The first part of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
New York Times bestselling author and former CNN political analyst Kirsten Powers joins us to discuss her history of chronic fatigue and illness, her experience with dubious diagnoses and wild wellness treatments, what she discovered about the true causes of her issues, how disordered eating helped mask and exacerbate her symptoms, how she’s rethought her relationship with work in general and her own past work in particular, her viral post “The way we live in the United States is not normal” and her decision to move to Italy, and more.
Kirsten Powers is a New York Times bestselling author and writes the bestselling Substack newsletter Changing the Channel. Kirsten served as a CNN senior political analyst for seven years, providing on-air analysis for major political and cultural events. The Columbia Journalism Review called her "an outspoken liberal journalist" in a sea of opposition at Fox News, where she previously served as a political analyst. She was a columnist for USA Today for more than a decade and, before that, for the Daily Beast and the New York Post.
Resources and References
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Kirsten’s book, Saving Grace
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast that offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist, and author of three books, including Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook, which came out on February 20th, and The Wellness Trap, which was published in 2023 and is the inspiration for this podcast. You can learn more and get them all at christyharrison.com/books.
Hey there. Welcome to this episode of Rethinking Wellness. My guest today is New York Times bestselling author and former CNN political analyst Kirsten Powers, who's here to discuss her history of chronic fatigue and illness, her experience with dubious diagnoses and wild out there wellness treatments, what she discovered about the true causes of her issues and how disordered eating helped mask and exacerbate her symptoms, how she's rethought her relationship with work, and so much more. As a paid subscriber, you get to hear my full interview with Kirsten, and let me just say this is a really long and juicy one. There is a ton of great stuff behind the paywall, so I'm really glad you get to hear it all.
Just a heads up that we had some technical difficulties toward the very, very end of the interview. So the last few minutes of audio are slightly lower quality, but I know my producer will work her magic and you may not even notice a difference. Before we get to the interview, I just want to thank you so much for supporting the show. It really helps me keep doing this work and helps support my family and my contractors and sort of everyone in my so I really, really appreciate it.
And if you're new here, just know that your subscription not only gets you full interviews like this one, but you also get subscriber only Q and A's and essays every other week, some cool newsletter bonuses on the alternate weeks, full access to our archives, commenting privileges, and subscriber threads where you can connect with each other and lots more. You can get a lot of that right here in your podcast player, since I record the Q and A's and essays as podcast episodes as well. And of course the interviews are here, but for the full experience, you'll probably want to go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com or the Substack app if you have it, or just check your email inbox and everything will be there.
I also want to make sure you know about my second book, which is called the Wellness Trap. You probably do if you're listening to this. You've heard me mention it a lot, but I think since you're clearly into this podcast newsletter, you'll love the book. And I'd be so grateful if you'd pick up a copy for yourself and maybe for a friend or loved one as well. It really expands and extends on the conversations we have here, getting into the connections between wellness and diet culture, dubious diagnoses and spurious cures like the ones that Kirsten had. And you'll hear her talk about the book in this episode and how we can both protect ourselves from wellness misinformation and scams and also reimagine well being as a society.
If any of that sounds interesting, or if you just want to help support the book and the show even more, you can check it out at christyharrison.com/the wellness trap and pick it up at your favorite local bookstore. With that, here is my conversation with Kirsten Powers, the full extended version. So, Kirsten, welcome to Rethinking Wellness. I'm so excited to talk with you today.
Kirsten Powers: I'm so happy to be here.
Christy Harrison: I feel like we have a million things we can get into, and I have a lot of directions I want to go. And this is probably going to be a far ranging conversation, but I think to start us off, I'd love to just sort of anchor us in your history with wellness and diet culture. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Kirsten Powers: Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is I don't even know that I would have realized that I had a history until I discovered your work, which wasn't actually that long ago. I had sort of this general idea, but I didn't really have a clear framework for it, I guess. Well, first I discovered your Substack and your two podcasts, and then I read your book, and I just really felt like, wow, this is my story, particularly your book, which I know is a lot of your story as well. So I grew up in the seventies and the eighties of Generation X. Wellness wasn't really, I mean, if it was an industry, I wasn't aware of it. And I never read a self help book. I didn't know anybody really who read self help books. And I would say the first time I ever started looking into these kinds of things was when I got sick.
