How do you turn off your job and turn on your life?
In April 2019, I spoke with Bryan Robinson, PhD, a psychotherapist, professor, researcher, and author. He is widely recognized as one of the leading experts on workaholism. He had just published #CHILL: Turn Off Your Job and Turn On Your Life, and we talked about why so many people feel driven, how a few quiet minutes a day can change that, and what calm actually feels like from the inside.
This is an archive episode, recorded when the show covered addiction and recovery broadly. The ideas Bryan shares here are his own, and I have kept them in his words.
Who is the book written for?
At 1:26, Bryan explained that the hashtag in the title is deliberate, and that the book reaches well beyond the full-blown workaholics he had written about before. He sees more and more people up to their eyeballs in work or in simply doing too much. In his view, the job in the subtitle can be paid employment, school, raising children at home, or even a busy retirement.
He was clear that chill is not the same as kicking back with a drink by the pool. Still, the state he describes is more active than that. It means finding a calm place inside yourself from which you can regulate your reactions when things do not go your way.
What is the space between irritation and reaction?
Bryan’s central idea is that there is a space between whatever irritates us and how we respond to it. Most of us, he said, are on autopilot, rushing so fast that we never notice the space exists. Once you become aware of it, you can take a breath and choose a response instead of reacting automatically.
He gave an example from his own drive home to Asheville, North Carolina. A woman in the car ahead made a rude gesture at him for no reason he could see. His anger wanted to answer back. Instead, he spoke to it directly, told it he understood, and reminded himself that he, not his anger, was driving the car.
In fact, talking to these parts of ourselves is one of the tools the book teaches. Bryan noted that talking to yourself was once taken as a sign of being crazy, while therapists now encourage it because the dialogue creates some distance from the feeling.
Can meditation really take only a few minutes?
At 7:02, I asked about the idea of being in a meditative state even while walking around or going about the day. Bryan said most of us spend those moments in the future or the past, planning or regretting, and that keeps the body in constant tension. His suggestion is to step out of the rat race for at least five minutes a day and come into the present moment.
He then led a short exercise for listeners. For one minute, notice every sound you can hear, from distant traffic to your own stomach. Afterward, the question is not what you heard but what you notice inside. In his experience, people find their muscles looser and their breathing slower. So, without realizing it, they have just meditated.
What should you do when your mind keeps wandering?
From 9:21, Bryan described his own practice of mindfulness meditation. He focuses on his breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth. When his mind drifts to lunch or to an unfinished task, he notices and gently comes back.
Unfortunately, he said, that wandering is exactly when most people give up. His advice was never to sit down trying to clear your mind, because that is impossible. Meditation, as he defines it, is simply focus. In his experience, after a week or two of regular practice the mind wanders less and a person stays calmer when others around them are agitated.
What is a non-smoking break?
At 11:57, I admitted that at an earlier job I used to envy the people who smoked, because they got regular breaks to step outside and relax. It seemed like everyone should get those breaks without the cigarettes. Bryan liked the idea of a non-smoking break, and at 12:20 he described a woman in Asheville whose employer lets her take a five-minute walk around the block every hour.
He compared it to driving a car. We use both the gas and the brakes when we drive, yet many of us run our own lives on the gas alone. In his explanation, the gas is the sympathetic nervous system and the stress response, while a short, focused pause engages the parasympathetic nervous system, the brakes. Interestingly, he said that people who slow down tend to reach their goals sooner and with better work, even though that feels counterintuitive.
How is the book organized?
At 15:48, I said I had enjoyed reading the book and noticed it has a chapter for each month of the year, so it can be read straight through or slowly across a year. I also noticed that the book gently introduces the 12 steps along the way, and I asked Bryan how the two relate.
From 16:50, he explained that every month follows the season and is made of short readings a person can pick up for a minute. April, for example, is about open awareness, and its final reading pairs with the fourth step, which he described as an inventory of yourself made with curiosity instead of judgment. Each month ends with brief takeaways he calls micro-chillers, small reminders to file away for the moment something rubs you the wrong way.
