I have been shocked by how much of an impact therapy with my husband, like, so we were going through just a really terrible time, probably four and a half years ago, and we went into counseling and holy cow, it was like a crip creeper digging up the dead bodies everywhere kind of awful, painful thing. But on the other side of it, I had no idea how incredible the relationship could be. And it wouldn't have been had we not hit that really painful moment of feeling stuck and just in a standoff. But it is hard to take that step to face the friction. I guess that's what we did. We went and sat with a therapist and did a friction audit on each other and on the marriage. And it was awful. Yeah, but the dividends that it pays on your life when you go through something like that, it just creates tremendous meaning.

Yeah.

So do you think part of the issue with the reason why it's so easy to get stuck is that life just kind of is the same thing over and over again?

I think that's part of it. I think the other thing about being stuck, you just described it, is that when something is a friction point, the natural instinct is to turn away from it.

Yes.

It's to say, I'm going to focus on something else. If you're having difficulties in your relationship, the natural thing is to say, well, let's just give it a bit of distance. I got to do some other stuff. You figure out other areas of your life that are more appealing. You throw your attention and time there, and that's a mistake because those friction points, they kind of nag at you. They become traps. And unless you figure them out and actually deal with them, you're not going to be able to raise them up and they can end up being problems for decades. And so I think that's a large part of it, is that there's a kind of sameness and a repetition to life. And the repetition comes from ignoring those little things that are niggling, that are sort of pulling at your ankle, saying, hey, do you want to look at me? And you're like, no, I don't want to do that. There are some other things I'd rather do instead that are more fun and more appealing. And that's why a friction audit is so useful, because it forces you to pay attention to what's not working, which we generally, as humans, don't have the instinct to do.

No, in fact, we not only don't have the instinct to take a sober look at what's not working, we have the instinct to turn away from it.

Yeah, exactly.

So if. Was there anything in the research about particular periods in life or ages where you tend to get more stuck?

Yeah. So I have some research with a colleague of mine, Hal Hirschfeld at UCLA, where we. I was. I was 29, and I felt like I was about to be 30. This was a number of years ago now. I'm much older than that now, but at the time, I was 29, about to be 30, and I felt like I had to do something just to kind of show myself that I was still just as vibrant as I'd been when I was younger and so on.

So did you feel stuck?

I felt stuck. In various ways. I felt stuck.

And how so, like, put me at the scene. I want to meet the 29 year old Adam. You're not where you are yet. You don't have, like, international bestselling books, like, all this renowned research. Tell me who Adam at the age of 29, stuck was.

I had just finished grad school. I was just starting a new career. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be in the United States still. I was missing people in Australia. I was single. I felt kind of lonely and unmoored in New York City. I didn't really know if I had a place there yet. And I just felt globally more blah than anything. Like, things were going well on paper, but I just wasn't sure where I was headed. And I wanted to do something that kind of showed me that I had drive and that everything was working well. So I signed up to run a marathon, my first marathon, my only marathon. And I did this at 29. And Hal and I were talking about this and saying we were thinking about the idea that the way we count, using this base ten system, the who, the decade, just. We count in tens. Oh, got it.

Okay.

So the way we count using tens, we think of decades as meaningful. Right. So turning 30, 40, 50, 60 is a big deal in our culture.

Yes.

There's no inherent reason why 39 to 40 should be different from 35 to 45, 35 to 36. But it does feel different. And because of that, we wanted to investigate whether every ten years, when your age ends in a nine and you're thinking about a new decade, does that push you to think more deeply about your life? And that's what we found. So what you find is there's a little spike in questioning the meaning of life around the nine ending ages. It's like a little end of decade crisis, and you see some interesting things happen on the back of that. So one of them is more people are likely to sign up for marathons the way I did at the age.

Of ending at 929-39-4959 yeah.

They're more likely to be interested in things like reading books on aging. You see a little bit of a. People are more likely to buy those kinds of books. They become more focused on aging. You also see some negative things if they have a crisis, when they have that questioning of meaning, you see a rise in extramarital affairs. So if you look at the data, there's a rise with nine ending ages for those kinds of affairs, and you even see a small rise in the suicide rate. So there are profound things that happen at the end of the decade for people. And this is a time when we tend to have these little moments of questioning and when we feel quite stuck.

