How to be Content

Andrew Dewar [00:00:00]:

Do you find yourself struggling with contentment? Today's episode is all about how to be content, and it's a subject that we all kind of struggle with. I think it's going to be very helpful for you to start enjoying where you are in your life more on a daily basis. Welcome to the five year you podcast, a show dedicated to helping you become the best version of yourself one day at a time. I'm Andrew.

Catherine Collins [00:00:24]:

And I'm Cat. And we promise to keep it raw, real, and relatable.

Andrew Dewar [00:00:29]:

Are you ready to grow? How are you doing, Cath?

Catherine Collins [00:00:32]:

I'm doing great. How are you, Andrew?

Andrew Dewar [00:00:35]:

I'm super d Dooper.

Catherine Collins [00:00:37]:

Okay.

Andrew Dewar [00:00:39]:

Why not?

Catherine Collins [00:00:40]:

So glad I asked. Go on.

Andrew Dewar [00:00:44]:

Oh, yeah. So this episode came about from a few days ago. We were talking about things, and I think being content sounds super simple, and I think other people that do it wonderfully, I'm not one of them. I don't believe that you are in the upper echelon of just being content, but I know we're both working on being content. Maybe you could share the story about how this all came about.

Catherine Collins [00:01:10]:

Yeah. Well, first, I want to acknowledge that we are going along with our listeners on the five year you journey. Right. The purpose of our podcast is to become our best selves in five years. And the goal for the company is to help 1 million people become their best selves in five years. So, all that to say, we are not sharing these lessons from a higher up place. We are learning them right along with you. And so I recently moved to a Chicago suburbanite, a beautiful little town full of beautiful houses.

Catherine Collins [00:01:50]:

And I chose this place because it's safe and has good school districts. But I rent an apartment. I've been a homeowner before. I've owned and sold two houses. And I'm at the point in my life where I am, you know, trying to rebuild, pay off debt, and, you know, meet some financial goals. I recently turned 37, and Andrew and I took a walk around my new town, my new neighborhood. And I immediately started to feel bad. Less than because it was one beautiful house after another.

Catherine Collins [00:02:32]:

It was one gorgeous lawn after another, one perfectly landscaped house. Each one was, like, more magnificent than the rest. And instead of being grateful that I found a safe place to live, that was in an amazing school district that, you know, my kids can safely walk around, instead, I felt like I was behind in life. I felt like I was where those people were. But because of a bunch of different things, divorce, etcetera, I felt like I had, like, downgraded and had done a disservice to my kids. And what I told Andrew is, like, I'm starting to feel really bad about myself walking around this neighborhood because I wanted to give my kids this. I wanted them to have it. And I feel like, see, I'm kind of, like, getting emotional right now talking about it.

Catherine Collins [00:03:27]:

I feel like they had it and now they don't. And it was hard. And so then you told me.

Andrew Dewar [00:03:35]:

I'm not interrupting you with this.

Catherine Collins [00:03:37]:

No, no, no. I was going to say, you know, and your response to me and our discussion led to this topic idea.

Andrew Dewar [00:03:45]:

Yeah. That voice in your head is, I think, where I want to touch on right now, because I think we have a really good story maker in our head. And unfortunately, he or she or it is writing horror stories and dramas more than they're writing happy comedies and rom coms and all these things. And that voice is our ego coming in, telling us that we didn't do it, we weren't right, we did it wrong. And you see it with everyone. We all have an ego. That's kind of how we survive in the world. That's what we teach our kids when they're very young, is, you know, you need to be looking out for things because if you don't have that, you aren't safe.

Andrew Dewar [00:04:26]:

But then it becomes a point in our lives where the ego kind of flips on us, and it is almost a detriment to how we live and our happiness and our contentment, and we'll get into happiness another episode. This is just about being content because, like we said, the happiest people are the most content. And, you know, in that moment, you're not looking at the roof over your head. I hope you don't mind me sharing this, but, like, the lack of mortgage that you have and mortgage payments that you have to make, and I did my best in that moment to kind of point out to you how utterly fake it all is.

Catherine Collins [00:05:03]:

Yeah.