You talk in your book about the dubious diagnoses that was really what ended up happening to me was I had the symptoms that I think a lot of people are familiar with. Started in my late thirties, probably, but really tipped over into something that made life kind of unlivable in my early forties. And it was the chronic fatigue and pain, which I was told was fibromyalgia. I got all of the different diagnoses for the chronic fatigue, you know, the brain fog, all of the different things that come with this whole sort of set of mystery illnesses. And I did what everybody does. You know, you go to your doctor and you go to the endocrinologist, you do all these things, and they tell you, like, there's nothing wrong. Your blood work is great.
They, I think, probably said, "You have too much stress. You need to rest more, you need to sleep more." I felt like that was being dismissive, which, you know, in hindsight, it was actually pretty accurate. So then what happened was, I was talking to a friend, and she said, "Oh, you have to go to this integrative doctor, right? So she's a real doctor, but she does integrative stuff." And so I went to her, and she did some test that allegedly showed I had chronic Lyme. That kind of started it, I think. Up to that point, I think I had started getting involved in the healthy eating thing. You know, "you can solve this with healthy eating." And so I did paleo, and I can't even remember, right? I did whatever at the time, was all the different diets, and where each little food gets demonized, and eventually there's almost nothing that you can eat.
But when I got this kind of diagnosis, I sort of spiraled. I ended up going to the "best" doctor for chronic Lyme. He told me I definitely had chronic Lyme, wanted me to start me on this protocol, and for some reason, I just was like, "I don't think this is it." So, thankfully, I didn't go down that route, but I did freak out that I might have chronic Lyme. So a colleague said, "You need to go see this infectious disease doctor who's my general practitioner, but he's also one of the best infectious disease doctors."
I went to see him. He told me that I did not have chronic Lyme. You know, he sent it out to the best place. But he told me I had reactivated Epstein–Barr, and so there's no cure for a reactivated Epstein–Barr, except he said, take off six months from work, which I was like, I live in America, and so I basically work full time, but I don't have any benefits, so I don't have disability. I don't have any of these things. So that's not possible. So instead I started. I don't know, it's just sort of interesting how it happens, you know, I was doing Bikram yoga, and I mentioned to the teacher, I said, "You know, I was diagnosed with reactivated Epstein–Barr. Is it okay to be doing this kind of exercise?" And then she said, "Well, you need to come see me because I do this thing." I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's like foot zoning.
Christy Harrison: Oh, no, I've not heard this. Is it related to reflexology at all?
Kirsten Powers: Kind of, but much more complicated. And she was like, "You have to go vegan. You have to cut all the stuff out." She had healed herself doing this. And so then I went on to this very restrictive vegan, like vegan times a million. And I was eating that way. And I was doing the Bikram yoga, and I was doing this foot zoning. And then she got me into the medical medium. What I sort of discovered was, I think what she was prescribing was what the medical medium prescribed. So I was doing that awful blueberry with the seaweed. It was just horrible, you know? And I was just miserable. And I can't even describe just how sick I was.
Christy Harrison: On top of already feeling fatigued and sick and run down.
Kirsten Powers: Yeah. And taking a million supplements, I would hate to go back and add up how much money I was spending on these supplements. And I was doing this for years, even though it wasn't really working. And so it's a long story. Like, this goes over for a long period of time. Now, in my story, actually, I kind of came around to believing that my illness was psychosomatic. And that doesn't mean that I was imagining it. It means that it was rooted in some sort of unprocessed trauma. And so I had gone to a place in Tennessee, and I did their intensive program. It was like a week long therapy program, which a lot of my friends had done. And when I came back from that about three weeks later, I would say I was probably 80% better.
