Depression Can Be So Funny, With John Moe

Morra Aarons-Mele (0:00)

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Hi, I'm Morra Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes, and honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

Today, we're going to talk about depression, not anxiety. But as my guest John Moe says, depression and anxiety, well, they're like hall and oats. You rarely see one without the other and neither managed to have a successful solo career. Sorry for the 80s pop music reference. The 80s are very in now though, at least according to my kids. Depression can have really distinct characteristics from anxiety and can have a much different effect on our work lives. For me, depression is very demotivating and my work tends to suffer. Whereas when I'm anxious, I'm a wreck, but I'm also often sort of hyperfunctional. But depression and anxiety definitely share at least two characteristics that we'll talk about today, both of which can really mess with your head and your career, magical thinking and unreliable narrators. You know them. John Moe calls magical thinking the if-onlys. If only I could achieve X, have Y, do this, then I'd be happy. And then there are the tapes of negative self-talk that can run on repeat in your head. I'm a failure and I don't deserve anything. And we'll talk about managing disruptive and uncomfortable change when you struggle with these kinds of mental health issues. Because John Moe hosted one of the most popular and well-loved public radio podcasts, The Hilarious World of Depression. He wrote a book called That Too.

Moe has had a long and storied career in public radio, and yet even with his reach and his fame and his celebrity guests and a growing community of people worldwide who care about mental health and talk about it, his show was canceled and he was laid off. So we'll hear about how he approached that change and others with humor and openness.

First of all, you're the only other person I've ever interviewed who has a podcast on mental health and who seems to sort of love to dwell in the ridiculousness and gallows humor of it all.

And I've admired you for a really long time. And so it's just really good to talk to you.

John Moe (5:32)