00:00:00
Dr. Cortney Warren
No other human defines your value, whether you're going through a breakup, whether you're having a difficult time in a relationship, or whether you're struggling with your family, you have value because you exist.
00:00:18
Raquel Baldelomar
Hi everyone. My name is Raquel Baldelomar and welcome to the mega podcast where I speak with high achievers on how they fulfill their professional dreams while being and balance throughout their lives. Today I am with Dr. Cortney Warren, an award-winning clinical psychologist, author and professor for the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She's an expert on addictions, self-deception, eating pathology, and the practice of psychotherapy from a cross-cultural perspective known for her ability to distill complex psychological concepts into easily applicable advice for the public. Dr. Courtney is a go-to research consultant, speaker and expert for numerous publications and television shows. Dr. Courtney's practical advice is designed to empower individuals to overcome their biggest obstacle to personal growth, self-deception,
00:01:07
Raquel Baldelomar
Latest work, letting go of your ex CBT skills to heal the pain of a breakup and overcome love addiction explores breakups and how to heal them through the lens of addiction and cognitive behavior therapy. This is the book everyone, highly recommend it. Anyone going through a breakup? It's a great, great, great, great book. Dr. Warren's love for travel and real world experiences is a testament to her understanding of the human condition. Before the age of 20, she lived in Australia and Argentina and traveled throughout Central America, south America, Russia, Scandinavia, and Western Europe. She is married and has two children, an 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son. She loves to walk on the beach and find little pieces of sea glass with her family. Dr. Courtney, welcome to the Mega podcast.
00:01:54
Dr. Cortney Warren
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
00:01:57
Raquel Baldelomar
I am so excited to have you here and I want to talk to you first about your experience in growing up in all of these countries, all of these other countries, and how they shaped your perspective. Did that lend you to want to get into study psychology and just get into this field? Because as a person who also grew up in another country for the first 10 years of my life, I feel like I have a really different unique understanding of people and unique understanding of just the world, and I want to hear your perspective of what that was like.
00:02:28
Dr. Cortney Warren
I think it's the difference between an experiential learning platform and reading in a classroom setting that my father's Scandinavian, I'm the child of two professors, so I grew up in a very academic household and my parents both really believed that I needed to learn by interaction and by exploring and by seeing different cultural contexts. My mother was a feminist philosopher. She gave talks all over the world in these very big venues on racism, sexism, classism, and so I would go with her and watch her give talks,
And there's no question that it shaped me. There's no question that it led me to ask questions about human nature, about what's similar and different about us, about how culture influences our identity, our values, the way that we see ourselves, and it's part of the reason that I got really invested in interested in eating disorders because it's such a culturally influenced disorder when we think about mental health. So my goodness, I think going into the world for anyone listening and putting yourself in situations that are sometimes uncomfortable, that are foreign, that are new, that force you to look in the mirror while you're looking outside is such an amazing way to learn.
00:04:03
Raquel Baldelomar
It is, and I think that's a big reason I love traveling is that it's that portion of experiential learning that you just cannot get studying a YouTube video or reading a book. Where there certain countries that you really loved that you connected with?
00:04:18
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh, so many. There were certain memories that you probably have too from childhood that stick with you in really profound ways. We went to Russia right after the fall of the CCCP, and I remember coming out of a subway and having kids hanging on me, begging me for food,
Anything in Russian, of course, because I didn't speak it, and I will never forget that feeling of compassion, of utter sadness, of guilt. When I came back to the United States of not knowing how to help powerlessness gratitude for the life that I had, just this massive mix of emotions that I brought back with me that of course shaped me. And then some that weren't quite so sad too, where inspiring moments of meeting people and having them literally welcome me into their home and offer me something to eat that was like amazing. These people are so amazing and so generous, and they have nothing to gain. They're just generous of spirit and how wonderful the human condition can be when we're at our best.
00:05:38
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah. Talking about the human condition, your mother, Dr. Karen Warren, a prominent feminist philosopher, seemed like she taught you a lot about the human condition.
00:05:50
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh, I mean, no question. She personally had a really difficult life in some ways, and I'm sure that's another reason I went into psychology. She was brilliant. She was tenacious. She stood up for the underprivileged, including the environment. She was passionate about environmental ethics, and I think she was such a powerful mentor for me to see a woman with a PhD in philosophy talking about isms of domination in a very male dominated field philosophy. I think she was one of the first PhDs in philosophy from UMass where she went to graduate school and just watching her stand in her own power and doing what she believed in authentically even when it was really hard, even when she was fighting personal demons is so admirable, and it's something that I carry with me when I see people struggle. That doesn't frighten me at all. When I see people struggle and strive to grow and do more and be better, it's probably the most awe inspiring experience I can have. It brings so much respect and so much compassion and so much empathy because being human is really hard, and so having someone say, I'm facing adversity. I'm struggling, but I'm not going to let this break me. I'm not going to fall on my face. I might fall for a minute, but then I'm getting back up because now what? Now I have to do something differently. My mother had that in spades,
00:07:40
Raquel Baldelomar
And she also was a single mom.
00:07:42
Dr. Cortney Warren
She was, yes, she was. My parents were divorced when I was about three, and she raised me on her own, really did everything that she could for me, and the amount of gratitude I have for her is endless for that.
00:08:00
Raquel Baldelomar
When you see what she did as a feminist, how do you think feminism has changed from what she taught to now, how you perceive what feminism is these days? Because I feel like feminism sometimes can be anti-men, but I think back then there was always more of a focus on men versus women because men were so dominated. But how do you think feminism has changed now in today's world?
00:08:29
Dr. Cortney Warren
That's such an interesting question because I do think feminism sometimes gets a bad name at the core of feminism. It is by definition that men and women are of equal value. It's really that people are of equal value, to be honest, and when it becomes competitive, men versus women, that's really a very tiny subset of what feminism is. So there are many kinds of feminists. There are radical feminists, there are existential feminists. So thinking through from a core foundational perspective that we live in a cultural context where gender matters and sex matters, and in the hierarchy of power, which is what we're talking about with isms of domination of any kind, any culture that values maleness and men over feminineness and women is by definition sexist feminism was really created to fight that from Gloria Steinem way back with the thrust of the feminist movement in this country.
Anyway, I think one of the best ways that feminism has shifted per my mother's work to a large degree and many of her colleagues, is that it is much better at unpacking how isms of domination are interrelated. So I think old feminists oftentimes really talked about just gender inequality and just sex-based inequality, whereas now it's really hard to talk about sex-based inequality without also talking about race-based inequality or class-based inequality and sort of appreciating that any time you have a power dynamic in a cultural context that is holding one group of people down because of a demographic feature, we have a problem. And if you can raise your voice to say, I don't believe in that, and as a human being, I'm here to say I don't think that that's moral. I don't think that's just it's fair. And so I call myself a feminist to acknowledge that I don't think it's fair, and I personally strive to not internalize those beliefs, to not act on those beliefs, even though I lived in a culture where I probably did to some degree because we all do. I think that's the best of what feminism has to offer.