Christy Harrison: So this was like a trauma intensive recovery program.
Kirsten Powers: Yeah. And what ended up being for me was that my father had died of a heart attack, age 61, when I was 35 years old. And it was a horrible shock. And then my grandmother, who I was very close to died a year later. Also, right after my dad died, my stepfather was diagnosed with liver cancer. Died. And I could just go on, all these people died in a very short period of time. And it was after that I started getting sick, and then I got into a really horrible marriage, and we ended up getting divorced. And that's what really tipped me into the really, really bad part.
So I ended up processing my father's death and my grandmother's death, and it was pretty clear I hadn't really processed it. And the doctor who sort of turned me on to the psychosomatic stuff, one of the things that he says is, when it is psychosomatic, you have to stop taking all the supplements. And so I did stop doing the supplements. I don't know at what point I gave up the diet, but I did basically, after that step away from all that kind of stuff. But what I realized when I read your book and when I discovered your work was that the part that I hadn't dealt with, and I would say I was probably 70%. So I still had a lot of fatigue. I still was nothing like before, where it really, truly was just almost impossible to even get out of bed.
But I still was like, something's not quite right. And I already had kind of come to this conclusion. I think you read the piece that I wrote where I had sort of pieced things together that I had serious disordered eating. And it did primarily start around all this wellness stuff. I don't think up until discovering that I really had that many issues with food. I would say I was, like, 40 by the time people started with this, like, don't eat beans, don't eat rice. I didn't know anybody who talked about that kind of stuff. There wasn't a don't eat gluten. It just wasn't really a thing. And then it sort of took over, and it became "this is the solution to all your problems."
Christy Harrison: Yeah, the one true solution.
Kirsten Powers: And so I realized, I think it was on one of your podcasts, or I can't remember, maybe it was in your book, about how so many women are basically living on starvation diets.
Christy Harrison: And thinking that's normal.
Kirsten Powers: Yeah, and thinking it's normal. And I made a decision. I was like, "Nothing's off the table. Like, I will eat anything." And I was saying, to my husband the other day, because I've been eating a lot of rice, a lot of white rice, which is like poison according to the wellness industry. And I was sitting there eating this white rice, and I was saying to Robert, I was like, this rice tastes so good to me. It's almost like I'm eating a bowl of ice cream because it was so demonized, and I didn't eat it for so long. And I love it so much. It's just so funny that I sit here and I'm like, this is so luxurious. Like eating rice.
Christy Harrison: That's wild.
Kirsten Powers: And so what I did was, and I know you're very not into tracking, right? So I just want to be clear. I'm not advocating tracking, but I actually did track what I was eating because I didn't have any sense of how many carbs I was eating. I just have no idea. And then I kind of looked up how many carbs you're supposed to be eating. I'm in my fifties. I am just now learning this, because carbs are so demonized. So I started eating and tracking, making sure I was getting my carbs. And almost immediately, I felt completely normal.
Christy Harrison: Wow. So you just were not eating enough carbs before, which, I mean, makes total sense.
Kirsten Powers: I wasn't eating enough carbs, and I wasn't eating enough calories.
Christy Harrison: Was this related to what you had learned in the vegan, the really restrictive vegan diet? Or was it partly just stuff you had inherited from diet culture in general? We also have to talk about your position on TV and if that played any sort of role in the body image stuff.
Kirsten Powers: Well, I think that those are all really good questions because it's kind of hard to always get back to where is this coming from? I think part of it was doing these different diets, like paleo, and then I think for a while I did the keto and then vegan, and then just reading all these books. I think just so many foods were off the table that you kind of can't get what you need. You know what I mean? You can't get your nutrients. And I also was eating way too much fiber. I always have indigestion and gas and stuff like that. And it's like, yeah, because you're eating so much freaking fiber.
Christy Harrison: It's wild.