What are a to-be list and tallcomings?
One of Bryan’s exercises is to keep a to-be list alongside the to-do list. People can recite their to-do list instantly, he said, but go blank when asked what they want simply to be. His own to-be list includes watching the sunset from his home in the mountains and his daily few minutes of meditation.
He also coined the word tallcomings to balance shortcomings. If you think only of your faults, he said, you will feel terrible, and that is not honest either. Of course, the same applies to the way we speak to ourselves. Bryan described replacing “I must” and “I should” with “I want to” and “I plan to,” a kinder way of talking that he believes takes pressure off.
Does slowing down make people less productive?
At 22:56, I said the book would make a good gift for a college student or someone in medical or law school, because taking time to meditate can make a person more productive, not less. Bryan agreed at 23:21. Many people tell him they cannot add one more thing to their list. However, in his view, the pause refuels people and helps them avoid what he called decision fatigue.
He listed a set of qualities he says show up on their own when a person spends time in chill, all beginning with the letter C: clarity, calm, curiosity, creativity, compassion, connectedness, and confidence. At 25:07, I pointed out that people often describe addiction with its own C words, such as craving, compulsion, consequences, and lack of control. Bryan called his list the flip side, the Cs of healthy living.
From 25:16, he also described what he sees as the physical cost of constant reactivity, from heart and digestive problems to a weaker immune system. He said that brain imaging of people who meditate regularly suggests the memory center of the brain holds up better with age.
Who is Bryan Robinson?
Bryan Robinson, PhD, is a psychotherapist, professor, researcher, and author based in Asheville, North Carolina. He conducted early research on children of workaholics and on how workaholism affects marriage and family, developed the Work Addiction Risk Test, and wrote Chained to the Desk and #CHILL: Turn Off Your Job and Turn On Your Life. He also narrated the audiobook edition of #CHILL and has written for Psychology Today.
What can listeners take away from this conversation?
Bryan’s message is that calm is not something that happens to you on vacation. It is a skill built a few minutes at a time, by noticing the space between what irritates you and what you do next. A short pause, taken often, may do more for a busy life than one more hour of work.
How do I approach this today?
Today my practice focuses on helping people come off benzodiazepines and other medications gradually, and on medication for alcohol and opioid dependence. Physical dependence is not addiction, and the safest way off is usually slow.
This page is educational. It is not medical advice, and listening to the episode or reading this page does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Decisions about starting, continuing, or tapering any medication should be made with your own physician.
Full transcript
A note from Dr. Leeds: my guests speak from their own experience and expertise, and the terminology they use is their own. Whatever the topic, this show holds to one distinction: physical dependence on a prescribed medication is not addiction. This transcript is educational content, not medical advice, and nothing here creates a doctor-patient relationship.
Read the full transcript (30 minutes)
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:09] Welcome to The Rehab on the Mental Health News Radio Network. I am Dr. Mark Leeds and I will be your host. Join me in exploring the world of addiction treatment. How can we improve the ways that we help individuals to overcome addiction? The goal of treatment is to save lives and help people to get back on track to a path towards success and happiness in life. Dr. Bryan E. Robinson is an author, psychotherapist, professor, and researcher. Dr. Robinson conducted the first research studies on children of workaholics and the effects of workaholism on marriage and the family. He developed the Work Addiction Risk Test and is widely recognized as being one of the world’s leading experts on workaholism. He is the author of Chained to the Desk, a guidebook for workaholics, their partners and children, and the clinicians who treat them. And currently he has a new book out, Chill, Turn Off Your Job, and Turn On Your Life. Dr. Bryan E. Robinson, thank you for joining me on the Rehab Podcast.
