Love 2.0: How to Fix Your Marriage, Part 1

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain turns 10 this year, and to celebrate, we are bringing the show to cities across the United States and Canada in a live performance. Our next stops are in Baltimore on October 11th, Washington DC on October 12th, and Los Angeles on November 22nd. Join me as I share seven key psychological insights from the show's first decade. For more information and tickets, go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. That's hiddenbrain.org/tour. I hope to see you there. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. There comes a time in most relationships when people look at the partner sitting across the table from them and think, who is this person? Maybe you don't like the way your partner eats with his mouth open. Maybe you don't like the way she's always working. Maybe you don't like, well, lots of things. At moments like this, a thought crosses our minds. Perhaps we can get our partners to close their mouths while they eat. Perhaps we can get them to have more work-life balance. Perhaps we can change them into a better version of themselves. We know exactly what needs to be done, and we know exactly how to do it. We'll first explain, very politely, of course, how our partners are doing things wrong. We'll show them how they can be better. If they fail to listen, we'll go back and try again. Maybe add a wagging finger, a slightly raised voice. With patience, persistence, and a little punishment, we can get our partners to change their ways. Or not. Maybe, instead of changing your partner, you end up in mutual recrimination. Instead of the flutes of heaven, you get fights. Instead of change, you get obstinacy. This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain+, we're going to bring you the first episode in a month-long series, All About Love. We'll explore the expectations we put on our relationships, and how our society's views on romance and marriage have changed over time. We'll also look at the anatomy of a breakup, and ways to soften the blow when love comes to an end. That's all to come over the next few weeks as part of our Love 2.0 series. Today, we kick things off with a deep dive into the art and science of mending troubled relationships. We'll explore a radically different path from the one we usually choose, a path that scientific research shows might actually work. Love songs and romantic poetry are full of images of two people becoming one in a relationship. But something that makes relationships difficult is that we remain to some extent stubbornly ourselves. Not one seamless entity, but two distinctive and sometimes prickly individuals. All of us intuitively know how to fix this problem. The title of a long-running musical that premiered in 1996 captures the experience of many couples. It was titled, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. At Clark University, psychologist James Cordova studies the dynamics of relationships. For many years, he has studied a different approach to the one we usually use. James Cordova, welcome to Hidden Brain.

JAMES CORDOVA: Thank you, Shankar. It's so great to be here.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: James, I understand that you're a person who loves to josh around and tease people in a humorous way. What happens when you engage this side of your personality with your wife?

JAMES CORDOVA: That's a great question. So yeah, I was raised in a community where one of the ways that we show like love and affection for each other is just ongoing joshing and teasing of each other. So this is just part of who I am in relationship. And as it turns out, my wife is much too tenderhearted for that kind of ongoing teasing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that you've sometimes made jokes and you have inadvertently hurt her feelings.

JAMES CORDOVA: Oh, often, often. Yeah. No, this was something that because it comes so naturally to me, it took years for me to really develop a sensitivity in that spot.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand this dynamic played out between the two of you once when you went shopping together in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Give me both the context for what happened and what happened, James.

JAMES CORDOVA: Oh, absolutely. So we were in the process of shopping for a new pair of boots for her. And one of the things that we have is sort of like an inside joke between the two of us, is that she has an exquisite taste. So way more often than not, when we're shopping for something, she makes a beeline for the most expensive version of whatever it is that we're shopping for. And it's an ongoing sort of running joke between the two of us. So we were having a good time shopping for boots, and we're heading into this like small kind of boutique boot store in Santa Fe. And so as we're walking in, I call out to the proprietor and I say, can you just go ahead and show us the most expensive pair of boots in the store and save us some time? Which I thought my wife would find hilarious, but clearly in the moment did not.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What was her reaction, James?

JAMES CORDOVA: So, you know, when my wife is hurt, she gets quiet, right? So there's a very distinct shift in tone from the sort of playfulness and lightheartedness that we were experiencing as we were walking in the door to you can just sort of feel her pull away.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm assuming at that point, you realized that you had put your foot in your mouth.

JAMES CORDOVA: Oh yeah, I'm not an idiot. I can tell like something happened. And it's interesting because like my instinct is still to see if I can maintain the momentum, right? So, oh, we were having a good time. We were feeling jokey with each other and something happened, but maybe I can just like keep going with the playfulness and it'll just wash away. And, you know, that just as it turns out doesn't usually work.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So over the years, you have actually nudged your wife to lighten up when it comes to your teasing. What have you said to her, and how has she reacted?

JAMES CORDOVA: So I've tried to explain where I'm coming from. This is just by way of being affectionate, and it's playful. And she obviously knows my friends and my family, and has seen that play out between other folks. And she gets it, but it just doesn't work for her, right? So I've tried to help her understand it from my perspective, which has just gone over like a lead balloon.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So in addition to being a researcher, James, you're also a clinician who works with couples in psychotherapy. One couple featured a woman who really wanted her husband to open up and talk about his feelings, something that he resisted. How did this conflict play out between them?

JAMES CORDOVA: So, you know, in this particular couple, the wife felt like quite deeply that her husband was withholding from her, right? That she wanted to be able to know what he was feeling, have him talk to her about his wants and needs and his ups and downs. And he was just very much a stoic, you know, very, you know, almost monosyllabic, right? You know, clearly loved her, but his love language was acts of service, not necessarily talking about his feelings. And, you know, she would try and he would feel judged. And then they would, you know, sort of turn away from each other. You know, she'd try a few times and then, and then give up in frustration. And he would feel judged and, and just sort of wander off.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You call this a porcupine turtle conundrum. What do you mean by that phrase? So, one of the, one of the patterns that we often see in couples is how they respond when there is conflict between the two of them. So something comes up that feels tense or, or hurtful or painful in some way. And, and our natural human reaction when something is painful, most often is some version of either fight or flight. And so some of us lean a little bit more in the direction of fight. We're sort of like porcupines. When, when we're having conflict, we pull our quills out, we push our quills out and we go toward our partner. The, the, the sense inside of that is, I'm going to resolve this problem by moving towards it and fighting it. And for others of us, we're more like turtles. We've learned something more of a flight response to feeling pain. So when we're feeling that stress of conflict or judgment, we get quiet. We pull inside. Sometimes it's just getting quiet. Sometimes it's actually literally leaving the room. And the pattern emerges such that it can, it can happen in either direction. If the turtle, you know, feels the porcupines quills coming out, they start to withdraw. That withdrawal feels threatening to the porcupine. And so that person like pursues even harder with their quills out even more aggressively, which makes the other person pull into their shell even more deeply. And it's frustrating for both of them, right? The person in the shell is waiting for the porcupine to stop poking me. And the person who's in the porcupine role is just desperate for the other person to come back out of their shell. And we can engage that kind of porcupine turtle pattern until we're exhausted. And that's, for most couples, how the pattern resolves. We just do it till we're too tired to do it anymore.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There was another couple you worked with who struggled with a different problem, James. Here, the husband was preoccupied with his wife being fit and in shape. How did that dynamic play out?

JAMES CORDOVA: This is a couple that I've seen somewhat regularly. They come in, I would say, once a year or so, and almost always initiated, coming into therapy will be initiated by her because she is feeling so hurt by his requests for his demands for his not particularly skillful encouragement for her to exercise more, become more fit, watch what she eats. He has this image in mind of a particular kind of physique that he says, I mean, I can't help it. This is just what I'm attracted to. His wife is actually quite fit. She's just normal woman fit, not like supermodel fit. They will get stuck in this place where she tries to appease, she tries to go along, she tries to resist, and he just is projecting this experience of frustration and disappointment, honestly tinged with a little bit of shame. They can't get themselves out of this pattern when it gets sticky for them.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm imagining that each person has tried to change the behavior of the other. You clearly indicated how the husband is trying to change the behavior of the wife, but has the reverse happened as well?