00:11:08
Raquel Baldelomar
That's wonderful. Talking about some of your biggest role models, you talk about your grandmother being one of your biggest role models and talk about a feminist back in her time.
00:11:18
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes. Oh
00:11:18
Raquel Baldelomar
My goodness. Tell me about your grandmother and what she went through.
00:11:23
Dr. Cortney Warren
My grandmother married at 18, went to college, had four kids, probably per many people's experience in that era, and in that generation was a stay-at-home housewife, I think relatively unhappily, I think had a husband who cheated, probably everyone struggled at some level. And then when my mother was 13 or 14 years old, he killed himself.
00:11:59
Raquel Baldelomar
That must have been so hard for your mother and your grandmother.
00:12:02
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes, for the whole family system.
00:12:06
Raquel Baldelomar
Did her husband have mental illness?
00:12:10
Dr. Cortney Warren
You wouldn't have known it at the time, but I think he was probably very depressed.
00:12:15
Raquel Baldelomar
And it wasn't talked about back then.
00:12:17
Dr. Cortney Warren
No. And it was very stigmatized and it was very sort of secretive and you whisper about its suicide was something that was to be ashamed of something must have been wrong with him. And I think if you kind of picture yourself or if I picture myself in my grandmother's shoes as a mother with four young children, with a husband who killed himself in an era where that was seen as very negative with no income, with no kind of infrastructure to support her, that's a pretty miserable life reality.
00:12:50
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah. How did she deal through that?
00:12:52
Dr. Cortney Warren
She got a job. She figured out how to get her kids into school. She really developed a stiff upper lip and said, well, this is out of my control. I can't change what happened, but now what I have to do something. And I think having that degree of grit, which a lot of people have when you see it, it's pretty extraordinary
00:13:20
Dr. Cortney Warren
It really could have gone a very different way if she hadn't kind of just sucked it up and said, all right, we're going to have to find a cheap apartment and I'm going to have to get a job and I'm going to have to figure out how we're going to make it through this, and our life looks nothing like it used to and nothing like I wanted, this is not what I wanted, but this is where I am, so let me figure it out.
00:13:41
Raquel Baldelomar
And she figured it out
00:13:42
Dr. Cortney Warren
And she figured it
00:13:43
Raquel Baldelomar
Out. And I'm sure that's kind of what led in a way you to get into your career is seeing how people can struggle and rise in the worst possible circumstances
00:13:56
Dr. Cortney Warren
And to admire it, to really see it as really difficult things happen to people in life.
You can't control most of it. The only thing you can control is your response. And so when I think about my own personal life, my mother's life, my family dynamics or patients I work with or friends of mine or people I interact with in a work context, I'm always thinking, so now what can we do today given this information so that you can have the most fulfilling life possible, independent of your past, independent of all of the bad things. And trust me, horrible things happen to wonderful people all the time. We aren't somehow protected from harm. That's a self deceptive belief that we want to know is true, but it just plain isn't true. Really hard things will happen to you in your life
00:15:02
Raquel Baldelomar
And teaching people how to get that grit within themselves when that happens.
00:15:06
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes. So how are you going to respond to it to keep your integrity, to keep your sense of self, to grow through it, to see it as an opportunity, not as victimization, but as an opportunity for resilience to transform into the next version of yourself.
00:15:28
Raquel Baldelomar
When did you know you really wanted to get into psychology and make your life that work?
00:15:36
Dr. Cortney Warren
When I was a teenager.
00:15:37
Raquel Baldelomar
Really?
00:15:37
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yeah, pretty young.
00:15:39
Raquel Baldelomar
That's great that you knew that young you
00:15:40
Dr. Cortney Warren
Wanted. I really did. And I knew I was going to study eating disorders because part of traveling the world led me to ask questions about body image and food and eating norms that I don't know if I would've asked if I had just stayed in the us. Did
00:16:00
Raquel Baldelomar
Certain countries culturally have more predisposition to eating disorders?
00:16:05
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes. Okay. So where were,
00:16:07
Raquel Baldelomar
Yes.
00:16:08
Dr. Cortney Warren
Obviously the United States, especially women, especially women, it's a very gendered disorder. Historically, western Europe, first world countries with an excess of food really with very clear value-based ideals of appearance.
So growing up in the Midwest as probably a very typical teenager, I didn't have any friends who really liked the way they looked. It was really normal for me to be around girls especially who would look in the mirror and pick themselves apart. For the moms to be chronically on a diet, whether they needed to lose weight or not, for people to downplay their appearance, it was as if no one was satisfied. It was never enough. It was the next diet, or I have to lose five more pounds, or I don't like my hair. It's curlier. I don't like my hair. It's straight. Or, oh, this dress doesn't look good on me. It was a constant picking a part of our physical selves as if it was a project.
00:17:17
Raquel Baldelomar
And that's when you were a teenager.
00:17:18
Dr. Cortney Warren
I
00:17:18
Raquel Baldelomar
Mean, imagine how that's been amplified now with social media.
00:17:23
Dr. Cortney Warren
No question. I think it's gotten worse. And then I would go to another country and that wasn't the case, and that was fascinating to me. It isn't that across cultures people don't want to be attractive. That's not true. Every cultural context, every community will have ideals of appearance, but the degree to which they matter to your as a human being to how much you are valued as a person varies greatly.
00:17:55
Raquel Baldelomar
Oh yeah. I mean, I certainly remember growing up in Bolivia where it just was not a focus. That was not a focus. And then as soon as I'm in the United States, girls are comparing each other. Parents, moms are calling their kids body, shaming them if they've gained some weight, and that just never happened. And that really affects a young when she feels like she has to look a certain way. So that's what eating disorders is. What made you is what made you kind of go into that world of psychology.
00:18:28
Dr. Cortney Warren
I was fascinated by that, by who cooked the food, by whether people talked about the food, people who loved food as opposed to seeing it as a battleground, which was more what I saw in the us. So I started doing research and I went in as a psych major into undergrad.
00:18:44
Raquel Baldelomar
So you got your tenure from the Department of Psychology at UNLV at the age of 34. That's so young to become a tenured professor. What was that experience like and what did you have to sacrifice up to 34 in order to get that tenured professorship?
00:19:02
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh my gosh. Academia is pretty brutal, which you probably know. Getting a tenured position is really difficult, and then getting tenure is really difficult. It's really got to be a labor of love because the amount of time and energy that goes to getting there and then getting the job, I think growing up, having two professors as parents, I sort of by definition assumed I would go into academia. I was kind of bred for it, and there are parts of it that I loved being on a university campus where you're really paid to think and you have all these young minds or older minds, but minds who are interested in exploring a topic, in learning, in hopefully respectful discourse about really provocative topics that we don't always have answers to is amazing. It's like brain candy for me. I love that environment. It's inspiring and it's fun and it's compelling.
