 Hi, so we are constantly being bombarded by unexpected surprises, from acute changes of plans to sometimes more chronic challenges that test our sense of identity. So how do we really change these stressors or setbacks to stepping stones to help us achieve our best selves? I'm Monica, and I'm a medical student, an aspiring neuroscientist and also the host of the Ask an Expert series. Today, we'll be talking about all things resilience. And I really have the great honor to chat with Dr. Maya Shankar, an incredible woman. She is a cognitive neuroscientist who has redefined challenges as opportunities and has really achieved incredible achievements. She has pivoted from being an esteemed concert violinist, student of The Pearlman, to serving as the first behavioral science advisor to the UN, senior advisor in the Obama White House, to executive producer of her own podcast, a slight change of plans. Welcome, Maya. Thanks so much for having me, Monica. So much fun to be here. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and sharing your expertise on all things resilience. You have such an incredible story. Thank you so much. It's very kind of you to say. So I thought it might be a great way to start just to provide a little bit of an overview of your journey from being a concert violinist to being the inspirational cognitive neuroscientist, cognitive scientist as you are today. Yeah, so when I was a kid, the violin was the center of my life. I started playing when I was six years old. My grandmother had actually played violin in an Indian classical style when she was growing up as a young girl in India. And my grandmother had gifted my mom her instrument when my parents immigrated to this country in the 70s. So the violin was sitting in our attic. And one day when I was six, you know, my older three siblings had decided they didn't want to play the violin and my mom went up to the attic and brought down my grandmother's violin and opened the case. And I think in part because I felt really attached to her, I immediately developed an affinity for the violin, right? There was an emotional attachment kind of in place. And when I was nine, I started studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. So every Saturday, my mom and I would wake up at four in the morning to catch a train to New York. I would spend 10 hours every day or sorry, every Saturday taking all sorts of classes like orchestra and chamber music and music theory and, you know, private lessons and performance and all that stuff. And I it really was my dream, Monica, to go pro. You know, I really felt like, you know, you mentioned Perlman when I was a teenager, it's like Perlman invited me to be his private student. And that was really the vote of confidence I felt they needed to really try to see if I could become a professional. And then just as my career was on the up and up, I had my slight change of plans. I was I was practicing early one morning. I overstretched my finger on a single note and tore a tendon, heard a popping sound and eventually doctors told me that I could never play again. And I found it so disorienting to lose the violin because I think it had to find so much of my identity. I mean, one thing I've learned about change is that one of the reasons it feels so hard, one of the reasons why change is so scary is that it often does involve a loss of identity, a shift in identity. And so because I was so tethered to the violin when I lost the instrument, I found myself grieving, not just the inability, I found myself grieving, not just the violin, but a huge part of myself, right? I felt like a huge part of myself kind of left with me with the violin. So it took me a really long time to figure out what I could ground myself in, right, and like where I could find passion again. And that was a process of discovery. It took a really long time to figure things out. But I learned a really valuable lesson from that experience that I'm hoping can help your viewers navigate change with a little bit more resilience and a bit more equanimity, which is that I think as humans, we all really have a desire to attach ourselves to specific identities. It's core to who we are. I think it's how we feel more stable during times of change and, you know, it gets a back hurt of lots of unexpected, intense turmoil. We want to feel like something remains stable, something remains fixed. And so I don't think our desire to have those identity attachments is going anywhere. But what I've learned from my experience is that we can change what we anchor our identities to. And what I decided to do over time, and again, this is really through discoveries I made through slight change of plans, is that I realized that I could attach my identity not to specific pursuits like being a violinist or being a podcaster or being a cognitive scientist, but instead to the features of those pursuits that lighten me up. So being driven not by the what of what I do, but why it is that I do it. And when I asked myself, what was it about the violin that I really loved? I realized that human connection was at the core of my love of the instrument. So if you took away all the superficial features of the violin and the performance element and all the practice stuff, it really was magical to be able to go on stage or play with my chamber musician classmates and have the ability to feel something new together emotionally. And that was a very powerful insight for me to have, because what it what it empowered me to do is say, OK, well, human connection is what makes you tick. Human