Andrew Dewar [00:05:04]:

Because I also, you know, I'm in a condo now, and I've. Life is different than it was a few years ago, and I can beat myself up about the way I think it was when it wasn't make myself feel bad all day long. And my ego and your ego are really good at doing that. The reality is we're actually much more happy than we've ever been, and we're much more content than we've ever been. The problem is, it's kind of like the expression goes, you know, be careful what you wish for. You just might get it and you get it. And then you're like, oh, I don't know how to handle this. I don't know how to handle not having a million obligations.

Andrew Dewar [00:05:44]:

The stress. I don't know how to handle not having the problems that I'm used to having. And our brains will actively find them. A big part of being content is not actively seeking problems, because problems are going to find you. They will show up eventually. You don't need to worry about that. But when you're content with things, you can actually embrace them a little bit differently and kind of go, okay, this is just a roadblock or a bump in the road that I need to get around, get over, get through, to get back to feeling content. So what we're really trying to emphasize today is you can make contentment kind of a baseline rather than this thing that you experienced.

Andrew Dewar [00:06:24]:

For me, it's glimpses of contentment. I wouldn't even say that I have, like, full days, but I really want my attitude to shift where this is my baseline, where I'm kind of like, how are you? I'm good. And I actually mean it, not, you know.

Catherine Collins [00:06:38]:

Right. I think that another thing that was going on with me at the walk, so it was like a double whammy, right? It's like I had this feeling of being behind. I had this feeling of, you know, failure. Like I had let my kids down, and then I had this, like, double heaping of, like, self loathing. Because I know better. Because we do episodes. Like, the rules are fake. I know that.

Catherine Collins [00:07:07]:

Checking every box of getting, you know, 2.5 kids and the white picket fence in the house and the job and the this and the cardinal. I know that that doesn't equal happiness. We have done 20 episodes on things like this. I have done research and written a personal finance book. I know statistically what most people have in terms of their debt load, the amount of stress they feel. I know, like, what percentage of people are not, quote unquote, where they should be in their retirement savings. I know all of this. And even with all of the self introspection and all of the therapy, I still let that feeling of less than when that morning.

Catherine Collins [00:07:55]:

And it was, like, powerful. It's like I was in a funk. Andrew will tell you, the whole day, I tried so many different things. He tried so many different things to get me out of it. And it's like I just couldn't shake it until I went to sleep and woke up the next day and tried again.

Andrew Dewar [00:08:08]:

Yeah, I did all the things I said, all the right things.

Catherine Collins [00:08:12]:

I think you did.

Andrew Dewar [00:08:13]:

I took her to chick fil a, which is our favorite restaurant to go to. I bought her six cookies because, well, if we're being honest, I bought her one cookie and me five, but. Because she wasn't going to eat any more than one. But, you know, I. I mean, man.

Catherine Collins [00:08:30]:

You know, if you can't get past a funky mood with that, I mean, you just gotta go to sleep. Yeah.

Andrew Dewar [00:08:35]:

And you know what? That's not a bad things. Sometimes you just gotta go to bed and let the brain reset. It's like, you know what? I am not getting better. And I think part of the. The problem with that for myself is that I'm like, no, it's a thing I can fix, and I'm gonna fix it with overthinking. And it's the actual opposite that works. It's just kind of finding the joy and simplicity, and that's really what contentment is. It's looking at what you have and going like, it's good.

Andrew Dewar [00:09:02]:

I'm good with this. Yeah, I want more. Yeah. And I think that's a part of the balance that I've been struggling with when it comes to contentment, is like, how are you okay where you are while still wanting to go to your five year you? In my personal case, I got to where I was in life by being ridiculously hard on myself. I went a different path. I don't know if we've shared this on the show, but, I mean, I got national attention when I paid off my mortgage in six years, and I thought I was doing all the right things, and it was at the time, but I wasn't any more content after those things were done. I was a little less stressed. Nothing having a mortgage at the time.

