Terrible, Thanks For Asking TTFA

When Nora was about to marry her first husband Aaron, they were in the thick of his cancer treatment. So the day before the wedding, she got a small tattoo to remind her to stay in the present moment.  

This was an excerpt from Nora’s first book, It’s Okay To Laugh (Crying is cool, too) which is available here.
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If you have anxiety, depression or any sense of the world around you, you know that not *everything* is going to be okay. In fact, many things aren’t okay and never will be! But instead of falling into the pit of despair, we’re bringing you a little OK for your day. Every weekday, we’ll bring you one okay thing to help you start, end or endure your day with the opposite of a doom scroll.
Created and hosted by Nora McInerny.
Find Nora’s weekly newsletter here.
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“It’s Going To Be OK” is brought to you by The Hartford. The Hartford is a leading insurance provider that connects people and technology for better employee benefits.  Learn more at www.thehartford.com/benefits. 
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Share your OK thing at 612.568.4441 or by emailing a note or voice memo to IGTBO@feelingsand.co. Start your message with “I’m (name) and it’s going to be okay.” 
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The IGTBO team is Nora McInerny, Claire McInerny, Marcel Malekebu, Amanda Romani and Grace Barry.
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The transcript for this episode can be found here.
Find all our shows and our store at www.feelingsand.co.
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Years ago, when Nora was in the worst phase of her life (dead husband, dead dad, lost pregnancy) she heard a lot of people describe her as resilient. Those people meant it as a compliment, but to Nora it didn’t feel that way. She was tired, grieving, and lost so much in her life- the “resiliency” people saw was often just…the privilege she had to survive it.

So when Nora got the new book, The Resiliency Myth by Soraya Chemaly, she devoured it. In this episode, Nora and Soraya talk about different ways to think about resiliency and how celebrating it can be a little toxic.
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Check out Nora on YouTube! Search for the Feelings and Co page.

A few months ago Nora's Dyson broke down. This was terribly upsetting because the Dyson belonged to her dead husband Aaron, and this was a reminder that he was still gone. In this episode of TTFA Premium Nora and listeners share some of the objects they've kept from their dead loved ones.

How many hours a day do you spend on your smartphone? If you're like many of us, it's an embarrassingly high number. Our phones are an endless source of distraction, and the dopamine we get from using them is changing our brains.

In today's bonus episode hear from some of you about how this addiction is impacting your mental health and day to day life. We also talk to Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation, about how the smartphone addiction looks in our brain and how we treat it.

Thanks for being a TTFA Premium subscriber! We couldn't make these episodes without you :)

"First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage."

We all grew up with our own version of this old nursery rhyme. Maybe we told ourselves we'd meet a partner by a certain age, have a specific amount of kids, or had plans of raising our kids alongside siblings and parents.

But the universe doesn't care about our timelines. Sometimes you end up with the opposite of what you expected! People die, kids come into your life, infertility happens, and falling in love happens when it happens and not a moment before!

Back in April, we launched our sister show, Refamulating, which explores different ways to make a family. The show celebrates whatever version of family you've created, and encourages all of us to let go of our expectations around what family should look like. On this episode of TTFA Premium Nora and Claire go through some of the submissions about your not average families.

It's a shitty club, yet it's one that most of us have been a part of at some point. Heartbreak can look like many things: getting dumped, grief over losing someone, or maybe a friend break up. When you're in it, it feels like the loneliest place in the world.

That's why we wanted to make a bonus episode about heartbreak, to remind ourselves that when your heart is broken, you are not the only one.

(Yes, we did coordinate this episode with Taylor Swift so she could release The Tortured Poet's Department the same month as our heartbreak episode).

On this episode, Nora listens to voicemails and reads emails from you all about romantic and platonic heartbreaks, and offers a little advice as well.

Thank you so much for supporting our show.