connections that really made you fall in love with the violin in the first place. Now that the violin is gone, you can actually still find that same love of human connection elsewhere. And when I looked back on my life, I saw, oh, my gosh, that actually is a through line. It was true as a cognitive scientist where I study the science of connection. It's definitely true in my podcast, A Sight Change of Plans, where I'm interviewing people about the most personal moments of their lives and we're sharing that experience together. And that has helped me feel a lot sturdier in my sense of self as I navigate change, because now I have something to hold on to, even if my circumstances change. I now know, OK, even if not for a bit, I ever lose the ability to do the podcast. Well, I can still find my love of human connection somewhere else. And so I would I would urge I want to get everyone a homework assignment who's tuning into this, which is ask yourself, what is your through line? Right. What is the thing that really makes you tick that sits underneath the surface of those things that you love doing in life and see, explore all the expressions of that underlying passion and it will allow you to see your identity as far richer and more expansive than you might otherwise. That is such a beautiful way of seeing things, really seeing things as focusing on themes rather than focusing on things. That's kind of how I took that all together. It was really amazing. Can I ask you that question? So you're in medical school, right? And, you know, aspiring neuroscientists, I'm curious to know what is it that has drawn you to medicine because you could say my identity is going to be of a doctor. And I think it's so much fun to do the thought experiment of, well, what is it about being a doctor that you love? And then you can hold on to that as part of your identity. So before medicine, I was a business school major. And, you know, being a business school major, we didn't really specialise in anything yet. But what was always in the back of my mind was I wonder how people interpret products. I wonder how people interpret marketing things, things like that. And through the years, I realised that the core of it was what was in the brain? Like, how do people, like, why do people think the way that they do? How do they think the way that they do? And so I made a slight change of plans. I decided to, I decided to just do a little switch. And then I ended up studying psychology followed by neuroscience. And that's when I realised that it's so interesting to learn about the social aspects. But what really explains our behaviour is a mix of both. It's a mix of our biology. It's a mix of our external factors. And I thought psychiatry, medicine would give me the perfect combination of that. And so that began my whole beginnings of learning science for the first time, learning chemistry. Like, I did not even know what a molecule was back in first year. And really starting to build those building blocks to get to pursue what I want. And I think it's very similarly to you. It's really that human connection to really understand the biology, the sociology, all the different factors that make us who we are, the way that we connect to people, the way that we can share our stories and the way that we can hear other stories as well. Yeah, it seems like your thing is curiosity about the human mind and how it works. And of course, I share that passion. So we're very similar. That's wonderful. I really resonated. Oh, yes, of course. And that's why I'm so grateful to be a part of Psych2Go as well. Just getting to hear the community stories and sharing what worked for me and then hearing from experts like yourself. So it's just an incredible thing. But I realized that the process of me discovering my why took years. Honestly, like I had I had a lot of like those informational interviews, like my friend introduced me to that. Anthony. And I would just email current medical students at that time. I would email entrepreneurs. I would email anyone that I thought had a slightly interesting thing going on about neuroscience or psychology. I would be like, hi, it's me. Cold email. Truly the power of cold email. Just a short digression. And that's how I found my why after years. But I would love to hear how you found it. What was the process like for you? Yeah, I so resonate with that because it can take a very long time to figure out our why. And as you saw from my story, a lot of the discovery was retroactive. So if you'd ask me at the time, why do you love music? I'm not quite sure I could have put a pin on it as a 10 year old, right? It took a really long time for me to discover that. But one thing that Angela Duckworth shared with me. So I had her as a guest on an episode of A Slight Change of Plans. She's the grit and resilience expert. And so we talked about the science of grit. And one thing she shared is that oftentimes we can actually look back to the things we naturally gravitated towards in childhood as a way to unpack what our whys are. So over time, because of socializations and various pressures and limited access to opportunities, our world necessarily gets constrained. I mean, in many ways, we're forced to sharpen our focus and to create some sort of funnel so that we end up in a sustainable career. But when we're really little, the things we gravitate towards, typically according to Angela, are things that stick around. I mean, they can be foundational parts of our personality. And so she was saying that as a little kid, she loved hearing about human