn the drums, but a different kind of drumming. I love bomba music in Puerto Rico. My dad is Puerto Rican. So I just went and saw like a group of, of female bomba drummers. And I, I say that because traditionally it's the men who play and the women dance, but yeah, so it was all women playing the drums. And I got the number from a guy there of his daughter who lives in New York and teaches bomba. So it's like,

Whatever it is about percussion, I'm really feeling it. It feels right to me. It aligns with some other things that I like. And...

When I show up in that space, I had an open attitude. I talked to this woman who was dancing because I thought she was beautiful and I thought her dance was like really incredible. And then she introduced me to this guy who had the daughter who teaches the drums. So you got to come at it with like not knowing exactly why you're saying hello to this person or whatever. You just like it. You like what you see. You like what you saw them do. You're curious about them. And then also,

R in the spark is for a little gentle rebellion. So like it's doing something that might feel kind of rebellious, like you'd get in trouble for it if you were in high school. So going roller skating in the middle of the night or jumping into the pool with your clothes on or something like that. I know our sleep is very important to us, but like we could spare one night for some shenanigans, some wholesome shenanigans. And then

The K is about keeping at it and just like, I guess it's like it's not a job. We don't want to make it into a job. But having fun is something that you should consider a basic human need and work it into your day to day life. Just to pick up on the K, play, you don't want to make it into another thing on your to do list. But you also don't want your whole life to be your to do list. Right. And so that's the balance. Yeah, totally. Totally.

I try to leave space now, too, especially when I travel, to not really program it. To just be like, yep, I know I'm going to this place. I'm going to stay in this one space and I'm going to bop around. I'm going to go to the beach this day. I'm going to go to the beach that day. I don't want to have another list of things to do. And it lets me follow the breadcrumbs a little bit. Yeah. Yes.

Marielle, it was a huge pleasure to get some time with you. Yeah. Just before I let you go, can you remind everybody of the name of your show and where we can find it, how often it comes out, the types of things you cover? Yeah. I know this makes some people uncomfortable, but plug away, please. Okay, let me do it. Yeah. So the show is called Life Kits.

It's from NPR. We're a service journalism show, which means we talk to experts and then give you research-backed advice.

We do a lot of different kinds of stories on health and money and life skills. So some of my favorite episodes are the ones that could potentially save a life. The ones about breast cancer screening or how to do CPR or how to prevent kids from drowning, like the things you can do ahead of time.

to make it safer. The money stuff, we love saving people money. How to negotiate down a medical bill, for instance, was a really helpful one, I think. And then we do stuff on life skills, like relationships. We're about to do one on how to ask people out in real life because everybody's tired of these dating apps.

Fun stuff like that. Or even like how to make a turkey for Thanksgiving. Things that people can take home and use that day. You can find us across platforms. So the podcast, you can hear wherever you get your podcasts or as...

Alexi Horwizgazi said yesterday, wherever the pods are cast. I thought that was cute. He's one of the hosts of Planet Money. And then we also have a radio show, which you can hear on your local public radio station on the weekends. And we have an Instagram, which...

We post all kinds of lovely videos on. It's at NPR Life Kit. And then we have, you can go to NPR.org slash Life Kit, and we have written up versions of stories, digital versions that have beautiful art alongside them. And I'm Marielle Segata. Marielle, thank you very much for doing this. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was really fun. Thank you.

Thanks again to Marielle Sagada. Awesome to talk to her. I also want to remind you to visit danharris.com for more information on how to get all of the bespoke Get Fit Sanely meditations from Kara Lai in your inbox. As mentioned, we're doing tailored meditations for every episode this month, all of the Get Fit Sanely episodes. And if you're a subscriber over on danharris.com, they come to you in your podcast feed and in your inbox.

Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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