Simplify

The turning point came for Ayelet Waldman when she found herself frozen before her medicine cabinet, wondering "what's going to kill me fastest?" She knew it was time to try a new tactic to improve her mental health. In this episode, hear this bestselling nonfiction author (who also happens to be a mother, a wife, and a novelist) describe her experience with microdosing LSD and how it improved her...

Do your negative thoughts race faster than Usain Bolt? Do you wish you were calmer, kinder, or more focused? Would you like to meditate, but just don’t think you have time? If you answered yes, then this episode of Simplify is for you. Dan Harris might be best known for his reporting on ABC News, Nightline, and the weekend edition of Good Morning America, but in recent years, this hard-nosed newsm...

In season 5, you’ll learn how easy meditation can be with Dan Harris, how to change your self-defeating beliefs with Jen Sincero, and how to talk about race with Robin DiAngelo. You'll also hear what it's like to microdose LSD for a month and learn the surprising ways a little bit of cannabis can improve your health. If you haven’t subscribed, make sure to do so before the first new episode drops...

If a friend of yours needed to hear an unpleasant truth, would you tell it to them? Or would you gloss over it in order to avoid an uncomfortable conversation? Many of us would probably opt for the latter to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, but sometimes loving criticism is necessary to make people understand that they deserve better — and are capable of achieving it. In conversation with Caitlin...

Effective collaboration, innovative thinking, and constructive problem-solving can be major struggles for many teams, regardless of industry. But for those who really want to fix these issues, it’s time to look beyond how other companies work and turn to improv comedy ensembles for inspiration. After all, they’ve literally taken teamwork and turned it into an art form. Reflecting on years of exper...

Nothing hurts worse than heartbreak. Whether it’s the painful end of relationship or the passing away of a beloved pet, grief and emotional suffering can quickly become all-consuming. And that’s where we blame ourselves and feel guilty for our inability to overcome emotional pain fast enough. Moreover, as psychologist Guy Winch shows, when going through a breakup, it’s not just our mental health t...

Do you consider yourself a night owl or are you a morning person? Regardless of whether you love mornings or not, we all want to make best of them. Everybody has those few things––that certain morning ritual––that if they don't do it, their whole day is ruined. But what’s the best way to start your day off right? Benjamin Spall and his co-author, Michael Xander, have spent five years studying morn...

How much of your life do you spend pleasing those around you? Maybe it’s time to be honest with yourself, invest time in the things that really matter, and start weeding out unnecessary obligations to people you don’t really like. But how exactly are you supposed to do that? In this episode of Simplify, Sarah Knight will help you start a process of mental decluttering and show you how to develop y...

We all like to buy stuff. Endless ads screaming “sale,” “discount," and “free” trick us into believing that we want things that we don’t actually need. In an age of credit cards, Paypal, Venmo, and Apple pay, it has become incredibly easy to spend our hard-earned sheckles and tough to save them. In this episode of Simplify, behavioral economist and cognitive psychologist Dan Ariely explains what’s...

In the first episode of Season 4, Caitlin talks with Cheryl Strayed about how tending to humanity’s toughest quandaries has become her calling, and the three central questions that keep us all up at night. Through years of listening deeply and sensitively to others’ experiences as well as her own, Strayed has unlocked what makes a good advice-giver and friend: sincerity, listening without judging,...

Simplify season 4 launches on August 23rd with an episode featuring bestselling author, memoirist, and internet legend, Cheryl Strayed. This first episode is one of our favorites yet, but as you'll hear in the trailer, there's much more to come. If you want to say hi to Ben and Caitlin before the season really kicks into gear, you can find them on Twitter: @bsto and @CaitlinSchiller . See you next...

Feel like there's never enough time in the day? Then this episode is for you. In this very first Spotlight episode of Simplify, time-management expert Laura Vanderkam offers surprising ideas from her new book Off The Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done to help you overhaul your relationship with time. Here, she tells Emily Phillips about how committing to more activities—not fewer—is the...

Are you slavishly devoted to your to-do list, rushing around to fit every vacant area of time to a task? In this day and age, most of us are—and it's doing no favors to our creativity, our minds, and our very humanity. Something's got to give, and Alan Lightman has a plan. Or, rather, a lack of one. And that's perfect. In this episode of Simplify, the MIT professor, scientist and novelist offers a...