Andrew Dewar [00:09:39]:

And now I'm in a completely different situation, of course, but I block my own contentment. You know, we put on off here for mosquitoes. I don't know if you guys have that down there. I do, but, yeah, like, it's like, I put contentment off on me every morning when I wake up, and I'm like, why am I doing this? Why? Why am I waking up thinking about the problems and not thinking about the greatness of life? It's hard, but only because I'm choosing to make it hard. And that's the journey is kind of going like, you know what? I got food in my stomach. I got water, I got Internet, which is now my kind of priority in life. Contentment. Okay, so you're out of this now.

Andrew Dewar [00:10:17]:

We've moved past this day. I want you to go back in your mind, and I know I'm putting you on the spot with this. What do you need to tell yourself in that moment? Because you were asking me to tell you a bunch of things, which I happily did, and it was all true and accurate, but nothing was working. So what do you think would have worked for you in a moment like that? When you're like, the day before, you were really happy. You were like, we had a really good day. I don't remember what we did, but it was a really good day. And then, you know, the good days don't exist without the contrast of the bad days. So what did you need to tell yourself? Because I don't think it's an external thing.

Andrew Dewar [00:10:47]:

I think it's an internal thing that kind of needs to happen. So what could it have been?

Catherine Collins [00:10:52]:

I'm not sure what would have worked, but I do know that the hardest person on me is me. I like to say I'm a recovering perfectionist, but the recovery is. Seems to be a long one. And I do know that a lot of my feelings of, you know, wanting to be, quote unquote, successful and things like that are things I've had to unlearn from society, from being raised in a family that really values education and career success and things like that. And so I need to continuously work on telling myself that I'm okay and I'm doing the best I can and that the choices I've made up to this point have been great for the kids. But even as I say, you're doing a good job. It's like, immediately my brain goes, no, you're not. You could have written one more article.

Catherine Collins [00:11:53]:

You could have done that. It really is a challenge for me to not beat myself up. A lot of it comes from how I grew up, and a lot of it comes from the type of job I do. Like you've heard me say so many times, I wrote a money book, like, I should not be in this position. And then I tell myself, you have made such good progress. I've paid off a ton of debt in the last two years. I've done a lot from it, and I've developed good habits, and I've really reduced my stress load. And so for me, I don't know if I'll learn my lesson anytime soon, but I can say that in the moments when I'm not in it, working on mindfulness and talking to myself, like we've said, like, being proud of myself is like a new thing for me that I'm trying out.

Catherine Collins [00:12:45]:

These are the things that I struggle with on my five year you journey that are going to take time. It's taken me, you know, 30 plus years, and these neural pathways are very deep. Ruts in my brain just snaps right to what's familiar each time. And so in order to create that, you're doing a good job. Pathway is a very light, like pebbles right now, so.

Andrew Dewar [00:13:07]:

Right. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't understand this neural pathway talk and all these things. I came up with an example, and Cat, you've heard it before, but I'm going to use it again here because I think it helps for people. So let's imagine you are standing in a field of high grass and you're a kid, and suddenly you get hungry and you see fast food restaurant. So you walk to the fast food place, you get your food, it makes you feel good in the moment, and then you walk back. So you've just kind of beaten down the grass just a little bit. That's how your neural pathway starts to form. Now, if you do 30 years of daily fast food treks, that pathway is going to be beat down.

Andrew Dewar [00:13:52]:

It'll be as hard as rock, basically, because you have done that. If you decide at some point, you know what, I'm going to lose weight, I need to go to the farmer's market, which is in a completely different way. The first time you do it, it's going to feel weird because that grass has never been stepped on before. So you're going to have to beat a new pathway over and over again while the other pathway starts to kind of grow in a bit. So when we're talking about neural pathways, that's always the visual I give myself is like, yeah, this feeling bad neural pathway is really there because, let's be honest, it served you. It served me. It served me to be hard on myself. It served me to berate myself.

Andrew Dewar [00:14:33]:

I used to go to the gym and I would visualize a drill instructor standing in front of me, yelling at me at full volume while I did my workout, thinking that it would make me push harder. And it did, but I didn't enjoy it. So now I'm trying to do the exact opposite. I'm trying to get a new neural pathway where I'm doing these things in a different way with different voices. I can't remember if we've talked about this on our show or we have.