Kirsten Powers: Yeah. And as soon as I stopped doing that, then I all went away. I had no more indigestion. I had no more gas. I had no more of these things. That was part of it. And then when I went into perio menopause, I started gaining weight for the first time in my life. And so then I got very into intermittent fasting. And so then they demonize a whole group of foods, right. So I was kind of piecing together all these different ones, and that's how I kind of got into this. Now, my mother is extremely fatphobic in the extreme, and so I grew up with that. And I do think that being on TV, the conversation around that is probably more about what you have to do to keep your face looking young. Less than my body, but it's being thin or whatever the ideal is.
But I think that it was more that I had unconsciously absorbed all this stuff from my mother that I consciously rejected. Certainly when she would do it, I would just be like, this is so messed up. I consciously thought that, but I also had absorbed it. So I think I had this idea that not just that I needed to be healthy or, like I said, my clothes fit comfortably or whatever, I needed to be skinny, thin. So I had to kind of come to terms with that because I wasn't really conscious of that. And I think also because I had a very high metabolism when I was younger and a lot of anxiety. And between the two things, I tended to just be pretty small and it wasn't healthy.
So I had to kind of come around to, well, what do I want to be? Well, what I want to be is healthy and strong and have energy. Right. And I also really love to exercise intensely. I'm a very physical person, and I always have been. And I played sports when I was young, but I never really could do that because now I know I didn't have enough. I wasn't eating enough.
Christy Harrison: Couldn't fuel that activity.
Kirsten Powers: Yeah. So I try to do the exercises that I really loved, and then I'd be like, "I can't do this. I don't have enough energy." So now I'm doing very intensive exercises, and I feel amazing. I just get rid of all that energy, and I really enjoy it. So I think it was partly my mother and my father, too. I mean, he wasn't as bad as my mother. My mom wouldn't even try to hide it. I think other people would be like, "No, I don't. I'm not like that." My mother's obsessed with it. And it's the kind of thing, if I was to show up and weigh more than I weighed before, she would just glare at me. And so I think that was part of it. I think part of it is just culture.
We just live in a culture that's just bombarding us with these images. But I feel like now I've gotten to a place where I am more conscious of this. And so I'm much more concerned about how I feel. And it is just so interesting how patriarchy works and white supremacy, because they don't even really, in some ways, need to do anything because we're harming ourselves.
Christy Harrison: Right. We're so bought in, and it's so the water we're swimming in.
Kirsten Powers: I mean, yes, they're responsible for the messages that are being sent to us, but, of course, women are often complicit in that, right? So it's like, how can you be equal or do what you need to do if you have no energy?
Christy Harrison: If you're undereating so much that you feel chronically fatigued and you think you have all these wild things. And I think the insidious thing about it, too, is that you know the symptoms of undereating, not to say that everyone has chronic fatigue or thinks they have fibromyalgia or anything like that, or has fibromyalgia, like, is eating in a disordered way. I'm sure for many people, there's many other things going on. But it is interesting because I have talked to a number of people with chronic illnesses who maybe they still have the chronic illness but feel so much better and the symptoms go away a significant percentage when they start eating enough.
But I think the really insidious thing is that when you fall down these wellness rabbit holes and go to practitioners, alternative practitioners, and other people in the wellness space, they'll encourage you to restrict more. It's like it's always food that's being demonized. There's always some restrictive protocol to do and then a bunch of supplements that also are really hard on your system and excessive amounts of fiber, like you said. So it just kind of exacerbates the problem. And then I feel like people start to think when they're in that paradigm, it starts to become easy to be like, "Oh, I just need to cut out more." And that's the message that so many of these alternative providers give too, is like, "Oh, well, it's not just gluten and dairy and this and that. It's also these five other things. Let's try this." And you just end up with a more and more and more limited diet.