stories. She loved storytelling and she liked hearing about what was going on. And she found that when she and her husband were looking to buy a new home, he was really focused on how many bedrooms are there and how high are the ceilings. And she was like, what's the story of the couple that used to live here? I wanna know what the, you know, and so that passion kind of persisted for people. And so I think one recommendation I have there is, think back to when you were a little kid and you were given unstructured play time. What were the things that you would naturally do? Was it learning something new? Was it engaging an imaginative play? Was it something really sporty because you love moving your body? I mean, just go to the most primitive level of things. And I think that can help give us insights because by the time we're adults, so many things are coloring and shaping our minds and experiences, it's hard to get access to that very organic, internal set of passions. That really resonates with me. I'm just thinking about that, like thinking about my childhood years as you were mentioning that. And I think that's very true. I would always, when I was younger, I would pick out books, I would go to chapters and I would just go to the psychology section and just read on that. And I would just be like, oh my goodness, I can stay here for the whole day. And so here I am hoping to pursue this kind of, this kind of role of things. I would turn every conversation I had into some sort of deep conversation even when I was a little kid. So I think that was probably kind of reflective. I was very curious about people. I would always ask these questions to try to understand what they were about and what made them tick and certainly that's persisted over time. So that's really helpful. And again, our personalities absolutely change over time. And so I'm not saying you're gonna get like a fully proper diagnosis about what it is that you love to do, but it's a nice proxy and it's a good place to re-occur yourself in. Yes, for sure. And I could also understand because as a child, I also had so many interests. So one thing I really wanted to do was be an architect. So when I was young, I collected these smarty boxes. I would empty out the smarty, throw out the smarties, keep the boxes and like try to build houses out of them because that was my way of kind of designing my dream home. Hopefully being an architect at that time. It was a very cute thing, but kind of, I think my point would be like, for a child, for anyone who has so many interests to then go pro at something would mean that you would have to sacrifice your time on focusing other things, pursuing other interests. So what is your thought on how to balance finding that spike versus pursuing the other interests and all the things associated with that? Yeah, it's a fantastic question. It's one I've been thinking a lot about just specialization versus exposure and reading books about this like range. I don't know if you've heard about the book range, but it's really talking about specialization versus exposure to a broad set of things. And one thing that my parents were really intense. So as I mentioned, I'm one of four kids. They really tried, and my mom in particular tried to expose us to as many things that she possibly could when we were young. So in addition to music, I was doing theater camps. I was doing art classes, plate soccer, like really a rich array of extracurricular activities. And in part, her initial intention was, I just really want to find out what my kids naturally love. So I don't have to like push them or force them into anything that they can naturally express. I love this, but I don't really love ice skating or gymnastics, but I really enjoyed doing this club or whatever it was. But I think the added benefit of that approach is that, and maintaining that balance over the course of my childhood, because I continued to audition for the school play, even when I was in the throes of my Juilliard life, right, in sixth grade, I took that audition really seriously. I got to play Rosie in this play called Really Rosie, is that I think it made me a better musician. Like I'm so confident that having exposure to a diversity of things in my life allowed me to bring a depth of emotionality to my music that I wouldn't have been able to bring to it otherwise. And you can see that, right? I mean, there are kids who practice like three times as much as I was practicing day to day, but when your life is confined to a practice room with four walls around you and you're not experiencing things at school and social relationships and you're not experiencing loss and challenges or being bullied or whatever the complexities of life entail, you have just a less rich palette to bring to your passions and your artistic endeavors. And so I certainly found that, while I might not have been the most technically gifted musician because I never quite got in as many hours of practice as my peers, I really feel like my musicality was enriched and enhanced by having a more balanced life. And my parents really giving me that freedom to always be a kid at the end of the day, right? It's like, okay, I would have to wake up at 430 in the morning and I would have to skip the morning part of the sleepover, but they would make sure I went the night before so that I could decorate the pillowcases for Katie's birthday party and then pick me up late at night and you were always trying to accommodate to make sure that I had this kind of exposure. And I had absolutely found in my adult life that having