However, it's also not a full-time job being a graduate student or being a faculty member. It's far more than a full-time job. It's more of a lifestyle. And I think I had internalized, I had been led to believe somehow that if I got tenure, then I was the best. Then I was smart enough. Then I somehow had proven to myself or to the world or to my parents that I could do it. And I think part of unpacking my own self-deception when I got tenure was getting tenure and looking at my life and thinking, do I really want to do this? Do I really like this? If I did this for the next 15 or 20 or 40 years of my life, will I look back with great gratitude thinking, oh, I did everything I really wanted to or will I look back and think, really, you did that because you thought you were supposed to? That was a very difficult journey for me to acknowledge and to be that introspective about my life. But once I started asking the questions, it became very clear that I needed to pivot.
00:21:32
Raquel Baldelomar
So what happened? You had a daughter?
00:21:36
Dr. Cortney Warren
I had a daughter. I worked 80 hours a week for years and years and years, which at the time I really loved. It wasn't a negative experience, it's just sort of the nature of the beast. If you want to get tenure because you're writing grants and you're writing research papers and it's a lot of work. And then I got tenure and got pregnant with my first child, and I would leave her at home early in the morning and come back close to her bedtime. And I did that for about two and a half months, and my husband said, is this what you want to be doing? And I said, no, no. And he said, well, then quit. So you quit. And so within a week I had a meeting with the chair of my department. It's not a small thing to quit a tenured position. So I said, I am resigning at the end of this year. So I finished that full academic year, and I actually stayed on faculty for a number of years afterwards to be sure that my graduate students finished their dissertations. But yeah, it just became clear to me that I was so grateful for the experience of being an academia and getting tenure. And I love the research that I do and I love psychology, but if I had stayed, I would've regretted it
00:23:11
Raquel Baldelomar
Because
00:23:11
Dr. Cortney Warren
I would've missed my daughter's core childhood experience.
00:23:17
Raquel Baldelomar
For people who may not have that ability to totally quit, let's say that yes,
00:23:23
Dr. Cortney Warren
The large majority of the world,
00:23:25
Raquel Baldelomar
How do you think they can try to still work for a tenured position that requires that so demanding or any other job that is demanding? How can someone try to have those and see their child during those formative stages of their life? Is it possible or do they have to give it up in opinion?
00:23:46
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh, I think it really depends on the person's circumstance. Of course, very few people can just quit a job, and I am fully aware of that. The amount of privilege that I had with a spouse who made enough money to support our family is not everybody's situation. So full disclosure there. But I think the first step of getting really honest with yourself is having an awareness of your experience. And so the first step for anyone who might be listening to this thinking, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm missing out on my kid's childhood. Or maybe it's something else. Maybe you've got an illness and you're thinking, well, I maybe don't have as much time left as I thought I did, to ask yourself regularly, am I living the life that I want to be living? Is this life that I'm creating the most meaningful that it can be for me?
And if the answer is no, it doesn't mean that you can quit your job. It doesn't mean that you could change an illness. It doesn't mean that you can change the big things in your life. Perhaps that depends on your circumstances, but I guarantee you there are smaller things that you can change today to be sure that you're getting more time with your kid or that you're getting more quality time with your kid or that you're efficiently doing your job in the way that you need to, but also making time to prioritize the things that perhaps matter to you more.
00:25:22
Raquel Baldelomar
And now you have two children, an 11-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son. What is motherhood like for you now?
00:25:32
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh, it's exhausting. Really. It'ss so exhausting. It's the hardest job that I've ever had. No question. And the most fulfilling, also no question. I think the reason that motherhood is so hard, there are many reasons that being a parent is so hard, but it is constant. I think that's the part that I didn't really understand before having kids, and it wouldn't have changed my choice to have them. But you're always on duty 24 7. And when I struggle the most is when I haven't created space for breaks to just focus on me. And so that's a very new experience for me where I'm responsible fundamentally for someone else's wellbeing before my own.
00:26:27
Raquel Baldelomar
And how have you integrated your professional life? How has your professional life changed now that your children are 11 to nine?
00:26:37
Dr. Cortney Warren
It's changed a lot from being full-time as a tenured professor, teaching, running a research lab, writing grants, writing research articles as sort of my 80 hour week job to, I'm still very active in research, but I also have really tried to make core psych material more available to the public. And in that way, I can structure my schedule really flexibly. So I still teach in the School of medicine at UNLV to psychiatry, psychiatry residents mostly. I still have my foot in academia. I still have my foot in the field in terms of doing the core research, which I really love. But my career has shifted to much more consultation with companies, with the public, doing public speaking, for organizations that want a workshop on personal development or a workshop on eating pathology and body image in teens or self-deception and honesty is a topic that a lot of people are interested in and writing books and writing blogs and being more outward facing to anyone in the world who is interested in taking what we know about mental health and applying it to their own life.
00:28:02
Raquel Baldelomar
And that's something that I think in academia, you just can't do so much so in the world of academia and your students that you can't kind of focus a little bit out into the broader world. And I think that also what makes your book so amazing in the fact that it's really real world examples. You understand people. It's not just a psychiatrist speaking. It's like a person who truly understands the issues that people are going through. I think it's really important that what I have seen in a lot of people who just aren't in academia their whole life, it's kind of like a bubble.
00:28:38
Dr. Cortney Warren
It is a bubble. It's a total bubble. You're absolutely right. We write for other PhD MDs, right? So the public is never going to read anything that we write, and it's not viewed positively, let's say to write for the public in traditional academic circles. You're not going to get any credit for writing a blog for Psychology today aimed at the public or writing a self-help book. That's not sort of what we're meant to do in academia, which I really think is a shame when it comes to psychology because it's the study of human nature. Everything that we do in our research is aimed to help people in their daily lived experiences.
00:29:22
Raquel Baldelomar
It seems like it's actually fulfilling for you. It's a track that you've done that say, this is much more fulfilling for me than anything else I would've done.
00:29:30
Dr. Cortney Warren
No question.
00:29:31
Raquel Baldelomar
You mentioned a bit about how you chose to seek, look at your life in ways to make you fulfilled versus happy. Talk a little bit about that. What does that mean to you to seek fulfillment instead of happiness?
00:29:48
Dr. Cortney Warren
I think there's been a lot of focus on happiness in pop culture, this idea that you want a happy life and you're looking to be happy all the time. The reality is that happiness is just an emotion and it by definition is going to be fleeting. You can't be happy all the time. It's not possible, and in fact, you're not even going to appreciate it if you don't also feel sad sometimes and anxious sometimes and overwhelmed sometimes. And so I really strive to live a fulfilling life, meaning do I have meaning in my life? Have I created a life that probably is going to have some happy moments and some sad moments, but that at the end of the day, I look at and say, I lived a life that mattered to me. I was the person I strived to be. I interacted with people in a meaningful way because I think that's actually what we're all going for. If you're aiming to just be happy in life, you're probably going to miss a lot of life.