JAMES CORDOVA: Oh, absolutely, so her strong attempts are to help him see that this is what a normal person's fit body looks like, to get him to let go of that desire, or at least to, I suppose, if he can't let go of it, to keep it to himself.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we face a problem in our relationships, the solution often seems simple. Obviously, our partners need to change. When we come back, when our efforts to change another person work, and when they don't, and what we can do about it. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Most long-term relationships eventually uncover sharp angles and jagged edges. Things that one person does or doesn't do drive the other person bonkers. At Clark University, psychologist James Cordova has studied the science of behavior change, when it works, when it doesn't, and what we can do about it. James, you say that for a long time the emphasis within the field of couples therapy was on helping couples change their behavior. Now, this must have fit with the assumption that most couples themselves have, which is that the problems in their relationships would disappear if only the other person would change.

JAMES CORDOVA: That is our natural instinct, right? Like, I'm feeling uncomfortable, I'm feeling some distress, and you're the problem, and if you would change, I would feel better. And so, yeah, of course, that is the way couples come in. That's what they're asking for. And warm-hearted, beneficent therapists tried to meet them right there in the thing that they were asking for.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And I'm wondering, there must be times when, in fact, this approach does work. Of course, couples are coming in, and presumably, they're trying to recruit. Each of them is trying to recruit the therapist onto their side to tell the other person what they're doing wrong. But there must be times where therapists, in fact, are successful at getting couples to change their behavior?

JAMES CORDOVA: It's true. I was originally trained in what was called behavioral marital therapy, which was very much a change-oriented approach to doing couple therapy. And the changes that we would work on with couples is increasing the frequency with which they were doing nice things for each other. We called that behavior exchange, teaching them how to communicate more effectively, teaching them how to problem solve more effectively. But as it turned out, even though it is a therapy that has demonstrable effectiveness, none of those skills would follow couples home. So, there is some change happening, but it's difficult for couples to sustain it.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Couples, of course, do solve problems all the time. That's because many problems have an easy solution. When we first get together, we're adjusting to each other, and the things that are easy to adjust to, we adjust to so quickly that we almost don't even notice that we've done it, like which side of the bed are you going to sleep on, which side of the bed am I going to sleep on, not usually an issue. And then just above that are what I think of as like mezzanine level problems that we might have to struggle with a little bit, sometimes they take weeks, months or years, but we do eventually solve them, and then we're good.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There is another group of problems that comes after this, and they are more intractable. We're going to spend most of our time today talking about those very hard problems. But I asked James to give me an example of what he calls a mezzanine level problem, the ones that are not simple to solve, but also are not intractable. He told me of a time he and his wife had a dispute over his love for cycling.

JAMES CORDOVA: I've been a long-term cyclist, and I guess there's two aspects to that that are important. One is I've become something of an endorphin addict, so it's just like it's a necessary part of who I am. And two, bike riding, like road cycling, is dangerous. I've been hit by cars like three times. So the last time I was hit by a car, my wife responded to that lovingly as, please don't ever ride your bike again, which I tried to limit, but I get like very fussy. When it's been too many days between the last like good bicycle ride.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that you and your wife eventually cobbled together at least a partial solution to this persistent problem. What was the compromise you worked out?

JAMES CORDOVA: So this cycling problem is a really good example of what I mean by a mezzanine level problem, because the solution didn't come quickly or easily. There actually was a lot of push and push back, you know. I was trying to get her to change, to just be much more accepting of my cycling. And she was trying to get me to change, to like do something less dangerous for your exercise, please. And the willingness to collaborate, the willingness to compromise for us came out of really compassionately understanding where the other person was coming from. For me to really, to really, deeply, compassionately understand how scary it was for her when I was out on the road. So I'm out on the road having a great time cycling, and she's at home terrified that I'm going to get hit by another car, that I'm going to get hurt or that I'm going to get killed. And for her to compassionately understand how important cycling is for me, both for my physical health, but mostly for my mental and emotional well-being. And from that place, we were better able to think, well, what might a compromise be? And the compromise that we actually worked out, which I find so beautiful, is that she bought an e-bike. We're both quite delighted with the e-bike that she bought. And so she goes cycling with me. And that helps both of us. She's with me, and she's able to feel like she's got some influence, some control over what's going on on the road. And I get to go out and go as fast or as long as I want, because it's easier for her to keep up. So it's actually become a really sweet source of connection between the two of us. But it took us a while to find our way to that.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You know, it's also an example of a technical solution to the problem, because in some ways, you're a faster biker than she is. She's a slower biker than you are, so you couldn't actually have gone biking together. It would have been difficult for her and boring for you. But the invention of e-bikes has now come up in some ways with a technical solution to the problem that she can now keep up with you. You can go biking together. But not all problems lend themselves to technical solutions, do they?

JAMES CORDOVA: No, they definitely don't. There are definitely problems that for all of us in all of our relationships, there are problems that will stubbornly refuse to be solved.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, you say, James, that in every relationship, there are what you call perpetual issues, problems that are simply not amenable to change. What are these perpetual issues?

JAMES CORDOVA: They are areas of friction in our relationship that arise out of naturally occurring differences between us that aren't ever gonna go away. Those are gonna be sources of conflict. We think of them as naturally occurring flaws in the fabric of our relationship. So, for example, one of the most fundamental personality traits is the difference between introverts and extroverts. And for whatever reason, because the creator of the universe has a sense of humor, introverts and extroverts find each other very attractive and often end up in relationships together. And introverts can be attracted to extroverts because they pull them out and have great adventures with them. And extroverts can be attracted to introverts because of that sort of steadiness. And there's a kind of connection that comes with that sense of steady calm. And what we're going to do on a Friday night is always going to be an issue because it's arising out of a fundamental difference between the two of us. If I'm an extrovert, I've had an exhausting week, I want to go out and do something fun. If I'm an introvert, I've had an exhausting week, I want to sit on the couch and watch TV. And we're going to fight every time about that.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So when we think about the common strategies that traditional couples use, many of them are highly dependent on their ability to collaborate. But if they've actually had a lot of conflict about something for a very long time, their ability to collaborate presumably has also been tarnished.

JAMES CORDOVA: That seems to be the main thing that happens. When you have a conflictual couple together in the lab, it looks like they're terrible at communicating, and it looks like they're terrible at problem solving. They actually have a skill deficit. But if you take those two people and pair them with two strangers, suddenly they're really good at communicating and really good at problem solving. The implication of that isn't so much that they lack a skill, it's that the emotional environment in their relationship has become so toxic, so poisonous, so conflictual, that they're not actually willing to collaborate. They're not willing to use the good communication and problem-solving skills that they actually have, because I don't want to problem solve effectively with you, I'm mad at you.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm assuming you must see this all the time in your practice, James.

JAMES CORDOVA: It is the most common way that couples come into therapy, stuck in this. It's almost like one of the analogies we use is it's like a Chinese finger trap, right? Like each of them is pulling so hard for change that the harder they try to make things better, the tighter the trap becomes. And they exhaust themselves. They frustrate each other so completely that often they find themselves in a spot where the only way that they can see forward towards some sort of escape is either therapy or divorce.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You were trying to help one couple who featured a dad who would have these long conversations with his 18-year-old son that left his wife, this is the son's stepmom, feeling excluded. How did husband and wife try to change one another, James?

JAMES CORDOVA: So in this couple, the husband and his son just had a long history of being able to get into these deep, sometimes hilarious, conversations about world politics, which wasn't a particular interest to his wife. And she would find herself just feeling left out, sort of left behind, ignored, which she found really hurtful. And she expressed that to him as, and the change that she was pushing for was, you need to talk to your son about how rude he's being to me and how thoughtless he's being to me, because he needs to include me more in the conversations that we're having. And the husband would defend his son to her and would just like not confront him in that way. He would ask her for change. Like you just need to throw yourself into the conversation, right? Like maybe read the paper in the morning and like, you know, in the service of like, we're gonna have a conversation about this stuff later. So that's where they got stuck. He's trying to get her to jump more enthusiastically into their conversations, and she's trying to get his son to be more respectful towards her.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you slowly started to see that couples needed a viable alternative to changing a partner's behavior. Can you explain this epiphany and how you came to it, James?