a broad set of interests, and of course, I'm really focused when it comes to the podcast, the slight change of plans, when it comes to my career as a cognitive scientist, I'm not saying I don't pour a ton of energy into these things, but I think having these balancing, it's like this balancing act and there's a bunch of forces that are influencing my point of view on the world. I think I just have a more nuanced and richer perspective on things that I'm really grateful for, right? I think I'm a better storyteller because I'm a cognitive scientist, right? I think I'm a better cognitive scientist because I have the empathy I built through storytelling, right? So a lot of these things work in beautiful ways in tandem. And I just wanna make sure folks are appreciating that, especially the workaholics who are listening to this, who are thinking, oh, I just need to, you know, I feel bad, I'm wasting time. I'm not like, you know, doubling down. There is a benefit to that and it can actually lead you to be better in most of the things that you pursue. And as you're saying that, I really sense a strong human connection theme, you know? Music, it's a way that, it's like a universal language. Everybody appreciates some sort of music and you as a cognitive scientist, you understand people. Ultimately, it's the human connection. So I see the themes throughout just looking back to our earlier conversation about focusing on themes rather than things. Sorry. And I just like to say, I've always been so fascinated by stories where people would tell me, I'm a doctor, for example, but I'm also an avid skier. I'm also an avid musician. I'm just so fascinated to see how things come together because it's, I would say, quite rare to find people who are like, you're just doing so many amazing things in such intricate ways. And it just, it truly is so inspiring for me. So thank you so much for sharing. Yeah. And again, I mean, a lot of it is about balance too, right? There have been lots of things that have excited me that I've just had to say no to because we're all human and I require eight to nine hours of sleep every night. I'm not one of those people that is a super sleeper. And I really value, you know, getting pressure every day, exercising, all that stuff. And so you certainly have to draw limits. But I think that you can richly invest in at least a few things in your life at any given time. And that will have a net positive impact. Oh, I would also just like to add, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well. Yeah. How do you know what to say yes to when there are so many exciting opportunities out there? Gosh, that is a really hard question. I think part of it is, so I try not to let regret guide me too much in my thinking. So regret is this really powerful negative force that we have in our brains all the time. It actually leads us to make lots of decisions that might not be in our best interest, but we're trying to minimize regret. So we're always like, oh, I think I should take this job because I've regretted down the line. And sometimes that's a valuable signal because what you think you might regret speaks to what your current day values are, what you think your future values might be. But it's not always cognitively accurate. Sometimes we can mis-forecast the things that we will regret down the line. And so I actually try to take the most present minded approach to saying yes or no to things. Rather than putting it in the regret framework, I say, is this a thing that would wake me up tomorrow and get me excited about the day? And it's really that simple. And I find that sometimes when we take out the complexity to decision-making about like, how am I gonna feel about this when I'm 45? How am I gonna feel about this on my deathbed? It actually simplifies the decision-making calculus. It's like, given who I am today, do I, comma, Maya want to do this thing over the next two months? And if the answer is no, but I just think future me would have wanted it, I typically just say no. And so far that's actually worked quite well. I think we tend to over-index on feelings of regret and some of the research to show this. And so I've been on like an anti-regret. I've tried to introduce an anti-regret decision framework into my life and it's worked pretty well so far. I hear a lot of themes of like focusing on the present and I just draw so many parallels with the idea of mindfulness. So I love that because I think I'm also quite similar. So when I try to think about what I want to do, yes or no, I actually follow Ali Abdaal. I don't know if you're aware of him. He's just a, he's a YouTuber productivity expert. And his idea that I lately just stole so credit to him is the hell yes or no method, which is quite similar in the sense that if someone asks you, do you want to do X? The instant, the instinct of, oh my goodness, yes equals, yeah, well, let's, let's consider it. Oh, I'm not quite sure. Maybe if it takes like a second thought, then perhaps safer later. So I've run my life by that and I'm gonna definitely add on the focus of being in the present from yours, from your way of thinking and you'll see. Sorry, I mean, I was just gonna say the reason I think this is important is that there's a lot of research showing that we are bad cognitive forecasters. We're pretty bad at predicting what our future selves will be like, what will make us happy, what our preferences will be, how different events will impact us on a wellbeing level. And so when we do too much forecasting, that can be a problem. At the same time, I will