Tim Houlihan  0:00  
So Kurt, I just want to let you know that the inspectors are here this morning at my house, and they're hopefully giving us the green light that the plumbing and electrical for the new bathroom are in good shape and all right, yeah, it's good. So

Kurt Nelson  0:13  
the project is being almost done.

Tim Houlihan  0:18  
Well, we're it meets the halfway point of being done, because now we can start the hard work of tiling and building walls and putting in the electrical fixtures and putting in the lights and shower heads and all that kind of stuff.

Kurt Nelson  0:31  
Yeah, so this is you are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel after three plus years is that, basically that what you're saying, that's what you're telling me,

Tim Houlihan  0:43  
yes, yes, I can see, yeah, actually, that's important. And why three it hasn't been three years for the bathroom, but it's been.

Kurt Nelson  0:52  
That's a good point, but it's been three years of you being uprooted, moving around, not having a sense of real permanency, of moving. Tell, tell just a little bit, because I think you know, for many of our listeners, many of them know you, but most of them don't, and they've only heard bits and pieces of the story. So tell our listeners what has been going on for three plus years with you?

Tim Houlihan  1:23  
About three years ago, this month, I was offered a job in Charlotte, North Carolina, and for more than 30 years I'd lived in the Twin Cities, in Minneapolis.

Kurt Nelson  1:36  
I know so bastard. You left us here so

Tim Houlihan  1:39  
and I felt like that was a great move, but it ended up actually being the first of five different houses that we would live in over the next five years, over the next three years, like between August of 2022 and May of 2025, we've lived in five places.

Kurt Nelson  1:59  
Lived lived in five places, but you've also stayed in a multitude of others,

Tim Houlihan  2:05  
right? 1212, more Airbnbs in seven other cities, right? So

Kurt Nelson  2:10  
a lot number of months as you were trying to figure out where you actually wanted to so tell a little bit more of that story. So you uprooted yourself after 30 years from Minnesota to take a new job down in Charlotte, North Carolina, and you and your wife moved down there, dream job, all your roots and in there. And then what happened?

Tim Houlihan  2:33  
Expecting to stay for many years, but after 18 months, the program was defunded, and we decided we didn't want to stay in Charlotte. So then that became a decision point of, where do we want to live? Do we want to move back to Minnesota? Where the friends and family are? We said, No, we want to actually, we like the area, but that's beside the point. Anyway. We wanted to stay in the area. And so we put our our scientific hats on, and we said, let's test out a few different cities. Let's stay in a few different places, and we'll figure it out.

Kurt Nelson  3:06  
Good plan sounds like a really good plan.

Tim Houlihan  3:09  
It was like the digital nomadism was not as romantic at all. It was the summer of our discontent. It was really stressful, because what we didn't anticipate was, not only were you looking for just a place, but it was like, Where might we belong? Where would be a place that we could call our home without having two important anchors? We didn't have a job to go to or family to go to in any of these cities that we were looking at yeah and that, and that was hard. That was really, really hard.

Kurt Nelson  3:52  
Welcome to Behavioral Grooves, and today's episode is going to be a little bit different, folks, because we are just going to be grooving using Tim's past three years of uncertainty and craziness as a way to explore how we respond in a world that seems uh chaotic, you know, upheaved, and it doesn't need to Be a movement. I mean, Tim, obviously, is moving around, and that was his life and the uncertainty and the upheaval there could be that you have job changes. It could be that you have relationship changes. It could be that you just have, you know, things in your life that are no longer the same that they were before we all go through these moments of uncertainty, and we just want to explore that process and what's going on and maybe give some hints and tips as to okay if you're feeling that way, if you're feeling that discontent, like Tim felt in the summer of discontent, maybe we can provide some you. Behaviorally scientific insights that can help ground you So,

Tim Houlihan  5:05  
right? So at the heart of it is what psychologists call temporal uncertainty, this idea that over time, if I have a lot of uncertain things that are uncertain in outcome, uncertain in the duration that they're going to take and I and uncertain and sort of what the experience is going to be that starts to breed a level of discontent and and it's an unpleasant experience for us that, of course, is different for everybody, right?