00:31:02
Raquel Baldelomar
When you're on that journey of trying to find fulfillment rather than happiness and you're trying to find meaning, you're going to have difficult moments. Lots of them, a lot of them. So how can people try to, in those difficult moments that are not necessarily happy, they're challenging, they're chaotic, they're painful, how can they try to ease those uncomfortable feelings knowing that maybe it's leading them to perhaps have a fulfilling life, but it's definitely not enjoyable at that moment.
00:31:40
Dr. Cortney Warren
Remembering why you're doing it, remembering why you're asking the difficult questions, remembering that being honest with yourself requires being uncomfortable. Growth doesn't usually happen when everything's going well in your life. Growth happens when you're so uncomfortable that you can't afford to stay the same if you're asking yourself difficult questions and your skin is crawling and you're thinking, oh my gosh, this hurts so much, and I don't know if I can really admit this to myself because it's that bad. You're probably onto something. Stay with the emotion journal, talk to people, get a good therapist. Start to unpack what's really going on there because the more honest with yourself you can be, the more you can make choices that are congruent with the life you want to live.
00:32:46
Raquel Baldelomar
One of the most beautiful blog posts you wrote was talking about your mom and you're talking about when she was going through her MSA her disease, and you're right about as is true for all of us, personal growth and evolution rarely comes from times of peace. It comes from times of chaos. Yes. What was that experience like in dealing, seeing your mom get this terminal disease and trying to help her when you couldn't help her, and then I'm sure that was an incredibly chaotic, difficult time for you.
00:33:26
Dr. Cortney Warren
It really was. Watching a loved one die, even when you know it's happening and going to happen is a pretty horrible experience for anyone who's been through it. She died at the very beginning of Covid, really in August, 2020, and she had a neurodegenerative disease, so we knew it was going to kill her. We put her in hospice in her home in January of 2020, and then Covid hit in the US really kind of February, March, and I was in California and she was in Minnesota. I think that it did a number of things. It made me appreciate her more. It made me reflect on our relationship. It gave us the opportunity to not leave anything unsaid, which a lot of people don't get because if your loved one dies spontaneously, unexpectedly, you may or may not have had those moments where you really had to ask yourself, is there anything else that we need to unpack before there isn't time to do it?
She was diagnosed about five years before she died, which was amazing in the sense that we planned for everything we wanted to do before she died. I saw her probably once a month for the entire five years. We traveled together. We had the difficult conversations together. We had some pretty brutal conversations about some really difficult things too. But I can tell you that there is no regret with my mother in my body or my soul. We were porno. We were on the best terms possible when she died, and that was a tremendous gift. I will also say that as a philosopher, she was very active in end of life options legislation, and I tried to support her in doing that.
00:35:35
Raquel Baldelomar
Was that difficult for you?
00:35:38
Dr. Cortney Warren
She did not need to live the last bit of her life, in my opinion or in hers. It was unnecessarily painful and there was no hope that she was going to survive it in any less brutal of a way. So in my opinion and in her opinion, when we think about how we treat people who are terminally ill, it's inhumane to think that they have to suffer through the end of their life when they know it's already ending. And all it is is pain. She couldn't see. She couldn't walk, she couldn't get out of bed. She was starting to lose her mental capacities. It was not a life anymore. If I could have helped her die before that point, I would have, and she would've as well.
00:36:33
Raquel Baldelomar
For other family members that are going through similar situations where they have these end of life discussions and there's differences, there's different viewpoints between the son and the mother and the sister, what advice would you give to family members who have different opinions on end of life decisions?
00:36:58
Dr. Cortney Warren
I think it's really a personal choice. My own value base in life is that as a human being, one of our fundamental rights is autonomy, and you should be able to decide what you want to do with your body. And so I think that trying to respect the person who's dying and listen to them, and of course Grant what they would like is really the best that you can do. I also think that as a caregiver, you need a venue to get support that isn't the person dying. And so finding a way to have a support system around you where you vent your feelings, where you vent your frustrations or your sadness or whatever it is, your experience is really, really important because there's really not a lot of positive moments at the end of a terminally ill person's life. I
00:38:00
Raquel Baldelomar
Think then, not even just a terminally ill, but my grandmother who passed away at 95, seeing her, seeing her slowly, slowly decline was very hard. And it reminded me how I needed to be. I wasn't focused on mortality so much. I wasn't focused on my own. The aging decline that we have, and you kind of don't think about it, and when you're not really faced with it every day. So I think it's for a lot of people knowing how to accept their mortality is really important and recognize that this could happen to any of us.
00:38:42
Dr. Cortney Warren
Well, that's such a good example too because it's something that I write about that I think part of our desire to not confront death is that we avoid thinking about it, which is a self deceptive technique that will bite you later in life, I think. And so actually the fact that we're all going to die is really important to creating a fulfilling life today. The more you're in touch with the fact that this could be your last, the more motivated we should each be to make it better. And so having those, again, really uncomfortable for some people, really difficult conversations about death, do you have a will? Have you outlined what you want your funeral to look like? If you want one, do you talk to your parents or your children about your wishes? Those are questions I actively ask people because I hope the answer to all of them is yes, but they're not conversations that most people want to have.
00:39:50
Raquel Baldelomar
The opposite of death I think, is life and love, and that kind of goes into your book of letting go of your ex CBT skills and for CBT skills to heal the pain of a breakup and overcome love addiction. CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy.
00:40:07
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes, it is.
00:40:08
Raquel Baldelomar
Can you tell me what got you into, what made you want to write this book?
00:40:14
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh my goodness. This is not a book I ever thought I would write. Years ago I gave a TEDx talk on the psychology of self-deception. And in the talk I used myself as an example, and I used my struggles in intimate romantic relationships as an example of how we lie to ourselves. And after giving that talk, the number of questions that I get from people about breakups has been beyond what I could have ever imagined questions about why do I struggle in my romantic relationships? I listened to you talk about the lies you told yourself, and all I could think was that was me. She knows me. How does she know me? How can she see inside my brain? I had this breakup and now I think I'm never going to get over them, and my life is over and nobody's ever going to want me, and something's wrong with me, and everybody's always going to leave. So many years later, after getting so many questions about attachment, about romantic love, about what it does to us emotionally and psychologically and why it's so hard to get through a breakup, this book emerged.
00:41:35
Raquel Baldelomar
Let's talk about what is it at a biological level, at an evolutionary level that makes romantic love like an
00:41:45
Dr. Cortney Warren
Addiction. Anyone who's ever been in love probably knows that feeling, the feeling of falling in love.
00:41:54
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah, it's a beautiful feeling.
00:41:55
Dr. Cortney Warren
It's amazing.
00:41:56
Raquel Baldelomar
It's a euphoric feeling.
00:41:58
Dr. Cortney Warren
It's really one of the most natural highs you're ever going to get.