say, I'm not like a lobbyist for always present-minded thinking. I think it is marvelous and miraculous that we as humans can travel in time, that we can spend time like marinating in the past or imagining what the future might be. This is a part of our minds that like, I think in modern day society, people have come to resent. It's like, how come I can't just be focused on the present? Why can't I just be in the here and now? And I'm not sure that's the right way to think about things. I think that if you find yourself drifting off into the future and imagining things, and it's not harmful to your wellbeing, marvel at that. Be amazed that we as a species can even do this kind of mental time travel because I think it actually makes for an incredible existence and allows us to sometimes escape a present situation that's not great or allows us to dream really big or learn from mistakes in the past. And so I just, I do also feel that we should be embracing a bit more. We move too far in the direction of being present-minded that I think sometimes we're losing a little bit of our, of the value of actually being able to do that mental time travel. I, can I just say, I love the way that you think. It's really inspiring because it's so novel to me. And I wonder if you would be open to really kind of sharing more of your mindset for approaching new beginnings. For example, when you started your career as a cognitive scientist and had to, you know, adapt to kind of shifting focus away from the music world. Yeah, so a couple of things come to mind here. Well, one, you mentioned cold emails and I feel like I'm like the queen of cold emails. So I love that we, I already knew we shared a lot in Common Monica, but I feel like we extra share lots of things in common in terms of our hustle factor and trying to make things happen. It's probably worth sharing a really quick story about how it is that I got into Juilliard in the first place because this is a very valuable lesson I learned from my mom that had carried with me over the course of my career. So when I was around nine, my mom could tell, okay, Maya's ambition with the violin is very quickly exceeding the connections that I have into the Western classical music world. Like my parents are both academics, like they didn't have any exposure or meaningful connections in that space. And yet we both knew about Juilliard and heard that this was like the promised land for young, budding, aspiring concert musicians. And so one day when I was in New York with my mom for the weekend, I happened to have my violin with me and she brought me to Lincoln Center so that I could see the Juilliard building from the outside and just feel inspired by it and like see where all my musical idols have walked in and out. And as we were passing by the entrance, my mom said, why don't we just go in, Maya and like see what happens. And I was like not reacting well to this. I was like, what do you mean just go in? That's like totally nuts. She's like, what's the worst thing that can happen? And I'm like imagining security guards escorting us off the premises and being like, who are you? So I can think of lots of worst case scenarios but my youthful enthusiasm kicked in and ultimately I said yes. And so we walked into the building. My mom struck up a conversation with a fellow violin student and her mom and we learned that she was studying with this amazing teacher and my mom just said, hey, would you mind making an introduction to the teacher when your daughter's lessons over? And they very generously said yes. I found myself an hour later auditioning for this teacher on the spot. He accepted me to a summer boot camp that summer in which I was practicing hours a day under his tutelage and like really trying to skill up for the Juilliard audition that was in the fall. And it was just a total game changer for me, Monica. And I say that with no false humility because I later learned from my teacher at the time that he also did not think I had a chance of getting into Juilliard when I first met him but he said he liked my personality and my enthusiasm. So that was why he wanted to give me a chance. And yet that fall I auditioned and got in and that was because my mom's fearlessness opened a door that would not have existed for me otherwise. And I'm so grateful to her for teaching me that lesson because I've used it so many times. I mean, with the White House, right? I was an academic. I was doing my postdoc and cognitive neuroscience at Stanford. I had no idea what would come next given that I realized late into my academic career that I did not want to be a professor which was really an old crap moment because you've just spent years and years and years doing academic thing. And then you're like, oh God, I don't actually think I have the right temperament for research. And I thought, okay, it's become a professor of bust. And then I talked to an old advisor of mine. They tell me about amazing work that's happening at the intersection of behavioral science and public policy. And I ended up just sending cold emails to Obama advisors like pitching them on the idea of creating a behavioral science team and creating a new position for a behavioral scientist and ideally hiring me for that new role which thankfully they did. And so that was like a huge leap of faith. I had no public policy experience but it was just equivalent of making that cold call move into Juilliard that day. And even with the podcast, just like writing up a pitch in my living room and then just sending it off into the world and seeing what