Bryan Robinson, PhD [01:26] Thanks, Mark. It’s great to be here. The name of the book, by the way, is Hashtag Chill. That hashtag is important in front of the word chill because it kind of brings it up into 2019. Some people in the Midwest have been calling me asking about pound chill. That symbol used to be known as the pound sign. But now it’s Hashtag Chill just to give it a little more emphasis. But the whole idea of the book is, as you say, I’ve written about workaholism before, and what I’m seeing is how many more people are starting to take on some of the profile of the workaholic. They’re not full-blown workaholics, but I’m seeing so many people who are up to their eyeballs in work or up to their eyeballs in doing something. The subtitle is Turn Off Your Job and Turn On Your Life, and your job can be fully employed. It can be if you’re a student. It could be if you’re a stay-at-home mom or dad. It could even be if you’re a retiree. What I’m seeing is even people who are retired are so caught up into biting off too much and overdoing it that even they’re burning out. So I wanted to write a book that would apply to everybody, from workaholics on one end to people who just are trying to do everything, which is impossible, on the other end, and whoever is in between. So Hashtag Chill is not just about kicking back and watching the Super Bowl with friends and having a beer or lying by the pool with your favorite drink. Although those are fine things to do, Hashtag Chill is more active. It’s not just being passive. And when I say active, what I mean is finding that place within yourself, and the book helps you do that, where you can calm down, where you can regulate your reactions to things that don’t go your way. And all we have to do is turn on the news to see how many people are overreacting to fairly small things like road rage and making it bigger than it needs to be. We live in a time now when many things can be threatening. Someone giving me the finger on the freeway, if I react to that, or someone cutting me off in traffic, someone stepping in front of me in line at the grocery store, the crying baby on the airplane behind me. And you see on the news people reacting to all these things. So hashtag chill is about taking a breath, stepping back, and learning that there is a space between what irritates us and our reaction to it and finding that space. Most of us are on autopilot, and we’re just hurrying and rushing and zooming across it. We don’t even realize there is a space there. But as you become aware that there is the space, you can take a breath, and you can choose how you want to respond in a situation. Instead of just automatically reacting like a rat in a maze. And we’re human beings. We are animals, but we have higher intelligence. So the book is really about paying attention to what’s going on inside of you, finding that place where you can make a conscious choice instead of just reacting, and you’re going to feel better inside your skin. I’ll give you an example. I was coming back from Atlanta. I live in Asheville, North Carolina. I was on the freeway here in Asheville. So as I got off the exit ramp, I casually looked over, and the woman who had been in front of me in a little red car gave me the finger and the ugly facial gesture. I had no idea what that was about, nor do I focus on that too much. What I focus on is what was going on inside of me. And this is the key. Instead of focusing outside of us, hashtag chill is about looking inside and regulating your actions. Actions. I saw my anger coming toward me, and he was saying, tell the bitch to go to hell. And I’m thinking, gosh, I don’t want to do that’s not me. I’m driving this car. My anger is not driving this car. So I stopped it. One of the things we do in this book is I teach people to talk to their parts. We call them parts like your anger, your control, your fear, your worry. And what it used to be, people who talked to themselves were considered crazy. That’s totally reversed now in mental health. We’re encouraging our patients to pay attention to their parts, talk to them, because it separates you from them as you dialogue with them. So I said to my anger, I know you want to do that. I know you’re upset, and that’s perfectly fine. But that’s not who I want to be in the world. And what happens is my anger calms down. That’s just one little example of what I call self-regulation that immediately put me into what I call chill. I felt calm. I felt more confident. I felt more in charge of myself. I felt like I just made a touchdown. So it’s an incredible feeling when we’re able to, despite what’s going on around us, to stay in ourself or stay in chill. And so there is this place that as you practice these tools in the book, over time, you start to find yourself more in that place. And it’s a wonderful feeling. And plus, you’re going to live longer, you’re going to have fewer health problems, you’re going to feel better, you’re going to be happier, and overall have a general sense of well-being.
Dr. Mark Leeds [07:02] And that’s great. And I believe you also talk about meditation, of being in a state of meditation even when you’re out walking around or doing your daily activities?