JAMES CORDOVA: I think what I started to realize and what colleagues of mine as well started to realize is that we had done everything that we could to help couples change the things that they were asking for change in the relationship. And again, the discovery that what is left are the things that arise out of naturally occurring differences between people. And it became clear that in our studies of different types of couples, that it's really not the presence of unsolvable problems that is the problem, that is corrosive, but how couples approach and relate to those perpetual problems. And for some couples, they can bring a kind of sense of humor to their perpetual issues, and they can maintain a sense of hopefulness as they confront yet again, what are we going to do on Friday night? And for other couples, they get stuck in a place where they are trying to coerce each other to change. And the coercion just becomes more and more exaggerated. And rather than collude with the couple in their ongoing efforts to change each other, we began to shift towards what does it look like to accept these naturally occurring differences between partners? What does it look like to become intimate with the parts of our relationship, the friction points in our relationship that usually make us turn away from each other? Can we actually find a way to use those points of friction to create deeper connection rather than disconnection?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So once you started exploring the possibility that couples could work on accepting each other rather than trying to change one another, you found that the practice of acceptance came with a lot of benefits, and one of them was that the emotional climate of relationships was often immediately improved. How so, James?

JAMES CORDOVA: So often, the toxicity in the relationship arises right out of that sense of, you're trying to change me in a spot where I can't change, and that feels like a fundamental rejection of who I am as a person. And so, I fight back by trying to get you to change so that you can just love me the way that I am. And you're wanting that change, and my rejecting that and validating that is in some ways also a fundamental rejection of who you are as a person. So, we end up feeling rejected by each other. And our, again, our reaction to rejection is some version of fight or flight. We either fight harder or we just start to give up.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We talked about how, James, when couples are trying to change one another, it creates so much toxicity that they're often not able to then collaborate with one another. Does moving to an orientation of acceptance increase people's collaborative skills?

JAMES CORDOVA: It does. It is so challenging because the trick, if it's a trick, is to seek to understand more than to seek to be understood. And that is needed in a moment when the thing we are most desperate for is to be understood. But if we can, if I can take a deep breath, hold my own wanting with some compassion for a moment, and prioritize understanding what you're asking of me, and prioritize empathizing with what you're asking of me, then what naturally occurs is that I start to feel more compassion for where you're coming from. And when I start to feel more compassion for where you're coming from, then I want to help. But if I'm stuck in a place where I need you to understand me, I can't access the compassion that naturally makes me want to collaborate with you.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There's another paradox that I'm noticing in some of this work, James, which is that when we are unhappy in relationships, we may feel like we are trying to change the other person because we want to stand up for ourselves, because the way we are being treated is unjust and unfair, and being a person of integrity or being a person of courage means that we stand up and we try and fight against this thing that is unjust or unfair. Can you talk a moment about the idea that when we tie our happiness to another person changing, paradoxically, we've actually surrendered some portion of our own agency?

JAMES CORDOVA: This is something that I work with couples on often, that if the only way for me to feel better is for you to do something differently, then I'm trapped in a place where I'm in a sort of self-justifying passivity. I don't have to do anything. I can't do anything except maybe complain and hope for you to change. And especially when it comes to perpetual issues, but I would say that this is true for almost all areas of conflict. The way that we can reclaim our agency, the way that we can reclaim our power to have a positive effect on our relationship and to deepen the intimacy in the relationship is to be the one who moves first. And oftentimes, that simply let me make sure that I thoroughly understand where my partner is coming from. And the cultivation of that skill, I talk about as developing a soft front and a strong back. So that I can understand where my partner is coming from, I can understand where the other person is coming from, with absolute compassion and empathy. But that doesn't mean I have to give up where I'm coming from and what matters to me. So it is a well-rounded compassion. One that involves compassion both for myself and my own wants and needs, as well as genuine compassion for my partner and my partner's wants and needs.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm assuming there must be some behaviors that you are not asking people to accept. If someone is being physically abused, for example, I'm sure you're not asking that person to simply accept the abuse, right?

JAMES CORDOVA: No, absolutely not. The way that I think about this is the things that are unacceptable are the things that actually diminish us as a person. So, if changing in this way, if accepting this from my partner makes my world smaller, makes me more constricted in my sense of identity or self, then that is too high a price to pay for connection.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: James' research and clinical experience suggest that when we take all the energy we have invested in changing our partner and orient our efforts into accepting them, a world of new possibilities opens up. When we come back, how to accept our partners for who they are? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from WhatsApp. Group chats are meant to connect us, but they often lead to confusion instead, like when you're planning a group trip. Travel dates get buried under endless messages, someone misreads a pixelated flight itinerary sent via SMS, and suddenly half the group thinks the trip is next month, not next weekend. Add different phones into the mix, even more chaos. Luckily, there's WhatsApp. WhatsApp polls make collective decisions, like choosing a travel budget, fast and frictionless. Pinned messages keep key details, like the hotel reservations or flight times, visible and accessible. Event invites bring structure, while high-res media ensures clarity across devices, so you can easily share incredible vacation pics. And with end-to-end encryption, conversations stay completely private. Even podcast hosts can benefit from WhatsApp by pinning episode themes, collecting audio clips, or sharing new show logos. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Claude. Human behavior follows patterns we rarely notice. Claude is an AI that works with you to uncover these hidden patterns. Together, you can explore psychological research, connect behavioral insights, and dive deeper into the questions about human nature that fascinate you most. Try Claude for free at claude.ai/hiddenbrain and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you spent years trying to change your partner? Have you succeeded? Have you failed? If you have questions or comments you'd like to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a short voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line acceptance. James Cordova is a psychologist at Clark University. He is the author of The Mindful Path to Intimacy, Cultivating a Deeper Connection with Your Partner. James you were once working with a couple who found themselves at odds with each other in terms of how much attention and intimacy each of them needed. Tell me about this couple and an analogy you used from the world of botany to explain their behavior to each other.

JAMES CORDOVA: here seems to be oftentimes a fundamental difference between partners in terms of our need for interdependence, interconnection and our need for independence. And we all need a little bit of both. And the botany metaphor that we use is some people are more like cactuses and some people are more like ferns. So some people are more like desert plants and some people are more like rainforest plants. And in this metaphor, humidity, water, rainfall is attention, time together, and all those things that are dimensions of interconnectedness. And so for some of us who are more like ferns, and this was what's true in the couple that you're asking about. So in that relationship, the wife was more of a fern and really thrived on lots of time together, lots of verbal and physical affection. And the husband was into a lot of independent activities, really into his work, really into independent hobbies, like carpentry and cycling, that sort of exercise kinds of things. And they would have terrible fights about her calling him selfish and him calling her clingy. And this was the tight knot that they came into therapy with. As we discover this in our work together, oh, what's happening here is you've got a cactus and fern pattern happening in your relationship. You're more like a cactus, you're more like a fern. And when you try to make the cactus happy, the fern just drying up and dying. And when you're trying to make the fern happy, the cactus is feeling overwhelmed and rotting. But when you can recognize that you're just a different types of plants, then you can actually collaborate on being good and loving each other skillfully. And what I find over and over again, and this couple in particular, is like, oh, I think you guys might be, like you're more like a cactus and you're more like a fern. Their eyes just lit up and they started laughing, right? Because they recognized themselves in the metaphor, like that is us. You are like, she's like slapping his shoulder. You are like a cactus. And he's like, you are like a fern. And there was a delight in the recognition of that pattern in their relationship. And you could just feel the release from the conflict. Oh, like I'm never going to win a battle to turn my fern partner into a cactus. And I'm never going to win the battle to turn my cactus into a fern. But I can learn how to love a cactus. And I can learn how to love a fern. And we just didn't see it before. But once we saw it, the solution seems so obvious.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, this couple is an excellent example of the importance of actually identifying and labeling the patterns that come up again and again in relationships. Talk about the importance of doing this in promoting acceptance, James.