happens. So I really, really encourage people. And we talk about fearlessness and being okay with getting rejected. And I've been rejected so many times but I really think we internalize my mom's message like what's the worst thing that can happen? The answers are usually just not that bad. And it's so worth it. I've had, despite all the rejections, the numerator of success stories is so worth whatever the denominator of failures is. And so, yeah, I'm just really, I'm really grateful for that. The other thing that I think can help with new beginnings is seeing our identities as more malleable, right? So we talked about this a little bit. I mean, I now know being a cognitive scientist that what I faced during the violin years is what's called identity paralysis. So you really do feel stuck in place when a huge part of your identity has been taken away from you. And how I learned to see myself as a more malleable entity that can take on a much broader range of identities and loves, right? Passions, I think that would have aided me well but it was something that at the time was so myopic. I mean, you were a concert pianist, right? You understand the kind of discipline and focus and like you just have blinders on. You're not aware of what's happening in the rest of the world. And so I think that would have served me well. So I hear throughout the story that there's a lot of fearlessness, a lot of initiative, a lot of calculated risk-taking. And I know you mentioned Angela Duckworth in the beginning. I am a huge fan by the way. I love her book, Grit. But I wanted to ask, so if Grit is broken down to the power of passion and perseverance, what do you think of the fundamental building blocks of resilience? Oh, that's a great question. You know, I actually, there's a quote that I have that I have near my computer, which I love and I like read it every single day. And let me pull it up here. So it comes from a conversation that I had. So there's the upcoming season of a slight change of plans, season seven. And I interviewed a guy named Dr. Richie Davidson about the science of meditation. So he's one of the pioneers in meditation science and that he's one of the first people to have conducted a proper randomized control trial on the impacts of meditation. During a time, by the way, when the scientific community were like, what is this? Like, why are we even taking this seriously from a scientific perspective? So Richie is a badass, okay? So I was talking with him about what he calls Olympic meditators. So these are people who have practiced meditation for over sometimes 34,000 hours. So basically 34,000 hours more than I've practiced meditation in my life. And what they do is they expose them to this painful stimulus in the lab. And they find when they scan their brains that, so the way the study works is you hear a beep and then you have the painful stimulus. And then later you hear another beep and then you have the painful stimulus. So assuming Monica, you're closer to me than you are to the Olympic meditator. I'm just gonna take that for granted. Here's what our reaction will be like, right? So we hear the first few beeps. Now we realize that the beep is associated with this painful stimulus. So now the minute you hear the beep, you experience some kind of anticipatory anxiety, right, anticipatory pain. Then you have the stimulus and then it takes you a while to come down from that negative anticipatory, or sorry, from that negative anxiety, right? And that negative pain. Olympic meditators have a very different neural response to this same experience. When they hear the beep, there's nothing. There's no, there's no anticipatory anxiety. Then they experience the pain. It turns out the intensity of the pain for them is a little bit greater. They're actually more present with it. And then there's no come down from the pain. So there's like literally you're rapidly coming down to your baseline. And he says, so this is the quote I had like, that is the neural resilient, sorry, that is the neural signature of resilience. The capacity, yeah, the capacity to rapidly come back to baseline after adversity and showing essentially no anticipatory anxiety. And it was so interesting because this quote is so meaningful to me because one it's just so beautiful. Like, well, sorry, clearly I'm very nerdy because I was like, oh my God, it's so amazing. But if you think about how relevant this is to so many parts of our life, like my husband, he's like an amateur squash player, but he just like loves playing squash. He travels for squash. That's like his true passion. And we were talking about this quote in the context of when he's not playing well or he has like a few bad points. You think about any athlete who's out there, they have to so quickly come back from those feelings of adversity or feeling down or discouraged and immediately come back to baseline. And we all benefit from not having, I feel like we all benefit from limiting the amount of anticipatory anxiety we have about things. Because I was reflecting on myself and I was thinking, you know, in terms of my anxiety, I feel like I spend 50% of my anxious time being anxious about things that have not happened yet. And only like 50% is really devoted to the anxiety of the thing actually happening. It's like, probably it's more than that actually. 