Catherine Collins [00:14:58]:

But that's a really good example. We've sort of talked about the wagon going down and being able to go into the treads, but I like this analogy. And one thing that I think would help me is to go down the new pathways during calm moments, during meditation, during journaling. Because our brains are designed for efficiency and safety. The human race is relatively young in the span of the universe, and we still have the same built in protections that our caveman ancestors had, where our brains are designed to conserve energy to keep us alive. And so in moments of stress and moments of, like, sadness or big emotions, your brain is going to go to the most efficient thing, which is to go to the path that's already there. And that's not really the time when you're stressed and sad and hungry to start walking through the tall grass. Your brain automatically directs you to the fastest thing and that's what's going to happen.

Catherine Collins [00:16:06]:

And so it's up to us to create. The brain's an amazing thing and it can form new pathways. It's just, we have to work at it. Actually, this whole conversation, it. Something people might not know about me is I'm a huge potter head, right? There's a part potter at the end, Harry Potter.

Andrew Dewar [00:16:27]:

Not a pothead, but a potter.

Catherine Collins [00:16:28]:

No, never been a pothead, but I am a potter head. Big Harry Potter fan. There is a part in the first book where Harry finds himself in front of the mirror of erised. And it's a mirror that shows people what they really, truly want in their hearts, right? And so when Harry, who's an orphan, sits in front of the mirror, he's surrounded by family and who are hugging him and like, that's what his heart wants. And, you know, he's kind of wasting away in front of this mirror night after night. And finally, you know, Dumbledore comes and he's like, you know, I'm going to move the mirror because men have wasted away in front of this. And he's explaining how it works and the way that Dumbledore explains it. And he says, like, the happiest man in the world will look in the mirror and see only himself, you know, the rest of us don't.

Catherine Collins [00:17:18]:

Right? And so that is certainly an ideal, but the goal is to be the kind of person who looks into the mirror and sees us exactly as we are right now, with everything that we have. And that is the definition of true contentment. And when you're truly content with what your life is and what you have and the moment you're in and you don't have the desires to be better, have the bigger house, have the nicer car, whatever. Those are the things that kind of contribute to unhappiness. And something that we always say is what we're trying to do is to be content with what we have while still pursuing what we want to.

Andrew Dewar [00:17:59]:

One of the things I've been doing is trying to just sit with my happiness and sit with contentment. When it comes to happiness, I'm trying to give myself ever increasing amounts of happiness in my life. It's very uncomfortable, by the way. But another challenge is just to sit with what you have and just be like, this is good. Yeah. It's not everything I want right now, but you aren't meant to have everything you want right now. You're meant to have desire so that you move forward, forward in your life. And that's what we're trying to convey here, is that life will be better for you.

Andrew Dewar [00:18:30]:

I assume this is what I'm working on when you are moving towards your goals, but you're happy with where you are. And it's our amygdala that kind of pops up and goes, but we have to find problems. We have to find these things, and it's just lying to you. That's why the amygdala front part of our brain, it's how we've kind of evolved this way. I call it Amy. I tell her, shut up, Amy all the time.

Catherine Collins [00:18:56]:

Sometimes we say that, be Amy.

Andrew Dewar [00:18:59]:

Yeah. Again, no offense to anybody named Amy. I have several friends with that name. But it's just saying, shut up. Amygdala just doesn't have the same oomph. But that's what happened with you the other day was just like your Amygdala popped up and it's like, you're not this, you're not that. And again, lifetime of programming, all the things, totally okay. But it's being able to kind of look at it and go, wow, I went down that pathway and I really don't want to, so I need to kind of sit with it differently.

Andrew Dewar [00:19:30]:

And you're not going to get it perfect. And that's, again, I know, covering perfectionist, ditto. We have to be able to look at ourselves and go, this is a really good part on the journey. And I think a really hard part of the human experience is when you experience a bad moment, you seem to think it's going to be the rest of your life, and it's not. You know, I get those quotes from the motivation app all the time. It's like, it's just a bad moment. It's not a bad day, month, year, week, life, but it's hard in that moment. So there's a bunch of things I'm sure we can, we're going to work on and discover and share with you guys as we go through our own journeys.