Kirsten Powers: And I also think that we have this puritanical kind of culture where we believe we're dirty or bad or whatever, especially if you grew up in a Christian environment that kind of feeds into that also, which is like, "Oh, yeah, I just need to be clean eating and restricting and denying and purifying." All this detox stuff. Oh, I forgot. One of the first things that happened was I went to this place in DC at some integrative health place and they wanted me to be coming in to be getting all these infusions and all this kind of stuff. All of this, like, "You got to purify." And so, I have a whole background of in that same period falling into evangelicalism, being very religious when before, I wasn't at all. And I'm not particularly religious now either. It all kind of came together of that kind of mentality. And so I think it's important for us to always be sort of unpacking the unconscious belief that we have absorbed. That we might even say if someone was to ask us that, we don't really believe them. But if you look at our behavior, what are we doing?
And then the other thing I have to say, no doctor ever asked me how many calories I was eating. Nobody ever said, like, "Can we just talk about are you getting enough calories, when you're so tired?" This is just around us all the time of kind of what is the ideal? What people think is the sort of ideal of the way you're supposed to look versus just being healthy and feeling good. So it's like if you're starving yourself, if you're trying to be a certain size, you're just doing the patriarchy's work, and it's impossible to show up and be as powerful as you want to be if you're exhausted and not getting enough calories. Like, with me, not even able to exercise, which I really need for my mental health. And so everything was kind of organized around that. I just feel like I lost so much of my life to this and spent so much money that I did not have.
Christy Harrison: Right. Because all that stuff is out of pocket. You're probably not getting insurance coverage for this yoga teacher or maybe even some of the integrative stuff.
Kirsten Powers: Oh, no, no, no. It's like, I paid for all that stuff. I did. All the supplements were incredibly expensive. And it wasn't just as, you know, it's not just that you take a supplement. You have to take a certain supplement and buy a certain brand. It's always really expensive. And it was like everything was poisoned was kind of what I was being taught, that all these things are going to harm you somehow and that you have to just do this thing and then you'll be healthy.
I think discovering the disordered eating and starting to eat more healthy was the final piece. I would say, the other big piece was in 2020. So I worked at CNN, and I was always on in prime time. So it's me on TV every night. I was on Anderson Cooper's show mostly, but sometimes I'd be on later on Don Lemon's show, which is from ten to midnight. So I was always on in the evening. And I had to be in New York at least three days a week. I live in DC, so I was always traveling. And that's stressful, right? Like that alone, like, yes, the being on TV thing, but even the just always having to travel and live out of a suitcase and never really being able to get on a routine of any kind.
And so with 2020, I was able to be at home, and start to just live a more normal life. And I wasn't on TV very much because they were really only covering COVID and talking to doctors and people who knew about COVID related things. And so I didn't have the chronic stress of that kind of life. And so I feel like that was the last piece. And I think we talked about this when I interviewed you, that I had felt that I was being dismissed when the doctor said "you need to reduce stress in your life" without appreciating that actually what a major role the stress was playing.
I just didn't, because it was so normalized that I really didn't understand when they would say, like, "But you have a stressful job." And I'd be like, "It's not really that stressful. I've been doing it for two decades." And what I meant was, like, other people look at it and they'd say, "Oh, my gosh, it must be so stressful to be on TV in front of millions of people doing whatever," and I get that. But for me, it literally was the same as if you were an accountant going to the office. I'd been doing it for so long that I knew how to do it, that it was not stressful in the way that people meant, I think. And so that's why I would be like, well, it's not really that stressful, but it was incredibly draining, you know, especially in post 2016, where things just went upside down.
Christy Harrison: The level of conflict you were probably exposed to at work on a daily basis.
Kirsten Powers: The conflict and the crazy making. Whereas before, I feel like I was more debating something, maybe, or analyzing something, and maybe somebody would say, "Well, actually, I think this." And it would be slightly different, but it would be rooted in reality. Suddenly I was dealing with just made up stuff. If someone would just say something, I'd be like, "That just didn't happen."
Christy Harrison: Because you were talking to people who were in the Trump administration.
