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Sociologist Christine Carter is a happiness expert and senior fellow at University of California Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. She's also a happily-remarried divorced mother of two, who has a great relationship with her first spouse. Her latest book, The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, looks at how to accomplish more by doing less, and bring more ease into your life—something all of us facing divorce could use.
Wendy Paris: I remember you saying this book came about after your own divorce. How did divorce lead to the idea of a “sweet spot?”
Christine Carter: "I had to think a lot about how to get my groove back. The divorce was really stressful, even though it was amicable. I came out of this prolonged, intense period, and I was really tired. Everything was going great—new husband, new house, great job. But I was just absolutely so tired all the time, which meant I got sick all the time, every virus on every airplane. Things were are good as they could get. I was living from a place of great strength, but there was no ease.
For me, the sweet spot is operating from our strengths and greatest power, but where there’s also total ease, no stress. Our culture assumes there’s only one speed at which we work or go about our days. You’re on or off, productive or not. We assume all quality of work will be the same as long as we’re trying really hard. But that’s absolutely not true. If we can get into a sense of flow, access the parts of our brain responsible for creative insight, we’re able to be much more productive. The quality of our work is much higher than when we’re just grinding through it with the sheer force of our will. You need to rest to be your most productive self and to be there as a parent.
WP: Okay, but most people facing divorce have far too much going on to focus on ease. Often they feel in crisis. How can there be a sweet spot during divorce?
CC: That is exactly the time to do this. When you’re in the fever pitch of crisis, you need to access your best self to survive it. You don’t have time to take twice as long to do something, to make mistakes, or not be very good at your job. You have to find your best self to come through a transition like that well. Your sweet spot is where you are your most intelligent, most joyful and most productive; it’s unrealistic to expect to live in that during divorce all the time. But it is really important to keep touching base with that highest self.
WP: Can you give us three tips for touching base with your highest self, getting your groove back in the midst or aftermath divorce?
CC: Yes!
1. Actively foster positive emotions. We know that when you have three positive emotions or experiences to every negative one, your internal systems change. The parts of your brain that get more blood, the way we operate in the world, changes from a more rigid system to one that is more open, more creative, more able to get more done. Whether it’s watching puppy videos on YouTube, or doing loving kindness mediation, or reading a poem you find inspiring. It could be gratitude. It could be straight up laughter watching Louis C.K. clips. Or things that give you a sense of awe. Where it is easy for you to access positive emotions?
2. Actively seek to reduce overwhelm in your life. Find ways to dial back the overwhelm, the sense that we’re so busy and have so much going on and there’s no stillness. In periods of stress, your ability to resist temptation is lower, so we can really get into bad habits, like checking our ex-spouse’s social media feed, or checking our email at work. That technology interference increases stress. The research shows more checking tends to equal more stress and tension. One of the most important ways to cultivate more ease is to reign in our device use. Only check your email five times a day. Turn your phone off in the car. Make sure you turn your computer off half an hour before you go to bed. The less frequently you check your phone, email and social media feed, the less tense you’ll be.
3. Cultivate Compassion. This is a hard time. If you’re hard on yourself and everyone around you, the harder it will be to function well. We think if we’re hard on ourselves during a difficult time, we’ll get better faster. But that is absolutely not true. When we’re more critical of ourselves, the more we get stuck in anger and depression and less likely we are to grow. When you’ve failed to reign in your technology use, forgive yourself. Lying in bed instead of exercising, eating a platter of brownies, those behaviors are really common. Feeling compassion for yourself will make you higher functioning.
WP: That’s great. Thank you. That totally makes sense. I have go watch a funny movie right this minute.