JAMES CORDOVA: It's so important. We're all blind to the patterns that are characteristic of our relationship. You know, one of us is more delighted by spending and the other of us is more delighted by saving. And we get stuck in what we call a spender saver pattern, but we can't see it ourselves. And we just end up fighting about whether or not to get a brand new TV. And one of us gets called cheap and the other one gets called, you know, a spendthrift. But if we can see the pattern, oh, we're stuck in a spender saver pattern. We're stuck in a cactus fern pattern. Being able to name it actually makes it really hard to continue doing it.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You say that if we had to move forward in our relationships, one way to increase our acceptance is to label the problems that we have in our relationship as inanimate, to call them an it. What do you mean by this, James?

JAMES CORDOVA: The it can be the pattern that emerges out of a naturally occurring difference between the two of us. It's not your fault and it's not my fault. It is this emergent property's fault. I alluded to this pattern of the spender and saver earlier. In that pattern, one partner realizes that what I want so desperately is I want to feel like I'm not living just to work. I want to be able to take the money, the resources that I earn to feel abundance in my life. And the other partner, the saver partner, feels more like the emotional meaning of money is a safety net. And in these relationships, when the spender partner, the partner who is seeking a feeling of abundance, goes to the store to buy something that feels yummy, it feels to the other partner like they're pulling strands out of their safety net. And they panic and say terrible things about, you know, how much money they spend and how they can't control their budget and can't they do math. And when the other partner, when the saver partner is, you know, taking the money that they have and squirreling it away in a soup can in the backyard, the spender partner feels like, oh, we're just in this dark little hole where no light or color ever gets in. That kind of pattern can create so much distress and conflict between partners. But when we can recognize that for one partner, it's driven by fear and for the other partner, it's driven by a sense of lack, then we're in a better position to be able to like, well, how do I take care of my partner who's a little bit afraid? Let me compassionately, generously put money in our savings account to show that what scares you matters to me. And when I can compassionately understand that my partner needs that color, needs that feeling of abundance, then I can compassionately be generous toward my partner by making sure that we are spending some of our money to do things that are making memories and having joyful times together.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, in some ways, what I hear you saying, James, is that we should treat our partner's personality traits and foibles almost like physical disabilities. So if, for example, my partner had a fractured foot, we might not be able to go dancing together, but I'm not going to blame my partner for not being able to go dancing. I would just say my partner has a fractured foot. What you're saying is that we should bring that same compassion, the sense that whatever the problem is, it's being driven by this external thing, this thing that's external to both of us, and blame that thing rather than blame my partner.

JAMES CORDOVA: Exactly. And there's a deep sense of both generosity and, I think, humility in that stance. Like, we're all just doing our best out here, right? This complicated collection of things that I'm super proud of about who I am and the way in which I'm really just a rolling dumpster fire, right? And what elicits that deep sense of intimacy and intimate safety in a relationship is knowing that my partner can see what a dumpster fire I am and is accepting of that, like loves me again, not even anyway, but almost because. And when I can offer that to her, that is a relationship that will stand the test of time.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We talked earlier in the episode, James, about how your wife is quite emotionally sensitive and how this has caused some tension between you when you engaged in teasing her. In recent times, you've had reason to reflect on what it was about that quality of your wife that drew you to her in the first place. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about how your wife's sensitivity plays out, especially when the two of you are in the car and driving somewhere together.

JAMES CORDOVA: Yeah, yeah. One of the things that I remember is the quality of my wife that was what was most delightful for me, most attractive to me when I was first getting to know her is just how tender-hearted she is, how open-hearted she is in the world. And the example that comes up for me is my wife is one of these people that when we're driving down the road, if I'm the first person to see road kill, I try to distract her from that, like, look over there. Because to her, when she sees an animal that has been killed or hurt on the side of the road, it is heartbreaking every time. Her mind immediately goes to the life that that little creature could have lived, the family that that little creature has that's probably missing them. And every time she weeps. And I've always found that deep compassion for others just gorgeous. And of course, that tender heartedness is simultaneously part of what makes her so sensitive to teasing. So the very thing that I find so beautiful about her soul is also the thing that can sometimes be challenging for me in that the rough and tumble of teasing is not gentle enough for her.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In our episode next week, we'll bring James Cordova back to talk about one of the most difficult challenges in accepting your partner. It's tough medicine, but it has the power to change your relationship for the better.

JAMES CORDOVA: It's like learning how to play the guitar. It's like learning how to write poetry. It's like learning a sport. Like nobody's good at it right away. The first time you pick up a guitar, you sound awful. But if you want beautiful graceful music in your life, you have to practice. If you want deep sustaining intimacy in your relationship, you have to practice.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One theme that runs through much of James Cordova's work is that we should think about the health of our relationships the same way we think about our physical health. We should get regular evaluations and stay vigilant to problems. In our companion story on Hidden Brain+, we explore a series of questions that James suggests that couples ask themselves to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their relationships. Spotting problems early can allow you to fix problems before they become intractable. Our companion episode is called How Strong is Your Marriage? If you're a subscriber, you can listen to that episode and all of our subscriber-only content immediately. If you haven't signed up yet, now is a great time to do so. Any listener who subscribes via Apple Podcasts during the month of September will receive an extended 30-day free trial of Hidden Brain+. To take advantage of that trial, find Hidden Brain in Apple Podcasts and click the Try Free or Subscribe button. Or you can go to apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. Your support helps us bring you more episodes like this one. We're truly grateful for your help. After the break, Your Questions Answered. Listeners share their thoughts and questions about how to discover and maintain their passions in life. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When he was growing up, Phil Hanson became obsessed with art, specifically an art form called pointillism. Phil would draw thousands of tiny dots on a blank page. Taken together, the dots formed a stunning portrait. Phil dreamed of becoming a professional artist, so he went to art school to improve his skills. But then, he developed permanent nerve damage. His hands started shaking as he carefully placed each dot. The dots began to look like squiggles. To compensate, Phil gripped his pen tighter and tighter. His hand got shakier and shakier. Eventually, he was in so much pain, he had trouble holding anything. These physical challenges took a toll on Phil's enthusiasm for art. He quit art school and gave up his dream. At various points in our lives, many of us will face similar roadblocks in pursuing our interests. We start out with a desire to develop and grow. Then, life gets in the way. We lose our passion over time. We explored these themes with Harvard Business School behavioral scientist, Jon Jachimowicz, on two previous episodes of Hidden Brain. If you missed those episodes, they are titled U20, The Passion Pill, and on Hidden Brain Plus, U20, How to Stop Feeling Burned Out. Today, Jon returns to answer listener questions about how to keep our passions alive. Jon Jachimowicz, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

JON JACHIMOWICZ: Thanks so much for having me for part two.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So Jon, later in the episode, we'll share what ended up happening to Phil Hanson. But at the start of your academic career, you experienced a similar struggle maintaining your passion. You submitted an important paper to an academic journal, you had worked really hard on it, and it got published. Remind us of what happened after you achieved that big goal.