Kirsten Powers: They were the surrogates for them. So they didn't actually work in the Trump administration, but they were the people that were brought on, and they were kind of people that came out of nowhere. They weren't people that had a reputation that they had built on being trustworthy, which in the past was most of the people that I was working with. These were people who had been journalists for a long time or had been working in politics for a long time and had built up reputations and knowledge and had something to lose. Now, I had people who had nothing to lose. Well, they had a lot to lose if they angered certain people. So they were incentivized to say things even when they didn't even think they were true. And I know that because we would talk during the breaks and it would be pretty clear that they didn't even really believe it, but that they had to say it because otherwise there'd be hell to pay.
So there was just so much crazy making, and that was stressful. And so I feel like when I was able to kind of get away from that and then I also, in that period, got off of social media for the most part. I was doing everything I could to support my health.
Christy Harrison: Was that sort of in response to the doctor saying you need to take six months off?
Kirsten Powers: I wish that I had done that. That would have been smart, but I didn't. When the doctor said I had to take six months off, what I did was I really prioritized getting sleep and going to bed as early as I could. And really cut back on my socializing. But as we've talked about before, the socializing also really gets cut back when they start cutting all the foods out. And so now you're getting isolated from your friends because you can't eat anything. Eating out becomes, like, a stressful event.
Christy Harrison: You might as well stay home because you're not going to be able to enjoy it anyway.
Kirsten Powers: And I started kind of getting healthier, I would say, in 2019, which is when I went and did that therapy. And that's when I started to come to terms with the roles stress was playing. I just realized I have got to get this under control because I am so jacked up all the time emotionally. And this is just so unhealthy and unsustainable. It's emotionally and physically unsustainable. I can't do this. I simply will not be able to go on if I don't change something. And so after doing a lot of research about what is now, I think, pretty well understood of what happens to your brain and your body when you're on a Twitter, for example. And I just was like, I just can't be doing this. And so I just stopped doing it. And it was as if I was going off of heroin. I swear to God.
Christy Harrison: No. It is so hard. I also took a huge step back from social media. I still have an Instagram account, and that's where I used to spend the most of my time. But I was also on Twitter and also on Facebook, and I just stopped all of it for a while. Now I have someone managing my Instagram for me, and I don't go on. But, that initial period of, like, I would delete it from my phone and then I would be like, "Oh, but I have to put it back just to check something." I couldn't go cold turkey. It was like a slow sort of pulling the blanket out of my hands.
Kirsten Powers: I went cold turkey, and it was brutal. And it took me a couple of weeks. And then after a month, I allowed myself to go on, but only on my computer because it's not as satisfying on your computer because you can't scroll. And so I would do that. And then eventually I lost interest in it. And for me, it was also a particularly hard experience being on there, being a woman in the public sphere on CNN, which Trump had targeted. And so anything you did, people were looking to use it against CNN. So I was being sort of watched to amplify anything that they could kind of even misrepresent to say, "CNN's Kirsten Powers said, X." So it just became especially toxic.
Christy Harrison: Didn't you also say there's another Kirsten Powers, like someone who's totally unrelated to you? Kristen Powers. Who had messages meant for you that were death threats and terrible things.
Kirsten Powers: This poor thing, she was right out of college, a journalist in DC. She actually reached out to me and we had dinner. She wrote a piece about how she's Kristin Powers, @kristenpowers, and she would get things meant for me, and she just couldn't believe the things that people were saying and, like, traumatizing for her. And it wasn't even about her. And, of course, incredibly misogynist. So I never listened to Facebook. I couldn't deal with it. And I did like Instagram. I still do Instagram, though. I'm rarely on it. I rarely post. And I maybe go on it for, I'd say, gosh, I don't even think I'm on it for 20 minutes a week.
Cutting that out, I think, made a huge, huge, huge difference in my life because I have more control over what my unconscious is absorbing. And then I guess Substack has become, for me, it's not really social media, but that's become, where I go, and I love it. The people are so nice and there isn't that trolling, you know, people trying to jump on what you said and misrepresenting it. And so I do love to connect with people. That's the aspect of social media that I liked. And so I feel like I get that from Substack. I am connecting with people. Like I connected with you. It's like you're finding people who think like you think and are talking about things that are interesting and stuff like that. And so I do really like that. But you don't have to deal with what you're dealing with on these social media apps.