Kurt Nelson  5:40  
There's an angst that goes along with that. And for different people, we are all on a continuum of different pieces. And we talked about this before we started talking, you know, my employee, Ben, he and his wife, uprooted their selves. Lived in RV for over three years, moving basically every three to five months, because she was a traveling nurse, and Ben could work from anywhere. And they lived all around the country, in the world, even well. And then they went, Yeah, they moved to Belize for, you know, three months as well, or two months. And they've done a number of those types of things. And for them, that was okay. I'm sure there were some aspects. I haven't really talked to them about some of the negative aspects, but there was a lot of positives with that. But to your point on temporal, temporal uncertainty, right? That, that piece of it, they knew that this was not a permanent thing. They knew they had a home base to always come back to,

Tim Houlihan  6:43  
yeah, yeah. And they have a higher threshold for for that uncertainty than the average bear, yeah, right, yeah. And I don't know where I fit on the on the scale of average or below average or above average, but it became this impermanence became chronic for us and started to really build up, item upon item upon item upon item, over month over month over month. That really just caused a lot of discontent for us.

Kurt Nelson  7:14  
You didn't you weren't able to get into a rhythm of having an anchor and then some chaos. And then going back to your anchor and coming back into that chaos. It was chaos, more chaos, more chaos. And then I, you know, I've known you for many years, plus somewhere in there, somewhere along that line, and I think you are an adventuresome person that you are out there, but I can see where those just constant and not having that grounding area could really impact

Tim Houlihan  7:56  
you. Yeah, that's a really astute observation. And if you think about when you teed up this this discussion, it could be relationships. It could be job changes, when we go from change to change without sort of having that base to come back to, without having the stability or comfort that allows the rhythm to or the arc of the wave to go from the crest to the trough. Without the trough, we start to lose perspective, yeah, and it makes it, makes it difficult to make any decisions, like there is this, this, this aggregation of of of trouble that gets in the way of good decision making on all levels, and

Kurt Nelson  8:47  
for different people, that recovery time is going to be different, just as well as like that. You know, again, I think your wave analogy is really good, because if we think about this, the height of those waves is, is going to be important. And you know, for Ben, maybe that movement, those are, those are smaller waves, right? They're not as big for you. They might have started off small, but they got bigger over time because of this, because you didn't have that ability to to relax and to refresh yourself. Kind of think about it like running. If you are running, running, running all the time, and you don't have that downtime to let your body recuperate. It's the same thing with your brain. Yeah, your change, change, change, change. Your body, your mind meet, needs that time to just recuperate and to get back into good space. And for different people, that recovery time is going to be different.

Tim Houlihan  9:52  
Back in episode 360 we talked to Wu Kyung Ahn, and she had a really great observation about basically. Decision Making. She was talking about what it's like to say, you know, she said something along the lines of, I'm paraphrasing here, you love your boyfriend, you want to get married to your boyfriend, but then you get an offer on a new job, and then that, that offer on the new job ends up impacting your decision about whether or not we should propose or get married. Even though they're really they can be disconnected. Yeah, they're two separate decisions. But the one start one domain starts to impact the other domain. And that that was exactly how, how we started to feel, that where we wanted to live started to impact our ability to decide, well, what are we have for dinner? You know, because we had to figure out, in every new city we were in, where the hell is the grocery store? How do we get there? What?