Bryan Robinson, PhD [07:12] Right. And what most of us are doing when we’re out walking around or driving our car somewhere is we’re thinking about the future. We’re not in the present moment. Or we’re thinking about the past, regretting maybe something we’ve done or anticipating what’s on our schedule or what we’ve got to get ready for. That keeps us in a constant state of tension. It keeps the gas on. It keeps us, it can create more anxiety, more worry. The key here is to take five minutes a day, at least five, it can be more, and step back out of the rat race and put yourself in the present moment. Now, a lot of people say, well, what the heck does that have to do with anything? That’s not going to help me get my job done or get my tasks accomplished. Oh, yes, it is, because it’s going to give you more clarity. It’s going to slow you down a little bit. It’s going to help the outcome of whatever you’re trying to get done be a higher quality. This is from the research. This is not just my opinion. And it’s going to give you that overall sense of being in your skin and feeling good on the inside. So five minutes a day, one of the things I do is meditate. But the key is to go inside, whether you pray, meditate. Here’s one little taste of what I’m talking about. If everybody listening will take one minute, one little minute, and listen to every sound they hear around them. It can be traffic in the distance, an airplane going over the heating system, voices in the background, your own gurgling stomach, whatever you’re hearing. For one minute, focus on as many different sounds as you can. And here’s what will happen. After you’re through, I wouldn’t ask you, what did you hear? I would say, what do you notice inside? The key is to go inside. And what you will notice is your muscles are a little looser. You feel calmer. Your heart rate is slowed down. Your breathing is slowed down. You just meditated. Now, that one minute feels great. But if you do this over time, it starts to build up. It widens what we call your resilience zone. That’s what scientists call it. And what that means is in times of obstacles or disappointments or if somebody rubs you the wrong way, you’re able to handle that with more calm, more clarity, and more curiosity and not get caught up in the adrenaline and the cortisol that clogs your veins, can lead to heart attack, and can cause you to feel bad on the inside. So meditation is simply focus. That’s all it is. So you could focus on sound. That’s called open awareness. You could focus on all the blue colors you see right now in the room and just name as many as you can. And that will do the same thing for one or two minutes. The kind of meditation I do is called mindfulness meditation. And what I do is I focus on my breath. I can do this in my car as long as I’m not driving. I can do it at home, in my office, and I do. I do it in all these places. I only do it for five minutes. Sometimes I’ll do it two or three times a day, but at least once a day, five minutes. And that five minutes, for me, has already added up to put me in that place of chill that I’m able to be in longer. So I focus on my breath in through my nose out through my mouth and what happens is my mind will start to wonder, I’ll think about what am I going to have for lunch or my stomach’s growling or I’m hungry or I need to work on that thing that I’m behind on and then I realize my mind’s wandering and I say okay, I just come back to my breath and in through my nose out through my mouth and then my mind wanders again That’s when people give up, when your mind wanders. Don’t ever sit down and try to clear your mind. It’s impossible. That’s not what meditation is. Meditation is focus. So you can focus on something in your environment. You can focus on your breath. Your mind will start to wander. Let that be okay. You just gently bring it back. After a while, your mind will not wander as much. It’s like after maybe, oh gosh, a week or two weeks, if you practice this regularly, you’ll start to notice you’re more focused and you’ll start to notice that you’re calmer when other people are agitated. And that’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling.