It's this stars in your eyes. You can't stop thinking about the person you think they're the greatest thing ever. You never want to live without them. Emotion, body sensations, cravings, you're thinking about them, you're talking about them. It's this overwhelming addictive experience where this one person becomes sort of a center part point in your life and your thoughts and your being. And the nature of addiction is really that. So when we think about addiction from a broader psychological perspective, it's really this idea that one stimuli, whether it's wine or a slot machine or a person, becomes the central focus of your life. And that this stimuli, this thing makes you want to be around them all the time, makes you want to use, you develop tolerance. You can't get enough of them when you're away from them, you experience withdrawal, you miss them, you think about them, you're pining over them. And so from an addictions perspective, really the core model is that experience happens, but it has really negative consequences for your life.
00:43:22
Raquel Baldelomar
Now there can there be a healthy addiction, like two people who are, let's say soulmates and it's a healthy relationship, they both want to have a relationship and they both are really into each other. Can there be a healthy addiction or is there a line in your mind?
00:43:40
Dr. Cortney Warren
I would say this. I think yes, but I wouldn't call it an addiction if isn't a problematic consequence. But I do think that love is a really natural addiction. And in the general way, we talk about what addiction feels like. It's very healthy if you fall in love with someone who falls in love with you and you're healthy for each other, that's the dream. That's what everybody is looking for. That's the fairytale. I think that's probably very unlikely for most humans, but we'll just put it out there that if it happened for you. Wonderful.
00:44:12
Raquel Baldelomar
So as a clinical psychologist who is very much inverse in academia,
00:44:17
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes.
00:44:17
Raquel Baldelomar
Do you believe in soulmates and twin flames?
00:44:21
Dr. Cortney Warren
I also would not use the term soulmates. I do believe that we will have chemistry with certain people. I do believe that you can report love it for sight. Is it really love? Well, you probably don't know anything about the person. So it's not love in the meaningful way that we talk about it in an attached healthy, long-term relationship, but it's certainly lust and maybe it turns into love over time. So I think yes, there are certain people you're just going to connect with and you're not going to understand why, and it's probably not going to be very rational.
00:45:02
Dr. Cortney Warren
That's really the crux of the problem or the reason that I wrote this book. The audience for this book is either you fell in love with someone who doesn't want to be with you, or you're in a relationship with someone and you are addicted to them. You feel like you need them, but it's not healthy and it's having negative consequences to your life
00:45:25
Raquel Baldelomar
To stay. And how do those negative consequences manifest itself? Or somebody who might be in a relationship or really like somebody and they think they're addicted, how does that manifest itself?
00:45:39
Dr. Cortney Warren
They just can't leave. They might say, I know they're not good for me. I know they don't treat me nicely. All my friends come to me and say, why are you with this person? They're not nice to you. They don't treat you well. You'll start making excuses. You'll try to rationalize it. You'll try to deny the bad things. You'll focus only on the good. You'll create a plethora of reasons why actually you have to stay. Those are big red flags in general, that the reason that you're staying in the relationship isn't that it's a healthy thing for you and it's addictive.
00:46:20
Raquel Baldelomar
But the book is really written for people who aren't a breakup.
00:46:23
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes,
00:46:24
Raquel Baldelomar
They don't want to be in a breakup. They want to get back together with their ex.
00:46:28
Dr. Cortney Warren
Usually they do. It's really written for people who are going through a breakup and struggling to move on.
00:46:35
Raquel Baldelomar
And it's very hard for a lot of people, I mean a lot of people, almost all of us who have any sort of emotionals just strength. I mean, we have been through breakups that have been really, really hard for us. Even if it wasn't necessarily a love addiction,
00:46:51
Dr. Cortney Warren
No question.
00:46:52
Raquel Baldelomar
It's been very hard. It could be very hard,
00:46:54
Dr. Cortney Warren
Very hard. When it's love addiction, I would say you're really looking for a pattern of behaviors to try to keep the relationship alive even though it's over. It's this idea that you've broken up and it's ended, but you can't stop thinking about them and you're still checking up on them and you're still bargaining with yourself about how you're going to get back together or how they can change or why you have to be together or why it has to work. It's this, we're broken up, but you're still in it. You're in a non-relationship relationship and you want to be,
00:47:29
Raquel Baldelomar
It's the self-deception that you referenced.
00:47:32
Dr. Cortney Warren
There's a lot of self-deception woven into this book in terms of skills that people would benefit from practicing.
00:47:40
Raquel Baldelomar
You use a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy skills to help people overcome that. Can you talk about what are some of those CBT
00:47:48
Dr. Cortney Warren
Skills
00:47:49
Raquel Baldelomar
That you recommend
00:47:50
Dr. Cortney Warren
Of course? Well, CBT is really at a basic level looking at how the way we think about a situation in our lives influence our emotional response to it and our behaviors. So for example, if you're going through a really rough breakup and your thoughts are, I'm never going to find anybody else, they're already dating somebody else. They've already moved on. Nobody's ever going to want me, clearly, I'm worthless. Well, the emotions that you experience are clearly going to be really negative.
Sadness, depression, guilt, anger, and the behaviors that you're going to want to engage in are not going to be good for you. Self-harm, drinking, checking up on your ex, screaming at the new partner. You can imagine the stalking behavior. This is where nothing is going to come from this that's positive for your mental health. So CBT is really trying to look at those patterns in a person's life and intervene from the way that you're thinking about the situation to the emotional responses that you're having to the way that you're acting in the moment. So there are so many skills that people can practice in the beginning of a breakup when you're really in the throes of it, and it's just that painful, horrible feeling. Things like distress tolerance, just sitting with the feeling and not doing anything to get rid of it, particularly when it involves contact with your ex, which is usually what people want to do. They want to call them, they want answers. They want to look on social media to see where they are. They want to ask their friends. They want to drive by their house, those kinds of things. No, stop. Sit with the emotion, don't do anything. It's a skill. It takes practice,
00:49:45
Raquel Baldelomar
And it's hard to do that. It's very, to go through that
00:49:48
Dr. Cortney Warren
Very painful.
00:49:49
Raquel Baldelomar
You write about how writing, journaling, that's doing that regularly. That is a very one CBT skill that you do. Along with
00:49:58
Dr. Cortney Warren
That, I would so recommend that because it's a wonderful venue for self-exploration. It is private. You can write anything in a journal. No one should ever read it. It's not meant to be factual. It's meant to be exploratory. That moment that you want to call your ex, you sit down with your journal and you just write all the things you want to tell them, all the things you're mad about, all the memories, all the dreams. You keep having everything, anything. Write it down. As you write it down, you're getting it out of your system and you're giving yourself a platform to explore it further because now you've admitted it. And once you admit something, it's really hard to deceive yourself again. So now you've created a platform to say, okay, so now what does this say about me? Why am I thinking this way? Where did I learn this?