Kurt Nelson  10:51  
What are the restaurants? Where? What restaurants do we like everything? Every time it's a new sometimes you just want to go to that old standby and get the in, you know, the meatloaf and mashed potatoes, because it reminds you of good home cooked meal to

Tim Houlihan  11:06  
see that crusty old bartender that you'd go, Oh man, that dude is such a pain in the ass. But still, he's, he's the, he's the anchor, yeah,

Kurt Nelson  11:15  
well, and so, I mean, all of this, right? This idea is, like a really good representation of cognitive overload that, yes, you know, so many times we talk about this, and people, I mean, we conceptually get it, but sometimes it's hard to realize when that's happening to us and you are living cognitive overload, this decision fatigue, and as you said at the beginning of this, the last part of your journey is that you finally have settled down. You have bought your house that you hopefully stay in for a long time. But when you bought it, then you realized, as part of the inspection process, the bathroom had mold, and you had to not just do mold remediation. You had to tear basically everything apart and rebuild it. And so now you're not only not you just you don't get to relax, because you now have to make decisions on all of the damn bathroom decisions that you have to do. And it's

Tim Houlihan  12:21  
not that we expect life to be perfect, right? But I think Wendy Wood said something along the lines of almost 70% of our day is based on habit and routine. So when all of that is thrown out the window, when 70% of our life is thrown into chaos, that level of disruption is is really bad. There's also, you know, an aspect of environmental psychology that I think we under event undervalue, that our physical environments actually profoundly affect our psychological states. And now, and this really got me into thinking midway through this about how important it was to get out into nature, because it's a place for me to connect that I go back to, you know, the sense foraging, yeah, and the importance of, like, breathing and smelling and and sunshine and trees and like that stuff really had a grounding effect on me, even, and as these were small little troughs in the wave, but they helped, I think they helped kind of keep us sane.

Kurt Nelson  13:30  
Yeah. What other tips do you have for people that are going through something and again, it doesn't this people. This isn't about moving seven times or seven houses or whatever, how many different places you've lived in the past three years. This is about how we deal with change and the uncertainty that is present in our lives, and maybe even is ramping up in today's world.

Tim Houlihan  14:00  
I think another thing that is really helpful is to find those things that are grounding. Maybe you do yoga, or you journal, or you have some thing in your life that it might be a reflective time, it might be an engaged time. It might be bicycling, if you can find a way to connect back to something that has in the past, meant something to you that can be really, really helpful. I mean, Kurt, you, you're you've been journaling consistently for years. So when you're on the road, you take your journal with you, right? When you travel, yeah, when you travel, you take it with you. And it's not just the keeping up the momentum, but it's also an act of grounding. It's also an act of pulling you off the peak of the wave and back to the trough for just a little bit of time to allow you to regroup, readdress and just kind of rethink about where you're at and to get some perspective. Yeah.

Kurt Nelson  15:00  
Yeah, there's that aspect of creating these anchors, and whether those anchors are small journaling different things. But whatever you can do to have we are, as you said, We're habitual. We like our routines. We like those habits. And so at least having some things that you can depend on, because our brain needs that it needs that grounding to help it stay and not just go crazy fluttering with all the uncertainty that is around us. So whether it's journaling, whether it's going for a walk, whether whatever it is. And as you said, those were small moments in the trail, right? They weren't these long, extended I can just go and figure this out, because I am in a new city, I am trying to figure this new path to the grocery store or whatever it is, an everything is an adventure, and that becomes overbearing to just then say, No, this is a constant. This is something that I have that hasn't changed, and when that that just helps you just ground yourself,

Tim Houlihan  16:15  
yeah. So, so we're talking about the building micro routines. And also want to suggest try not to make really momentous decisions when you're in that state of chaos, right? Because decisions aren't made in a vacuum, and so if we're really unable to focus properly on like, what our next goals should be, like, the big goals in our life. That's a hard time. That's a really difficult time to sort of sort that out. And if you can avoid those kinds of big decisions, or the momentous kinds of things that aren't really central to survival at that point, don't do that. Don't start the new relationship, etc, but,

Kurt Nelson  17:04  
but sometimes you can't. Sometimes you are in the midst of this change and big life decisions, like you said, it's like relationship and new job. Well, all right, I have to, you know, I can't, I can't not make the decisions on those That's right. So one of the things that you know to make sure that you're not having all of this chaos and change impact in a negative way those decisions is to, again, use those micro anchoring moments and get yourself, try to get yourself in as good a space as possible, but also work through that decision in not just an emotional response way. And so that means working through using some tools. Journaling is a great tool for some of that, where you go in and you're looking at this, you know, here are the decision points that I have. What do I need to do? You can use the tools of, you know, SWOT analysis. You can do other types of, you know, rational tools, not saying that that's how you often make your decisions, but so they can help you in giving you some context and maybe getting you to see so just maybe not avoid them, but take your time with them, I think is really important.