Dr. Mark Leeds [11:57] It reminds me of when I used to work at a job with an employer that I used to envy the people that smoke cigarettes because they got to take smoking breaks. And while we’re all working hard throughout the day, they’re out there every few minutes taking another few minutes to relax and puff on a cigarette and it seems like it’d be great to have smoking breaks without the cigarettes you know for everybody
Bryan Robinson, PhD [12:20] Yeah take a non-smoking break we call that’s a really good point I like the idea of a non-smoking break and then but decide what are you going to do with that time and I know someone who every hour takes a five minute walk around the block and her employer allows her to do that here in Asheville and she said it’s made a huge difference and when you’re walking, don’t let your mind think about all the things that you have to do. Just let your mind wonder or focus on your breath while you’re walking. Focus on something. And when your mind does wonder, bring it back to whatever that focus is. It can be a mantra. You can do a guided meditation. Some people wear earphones and you have a voice that helps you focus on seeing or experiencing certain things. So you want to have a focus when you take a break, whatever that focus is. But the key is to put on the brakes. Now, think of a car. Most of us, hopefully all of us, when we drive our cars, we use the gas and the brakes. That’s what it was designed for. But if we drove our cars the way we drive ourselves, we would all be crashing. Many of us have the gas. We’re hurrying and rushing and speeding over people around us and not paying attention to our relationships and ignoring, in some cases, our kids. And so this is about putting on the brakes. And when you take that five-minute non-smoking break, what you’re doing is putting on the brakes. And when you put on the brakes, you’re bringing balance to the gas. That’s whether you’re a workaholic or just somebody who feels like you can’t get it all done or somebody who has trouble relaxing. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. What you’re doing is you’re activating without pills, without needles, without medication, you’re activating what we call the parasympathetic nervous system, and you don’t even know it. The gas is the sympathetic. That’s the stress response, and that’s why so many people are burning out. When you take that five-minute non-smoking break, you’re activating the opposite system, the brakes or the parasympathetic nervous system. And you don’t even know it, but you will notice that you’ll feel a little calmer inside and maybe even have a little better perspective on a project you’ve been involved in. And you go back to it, and your batteries are recharged. So balance is really about bringing both brakes and gas to whatever you’re doing in life. And here’s what the research shows. We have the MRIs showing the changes in the brain. When you do this, it starts to add up. And as you slow down and as you’re moving towards whatever your deadline is or whatever your tasks are, you get there faster. I know this is counterintuitive, but you get there quicker, and you get there with more creativity, and the quality of what you’re trying to get done is superior to what it would be if you’re hurrying and rushing. That’s the research, and it’s being shown over and over again that people who slow down do better with all the things that they’re trying to get done. My dogs are barking.
Dr. Mark Leeds [15:48] Okay. So as I was reading Hashtag Chill, and I really enjoyed reading it, and I noticed as I got through the first chapter and the second chapter that you were very gently introducing the 12 steps. And then I realized, well, there’s 12 months of the year and you have a chapter for each month. And it’s kind of a meditative book that you can, I guess you could read it straight through or you could read it throughout the year, you know, one chapter per month. But as you go through the book, once you’re finished, it’s given some exposure to what the steps are all about. And probably an easier introduction rather than just looking at them on the wall in a meeting and trying to figure out, oh, what is all this about, and now I have to work through this. And I know you’ve also been involved with Workaholics Anonymous. Can you talk about how the book relates to the 12 steps and about how the 12 steps can help someone in their life?