What do I believe is true about romantic love? What do I believe is true about my ex or myself? More importantly, journaling is a wonderful mechanism for personal growth and exploration. Radical acceptance is a strategy that I use a lot early on with people, particularly if they're wishy-washy and thinking, oh, we're going to get back together. I can make them want me again today. We are going to radically accept the truth that you are broken up. That's it. Everything that you do is going to reflect that truth. So any of this dialogue, commentary that you're having in your own mind with yourself about how it's not true needs to go over to the side right now. You're broken up. So now what? These are rough skills. This is not easy, and it's not for the faint of heart, but I promise it gets easier as you
00:51:48
Raquel Baldelomar
Practice, and that's what makes it, it's small little steps you do every single day. And this book will actually teach you how to do those small little steps you talk about in the book, awareness, assessment, and action. Tell our viewers a little bit about that.
00:52:04
Dr. Cortney Warren
So I call these the three A's of authenticity, which is being authentic is what I hope for everyone. It's being safe and sound in your own skin. It's understanding who you are and owning that no matter where you go in the world, no matter who you're around, no matter what context you find yourself in, knowing I am me, these are my values, this is what I believe, this is how I'm going to act, this is who I am. So the three A's as you said, are awareness, assessment, and action. Awareness is becoming mindful of yourself, becoming aware of how you respond and react in situations in your life. And as you become aware, this amazing magical thing happens where you can pause long enough to do an assessment, which is the second step, which is, what does this say about me? Where is this coming from?
Why am I having this reaction? As you start to understand yourself more deeply, now you get to the third A, which is action. Now, what are you going to do with this information? And you actually have to do something because awareness in and of itself, if you're not going to change, is just going to be painful. I'll give you an example. I know it's hard sometimes to get these conceptual ideas on paper. So I struggled so much in my romantic relationships, especially early in my life. My first love was in college, fell madly in love with someone. We dated off and on for a long time, and there was one night he was going out with his friends and he had come by my dorm room to say goodnight. He was like, I've just came court to say goodnight. I hope you have a great night. I'm going out. And I just burst into tears, just absolutely burst into tears. And he looked at me like, what's wrong? What's wrong with you? Why are you crying?
And I couldn't tell him because I didn't know. So the first A of awareness is pause. I am having an emotional reaction that I don't understand because it doesn't make any sense in the context of the situation that I'm in right now. My boyfriend came over to say, goodnight. It makes no sense that I'm crying about this. This doesn't make any sense at all. And he looked at me and he said, if you continue acting like this, you're going to ruin our relationship. And he was right because there was nothing he could do to make me feel better because the reason that I was having that reaction required me to do the second step, which was the assessment, which is when I sat with myself after he left to go out with his friends and unpacked my reaction. My reaction was coming from the place of seeing my parents have a very miserable, violent relationship, and me learning from an early age that love is not trustworthy and that people will always hurt you. So him going out with his friends to me in that moment triggered this massive reaction about me that I had learned. If he goes out without me, something bad's going to happen.
Now, as I became more aware and got into some really good therapy and tried to understand what I had learned in early childhood that was negatively affecting my romantic relationships as an adult, which it always will by the way, I now had to take responsibility for my part. And as I did that, I had to change. So in those moments, I had to say, I might be feeling really anxious because my boyfriend is going out, but actually that's my problem, not his. He's going out with his friends. There's nothing wrong with this, and if I'm having a reaction to it, it's my responsibility to start healing that.
00:56:25
Raquel Baldelomar
And in regards to breakups, the second step, second part of your book is really exploring why you get into these unhealthy relationships, why you were attracted to that partner who may not be healthy for you.
00:56:42
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes,
00:56:43
Raquel Baldelomar
Developing core beliefs about love.
00:56:45
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes,
00:56:46
Raquel Baldelomar
I'm going to read a little bit of a segment of your book that I really love. Love is actually much more than a feeling, love's a need. It's a drive. It's the profound experience of emotional care, commitment, devotion that bonds you to another person and helps us survive as a species in these ways. Love is in particular, rational love is deeply ingrained in the fibers of our being, given our profound need for love, the decree to which you felt loved, safe, valued, cared for, understood and accepted as a child dramatically influences your core beliefs about yourself and others in a relationship. These stable fixed conclusions that developed early on in life are reflected in every aspect of your romantic relationship with your ex, what you were attracted to, how you felt safe, how you expected your ex to treat you, and how you treated them and how you expressed love. So the book is really also about how did you fall in love, what makes you fall in love, and why necessarily did you choose your ex as a partner and the faulty beliefs that you develop. Developing the faulty beliefs about your ex is another excellent part about the book because that is part of, I think, the narrative that people go through. They start putting faulty beliefs about their ex
That just are simply not true.
00:58:14
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes,
00:58:15
Raquel Baldelomar
So I think it's really excellent, just wonderful to have this as a guidebook for people who are going through a breakup, how they can try to look at their ex in a more realistic way and then really look at themselves to see how really it's on them, how they contributed to that situation.
00:58:38
Dr. Cortney Warren
Thank you for that. The truth is that your ex is just a stimulus. The people that we meet, and that's not to trivialize relationships, they're so important. People are so important, but we are projecting onto them so much of who we want them to be.
And really the journey of healing from a bad breakup or many bad experiences that you might have in life is instead of looking externally outward for answers, looking in the mirror and saying, what can I learn about myself from this experience? How did I get here? How did I pick this person? Why am habitually attracted to men that are not emotionally available? What does that say about me? For me, that said, I am very uncomfortable with emotional intimacy because it makes me vulnerable, and if I ever want to be intimate with another person, I have to work on that while I start selecting partners who can help me through it, not partners who are also not emotionally available. So it's this dance of who am I? How am I contributing to my own issues? How am I selecting people? What do I need to do differently so that I don't keep getting myself in a version of the same relationship over and over and over again?
01:00:11
Raquel Baldelomar
How can people go through that exercise of trying to have that mirror in front of them to really develop that? That is very hard. It's so hard to do that, honestly. I think obviously therapy. I highly believe in therapy. I've been in therapy for a big part of my life. But what are other ways that you recommend to have a mirror in essence that really gives you that honest sort of outlook of what it is that you need to work on?
01:00:46
Dr. Cortney Warren
A couple of suggestions. The first is when you have a strong emotional reaction to something, pause,
Stop. Don't react. Don't respond. Don't do anything. Get out a journal, write down what the situation is, what the thoughts are that are running through your head, what your emotional response is, and then pause with that and look at what you wrote down. Look at what the situation is. Try to unpack why you're having the reaction that you're having. This is a profound opening for you to understand yourself differently. And I have a self-monitoring chart in this book that anyone can use, which is very difficult, but it's really a guide for doing this where when you're having a moment where my reaction doesn't make sense, it's just really strong, write it down and try to ask yourself, are my thoughts accurate and are they helpful? Is this helping me? What is it about the situation that's triggering something in me that might have nothing to do with my life right now?