JON JACHIMOWICZ: Absolutely. I had really high expectations for what would happen next. I had worked really hard on this paper. In many ways, it was the culmination of my intellectual journey, and I was so proud to finally see that paper in print. I was hoping that after that paper would come into press, that there would be media attention, that public policy workers would become really interested and excited about what we have found, and that perhaps some change would happen. But as the days passed, the weeks passed, I heard nothing from nobody. And that was really challenging for me to deal with. I mean, looking back, I can say I was overly idealistic, perhaps even naive. But back then, I just remember feeling so shattered because what I had worked so hard for, and what should have been a success or what I thought would be a success, ultimately just felt so empty. Nothing followed after that paper went online. You don't even get the physical copy anymore. It just appears on a website with your name on it. And so I remember in the days and weeks afterwards asking myself, why am I doing this? Like, what is it all for? I thought I'm doing this research because it could eventually make a difference in the world. And now I have done the hard part. I've done the research bit, or that's what I thought. And now the making a difference bit will be a lot easier. And so it was challenging for me to then come back the next day and work on all the other research that I had to do. I was working on other papers at the time. Just because I'd finished one paper doesn't mean that other papers didn't need to be written on and didn't need to analyze data for. But then showing up to my office the next day and coming back and trying to analyze data or write a paper when I knew this didn't really make a difference the last time, why would it be any different this time? That was really, really challenging.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So as you told us in our initial conversations, Jon, this experience that you had helped to peak your interest in passion as a research topic. And once you started digging into the topic and surveying people, you found that many people pursue their passions, but their challenge is maintaining those passions over the long haul. Say more about this, how so?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: Yeah, so I think the key insight that I learned in that time was that passion isn't something that you have, but something that you have to sustain. Meaning that passion kind of like a delicate flower, you have to look after it, you have to water it, you have to prune it, you have to make sure it gets enough sunlight. It doesn't just grow and bloom beautifully by itself. But when I was starting this project and really starting to think about my research on passion, I looked at passionate people as if they were different from me. As if there was something different about those people, that they were special, that they had something that I didn't have, and that as a result, I might never be as passionate as they would be. Meaning, if I lost passion for something, the inference that I draw from that is that there's something wrong with me, and that in turn, I will never become someone like them. But what I ended up actually learning is that almost everybody that I talked to had an experience of having fallen out of passion, of having to learn that passion is something that they have to maintain, and that there was a wide variety of practices that they had all learned for themselves because there was nothing really codified, but strategies that they now engaged in on a regular basis that allowed them to sustain that passion day in and day out, as well as an acknowledgement, kind of an acceptance internally, that it's okay if you don't feel that passion every single day.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So one reason that people say they lose their passion is that they feel like they have gotten bogged down in the day to day of whatever they're doing. So the little boring tasks that need to get done in some ways detract from what we are passionate about. A listener named Julio asks, how does routine fit into the idea of developing a passion for a career? Can we have enough passion for a job to develop a routine and enjoy the process?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: That's a great question from Julio. And I think there's two things really to tease apart there. I think one is that in many jobs, the majority of the tasks that we work on aren't in and of themselves gratifying. This is what research calls intrinsic motivation, that the task in and of itself is really gratifying, that we get a lot out of just doing the task in and of itself. When I do research, the vast majority of my time is not really fun. Like I write, I analyze data. Like doing this interview is one of the few times that this is actually inherently enjoyable. So thank you Shankar for that. But the vast majority of time, it really isn't. But there's a second reason that I think is really helpful. There's research on what's called construal level theory. Construal level theory suggests that we can think of a task at two different levels of analysis. We can think of a task just in and of a task itself. What is a task that I'm doing concretely? What does it require from me? What does this task help me accomplish? Just by looking very narrowly at the task. But at a more abstract level, if I were to zoom out, where does this task fit in with all the other things that I am working on, that my coworkers are working on, that the organization is trying to accomplish when I'm thinking of the broader mission of what we're trying to accomplish? Andrew Carton and others have done research showing that when people see the broader vision of something and they're able to connect what they do day to day to the broader vision of what it is that they actually care about, that can also be a real source of meaningfulness. But doing that connection can be really challenging, and it's something that we often depend on other people, like our leaders, to do for us explicitly.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So it's perhaps not surprising, Jon, to know that we heard from listeners who struggle with burnout. They start out feeling passionately about a project, but then they dive in and work really hard, and then they find they can't sustain that over the long term. Here's a question about that from a listener named Reem.

REEM: In terms of time, I was just wondering how long we can sustain these kind of phases, where we're just working really hard, where we're working really late, where we're just like forcing ourselves to do something really hard. How long is that sustainable? And I know that's obviously depending on the individual and like individual mental health. It's just really interesting to think about, is it really short-term pain for long-term gain or is it just habit building if we sort of keep forcing ourselves? Like how dangerous is that?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What do you make of Reem's question, Jan?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: Yeah, that's a great question, Reem. And thank you for submitting that. I think that there's a way of thinking about it that could be helpful for Reem and maybe for others who are struggling with that as well, is what you're working on, a sprint or a marathon? Because if it's a sprint, then it doesn't have to be sustainable. It is totally fine if for a very short time period, when you feel really passionate about something, that you truly do give it your all, and where perhaps life feels a little unbalanced, where the famous work-life balance doesn't exist, and it fully tilts toward what it is that you're working on. But I would argue that more often than not, for many of us, the things that we are passionate about are not like sprints, but they're more like marathons. They're very long-term things that might take days, weeks, or even months and years to accomplish. And for that, I think the question that we need to ask ourselves is not, how can I give my all today? But what can I do today to make sure that I'm still as passionate tomorrow and the next day and the next day? We find in one of our papers that on any given day, the more passionate people are, the longer they work, that is fine, that's wonderful. But on the next day, they are more emotionally exhausted. And that makes it harder for them to actually muster that passion again, because we require those emotional resources to feel and experience that passion day in, day out. So perhaps a little counterintuitively, on our most passionate days, we should be most careful in how much of ourselves we give and perhaps even take a step back.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So the term burnout has been used very widely in both academic settings as well as in public settings. And the term sometimes means different things to different people. But have you done any work that looks at what the warning signs of burnout might be? When do we actually have to say what I'm experiencing now is not just a short-term blip, but actually a sign of something more serious?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: Yeah, that's a great question. So one component of burnout is a lack of self-efficacy. A lack of self-efficacy means I don't really feel like what I'm doing today makes a difference anymore. I don't think I have the skills necessary to do that. I don't feel like I have any sense of control over what I'm doing. And so it can feel really defeating when what I'm working on doesn't really seem like it's moving the needle anymore. The prescription there is not really taking any time off, but trying to figure out, can I work on other things where I could make a difference? Or do I need to figure out how I can develop a better skillset that would actually allow me to make a difference? That's one of the components of burnout. The second component of burnout is what I think people often think about when they think about burnout, which is emotional exhaustion. That is when people feel like their emotional tank is empty. They don't really have a lot in them anymore to feel a lot of emotions anymore. And it can be both positive and negative affect, so we might find it harder to feel joy, excitement, enthusiasm, but it can also be really difficult for us to feel a lot of the negative emotions that are important for us to experience because they are helpful signals of how we react to the external environment. And typically the prescribed solutions for emotional exhaustion in the short term is something like a vacation, a break, having psychological detachment from your work, and in the long term, a more sustainable relationship to your work, making sure that in between work days, you have adequate time to recover, or that if you have a particularly emotionally intense work day, that you take some more time to recover and so on. But there's a third source of burnout that I think often goes missing, and that component is called cynicism. That is when you no longer believe in what it is that you are doing. And when you're feeling cynical, no vacation is going to fix that. No amount of upskilling is going to fix that. When you're feeling cynical, what you need is to feel inspired again. You need to remind yourself, why am I doing this to begin with? But it's really difficult to continue giving more of yourself when you're feeling cynical. It's one of the hardest things to come back from. And it's something that can creep in because we don't really recognize it until it can be too late. And so when it comes to diagnosing ourselves, I think it's just really helpful to think about, what am I experiencing right now? Am I feeling emotionally exhausted? Is my tank empty? Do I need a break? Or perhaps do I need to renegotiate a different relationship to my work so that it's more sustainable? Am I experiencing a lack of self-efficacy? Are the tasks that I'm working on not controllable enough for me? I can't really accomplish the outcomes that I want. Do I need to upskill so that I can actually do the work that I want to be doing? Or am I feeling cynical? Do I no longer believe in what it is that I'm trying to accomplish here? And that's a very different kind of break and a very different way of addressing it.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So it's one thing to say that pursuing and maintaining our passions is helpful to us, but not everyone might have the ability to do that. Here's a message we received from a listener named Nancy.