Bryan Robinson, PhD [16:50] Right. I’m glad you brought that up. So there are 12 chapters, and each chapter deals with the month of the year. And within the chapter are short readings. So this is the kind of book you can pick up for one minute and then put down. Or pick it up at any month. So like a fifth of February and you buy the book now, you can start in February. You don’t have to start with January. You can start wherever is relevant for you. And they’re very short ideas. And each chapter relates to the season. For example, April, the word April means a prey. It’s a Latin word. It means to open. And so the name of that chapter is open awareness. It’s becoming more aware of what’s going on in the present moment, bringing your mind into the present. That happens to be, April happens to be a time in the northern hemisphere when baby birds hatch, flowers balloon, and so you can see how the openness goes with that. At the same time, the very last reading in each chapter goes along with one of the 12 steps, so that’s the fourth step. And the fourth step is making a fearless inventory of yourself without judgment, just with curiosity, and looking at your what I call tall comings and your shortcomings, and admitting that to yourself. That’s the fourth step. So each step goes along with the title of the chapter and the theme of the season. So it’s all related. At the end of each chapter, each month, there are takeaways. These are just one-liners that kind of summarize the book. And these are little quick things, I call them micro-chillers, that we file away in the back of our mind. And during the day, if we have an obstacle or if something happens, it rubs us the wrong way, instead of reacting, we have that reminder, that takeaway that helps us stay on the launch pad instead of going off into the wild blue yonder. And then at the very end of the book, there are 366 chillers, one for each day of the year. In fact, Barnes & Noble has put that on their website, and for each month now, they’re putting up one of the readings out of the book for people to read, and it’s all free, of course. But yeah, that’s how the book is arranged. And the microchillers, just to kind of give you an example of when you’re doing some of the readings, are little exercises you can perform, like make a to-be list alongside your to-do list. And usually when I say that, people go blank. What in the world is a to-be list? They don’t even know where to start. But if I say, well, tell me your to-do list, I mean, they would rattle it off really quickly. So it makes you start to think about your life in a different way. And this starts to stick with you. It widens the, I call it the wide-angle lens. So if I make a to-be list to go along with the deadlines and the projects that I have, a to-be list might be, hmm, I’m going to watch the sunset this afternoon. I happen to, I’m fortunate enough to live in the mountains and have a beautiful view of the western sunsets this time of year. And so as that happens, I just sit there and look at it and just notice how I’m feeling inside. That calmness and the clarity and that creativity comes out of that. You know, we have creative thoughts and we’re doing nothing. That’s one thing. The other thing, of course, is the five minutes of meditation I do a day. Those are two examples of what are on my to-do list. And then as you do that, you start to think more along those lines. You start to make the commitment to having more of those times in your day when you can do nothing. And most of us don’t think that way. We’re busy doing. But what that does, it brings the balance to the doing. So you have the being and you have the doing. And then the tallcomings I mentioned before, that’s a word I made up. If you make a list of your tallcomings, that brings balance to the shortcomings. So if I just go around thinking of all my shortcomings, I’m going to feel like crap. But if I balance that out with, okay, what am I good at? What are my talents? What are my character positive attributes? And as I list those, it brings balance to that negativity. You start to stack your positivity deck by being honest about who you are. It’s really not honest just to think of ourselves in a negative way. That’s not honest at all. And so you throw modesty out the window and you start looking at yourself from a bird’s eye view and really say to yourself what other people say about your talents and your abilities and your skills. That’s really important for us because, again, it helps you sink into that chill place. If I just go around putting myself down and calling myself names, it keeps me out of that place. It makes me feel bad on the inside. Most of us are on autopilot and we’re musturbating is what I call it. That’s one of the readings in the book. When we musturbate, we say, I must, I have to, I should, I ought to. And we don’t even know what we’re doing, but we’re putting pressure on ourselves. And that pressure keeps us out of the chill spot, the sweet spot. So instead, you can say, I want to, I plan to. I will. I could. So these are ways of speaking to ourselves with more compassion. And again, it raises that chill factor. It helps you feel better about yourself on the inside and makes you feel like that you’re in charge of your life.
Dr. Mark Leeds [22:56] This book would be an excellent gift for a college student. If someone has a family member in medical school or law school, this would be really incredible. And you don’t have to worry about being less productive because you’re taking all this time to meditate and appreciate nature. You’ll actually be more productive if you take that time off to meditate and clear your mind.