These are profound moments. So emotional reactions, number one. Number two, when people give you feedback about yourself, listen, our first response, usually when someone tells us something, especially something negative, is to be defensive, serves a function. It's denial. It protects us from information that we don't want to hear, but if you cut that off before you've thought about it, you have also cut off your opportunity to learn about yourself. So the next time somebody says, oh my gosh, you seem really irritated, or You seem really jealous, pause. And instead of saying, no, I'm not, or ignoring it, or, well, you're irritated too, or whatever, we might say more about that. What do you see in me? What are you noticing? What are you picking up on? Let me hear your perspective. Thank you for offering that perspective to me. I'm going to think about it, and you take it as a gift. You might still disagree with the person, you might still disagree, but usually there's at least a kernel of truth to what they're seeing, and that is something you can use to help yourself become more aware, and then assess and then take action.
01:03:18
Raquel Baldelomar
That's great. One of the quotes in your book that I love is when you say you're actually evolutionary and biologically driven to find a mate, have sex, make babies, and stay around. You're partner long enough to ensure the survival of your child.
01:03:36
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes.
01:03:36
Raquel Baldelomar
And when you fall in love with someone who wants you, feeling addicted to a lover doesn't seem problematic. Quite the contrary. It's euphoric. I think human beings are wired to want to find a relationship, want to find a mate.
01:03:51
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes,
01:03:52
Raquel Baldelomar
And a lot of how people are doing that these days is through these online relationships, through apps. What has been your experience with apps, and what do you recommend to people who are on these apps, and what are the problems that apps can bring to a relationship?
01:04:10
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh my goodness. I do think it is the way of dating at this point, right? We are a very internet-based group of humans at this point in terms of some of the struggles that they present. Honesty is a huge one. So what people write about themselves on an app in their profile, how they present themselves, I would always assume that it's partially false. They're trying to present their best self, which is fine. That's also human nature. You do that on a first date also if you were in person, but online, it's easier to be deceptive. You put just the best looking picture of yourself and maybe elaborate a little bit more about what you're doing. I think it's probably difficult to assess whether you're going to have any chemistry with someone. If you just see them online, you have less of the context, less of the back and forth.
Even just being in the same room with someone where you get to smell them and see them and be next to them, usually we have a better sense of are we attracted to them? One of the good things about apps, I would say, is that if you can have a more meaningful dialogue with someone, talk on the phone or do email exchange or message exchange, where you get to see, oh, I like them as a person. That's really the foundation for a good relationship is if you like them as a person, as a friend, as a human being. And sometimes people can form a bond because they like who they are, so that when they meet, even if it's not a full love connection, you liked each other and you still like each other and sometimes love blossoms from that.
01:06:01
Raquel Baldelomar
You talk about the paradox of choice with online dating.
01:06:05
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes.
01:06:06
Raquel Baldelomar
Tell people what that means.
01:06:08
Dr. Cortney Warren
The paradox of choice is really this idea that when you have too many choices, we get into a state of choice overload, it's called, where you just can't make any. So it's like if you went into the grocery store and there were five types of cereal to choose from, well, you look at the cereal and you pick one. If there are 50 types of cereal, you might look at them all and just walk straight out of the store without getting any. It's this idea that when you're looking at, as applied to dating, dating partners and you have thousands of options, you think, well, a, I don't know how to pick because there are too many options. B, if I do pick someone, I'm less likely to be satisfied with who they pick because if they aren't the perfect mate for me, I'm going to interpret that in my brain as, oh, I just picked the wrong one because there were so many that I wasn't sure. And it can fuel this drive in us that leads us to never be satisfied
01:07:20
Raquel Baldelomar
And also never really fully commit and invest in a relationship when things get difficult.
01:07:27
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yes.
01:07:28
Raquel Baldelomar
Because you think, oh, I can just get back on the apps and try to find somebody who is more perfect for me or actually fits this better. So I feel that that has definitely, our culture these days has made that possible.
01:07:39
Dr. Cortney Warren
I think it happens a lot staying in the relationship after the honeymoon phase and the lust has worn off a little bit and being willing to still choose to be with someone who isn't perfect and isn't ideal in some ways is sort of the journey of a healthy, intimate relationship. But it's a much harder one because it's part of that vulnerability of the warts and the ugly parts of us that bond us to someone. But if you're constantly thinking, oh, there will be a perfect person out there. There are so many people available. I just haven't found them yet. That's a striving for really a unicorn as far as I'm concerned. You're never going to find it. You're just going to keep looking.
01:08:25
Raquel Baldelomar
How have you tried to maintain that spark in your relationship with your husband over these years with two children? And obviously hopefully the honeymoon phase has ended it, but hopefully you found ways to keep that
01:08:38
Dr. Cortney Warren
Alive. Yeah, I think relationships morph over time and what I care about now, being married for whatever 17 years is very different than what I cared about in some ways when I was first married. The things that I love about him, I still love. The things that I don't like about him are still there, but I think I have a very different attitude towards them. I see him for exactly who he is, and I still choose to be there. That I think you have to have, if you want to sustain a long-term relationship with someone and finding ways to make it fresh and new. Simple things like going to different restaurants, going to new places, having experiences together, that puts you out of your comfort zone. I mean, novelty is attractive. Novelty tends to be stimulating. So if you're with the same person for years and years, people struggle with desire. People struggle with still wanting to hook up and having that strong sex drive. Not everyone, but I think a lot of people do. Finding ways to still bond and still have fun and still have some mystery is a really good way to keep the spark and making time for each other. Also, I think especially when people have a family, the world can become very centered on the children, and although in many ways that's healthy, you also have to make time for your spouse.
01:10:16
Raquel Baldelomar
And how do you do that? Do you try to do date nights with each other or spend time?
01:10:21
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yeah, we do lunch dates, actually. And that works a lot better because it's hard, at least for us to get away at night, you have to organize the babysitter and you have to sort
01:10:32
Dr. Cortney Warren
Plan for it in advance. But lunch, we can pull off a couple of days a week or at least once a week. If we plan it in advance. We have to eat lunch anyway, so that works really well, doing really fun things for each other. Sending text messages out of the blue just saying, I love you, or Can't wait to see you later, or something. That just keeps it, you're still in my thoughts. I'm thinking about you. I'm still trying to have fun with you.
01:11:00
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah, fun. It's good. And fit work. It's work and fun, but
01:11:04
Dr. Cortney Warren
It's silly.
01:11:05
Raquel Baldelomar
One of my podcast guests, she had two kids and had, her partner had been together for years. They had an appointment at 4:00 PM to have sex. Do it. I love that.
01:11:19
Dr. Cortney Warren
I think during the day, if you can pull it off because you don't have the kids at home, you have to find time alone. And if you're too tired at the end of the night, which I hear from most parents, to be honest, schedule it. I think it's smart.