NANCY: I have a question concerning Jon's research. I was wondering if he saw any patterns around how a person's existing financial resources as well as expected changes in future earning potential might have had an impact on a decision whether or not to pursue a next chapter. For myself, for the first 25 years of my professional life, I worked primarily in banking and finance and we were able to establish a strong financial foundation and save well for retirement. Without this financial security, I am not sure that I would have pursued my next chapter of going to graduate school at the age of 48 to work as a therapist, which I will tell you is a much lower paying profession. Thank you.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So Jon, what does the research say about the correlation between passion and income? Is there a link there?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: I'm so glad Nancy brought that up. It was the main criticism that my wife had after our episode as well. And I didn't talk about the socioeconomic component. The truth is that many professions that allow someone to pursue their passion do not pay well. Right? Like if we think about the canonical example, the artists, the chefs, the musicians, a lot of these professions don't pay well. There's some evidence also that seems to suggest that people can be exploited for their passion. Meaning that if you ask somebody, oh, there's this additional task that needs to be done at the office. Who do you give that task to that you're more likely to give that to the passionate person because you think, oh, they'll do it for free. And there's also research showing that when people care very deeply about something, that they are less likely to want to bring up money in the salary negotiation because they worry that if they bring up money, other people might doubt how deeply they care about that. So all these things seem to suggest it can be really challenging to bring money into the mix. The broader evidence, however, is inconclusive. When you look at broad, large-scale correlational studies, the relationship between people who pursue work that they're deeply passionate about and their salary is sometimes flat, it's sometimes positive, sometimes negative. There's one paper by Yun-Hao Cho and Winnie Jung who suggest that one of the reasons why the relationship might actually be positive is that other people respond so positively to people who are passionate for what they're doing. I mentioned earlier research showing that people want to exploit others who are passionate, but in the same breath, I should mention that there's a lot of work that has shown that when we see someone who's really passionate for what they do, we also admire them more. We want to help and support them more. So there's this underlying conundrum. What does it actually mean and look like? There is one more thing I want to add to Nancy, and I'm really glad, Nancy, that you went back to grad school after 25 years of banking. More often than not, I think that's a very rare story for the following reason. People often underestimate how much they change in the future. There's this really wonderful work by Daniel Gilbert and others, and they call it the end of history illusion. We think that we are the most complete version of ourselves at this point in time, and that we have changed more in the past than we will change in the future. Whereas when you look at the actual data, that's not true. We actually change a lot more in the future than we might think. And so I have a lot of students who come to my office and who report the very same thing that Nancy was telling me. I am 25 years old. I have student debt. I need to go into finance, consulting. I need to make money. I need to save for retirement. And I am very sympathetic to those arguments. And I say, I understand you have those constraints. That makes a lot of sense. But the students then are very quick to add. And later on, when I am in my 40s, in my 50s or 60s, then I am going to change and then I am going to pursue work that is really meaningful to me. What they underestimate is that when they are in their 40s, 50s or 60s, who they are has fundamentally changed. The people that they have surrounded themselves with for the last 20, 30 years of their career will be very different to who they were, perhaps at that moment in time. Their values will be impacted by that. Their lifestyle has changed. And then switching back actually becomes a lot more difficult and challenging. So many of the conversations I've had with alums who are in their 50s and 60s who are telling me, oh, I remember when I was in my 20s and I wanted to pursue what I was passionate about and I put it off. What they tell me now is I wish I had started earlier. I wish I had found a way, even if I couldn't do it in my work, I wish I had found a way to continue developing that sense, to find ways to experiment and explore so that when I had finally had the time to actually make that the main attention that I could focus on, that I knew what to do and how to do it.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, Jon answers your questions about practical steps we can take to nurture our passions. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Having a job that pays the bills is great, but even better is doing work that builds on your passions, one that challenges you, that drives you to innovate and excel. This message, that the ideal career is one where our work and our passions are neatly aligned, is widespread in American culture. For better or for worse, many of us want our work to do more than just keep a roof over our heads. We wanted to reflect who we are. Our guest for today's edition of Your Questions Answered is Jon Jachimowicz, a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. Jon, a lot of your work seems to be about stepping back from the pursuit of passion to see it more clearly and accurately. You say that one obstacle to doing this lies in the way that we have moralized passion. What do you mean by that?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: I think that we have elevated the pursuit of passion to such a high moral level where we are a good person for pursuing our passion and vice versa. We're seen as a morally bad person if we don't pursue our passion. And I think that that is a wrong expectation to have. At best, I think it's unhelpful. And at worst, I think it actively makes the pursuit of passion more challenging for the people who enter that. Let me explain why. I think that when we tell people you should pursue your passion, it becomes an imperative and a source of pressure that can make it difficult for people to actually explore how they want to go about pursuing their passion, when they might want to explore their passion, and it implicitly denigrates other ways of finding meaning in their life. Amy Wzefsiewski has this really wonderful distinction between meaning and meaningful. Work can have a meaning without in and of itself being meaningful. I can think of my work as having a really important role in my life. It can empower me to do other things. It might allow me to support my family. But in and of itself, that work might not necessarily be meaningful. And we need to be careful, in my mind, not to denigrate people who find that their work has meaning, but who in and of itself do not find their work to be meaningful. Because the reality is that for many people, pursuing work that is meaningful is a luxury, or something that they feel like they are not able to do at that point in time. And I think we as a society need to embrace that that is a perfectly great justification to do what it is that we're doing. I think we would do better by highlighting that for some people, given their life circumstances at some time points, it might actually be more meaningful if they focused on work that isn't in and of itself something that they're passionate about, but that might empower them either to pursue their passion later on in life, or to pursue their passion outside of work, which is an equally noble, or in my mind at least, an equally noble way of doing something that we deeply care about.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So one other unfortunate consequence of moralizing passion is that passionate people can sometimes be reluctant to give up their passions, even when they should, because they're afraid that others will think less of them. I want to play you a clip of a man named Simone Stolzow, who left a traditional career in journalism to become a speaker and a consultant. Here he is on a podcast describing how he felt about that decision.

CLIP: I felt guilty. I felt that I was sort of abandoning a calling and democracy dies in darkness, and what am I doing turning off one more light in the room? And will my colleagues and my coworkers ever forgive me? Will I ever be able to publish ever again?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Jon, would you say this is another way in which moralizing passions ends up hurting people who decide to take a different route in their lives?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: Absolutely, I think part of the challenge is that when we moralize passion in that way, we also worry about how other people might think of us if we were to quit or give up on one passion pursuit. The implication being, if I am a good person for pursuing a passion, then what must be wrong with me that I'm now giving up on that thing? There must be something inherently morally wrong with me. I must be a bad person for choosing to give up on what it is that I'm passionate about. Or at least that's the belief that people themselves have. What we actually find in the research together with Zach Barry and Brian Lucas is that other people understand that sometimes you need to give up on one passion in order to pursue another, that that's just what life is like, that you don't give up on passion pursuit altogether. But from that person's perspective who's pursuing a passion, they might really worry are other people going to think of me as a lesser person because I've given up on that passion. And we find that that worry can keep people in jobs that they perhaps initially were really passionate about or where the working conditions perhaps initially were a really good fit, but where for whatever reason, it's no longer a fit where they're now having troubles and challenges maintaining that passion or they're incurring negative outcomes that can harm them in the long run. But they keep on persevering because they worry so much about what other people will say if they were to give up.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the listeners we heard from earlier, Reem, is an anthropologist. So she listened to your work about passion from a cultural perspective. Reem was born in Germany but has lived and worked in the UK for a decade. And she sees major differences between the two cultural contexts. Here she is.