In this episode of Simplify, Caitlin talks to Janice Kaplan, bestselling author, TV producer, and magazine editor about how luck happens and how you can create it. Does luck feel like something you either have or you don’t? Does it feel like chance? Or, do you think you have some, not all of it good? Well, Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh turned to research, pioneering studies, and interviews with...

Ever wondered whether humans are meant to be monogamous, or when we started to look at our sexual partners as private property? The authors of the extraordinary book on sexual evolution Sex at Dawn, Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan, study our primate legacy and explain how it shaped human sexual behavior. In this episode, Ryan talks about the purpose of sexual relations in matriarchal and male-d...

While mindfulness can feel like a relatively new phenomenon in western societies — Jon Kabat-Zinn popularized it in the US in the 1970s — it has, in fact, been helping people feel connected to their lives for centuries. Dr. Lori Brotto experimented with the practice as treatment for women with sexual concerns and found that mindfulness can have positive effects on desire, response and connection —...

A lot of the things that we’ve learned about how our minds work are simply not true. Did you know that a small part of your brain can fall asleep while the other parts are awake and working? And we can't trust our memories, either: it turns out that much of what ends up getting stored in memory, especially what people remember about themselves and their past, is a distortion. But it's not all bad...

As a sex educator, Emily Nagoski sees her main purpose as “teaching people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.” Step one? Understanding what’s actually going on in there! In this episode, Nagoski employs colorful analogies to illustrate the ways in which our minds and bodies react to stressful situations (spoiler alert: you'll have to use your imagination and become a gazelle) and...

Pultizer-prize-winning, bestselling author and NYT writer Charles Duhigg has cracked the code to what makes the world’s most productive people so effective—and how you can use those techniques for yourself. Listen in to hear why self-belief is the key to real, lasting change and find out which productivity tips Duhigg’s teaching his kids. Plus, hear the smart, slightly dirty productivity trick he...

Simplify Season 3 launches next week with an episode featuring Nobel Prize-winner, NYT columnist, and master of habits: Charles Duhigg! If you want to say hi to Ben and Caitlin in the meantime, you can find them on Twitter: @bsto and @CaitlinSchiller . One more thing! We'd still love to get your voices on Simplify. Specifically, we want to hear how you would answer one of the questions we always a...

What’s better than getting to the heart of a great idea? Getting to the heart of seven great ideas in under 40 minutes—which is exactly what happens in this best-of episode. Hear from Simplify Season 1 and 2’s most beloved guests, including Seth Godin, David Allen, Dan Savage, Jaclyn Friedman, Ryan Holiday, and more. And stick around after the last interview’s rolled to hear hosts Ben Schuman-Stol...

In this bonus episode of Simplify season 2, we talk with Eli Finkel. Finkel is a writer and social psychologist at Northwestern University. He's also the author of the new book The All-or-Nothing Marriage . On this episode, Caitlin Schiller talks to Finkel about where the ideas in the book came from. Finkel explains how he discovered that marriage is tied to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: throughout...

Rebecca Traister is an author and writer-at-large for New York Magazine. She writes about women, culture, and politics, and her most recent book is All The Single Ladies . On this episode of Simplify, Traister and Caitlin Schiller discuss the larger meaning of singlehood, why marriage doesn’t make any sense anymore, and the one thing that attracts the most single-ladies. It's part Traister's story...

Julian Treasure is a sound designer, a musician, and a public speaker—his TED talks have been viewed more than 40 million times!—and he’s also a master of what he calls the “silent skill:" listening. In this episode, Treasure talks to Caitlin about the 7 deadly sins of speaking, how your listening shapes who you are, and why certain cities sound so delicious to our ears. Plus, Caitlin finds out wh...

Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, sex-educator, and activist whose work helped establish the “yes means yes” standard of sexual consent. Her new book, Unscrewed; Women, Sex, Power, And How To Stop Letting the System Screw Us All , was released in November, 2017. On this episode of Simplify, Caitlin Schiller talks with Friedman about sexual empowerment – or the lack thereof, which Friedman calls “Fauxpo...