Tim Houlihan  18:33  
You know, another thing is to make some pre decisions on low stakes choices. I loved how remember reading that many of the presidents, several presidents that we've had in the past 30 years, have basically built a wardrobe around like two colors of suits, and all the ties go with all the suits, and all the shirts goes with all the suits, and so there is no decision making that's going to tax them on what am I going to wear today? Because they've, they've sort of pre set up their wardrobe to be very, very simple and very, very flexible, so they can anytime

Kurt Nelson  19:12  
the Steve Jobs, right? A jeans and a T shirt, and that's what his wardrobe was 90 years, right? For years, and I don't have to do it. So I think there's a lot of that right is, is, if you can take away those little decision points, if they're not meaningful to you, and outsource those or just make them predetermined, as you said, that goes a long way. I think another aspect of kind of thriving through this chaos, right, is this idea of reframing. We talk about reframing all of the time. How do we reframe the responses that we're feeling in. Are looking at things like, you know, it's not this or that. It can be this and that and that, and that's okay. And there's an element of, you know, thinking about, we talked about everybody is on this continuum of how these things impact us. Part of that is how we frame those happenings, those impacts in our life, and how we do ourself talk to ourselves about those, yeah. And can we change this as, oh, this is just painful. I have to move one more time. It's Oh my gosh, crazy to this is an adventure which you started off with. That idea just kind of got back, but maybe remind yourself we started this with this as an adventure that we're exploring, that we're, you know, getting to find out new information about these places, and keeping that top of mind, because that can sometimes get subjugated back down. So it's this framing the situation that you're in and reframing that situation. Yeah,

Tim Houlihan  21:09  
that's that's really great advice, because it's not so much about saying someone saying, well, there's an elephant in the room. Don't think about the elephant. The elephant's there. But the way that we think about the way that we frame the elephant, the way that we are is the is the elephant going to be our friend, going to help us move through this, or is it going to just be an impediment? We can, we can change the framing very, very meaningfully. And I think that that's absolutely worth it. Kurt any more advice that you want to share?

Kurt Nelson  21:39  
I'm sure I could go on and on tons of advice. I can wax poetically about this for many times. I think the couple things is, look, uncertainty has an impact on us, and there's research on uncertainty, and we've talked to a number of people around uncertainty. Nathan Farr, Nathan and Susan Farr, yes, and we've had others great yeah. And I think what's really interesting, Tim is that even having all of that as your background and having had those conversations, that this still struck you hard. As you said, it's summer of discontent. There was you had physical and mental manifestations of this. Yeah,

Tim Houlihan  22:32  
yeah. It was sort of it stretched me to a limit that I never knew that I had was going to go to before, and and I went back and I listened to Nathan and Susanna, I think it was episode 325, and they talked about the joys and the value of uncertainty, and it was hard for me to reframe it was really difficult for me to get there, but,