Bryan Robinson, PhD [23:21] That’s right. You’ll be more effective at whatever it is you’re doing. Now, a lot of people, when I say take time to meditate or take time to go inside, their hands go up and they say, I can’t add one more thing to my list. In a way, this is counterintuitive. Because by adding this, you’re actually improving your success rate. And that’s a fact. That’s not just my opinion. So by taking that time out, you’re bringing more energy to your life. You’re bringing more clarity. So if we just work, work, work, or just go, go, go with the gas, we get fatigued. There’s something called decision fatigue. But if you take that time out, it replenishes you. It refuels you. So you have more clarity, more calm, more curiosity. Notice these are all C words. You have greater creativity that’s automatically unleashed when you take this time out, which is going to make you more successful and the end product better. You’re going to have more compassion for yourself and other people, which, again, is going to make you more successful. It’s going to improve the morale in the workplace or wherever it is, whatever your job is. You’re going to feel more connectedness with yourself and other people. You’re going to feel, notice again, these are all C words, and you’re going to have more confidence. And you’re going to, I don’t know if those are all eight or not, but there are a total of eight C words that automatically occur as a byproduct of being in chill. They automatically occur, but you don’t even have to have that as a target. They will just start to show up and they’ll start to notice them.
Dr. Mark Leeds [25:07] And in addiction, they usually talk about the Cs of addiction, things like craving, compulsion, consequences, lack of control. So now we have the good Cs.
Bryan Robinson, PhD [25:16] Yeah, and these are the flip side. These are the Cs that automatically start to show up when you practice some of these tools in the book, and you start to feel yourself in that place of chill. It’s a place inside of us. It’s a sweet spot. And the more you practice it, the more you find yourself there from day to day. My goal for 2019 is to forgive people who get in my way because it’s the people who get in our way that causes us to go off the launch pad. And when we do that, it makes us feel bad inside. It also has a negative biochemical effect on us. It clogs the arteries. It can lead to heart attack. It creates gastrointestinal problems. When we react that way, it lowers our immune system, compromises our immune system. And, you know, the other thing is you can see this in an MRI. People who take that five minutes, and they’ve done this with people who meditate regularly, their hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for memory, does not shrink as you get older. Normally, if you are not, if you don’t have any kind of internal five-minute tool, and if you’re rushing and hurrying, what happens is your hippocampus shrinks over time. And what that means is you have poor memory, especially short-term memory. It starts to affect your mind, your brain. People who meditate, they don’t have that issue. So meditation has incredible effects, not just on the mind, but on the body. And that’s something for people to really pay attention to. And you will live longer and have fewer health problems. And who doesn’t want that? Yeah, definitely. But I like what you said. Yeah, the Cs of addiction, these are the Cs of healthy living. And they will come automatically from five minutes over time from the chill.
Dr. Mark Leeds [27:30] Thank you, Dr. Robinson. I wanted to mention one more thing. You have a really nice, soothing voice, and for people that want to read the book and feel that they don’t have time to sit down and read, you are the narrator of the audio book on Audible, and I listened to the sample, and I’m going to download it because it’s really nice to hear the book read to me and your very soothing voice. So thank you for that.
Bryan Robinson, PhD [27:55] Yeah, the publisher, HarperCollins, insisted that I read it. And it turned out I’m pretty pleased with the final product, but I appreciate your saying that. It’s very kind of you. I wanted to let everybody listening know that they can go on my website and you can take a test called How Chill Are You? It’s free. And you just click on the button and it will give you the test and automatically score it for you, and the score will tell you where you are on the chill scale. And it’s free, of course. And then there are resources that you can read. You can order the book on the website. You can read some of my Psychology Today blogs, and all that’s free. So there are a lot of resources there. You can see how chill you are. You can order the book, and you can also contact me. Anybody who would like to get in touch with me, all the information is on the website. Oh, and by the way, that’s bryanrobinsonbooks.com. B-R-Y-A-N, bryanrobinsonbooks.com.
Dr. Mark Leeds [29:01] Thank you again, Dr. Robinson. I appreciate you joining me on the Rehab Podcast, and thank you again for everything.
Bryan Robinson, PhD [29:08] My pleasure, Mark. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Mark Leeds [29:12] Thank you for joining us today on the Rehab on the Mental Health News Radio Network. I hope that you have found this show to be interesting and useful. If so, please subscribe to the Rehab Podcast and share on social media. I appreciate your taking the time to listen to the Rehab. Thank you.