REEM: It's really interesting to see how we communicate that in Germany, sort of where I grew up and I've been living in the UK for the past 10 years. It's really different how we talk about different things in the UK. People are really self-deprecating and really vulnerable and really open. And it seems more, I guess, real when people say, well, I work really hard but at the same time it was so hard. And it was just I lost my hair and I developed a skin condition and I lost all my friends. And in Germany, there is almost that almost strive for like not perfectionism, but sort of like, oh, it can be very easy to me. I'm just naturally very smart. It's very it was kind of very easy. And how? Yeah, I just found really interesting thinking about the sort of different nature of how we talk about passion.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, Jon, what Reem is describing here sounds like the duck syndrome. Some people want you to know how hard they're working, while others want to conceal how hard they're working. They're like ducks placidly gliding along the surface of the water, but underwater, they're furiously paddling. I know you grew up in Germany. What have you found in terms of differences in passion across cultures, both in your own life and in your research?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: Yeah, that's a great question. And it sounds to me like what Reem is paying attention to here is how people talk about their work and how they talk about what they're passionate about. I think what I really appreciate about what Reem is highlighting here is that what is okay to conceal and what is important to reveal can vary from one cultural context to the next. So in the UK, it is more acceptable and perhaps even expected to be a little more self-deprecating. And that is a more acceptable way to talk about one's work and perhaps even a more acceptable way to talk about oneself, to disclose some weaknesses or some challenges to round out one's narrative. If you don't want to be too full of yourself and come across as perhaps too arrogant in that context. Whereas in Germany, the way that Rima is describing it, people are more hesitant in disclosing some weaknesses and challenges that they've experienced. And instead, it sounds to me like that's a more, like a genius narrative or like a naturalness narrative, meaning that this comes very easy to me. I've been passionate about this all along. There is no struggle here. Everything is great, which is a very different way of thinking about how much of myself I want to disclose and what I am worried about other people might think. And so that can be really challenging in how we think about how we communicate our passion. What I have found personally is that when I express my passion, I have to be a little bit more reserved in Germany. I have to be a bit more thoughtful that I cannot wave my hands as intensely. I cannot speak quite as loudly and quite as quickly in German because that is not how other people expect passion should be expressed. And instead, it seems like passion in the German cultural context is more about deterministic focus, being really clear and articulate and having a vision that you can articulate versus in the US. It sounds like there is no passion that can be too much. I can wave my hands. I can go absolutely nuts and crazy. And people might say, look at this person. They're so passionate about what they're doing. I think there's a second component to what Reem was mentioning that I wanted to highlight. And that's the extent to which we value passion or the extent to which we believe that passion is something that people should pursue. There's some work that Paolo Kief has done and Hazel Rose Marcus have done where they survey people across different countries around the world. And perhaps unsurprisingly, what those two papers find is that in cultures that are less individualistic, so where it's less about what you yourself want to accomplish and more about what is beneficial for the group, that in those cultures, passion still matters, but it matters less as an important career goal. Instead, other career goals take higher prominence, being able to support your family, being able to contribute to your community and so on. Whereas in cultures that are more individualistic, and the US ranks really highly there, so does the UK and many other Western countries, you see that passion floats a lot more to the top as one of the most important things to consider in your career.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We got a lot of questions from listeners about transitioning to new passions as retirement approaches. Here's one message from listener, Hank.

HANK: As I near retirement age, I just turned 70, my passion for my work is going down so much. I suppose it's a natural thing. But what does one do about diminishing passion as one reaches retirement? I want to stay relevant in my work. I am very much relevant, I suppose I could say. And how does one transition from one passion to another? Thanks very much.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, Jon, even if we maintain a passion throughout our whole career, most of us will eventually scale back or stop pursuing that passion at some point. What does passion look like beyond retirement?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: I think that's a great question, and I'm really grateful to Hank for bringing that up. I can assure Hank that is a very common narrative. Teresa Amabile and some of her colleagues have written a book about that, in part because they are academics who themselves retired and then realized how difficult it is to retire and no longer do what it is that is really meaningful to you. So I think that what Hank is doing in and of itself, I think is really helpful, which is to starting to think about what will I do after retirement? What Teresa Amabile and others find in their book is that a lot of people under plan what retirement will look like. Retirement is often seen as the end goal. This is what I'm retiring from. I'm no longer doing work. And instead they reframe it in a way that I think is really helpful. What are you retiring to? Not seeing retirement as something that is the end of a journey, but it's just a stop along the journey. And what's the next destination that you're going to go to? And in that process, you can start thinking about what are the things, even while I'm still working, that I might want to do to prepare myself. Perhaps that means I need to explore more of the things that I might want to do after retirement. Perhaps that means that I need to engage in a little bit of a self-focus, exploring my identity, who am I? What do I want out of life? What is something that I've always wanted to accomplish? And perhaps even experimenting, dipping my toes in a number of different things. Is this really something feasible for me? Is this something that I could see myself doing? Is this something that I can do while I still live where I live? Is it available where I am? Or would it require a very different way of living? But being more thoughtful and intentional, I think is really helpful. One of the great comparison, at least in my mind, are athletes. Athletes retire when they're very young. Many athletes retire when they're in their 30s. And so retirement is a shock that we can observe and then actually look at for a lot longer time periods. And there's this recent story that I love by Andrew Luck, who was a quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts for six years. Retired, I think he was 29 or 30 when he retired, which is quite young for a football player. And in the months and years that followed, or the way that he talks about it now, fell into a deep crisis of meaning. He was completely unprepared for what he wanted to do next. There were really difficult days. And in large parts, because he asked himself, if I'm not a quarterback, then who am I? And then to start thinking about, what am I drawn to? What else could I do that can, that really opened the door for him? He now ultimately, he went back to grad school. He is now, I believe, the general manager of the Stanford football program. So a very different role than he had before, but still somewhat related to the sport of football that he cared very deeply about. But I think using that as an excuse to say, what if we thought more intentionally about what we might want to do after retirement and started experimenting now before we actually make that transition, so that when retirement happens, we have something that we can retire to and we can start experimenting with.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, listeners share their ideas and stories about how to maintain a passion over the long haul. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We're surrounded in our culture by stories of people who pursued their passions and became wildly successful. The actor who was down to the last five bucks in his bank account when he scored the role that made him a star. The inventor who tinkered for years in his garage before finally having a eureka moment. The writer whose work was rejected dozens of times before she finally broke through and made it to the bestseller lists. It's much more rare to hear tales of passion that peter out or end in failure. So when we struggle to fulfill our dreams, we wonder what's wrong with me? Why can't I stay the course and succeed like all these other people? Today, in the latest edition of our segment, Your Questions Answered, we're talking with behavioral scientist, Jon Jachimowicz, about how our passions fade over time and what we can do about it. Jon, let's talk about strategies we can employ to keep our passions alive. We heard at the top of the show about the artist, Phil Hansen, and how he suffered nerve damage that caused him to fall out of love with his art. A few years later, Phil visited a neurologist about his problem. The neurologist looked at him and said, why don't you just embrace the sheikh? Phil shared what happened next in a TED Talk in 2013.

PHIL: So I did. I went home, I grabbed a pencil, and I just sort of let my hand shake and shake. I was making all these scribble pictures. And even though it wasn't the kind of art that I was ultimately passionate about, it felt great. And more importantly, once I embraced the sheikh, I realized I could still make art. I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, Jon, Phil went on to create lots of beautiful art by embracing the sheikh and using squiggly lines instead of tiny dots. Is there a deeper lesson here for the rest of us in how Phil responded to his doctor's advice?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: Absolutely. I love Phil Hansen's story because to me it exemplifies that we often have very narrow beliefs about how we want to go about pursuing our passion and that we're not attentive enough to the many different ways in which we could actually pursue our passion. So for Phil, he wanted to make pointillism art. That was what he had defined for himself as being his dream. And so when it didn't work out for him, he fell into a deep, dark hole because he said, this is the goal that I had. This is the path that would require for me to reach this goal. That path is no longer available for me and therefore I cannot reach this goal. When his neurologist said, wait, but you can still you can still make art. Like, why don't you just do it? But in a different way, what Phil started experimenting with was to realize maybe there are other things that I could do and maybe it'll take me to a different goal. But perhaps that goal is still meaningful to me. Perhaps that is still something that I could be passionate about. So I think the initial step here that he talks about is that he had to let go of the conceptions that he had about himself. The second step was to then embrace, okay, what else could I do? What other things can I pursue? Even with an uncertain outcome, right? I don't know what I'm ultimately working towards. And the way that I think about this is to be open to experimenting and in this way developing what it is that you're passionate about. It sounds to me like what Phil is doing is finding out why he cares about art so much. What it is that through art he wants to accomplish. But I think more broadly it highlights this distinction between the outcome that I think we become very fixated on. I want to become X person. I want to do Y thing versus the process. Here is how I'm going to go about developing and experimenting. This is a way in which I'm going to figure out who I am and what I care about. And it might ultimately lead me toward a different journey, toward a different end. But perhaps that can also be something that I could be passionate about.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: >We received some personal accounts from listeners about how they've been able to maintain their passion over time. Here's one from Leonard.