So is that called a temporal landmark, where there's this sort of almost marking of time that makes you then assess the span of your life?

Yeah, I think it's similar to how we do this thing of creating resolutions between December and January. It's a moment that just pushes us to think more broadly and abstractly. And because of the way we count, it happens to be just before those new decades.

How can you use this research to your advantage? So you're kind of cruising into the 29th, 19th, 49th, 69th birthday. How do you use this to your advantage?

Yeah. So there are a few things you can do. One thing is to say that there's something very arbitrary about picking those years. You know, you could be 34, you could be 44, you could be 54, 64, and say, this is when I want to do this little audit process. I don't have to ask myself whether my life's meaningful only once every ten years. And actually doing it more often is better for you than doing it once every ten years and having this huge, you know, event where it feels overwhelming.

Right.

So do this often. Just ask yourself, maybe once a year. Maybe it's your birthday. Maybe you don't want to do that on your birthday. You want to do it on a different day.

I think it's the perfect day.

It is. That's what I do. But other people might not want to, you know, have their birthday be about this process, but do it one single day.

Hold on. I want to push back on that, because the single best thing that you could do as a gift to yourself is to pull out a blank piece of paper and go, where is there friction in my life? Because what I know, based on Adam's research, is that if I were to turn my attention to the friction in my life and make it a project to either remove it, smooth it out, or face the stuff that I do not want to face that I know is in the back of my mind and it bugs me, but it's going to bite me in the rear end someday if you did this, because here's the thing I'm thinking about this list that I did with Pete. I do it every year.

Yeah.

My business, my life, very different right now than it was even like six months ago. And so I think this is like the greatest thing you could do for yourself is to wake up to where are those places in your life where there's like, it's almost like stuck? Is this signal and this flag from your internal like, navigation gps going ding ding, ding, ding, ding, turn toward this?

Yeah. I mean, you could do it on your birthday. Absolutely. I think for some people it's kind of overwhelming moment and so they don't want to do it on their birthday if they prefer not to. But I'm totally fine with it being on a birthday. The one thing about doing it consistently every year is the list should change. If you're doing a good job of intervening, then that's a moment of confirmation when you can say, hey, look, there were these things that two or three years ago I was writing down, I kind of fixed them. I figured out a way past them that is incredibly reaffirming. The opposite of feeling stuck, its feeling that youve got forward motion. So theres great value in doing that more regularly. The other thing is if it does happen naturally when youre 39, 49 59 thats okay. The research suggests that to make meaning and to deal with these moments in a way thats productive, you can do a few things. One is to set yourself a goal, which is why running a marathon or an ultra or a try or whatever, thats a good goal because its an extended goal.

Its very defined. It has steps that get you closer to the goal. That's very reaffirming. It's also about connecting with people. So one way we get meaning in our lives is to feel a sense of community, to feel a deep sense of connection with other people. And so if you can do that, if you can make sure that you reach out to all your friends that you've been meaning to reach out to, that will also be very productive on those times when you're questioning the meaning of life.

Okay, so doc, I'm going to play the role of the stuck family member. And I have been in a string of jobs that just blew. And I've been through a breakup and my life is boring and meh is kind of how I feel. How the hell is running a marathon or setting a goal going to change my life?

So the thing itself is not. That's not the issue. It's not that you've run a marathon and suddenly you're going to become a person who makes all their money and spends all their time running. Okay, that's not what it's about. It's about demonstrating to yourself through the way you're behaving certain things about who you are, that your life has a kind of purpose, and that you're the kind of person who can seize an opportunity to approach a goal and to reach a goal and to succeed. There's something tremendously valuable about signaling that, especially when you feel globally stuck. So it doesn't actually matter what the goal is. It's not the goal for goal's sake. It's the fact that you are moving towards something that says, I have achieved. I have done this thing. So that's what the value of, say, a marathon is. It's not for everyone, but for some people, it's very useful. It was very good for me. It did make me feel much better about where I was.

I'm ready to have a breakthrough.

I'm ready to help you have a breakthrough.

Why is this feeling that you haven't reached your full potential? You know, we kind of say we're stuck. Why is this so common?

The way life is structured for us today, there is a lot of emptiness. A lot of what we spend our time doing does not build on the other moments we spend, so that we're building towards something that feels meaningful, that is substantial.