Andrew Dewar [00:20:10]:

What I find with being content is, as somebody who just likes to be doing things, I mean, like, my literal last name is Doer. It's a in my DNA to go do things. I know it's spelled differently, but still, it's like, I'm a doer. That's what I've always been. So for me to sit and just go, this is okay. In fact, this is good. And sometimes you need to look back on all you've accomplished sometimes, and I don't know if this would have helped you in the moment, but sometimes you need to go, look, you've done a lot. You're actually at a really good place.

Andrew Dewar [00:20:45]:

And these things you're telling yourself that you aren't a. Do you want to have all those things? Like, did you want to have the house with the lawn and all those things? Or is it just something that, you know, because we talked about this on the walk, was that you and I hate yard work. We hate cleaning houses. So the actual idea of having a giant house with a giant yard is very, very painful. So while we're going like, well, we live in condos and stuff, and we don't have the big houses. Like, I actually don't want that. We both had those things, and we're like, it is nothing for me right now. Maybe it is in the future, who knows? But it's not part of my five year plan.

Andrew Dewar [00:21:23]:

It's not like I'm looking at that going like, wow. Yeah, I can't wait to have a $4 million house or something like that. Or a big yard, or even a yard, I kind of look at things and I'm like, I'm giving myself permission to reframe it. So sometimes when you're stuck in the moment, looking back and acknowledging all you've done and then looking forward gets you out of that present moment, which is kind of funny because we always talk about being present in the moment and enjoying it, but sometimes you gotta, like, move your time around so that you can look at it and go, yeah, no, this isn't what I want. I don't know. Do you think that would have helped you at all?

Catherine Collins [00:21:58]:

Yeah, I think it might have. I agree. And we did talk about that on the walk, and it's good. I think I probably could have, you know, journaled it or, you know, remembered the time my basement flooded in my nice big house and all the things that were very stressful. It was really hard to get out of it that day, and that's why we brought it it up. But I at least hope that by sharing that, that listeners maybe can relate. And even though it's a work in progress, I at least hope by describing the steps we took, including the chick fil a cookies, I can help you work through those thoughts if you ever have them yourself.

Andrew Dewar [00:22:37]:

I like that. I think that's a good place to sum up for this episode. We're going to go more into contentment and happiness and all these good things because I think we view them as a destination a lot of the time. But it really is my goal in this current existence to kind of be happy with where I am and what I have, and while always moving towards something, but always kind of bringing that gratitude to the present moment, which is way easier to say than to do. But again, new neural pathways. Right. I look forward to carving them out and to sharing them with you. Okay, Cap, so we are at the end of the episode, and it's time for your glimmer, which is our little bit of joy and pixie fairy dust, that we get to sparkle on our episode at the end so that we can share with the listeners what's lighting us up from the inside.

Andrew Dewar [00:23:26]:

What do you got?

Catherine Collins [00:23:27]:

Yeah. Well, I'm just going to be a big cheese ball today and say that I'm very grateful for you, Andrew, and very grateful that you listened on a hard morning for me and you tried everything you could to help me talk through a hard day. And it's really something I never want to take for granted, to have you and to have somebody who listens and who is just as much of a self improvement nerd as I am, and that we can sort of talk about all the things and go deep and talk about all the triggers. And I'm very, very grateful for you. I've got all kinds of sparkly things I could mention, but in this exact moment, after this podcast, you're my biggest sparkle.

Andrew Dewar [00:24:13]:

Thank you. You know, I'm grateful for you, too. Thank you for saying that.

Catherine Collins [00:24:17]:

Sure.

Andrew Dewar [00:24:17]:

I think that's a good place to stop right now.

Catherine Collins [00:24:20]:

Thank you. Oh, that's sweet. Okay, you're welcome. And for those listening, we'll see you next time. Oh, and don't forget, if you want to get that advice from your future self, head on over to fiveyearyou.com future to get signed up.

Andrew Dewar [00:24:38]:

Just a reminder, we're two people on the Internet. We're not doctors or anything else, but we do want to help. If you feel that you need professional medical care, please see a licensed medical practitioner.