LEONARD: I got into acting after a career in the Navy and having lost my wife to breast cancer. I got into acting for therapeutic reasons primarily, but developed quite a passion for it. I was in LA for a couple of years and actually got a couple of small roles and had one film with Clint Eastwood. I was fortunate enough to be in. But what I've realized is that in order to pursue the passion, in order to keep it sustained, what works for me is to study, is to continue to be involved in training and to continue to try to learn and have an intellectual curiosity about what the sense of the cutting edge of the field really is. You don't really think about acting as having a cutting edge very much, but in fact, it very much has one. And trying to understand that and pursue that and recognize that, even at the local level, I think, is tremendous for having the ability to sustain your passion.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Jon, what do you make of Leonard's story and his assertion that curiosity is a key to keeping passion alive?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: I love that story, Leonard, and thank you for sharing that. I think what's important is to say that he approached it with a sense of open-mindedness. Perhaps this could be something that I'm passionate about. And I think having that approach toward the world is really helpful. Matt Blumen colleagues have charted the narratives that people tell when they are deeply engaged in deeply meaningful work. And the narratives are not as straightforward as we often like them to be. We want stories of passionate people to be A to B. I was really passionate about music, so I studied music for 30 years, and now I'm a really famous musician. No challenge or strife, period. That's the story that we like hearing. I think it provides us with a sense of comfort that like this is an easy narrative. When in reality, the stories of people who pursue deeply meaningful work is a lot more zig-savvy. I did this, then I did that, then I learned about this, then this bad thing happened, or this setback occurred, and then I had this success. And that's a much more normal way of living one's life, particularly a meaningful career. I think the other thing that Leonard mentioned that I think is really helpful is that it can be helpful to differentiate how we pursue our passion and what we are passionate about, and that over the course of our career, we can develop both. We can both develop how we pursue our passion. Maybe I'm passionate about one thing, but I'm going to try very many different ways of pursuing that thing, and or I can pursue what it is that I'm passionate about. Maybe that can change. Maybe I have one passion, then another passion, then another passion. But I think approaching it with this sense of curiosity and a developmental mindset, at least based on the research, seems really helpful.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hmm. Another suggestion comes from a listener named Lynn. She writes, when I was in between jobs, I took an exercise where I took a piece of paper and divided it into three columns. In the left column, I put all of the jobs I'd ever held, starting with fifth grade babysitting. In the middle column, I put all of the things I loved about each of these jobs. And in the far right column, I put all of the things I despised about each one. It was a great discovery for me to learn that I love coaching, counseling, mentoring, and empowering people, particularly women. What I hated were the bosses, meaning I really needed to find a job where I would be the boss. At the time, I was working with my financial advisor and she said, Lynn, you've done such a great job of bringing me clients over the last 10 years. You should do this job yourself. So began my career as a financial advisor, which has been by far and away the most exhilarating and rewarding career of my life. Are there similar practical steps or exercises people can do to help them find their next passion?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: I really like this way that Lynn did it by highlighting, here's the things I love and importantly, here are the red flags. Here's the things that I don't want. I think we often neglect those red flags, and so I really like that exercise. I think there are a couple of things that I have found can be helpful, and it's not just things that I have developed. This is trying on a lot of different research that people have done, that I'm really grateful for that I can draw these tips on. I think one of the ways to think about this, and this is based on research by Akira Shabram and colleagues, who focused on people who have taken sabbaticals in their life and how they have used those sabbaticals to different ends, is to not only think of sabbaticals as places to recover, but to also think of them as places to discover more about oneself, and importantly, to then also practice. And I think it's this practice component that we often underestimate. I think a lot of people are very happy to do the kind of self-exploration that Lin talked about, but the second step is then to apply that and to experiment, to practice. What would actually look like to then act on that information, and what sort of feedback do I then get? Arminia Ibarra calls that a provisional self. It's kind of like putting on a jacket, and you get two sources of feedback when you put on a jacket. The first is you get to wear it, and you get to look in the mirror, and you get to ask yourself, do I like how I look in this jacket? Do I like what it says about me? But you can then also go to a dinner party, or you can go to the office, and you can see how other people respond to you. And you can say, do I like how other people see me? Is this how I want to be seen by other people? And it's this experimentation that I think people don't do quite enough of, in part because it's really scary, but it's a really helpful source of information that can tell us a lot about ourselves, both about who we are and what we care about, but perhaps also about how we want to pursue that that we're passionate about.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I want to end on one last question, and in some ways it goes back to something that I think our listeners have asked over and over since our conversation with you was first put out, Jan. It's about what to do if you don't have a passion to transition to after one starts to dull. It comes from a listener named Richard.

RICHARD: You gave the example of the Boston Symphony flutist who felt there was more to her life than music, and she left her pinnacle career to become a leadership coach. It seems dulling of passion is a common and perhaps natural evolution in the lifespan of a career. If passion dulls and that does not necessarily mean there's another trapeze to grab on to. Having a second interest that one is passionate about of course is great, but what if there is not one? Can you speak about the journey of people whose passion dulls, yet do not have anything to replace it with?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What do you think, Jan?

JON JACHIMOWICZ: I felt that question. Thank you, Richard, for sharing that. I think that on its surface, I can hear a lot of fear in that question. What happens if one thing that I deeply care about is no longer there for me and I don't know what comes next or I don't think that there is something that comes next? That is really scary because in part, it means that we don't necessarily know who we are anymore. In many ways, it reminds me of the football player Andrew Luck who had to give up on football because of an injury, and then was forced to confront himself with the question, if I'm not a quarterback, then who am I? Sally Maitliss similarly has focused on dancers who had a career ending injury. Those are the very same thoughts that they ask themselves, if I'm not a dancer, then who am I? So, I think recognizing that when a person goes through something like that, it is normal and perhaps it should be expected that that's a very painful time period, and that perhaps there is no easy answer or easy solution. That's fine, and that's part of the journey. I think what we do next is then what determines the rest of that journey, what we do with that pain. We can say, I'm gonna do what I can to modify that pain, to treat that pain, but not the underlying symptom, and I'm gonna spread myself very thin. I'm gonna do a lot of different things. They might unnecessarily be meaningful, but they provide me with enough positive feedback that I can keep going. And that's one approach, but probably not an approach that will allow you to have long-term positive outcomes and will make you feel like your life is particularly meaningful. I think the more challenging set of questions is, well then, who are you to begin with? Like, why did you care so deeply about this one thing? And how else could you pursue that? How else could you use that as a jumping point to continue expanding? So I think it speaks to, on the one hand, the possibility, perhaps there is more we can do to prepare ourselves for what comes next if we notice that the flame of our passion is dying. But I would even say, if the flame of our passion is dying in this one thing, is there something I can do to rekindle it? Just because a passion is dying, I wouldn't necessarily use the inference that means that it's gone forever. Perhaps there's something I can do to reinvigorate that. Perhaps I can go back and understand, why did I care about this to begin with? What has changed in the last few years? When I think back to a time period when I was really fired up, what were the circumstances then? Who was I working with? What was I working on? What was going on in my life? I think we often make the inference that there must be something wrong. But perhaps I'm under duress. Maybe I'm really stressed. Maybe something is happening in my life that makes it really difficult for me to experience passion. So I think using that as an opportunity to diagnose, perhaps even to experiment. And if none of that works and really you give up on a passion and you don't know what comes next, to give yourself the space to understand it is okay if it's really painful, because what has happened is a big loss. And after their loss, something else could happen and that provides space and opportunity for the next thing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Jon Jachimowicz is a behavioral scientist at the Harvard Business School. Jon, thank you so much for joining us again on Hidden Brain. Thank you so much, Shankar, for having me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoyed the ideas we explored on today's episode, please share it with a few friends. I'm Shankar Vedantam, see you soon.