01:11:35
Raquel Baldelomar
Dr. Courtney, thank you so much for being here with me. I'm going to have a few final questions that we ask all of our guests.
01:11:41
Dr. Cortney Warren
Please.
01:11:42
Raquel Baldelomar
What are your top three healthiest habits?
01:11:45
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh my goodness. Healthiest habits. Well, I do journal every day. I reflect on yesterday. I write about things that were hard for me. I write about things that I'm working on. I work about things that I did well and reflect. It's just a reflective time. I work out and exercise. I have to exercise to keep my mind focused, and I think that's something that's really important for all humans, to be honest. I do 30 minutes, four days, a week's. Great. So for anybody out there who thinks like, oh, you have all these hours, 30 minutes, four days a week,
01:12:19
Raquel Baldelomar
What do you do?
01:12:20
Dr. Cortney Warren
I do functional training.
01:12:21
Raquel Baldelomar
That's great.
01:12:22
Dr. Cortney Warren
Weights, jumping boxes, lunges, intense. 30 minutes, I'm done. I also make time to be alone, and that might sound kind of strange, but I am someone who really needs some quiet alone time to contemplate myself and to reflect on my life. And if I don't schedule it, I won't have any.
01:12:50
Raquel Baldelomar
One of my principles is that part of balance is having healthy vices.
01:12:55
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh,
01:12:56
Raquel Baldelomar
Things that are not necessarily good for you, but bring you great joy.
01:13:01
Dr. Cortney Warren
Oh boy.
01:13:02
Raquel Baldelomar
So for me, one of my healthy vices is poker. I love poker
01:13:07
Dr. Cortney Warren
Fun.
01:13:09
Raquel Baldelomar
It's gambling though, so I have to remember that. Do
01:13:14
Dr. Cortney Warren
You actually use money?
01:13:15
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah, I play with money. I play with money and I would say a good amount of the time, but I can also lose. So it is a vice because it's not always healthy for you. Gambling is not healthy for you, but it brings me great joy and I think that people also need to be aware, having self-awareness is having, what are the health vice that they do? So what
01:13:37
Dr. Cortney Warren
Are
01:13:39
Raquel Baldelomar
Your top three vice that bring you great joy?
01:13:42
Dr. Cortney Warren
I mean, I have to start with football. I'm a diehard football fan. I bet on football, little known fact. I also play in seven fantasy football leagues and have for probably 15 or 20 years. So Sundays at my house, I have one wall with five TVs where I will watch all of
01:13:59
Raquel Baldelomar
The kids. And you're from Minnesota and I'm
01:14:00
Dr. Cortney Warren
From Minnesota. I'm a fan. I have a vice, I think I would say in watching reality tv, which sounds kind of silly, but at the end of the night, my brain is done. I can't watch documentaries or meaningful television, which sometimes I really love or read. My brain is done. So Top Chef or one of the Housewives shows or something that's just mindless and kind of silly, but also where I'm looking at how do humans act or watching someone who's really talented at something. But I'm not doing anything. I'm just watching.
01:14:39
Raquel Baldelomar
No, I think entertainment is really, really important to be just entertained and be okay with that.
01:14:44
Dr. Cortney Warren
Yeah.
01:14:45
Raquel Baldelomar
What are small things you do every day to try to achieve balance?
01:14:53
Dr. Cortney Warren
Small things that I do every day. I get up, have a delicious cup of coffee with my journal, watch the sunrise. I usually am up first in my house so that I can have some alone time. I set my intention for the day. I ask myself throughout the day, am I living the way that I want to be living? Is there anything that I need to do differently in this moment? And if there is something that I need to do differently, I try to shift because I think the best we can get at is when you're presented with new information, you're willing to see it and change your choices. And sometimes those changes are tiny, like, oh, I was going to get all these errands done today and I'm only halfway through and I'm not going to get 'em all done today. I'm just going to go home. Or sometimes they're massive. Actually, I'm really unhappy in this job and I don't even care about this field anymore. I need to find a new career path. But whatever that information is that the universe is throwing in your face, that the world is showing you, being willing to look at it and ask yourself those tough questions and then change your behavior is key.
01:16:13
Raquel Baldelomar
What does wealth mean to you?
01:16:16
Dr. Cortney Warren
Wealth, the first thing that comes to mind is freedom. Wealth is having the freedom to spend your time the way that you want to do what you want to in your life to whether it's donating money or using your money to do something fun or wealth of energy to go for a run or workout or wealth of brain, power, intelligence, generosity. It's the freedom to live your life as you see fit. And I think that's probably the greatest thing any of us could ever have.
01:16:58
Raquel Baldelomar
And if there are top three books that you recommend most often, what would those books be?
01:17:03
Dr. Cortney Warren
Top? My favorite book is A Man Su for Meaning Victor Frankl. Yes,
01:17:11
Raquel Baldelomar
I brought tears to my eyes reading that book.
01:17:13
Dr. Cortney Warren
If anyone has not read that book listening, I would strongly recommend that book about finding meaning through adversity, finding a way to survive finding a voice in the worst possible circumstance. You could really imagine written by a Holocaust survivor who was a psychiatrist. I love the book, loves Executioner by Irv Yalom. He's a psychiatrist. It's about doing therapy with clients if anyone's interested. I read a lot of mental health text, so there's probably a little more of a bent to that. I would also really recommend Saving Normal by Alan Francis, also a psychiatrist, talking about really just the influx of mental illness and how we diagnose and think about mental health and mental illness in this country. The spirit catches you and you Fall down is an amazing sort of more layman read about a Hmong girl who had epilepsy and her experience in the US actually California medical system and how to combine cultural perspectives on health and illness. Wonderful. Those are a few.
01:18:25
Raquel Baldelomar
Okay, last question. Okay. All right. If you could have one message on a billboard on what it would take to achieve a combination of health, wealth, and happiness, what would that
01:18:37
Dr. Cortney Warren
Be? Know thyself. Know thyself. That's it.
01:18:44
Raquel Baldelomar
Dr. Courtney, thank you so much. Thank you for being here. And is there anything else you would like to leave our viewers with?
01:18:54
Dr. Cortney Warren
I would love to leave anyone listening with the message that no other human defines your value. Whether you're going through a breakup, whether you're having a difficult time in a relationship, or whether you're struggling with your family, you have value because you exist and you create it, not somebody else.
01:19:18
Raquel Baldelomar
And where can people find you?
01:19:21
Dr. Cortney Warren
I have accounts on YouTube and on LinkedIn. I write a blog for Psychology Today. My website is dr courtney.com, D-R-C-O-R-T-N-E y.com.
01:19:32
Raquel Baldelomar
Wonderful. Well, thank you so very much for being here. Thank you for having me. You've been wonderful. And to all of our viewers and listeners, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. If you can please click the like and subscribe button that will help the YouTube overlords find this podcast and find this other people who are interested in balance. It will help find us. So thank you so very much. I love you. I love you all. And until next time.