75% of my brain is engineered towards anticipatory anxiety. So anyway, I just find this to be such a beautiful idea that we can aspire anyway to be in a situation where we limit the anticipatory anxiety, we limit how much time it takes for us to restore our equilibrium. And then we are really just living in the present moment, whether that's painful or joyful. And I asked him, I remember, sorry, I'm just gonna run up a little bit longer on this topic, but I remember asking him like, Richie, okay, I get that for negative things. We wanna read on really quickly and return to equilibrium. But what about when we experience awesome things? Like we go to an amazing wedding and we're just like, I'm cloud nine, because you just saw this couple of fall in love and they're the best time ever or we have this delicious meal or we just saw the best sports game of our lives. I don't want to return to baseline quickly. So like, are these Olympic meditators able to opportunistically choose when they want to let that negative stuff go or the globe persist, right? And he was saying that there are some philosophers who believe that our orientation as humans is fundamentally positive and optimistic. And so all these other forces are coming into play, they're preventing us from feeling that way. But if we were left to like our most natural devices, we might lean towards, you know, being in that glow state or being in a more positive state. So I don't know if I fully believe this and certainly there are like mental conditions where it's just absolutely not true, like people who suffer from clinical depression, et cetera. But it was a hopeful message and one that I'm at least like, you know, it's marinating. I'm thinking it over. That's amazing. That's a homework for myself because I feel like I'm also quite the same. Like I always think about what am I doing tomorrow? I have a whole calendar situation going on. Like what am I doing tomorrow, color coded? I always stress about the things that haven't happened yet. And most of the time, the things that are actually stressing me, for example, an exam, it's like three hours. The time I spend stressing about it, three weeks. So my homework for myself is to try to reflect and introspect on my emotions presently and then try to just focus more on that so I can spend more time doing what I want to be doing, feeling the ways that I want to be feeling instead of anticipatorily feeling anxious. So thank you for sharing. Yeah, and you know what's so interesting? So I gave a TED talk recently and it'll be online later this summer. And as I was prepping for the talk, I was realizing that when it comes to change in resilience, you know, I'm not a particularly religious or spiritual person. So I don't have that soft landing when bad things happen in life and I'm forced to figure them out or just a surprising thing happens in life. I just don't have that to fall back on. And I had this realization in creating this talk that psychology is actually my soft landing. Like the fact that we can intentionally change our frame of reference, the way that we think about something, our perspective, how the narration that goes on in our minds, that can actually be a soft landing. And I think this is an example of that in real time, which is we can actually figure out how it is that we can change our relationship with anxiety, the story we tell ourselves about our anxiety, those things can be more in our control than not. And when we see our psychology as, I don't know, I would call it maybe something that we can be active, like I know our minds are us, but it's like you think about like kind of actively collaborating with your psychology as bizarre as that sounds, but it's like, you know, it works in progress, a friendship, where you're trying to figure out, okay, well, I do have this negative tendency, can I rework this, can I reframe this? I think that is actually really empowering to think through. That is so amazing. I feel like we could discuss this for days and days and days, but I recognize that the time for the podcast is coming to a close, but I really wanted to ask you a very important question. And that is, what is next for you? I just hear so much excitement for all the amazing things that are gonna happen. I would just love some insight into what's next. So I am just genetically a planner. I always need to have the five year plan and the 10 year plan. And I realize over time that that is not very helpful and I've had too many curveballs in my life to defend that way of thinking anymore. I feel enormously grateful that for the first time ever in my life, I am so happy with what I'm working on right now. I just don't want things to change. Like what's ahead for me, I hope is the same thing as what I'm doing right now. And that's such a special feeling. But I mean, I'm just obsessed with making a slight change of plans. It's just the perfect intersection for me of my passions and my loves because I bring science and storytelling and I marry them in order to help us all understand how we can navigate change better, right? Strategies and tools we can all use to become more resilient. And it's such a huge source of joy that I'm hoping that the future of Maya is getting to make more of the show because more people listen to it and they love it and they find that it's helpful to them. Thank you so much. I've also, for everyone who is listening, linked the podcast link. So it links all the different places where you can listen to the podcast. I will also be listening. I am so excited for the new season. So big congratulations to you. Thank you so much, Monica. It was such a pleasure to chat with you. Likewise, I've learned so much and I'm just really grateful for the chat. Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Till next time. Bye, everyone.