When I look at my For You page on Instagram, I just think what can I do to get rid of all of these photoshopped pictures? You're just being constantly inundated with this idea of this bizarre beauty ideal. Nobody looks like this. I don't want to see these pictures, and it doesn't matter that I never touch them. There's no reason the algorithm should be sending them to me. I'm never opening them, and yet they're always there.
Christy Harrison: It's so bizarre.
Kirsten Powers: Yeah. And so you're always being kind of brainwashed I feel like, given these pictures, I never asked for this. I never at any point have followed an account like this. It's never happened. And yet you always put this in my For You page.
Christy Harrison: And it's like it just takes one moment of absent minded scrolling or something and falling down that rabbit hole to get served way more content like that. Another thing, too, about social media that I think is interesting, especially with your story where you didn't recognize the stress you were under and you were sort of like, "Well, my job's not stressful," but you had all these sort of intense pressures going on, objectively stressful things, which I think social media is that for a lot of people, too. It's like, we don't think of it as such because it's just part of our everyday lives, and it seems innocuous and everybody's on it, so it's like, well, why would that cause me particular harm? Or that can't be the problem, but I think it really does.
And there's lots of evidence to show that it's changing our behaviors and our brains and all of these really detrimental ways. But we don't think of it as such until we maybe do some research and start to realize the harm that it's having on us and take that leap. And then you can sort of see on the other side how much better your mental health is. But when you're in it, it doesn't feel like it's stressful.
Kirsten Powers: Yeah. And I think that there's also an easy way to discover this is just go off of it and journal about how you feel, and then go back on and journal about how you feel. It's so obvious that it's making you miserable, and it's affecting you. Whether you think it's affecting you or not. Also, it's just not real. It's like I always say, Instagram is where people go to lie, you know? People are feeling so bad because all these people are like, "I have the perfect marriage," and, "Oh, my mom is my best friend." It's like, no, she's not. It's just not real. I follow accounts on renovating a house in Italy, and so I follow renovation accounts or whatever. Right? So it's like, it's pretty harmless, or I follow people like you or whatever it is.
So when I started doing the therapy in 2019, I started seeing a therapist also who was a Jungian therapist. And I started to learn more about the unconscious and how much of what we do is driven by unconscious beliefs and that you have to really dig into what I really believe that I'm not even aware of and I'm acting out of, but also be aware of what you're allowing into your unconscious. And so everything you're doing is just being picked up. And another area, honestly, is, I hate to say this as a person who worked in the news for so long, but a lot of the news that you're consuming is also jacking up your nervous system. And you have to be careful. You have to do it in a way to see it, be informed, but not this constant, "I need more and more more. I need to know all the time everything that's going on. I need to follow up minute by minute."
Christy Harrison: It's so interesting to me to hear you talk about how you were so jacked up when you were on the news. Of course, you were in that environment where you're exposed to it so much, probably more than the average person who looks at it in their spare time versus all day for work. And I think it's interesting to extrapolate that, perhaps to other people, because I've heard a lot of journalists who work in news say that they're total news junkies and Twitter junkies and that they spend all this time getting on there and they get into Twitter fights and they can't help themselves. The outrage just is at this heightened level. And they sort of boil over sometimes.
To live with that level of outrage, I'm sure it spills over into how the news is framed and constructed and delivered. And therefore, the sort of levels of outrage and maybe less nuanced takes that people are getting from their news, which I think relates to your book, Saving Grace. And I would love to talk about that and sort of how you've rethought some of your work first, how you decided to leave television in the first place, but then also how you started to rethink some of your work, to have more nuance and compassion and speak in ways that were less polarized than you did before.
Kirsten Powers: What's interesting is that people who followed my work over the trajectory of my career will usually say, like, "You're the voice of reason." And I think that was my overarching tone and behavior. And then there was a certain percentage where that's not at all what I was doing, and not consciously.