Kurt Nelson  22:57  
but that doesn't mean that it's not a good thing to Try, right? So if you are an individual who is out there right now and you are going through again, it's not about moves, it's about the sense of permanence in your life and the whitewater world that we're living in, whether it's the political environment that's constantly throwing shit at us all day long. If you live in America, I guess even the rest of the world, if it's the job situation that you're in, maybe it's not losing a job. But wow, our organization is being restructured again, and there we are changing my roles and responsibilities. Another time I have a new boss, whatever that would be all of those things too. Relationships that you have with a girlfriends, boyfriends, friends in general, family, they're moving, shifting, changing. People are mad at you. You're mad at them. All the world just seems to be in this chaotic mess. Take that moment, find those micro things. We talked we actually, we talked about these, like social or these, these micro anchors, these small anchors. There's another aspect that we didn't talk about, I think, which is the social connection piece of this. And I think when we are under stress again, our brain treats uncertainty as a threat. So the amygdala, the limbic system, in our brain, gets activated when we feel this uncertainty, and particularly if it is consistent and changing and you're having some potential negative responses, it only reinforces that, and what happens then is that our brain goes into the fight, flight, you freeze, Fauci and fester, right? We add those extra two now all the time, but it goes into that mode. And when you go into that mode, we have evolved that when we were in, you know, the Savannah, you know two. 100,000 years ago, we were what was it called, meat bags, if we were alone on the Savannah, yeah, we were not the apex Hunter. We were prey. We were prey. But when we were in groups, when we were surrounded by our tribe, we were safe. And so that social connection with others does a lot to relieve that fear that we have and the amygdala over responding to the uncertainty. So social permanence, talking to your spouse, having your parents, whoever that is, a sibling, maybe it's your best friend from high school that you don't talk to that often, but when you do, you immediately go back to those days and you have that sense of permanence. Really double down on those if you're feeling this piece, because that is a way for you to take that breath and to go, Yep, the world might be in chaos around me, but these are the people that are there for me. They're my tribe. They're the ones who are going to protect me no matter what. Doesn't matter. We're gonna live who knows our house might burn down tomorrow, different things, and we're going to be in this mess again. That's okay, because these people are going to be there for me no matter what.

Tim Houlihan  26:29  
That's a that's a really important reminder. So when you're in these times, try to look for micro routines. Look for simple little things that you can do to get you grounded. Try to limit the number of difficult decisions that you're going to make, and just stay focused on the most important ones, and then pre assign some of those make, you know, the free roll type choices. Make those in advance. Yes, we

Kurt Nelson  26:56  
didn't talk about this. Sorry to throw in a wrench in the middle of this one day. We're just a chaotic episode. Here we go. But in those decisions, also think about satisficing as opposed to maximizing. And I'll leave that at this too, because if we're trying to maximize, every decision that just adds on a whole nother layer of of stress and worry. And oftentimes we can just, if we take the mindset that we can just satisfy that this is good enough, then I think that's a really good thing. Keep going. My friend, good

Tim Houlihan  27:37  
enough is very important. And then, you know, do that sense forging connect to things the the environmental side of your world is important. If there is, if there are all these changes going on, connect to the part of your apartment or your house or or social environments nearby that when all this chaos is happening at work, find those places where you can go to connect deeper into your core self, to really who you are, and that place that really serves you the best, I think that that's another part of it, and Don't give up, you know, just it's worth having hope that even though tomorrow isn't necessarily going to be better, at least having hope that it will be better is a really powerful thing.

Kurt Nelson  28:32  
Yeah, yeah. Make sure you really reinforce and lean into the social connections, reframe pieces and understand that, in the end, this is part of the human condition, and we might not like it, but it is part of how we Just have evolved, and the world throws stuff at us, and that's okay. And as you said, there's hope. There is that light like even at the beginning of this right, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. You're still not done with the damn bathroom remodel, and you are going to have multitudes of decisions and probably pushbacks if it's a construction project, like any normal construction project, it's not going to just go, Oh, now we just go step wise, and we're going to be done in two weeks, and everything's going to be smooth and and groovy. No, there's more. That's not how it's going to happen. There's going to be, hey, you know what? This doesn't work, and what are you going to make? You got to make a decision, and you're going to have to make trade offs and all sorts of different things. So so we hope

Tim Houlihan  29:43  
that you can benefit from the crazy, chaotic life that I've had, and and relate them in in your own world with whatever kind of crazy and chaotic things are happening, and that you you can use this little bit of. Knowledge about uncertainty to help you this week, as you go out and find your groove, you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai